Tiny Stories

My bit:

excavation crew broke through entered cave STOP blue light unknown source STOP shadow scout patrol MIA recovery troops also now MIA advise course of action STOP

Madi Huber:

advised course of action go towards the blue light STOP there is nothing we can do for you STOP you are on your own STOP hope to see you back at headquarters soon STOP

Danny Hunt:

He walked towards the light, but drew no closer to it. He did not know how long he walked, nor how far. It no longer mattered.

Max Johnston:

It was cold outside and it was late in the morning, but if he went out and practiced for a couple hours he'd be warmed up for the game in the morning.

Daniel Kellis:

The mourning eventually ended and he had nothing left to do. He thought about playing bingo with his neighbors, but he didn’t feel ready.

Artist’s Statement:

Creating the series of tiny stories was an interesting endeavor for me. In creating these I was really mostly looking to have fun, which is nice when it intersects with an assignment. I thought for a while about how I wanted my story to start. I decided quickly that I didn’t want my part to be told in third-person. Second-person was also out. What about narration? This seemed promising but then I alighted on an idea I liked even better: a telegram-style letter from one character to another. I felt this would convey a maximum amount of information about the time frame in which the story takes place.

Now I had decided a format and a time, I thought of what the story could be about. I wanted something that had substance and mystery to it, something with unexplored, rough edges. In the end, I settled on doing something underground, since caves have always fascinated me.  When I had finished writing the first part of my story, to me it conveyed an expedition to a cave where some unknown, supernatural force was at stake. After breaking through into a cave, the expedition came across a strange blue light. When their armed shadow scouts set out to explore, they disappeared. The backup crew went in search of them, but they, too, disappeared. The commander of the whole outfit is now very unsure of what to do and telegrams back up to the surface for feedback. The illustration I chose was of blue lights in darkness, evoking countless eyes. I hoped to convey a dark, foreboding tone with this pairing.

I was very interested to see what Madi would do with the story from this point on. I was happy to see it continue in the same vein I had begun it, as a reply from the commander’s overseer somewhere on the surface. I thought maybe it would continue on in the same fashion, but then things changed dramatically as the story changed hands once again. The story changed wildly and left the original plot line behind—or so I first thought. When I re-read the conclusion, this time it seemed to be less about the voyagers below and more about to the commander on the surface. Having lost all contact with the missing underground contingent and the expedition declared a gaping failure, he sought to find comfort after the funerals they themselves could not attend, yet could find none…

Like the Exquisite Corpse parlor games mentioned by DJ Spooky, these stories took on a life of their own, where compared separately they seemed to be dissonant notes. Looked at as a whole, they oddly formed a cohesive narrative that was more than the sum of its unknowing parts.   Viewed as a snapshot, like Dorothea Lange’s “Destitute Mother,” they create a window into a world much larger than explicitly defined, limited only by the imagination.

Wildcat

             When I set out to find the visual images to accompany Wildcat, I was initially unsure of what route to take. It was clear, at least, that I needed to avoid any outright associations with the song’s title. Right off the bat, then, anything with a cat or cougar in it was right out. I’ve listened to this song for a few years. As I have considered it at length, it has come to represent personally the chaos and disarray that emerge in artificial constructions of order—and the chances for a new beginning and a fresh start these afford. For what is a beginning but the end of some pre-existing condition to allow the resurgence of something that was there all along?

                In Annie Dillard’s Seeing, she emphasizes the importance not of looking, but of seeing.  When do I look? Glancing up at passersby while eating at a table, noticing a bird, or watching a car zip by, then returning to whatever I was doing before—I have looked up and decided at some level these things hold little interest because I presume to know what they are. I’ve seen it all before, so I can return without guilt to whatever self-engrossed activity I was engaged in before. Seeing requires disengaging from my prefabricated conclusions and re-engaging with the holes in my perception to see what I might find.      

A look at William Bliss Baker’s Fallen Monarchs reveals some trees in a forest. Trees are kind of boring. They’re all over. Don’t do much, just sort of sit there. Wait, though. I need to open my eyes and see it. Now, I see the centuries-old trees, the eponymous monarchs, rotting on the forest floor. How long had their order lasted before they lost grip and toppled into oblivion? Squinting my eyes, I see it is fall. It won’t be long before the status quo of the painting is revealed to be just another perceived construct.

