Fiction & Commentary at Tintas Online Literary Journal, edited by Joseph Robertson

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When confronted with the problem of seeing into the fabric of a story, it becomes necessary to pose a new series of questions about the nature of ‘the story' as such, as an abstract impetus to speak. One might ask: Is the commentary which seeks to comprehend a fiction not also part of the fiction itself, motivated by the same unsayable patterns of light? I have ventured to include such ruminations in the composition of my own fictions, and they, in turn, have furthered my intuitions about ‘the story'. The story is not the written word, not the sequence of events thinly veiled by the written word, which also seeks to represent them; it is not the neatly told tale. Those are but the symptoms of the lurking of a story.

The story is what has yet to be told. And when we’ve told what we know, or what we think we know, or what we might have managed to fabricate for our purposes, about the story, the story remains, alive and breathing in a vacuum of its own, always beyond our reach. In fact, it not only remains, but it expands. It isn't merely an untold story, one single perfect possibility, but rather a host of possible variations splitting off from the told and the untold, intermingling, on the edges of the story’s vacuum, pushing outward, humming, threatening to reveal itself. It is now not simply a thing which might be told, which must and will be attempted; it is all that did not manage to be told in the transference of what little could be worded within the limited scope of our language.

The story is always a mystery. It is something which wants to and will, in some way, unfold, offer itself to our vision. It is the tide that rolls beneath the telling, a jargon of urging mixed with silence, ever untold, ever more inclusive, elusive. And so, no two tellings of any story should produce the same tale; even the sequence of twists and trauma should vary. The closer we get to the untellable mystery, sunken near to the heart, the center of gravity, of all the untold expanse of the story, the less grip chronology can possibly force upon events, as worded.

Between the story and the telling, there is a meaning. How do we arrive at meaning, and what are the components, in themselves? Are words facts? Incorruptible spheres of inclusion? Or, are they facilitators? The words are within the ink, the ink within the pen, the pen within our hands’ faithful flurry, the dexterity by which we write a loyal component of the mind. This is the integrity of a mechanics, not of a meaning. The words are not meaning; they are a map to meaning. They are the story’s hope of a practicable and traceable genetic code, or memory. They are hints, not laws; they are flesh, and neither soul nor granite; they are whatever we tempt them to be... the story is something else.

The challenge we face is asymptotic. We must strive to move endlessly nearer the story, though it will always elude us, in its most essential respects. It is those elusive respects around which both author and reader revolve in the moment of telling. It is that assemblage of psychic passageways, capillaries, which cannot be embodied by language, which is our most guarded concern.

Papa, they called him. A young old man. A voice and its layout. I, for my part, first met Ernest Hemingway in a small bar in Madrid. The ceilings were sloping, rounded, the establishment itself below the street level, nestled. You had the sensation that life began in a cave and you’d returned to the source. I found him sipping poison at the source.

A complex character. Papa complexity. Pleasantly odd to be witness to this complexity, to meet a human being who so much resembles a vortex: something brilliant, some musky luminescence about him always. Charisma? Yet light seemed to lose its variety, its shape, its color, the closer it was to his face. A grey being, a configuration of devices both authored and unauthored.

I was immediately taken by the effects of his presence in the room. I dare say it was difficult to hear him speak above the din he produced around him. And so, I chanced upon the question: how do you greet a person of this stature? A legend. An angel made almost of asphalt and bronze, he was so hard, unapologetic. A man who’d been murdered by commentary. He knew this, he would later confess, because he had already died many times. He had died on a rescue in the Great War. Discovering futility, and its implacable scope, full and more full with shrapnel. He had died when he met his nurse, and died again when they asked him to rise from his bed, where she knew him. He had died when Spain caught fire. Died when they called him Papa, though he would learn to enjoy its resonance, like some new code of his own invention. He was a man beset with death, so he knew it was death when the biographers got to him. Death because it was necessary. How do you greet such a man?

It was not what she preferred to be called, but then mostly everything was not what she preferred. Her brother called her ‘Scorpio’. People always said there was ‘an edge’ about her, and she did have a gaze, at times, much like poison. She could paralyze or digest you with that stare. Indeed, she often did just that.

“Scorpio, why don’t you get some sun?” Youth’s counsel. A brother’s lament.

“It will only kill me. Besides, I’d have to surround myself with people, with bodies and air already breathed.”

“I AM OPEN! It’s all of you who are closed. Reduced to your least-inventive.”

She was a mystery and an agitation. Her words were not so radically false as to point to real irreparable paranoia. But she didn’t want to know the truth, so much was clear, about these familial ties, this closest circle of relations. It became common to assume that she had suffered a grave trauma. Of any such trauma, she would never speak. She never spoke of anything except for her love of rain and of the winter months. ‘Everyone runs and hides, and the world keeps quiet.’ She watched little television. ‘Almost never!’ This much she would passionately assert, but she had so many complaints, complaints so specific, it was clear that her frustration was a telecommunicated ailment.

Funny thing about false assertions: they speak so eloquently about things unseen. She watched. No lights. There could be no lights. She cherished the blue light as it bounced off uninteresting silhouettes around her room. Blue light was human. Of course, some know it as blinding, deadly, dangerous. Hers was an unaccountable daring.

An interminable wait. An opening in the muck of time that equals a century, eight centuries, the full trajectory of the human experiment. I have become familiar with the sudden simultaneous mosaic apparition of my biography, bent and mortared with so many doubts and desires. Life flashing, as before internal eyes.

Then it comes! The first drop. It seeps out, plunges reluctantly, clinging, dark and turbid, reminding of blood. Someone will drink this. It seems a shameful secret. I am overcome with the responsibility implied by my having witnessed the fall of the first drop. First betrayal. Of unifying sinews. I am in the first drop. I am that act of clinging to the spiget from whence I fall. I am alone on the bottom of a steel basin, losing my form, dispersed, walls of intended containment rising on all sides, the light above, streaking in from around the spiget, unreachable. I am responsible for my own predicament. I will be drunk by some craven consumer of this soon-to-be-beverage, this liquid imagining itself before my eyes, taking the place of my would-be mosaic biography, my supernova self-delusion. I am fated to act as fodder to the appetites of a post-human money-changer, swallowed in a contained compulsive, almost orgiastic repetition of the one indulgence that manages to fit into the daily patterns of this woman’s life, the woman who has summoned me.

from Still Lifes of Finisterrae

by Joseph Robertson

Flora favored certain colors. Colors that behaved like a feeling about fortune. She inverted almost everything with effortless tricks of the mind. Harbored an inclination to move northward, to recollect cold spaces and relate them to feelings most people associated with the tropics, or at least with heat.

I was captivated by that tendency, to reach for the golden bough, to know how to wait alongside one’s kindred, to wait with humanity, to hope for the unattainable, specifically because such activity (its selfsame irony actually lifting it above futility) keeps us on track.

There was a metaphysics between us. It seemed to have arisen at a certain altitude, which we never managed to measure, but whose pressure against our skin was always unforgettable.

Objectivity is implied by the behavior specific to pressure. There is subjectivity in what can only be immeasurable. There are metaphysics implied by almost any object's naturally epicurean relation to what defies measure.

...there are always choices, and you have been refining the shape of this problem for a long time now... it just took a little calamity to realize the design.