Being the Author's free-associative thoughts
on process, simulation and escape velocity . . .
I think of you
and wonder who
you are and what's your line
I wonder if
there's someone else
or if it's true that I'm
the only one
in your life . . .
As enigmatic
as you can be
I'm not suspicious
naturally
There's so much that
you hide from me
The mystery:
am I the only one
in your life?
--Pet Shop Boys, "The Only One"
There was no sleep last night: I couldn't get on top of the ache in my leg, and I haven't been able to shake the cling of ill-health that managed to find me last month. Plus, I've been struggling with a critical sequence in the novel. So yes, insomnia. For me, the distressing aspect isn't the inability to sleep; it's the vague feeling of claustrophobia that invariably accompanies my extra-innings wakefulness.
So after wandering around darkened, suddenly too-small rooms, I decided to play one contributing factor against the others: Sleeplessness being a given, my problem with the book sequence could at least distract me from various aches and help productively pass the time until dawn. I sketched a schematic of the pesky impasse with Tony that resembled the hub of wheel, with spokes extending in all directions. The hub represented a specific view held by Tony; the spokes led to constituent parts of that opinion.
Laid out in this fashion, it was clear the eight components of his view could be just as easily gathered in subgroups. Indeed, it would be much easier for Tony (and therefore me, his long-suffering conduit between aether and page) to embrace a "small-plate" approach to life: Seizing partial opportunities in a pragmatic, highly effective way. But this tricky sequence occurs after Tony has his hard-won authenticity and wants what is not necessarily easy, pragmatic or conventionally effective. In fact, he's appalled by time/motion studies applied to the emotions. And further, in terms of structure, Tony's needs are meant to underscore the breathtakingly shallow Venn Diagram Philosophy Beatrice espouses. For her, one lover's 80 percent overlap with her interests is equal to another lover's different, similarly sized intersection. (It's a relativistic, any-lover-in-a-bout-of-boredom strategy that she's worked out with elegant and frightening precision: Bed-hopping justified with statistical analysis.)
