Friday, March 25, 2011

On imaginary dogs.

"The yellow dog runs across a sunny park."

That's true. You just read it. And yet there is not dog, no park, nothing to run or be ran upon, nothing to catch the ray s of an imagined sun. And yet, in the imagined world, the world of writing, that goddamn dog goddamn well ran.

Such is the magic and mystery of the written word.

We can augment the words, the dog can be strong, the park can be lovely, we can tie the dog to my childhood (he's a yellow lab named Buddy, the first animal I ever really loved), but no matter what, there is no dog. He's just a notion brought to mind by the process of reading, a phantasm conjured by the flicker of eyes across a page of static text.

And that's the magic of writing. It's frankly astonishing that a few short words casn create such a vivid reaction in the imagination. And it's the awareness of this fact that makes writing so difficult for me. There are so many words, so many combinations, so many ways for the words to be read, and so many ways for the well-intentioned story to go horribly off track in the imagination of the reader.

And now the yellow dog shimmers, not unlike an effect from an MTV video, and now it transmutes itself into a blue cat, which still runs across the rose-strewn, gated park. And now he's on an epic quest, out for vengeance, or to find a missing love. The blue cat will strive and suffer and grow, fight monsters more bizarre than anything dreamed of by Tolkein, and in the end learn a valuable lesson, the kind worth teaching.

Or maybe he'll fuck off and have a beer. Or go to Disneyland. Or win the superbowl. Or travel through time to kill Hitler. It doesn't really matter. It's your yellow dog now (or blue cat, or whatever you want him to be). Please take good care of him.