multiplicity

The light was caught, too-still; it gave the impression of a space filled with glass, rather than air.

Leading the small procession, the Paladin faltered at the lintel. The Diocesan Divine urged it forward. In the small line of postulant figures went, with a reverence that encompassed millennia of lungs, myriads of breaths.

The hall itself soared, as it must to contain that solid profundity of light. The walls, faced in a hard, white stone, dazzled the eye; one learned not to look where they joined the floor or each other. The combined effect of all-white illumination acted to remove all color from the scene. The Paladin wore the Armor of Righteousness, brought out of the Holy of Holies as it was every year. The burnished red of its metal plates was lost in the vastness.

#spmo #exercises

The well-known roads, so often travelled, had changed: shifted, almost imperceptibly, but still unmistakably.

The roads over which I had so often travelled were no longer familiar. They had changed, and moreover: something had changed them.

The roads I knew were changed. Not in their courses — each still led to its appointed destination — but in the winds the scenery's underpainting had been was suddenly seemed the scenery seemed repainted, perhaps by a different hand, perhaps with a different color used in the wash.

What I am saying is: The light reflected off the rain came from a different star.

The light diffused by the rain originated from an unexpected star.

The rain scattered an unexpected light.

The light, diffused by the rain, had an unexpected quality, as if emanating from an unfamiliar star.

Here is what I am trying to say: the rain diffused the light from a different star.

The roads I knew were changed. Not in their courses — each still led to its appointed destination — but the scenery had been repainted, perhaps by a different hand, perhaps with a different color used in the wash. Here is what I am trying to say: the rain diffused the light of a different sun.

#exercises

Difficult to write an intro post for a new blog without getting navel-gazey, so instead I will just cite Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

• Lightness
• Quickness
• Exactitude
• Visibility
• Multiplicity
• Consistency

I chose “multiplicity” for this blog, because of a quote in the Multiplicity chapter of Six Memos. Calvino, who is my guiding literary star, describes novels as networks, and closes the lecture with this:

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

Writing is not work done in a vacuum. I have my magpie hoards of ideas, words, imageries, etc — my lenses, to see through. Now comes the time to write what I see, or what I imagine.