                In my photographs I have sought to portray how we as humans sometimes look at ourselves. We reach out and try to impose order on our surroundings, sanitize the dirty, tidy up the crooked lines. Because we’re Orderly, and Clean, and we Subjugated the Wilderness, so now we’re Civilized and Good.  We persuade ourselves a few moments longer to ignore the duality of our nature, packaging and boxing our monochrome realities. But when we turn around to go home for the day, these ideas--the unpredictable, the bent, the loopy, the smudged that is in us and is us leak and gush at the seams of our self-image.

              Pausing in mid-stride, we will slowly turn and see who we are,  finally understanding where the looping edges, dappled light and surging colors of our humanity lie.

Listen to Wildcat here.

And the Mountains Echoed

             And the Mountains Echoed is a powerful novel by Khaled Hosseini. In this work, Hosseini explores the complexities of a handful of characters whose lives bleed imperceptibly into one another’s. It is a tale of choices and consequences, of words said and actions done that can never be taken back, for better or worse. It is written from multiple points of view—rather than following the story through the perspective of one or two main characters, it written almost as if there is no main character. Nor is the story written in a linear fashion—it frequently jumps times and locations with little warning. It could be argued this narrative choice weakens and distracts from the story’s message by choosing an unfamiliar form. I argue that not only is the book powerful in spite of these narrative choices, it is successful because of them.

            Most novels I encounter have a familiar form following a plot structure that is more or less Aristotelian in nature—an exposition of a norm followed by rising action that culminates in a crisis and climax, finished by a falling action and the establishment of a new norm. And the Mountains Echoed takes these conventions and tosses them out in favor of a form that more closely fits the author’s purposes. There is an exposition of sorts, yes—where we are introduced to the characters whose lives are inextricably linked to the other lives lived around them—but on the whole we are summarily thrown into the middle of a moving story whose inertia will carry us forward through the entire story. This is not to say that books based on an Aristotelian plot structure lack movement, meaning, or gravity, but the departure from (or complication of) this well-versed narrative form creates a set of expectations between the author and readers.

            This expectation is one of trust. Hosseini rarely, if ever, gives the reader a “complete equation,” rather he provides them with the pieces they need and expects them to be able to fit them together. For example, in one portion of the novel Iqbal, a man unable to regain his rightful land, engages in a violent confrontation with the men who took it from him. Rather than tell us what happened to the man, Hosseini explores a secondary character’s thoughts about the event. The reader is led to believe Iqbal suffers a gruesome, violent death, but while heavy hints are dropped, there is no sanctioning closure from Hosseini. Did it happen, or didn’t it? Will Iqbal be back? Or is his absence later in the book proof enough? Here, Hosseini treats his readers as a mature audience whom he deems capable of reason and imagination. He doesn’t have to say exactly what happened to his characters, here or elsewhere. There is a measure of decision he leaves up to their discretion.

            To even out this lopsided exchange, in return the reader saddles the author with the burden of trust. More than once, I thought something much like the following: I have no idea where this story is going because we just started three years in the past and then jumped more than half a century back and I don’t know what just happened to Timur and did that guy stab him or was that just allegorical and wait now who are we talking about and why should I care about that guy I hope you know what you’re doing—“ In the absence of a story form I could expect, I had to choose to trust Hosseini, that he would dig the characters out of the pits they find themselves in.

            Hosseini expects his readers will be able to understand what is going on without him telling them explicitly what has taken place, in turn, the reader expects Hosseini will eventually “come clean” and provide the pieces necessary to create the multiple resolutions peppered throughout the work in readers’ minds.

            To truly evaluate whether Hosseini’s stye is merely stylistic or if it manifests a certain action or theme requires reading the book—in the end, most loose end are tied up. Those that are left unresolved (or maybe just unresolved to my satisfaction) felt very deliberately written and contributed to the sense of loss that is often felt throughout the novel.

            I acknowledge my experience with non-linear narratives is limited; another more experienced reader might even look at And the Mountains Echoed and feel it wasn’t a twist on conventional storytelling at all. I think comparing Afghani plot conventions to Western ones would be productive—again, an area I am undereducated in. Yet despite these shortfalls of my understanding, I truly feel like the offbeat rhythm of Mountains served a larger message in purpose in Hosseini’s masterful rendition of this compelling story that transcends space and place.