Your choice

 

I lie naked in bed sprawled across the sheets. If I close my left eye and look at my nose, one third of my world is blocked by a monumental ski jump. A blurred open book about two feet is on my left side; my view to the right is only vague shapes and shadows. If I concentrate on my hand from close up, I can see a cracked and sere landscape with a sprinkling of desert grass. If I sketch myself from the viewpoint of what I literally see right now-- an extremely foreshortened view of the world--I am a headless entity, a looming chest, a hint of hip, moderate thighs, tapering down to small distorted feet. I have just discovered first person point of view. I am the central character of my own story.

I tried using this technique in my story “The Eve Recursion.”

“As she looks down at her foreshortened body, she becomes a headless entity. Her looming chest is two granite peaks. At the cleft of her thighs is a spring-fed pool. Her legs of white sand dunes, taper down to her feet, now small distorted drifts caressed by the cerulean waves. She is Socotra.”

Tara had married her college sweetheart Sven. With his fair hair and six-foot plus frame, Sven could only be Scandinavian. When asked how they met, he joked that he had swept her away during a Viking raid from some undiscovered island. Really he had courted her with heirloom, heavily scented, red roses. Their attraction was like the tide to the shore, sometimes rolling away strewing the strand with wrack and wreck, sometimes overwhelming as a king tide during the full moon.

I can manipulate the hand to block out what I don’t want the viewer of my self-portrait to see. I can exaggerate my attractive features, the large green eyes, or-eliminate the unattractive-- the calluses, cellulite, and scars. I am playing with persona or masks, what truth I choose to share with the viewer. In fact, I can lie. The unreliable narrator can add twists and unexpected depth to the plot line. Readers be certain as to what is truth and what is false as the plot develops.

“Sven stares at the ominous stalactites dangling from the cave entrance and the darkness of the cavern. “I came here in the distress of my soul,” he intones. The couple had toured the Hoq cave yesterday and Tara recognizes the saying from the stone inscription written by Nogar, a sailor from Palmyra shipwrecked on Socotra in 257 AD.

“Perhaps Nogar was lured by the singing Sirens of Socotra before their appearance on America’s Got Talent,” says Tara.

“I don’t do well in dark, tight spaces and I don’t think we’ll find any sirens in there,” Sven says. “You and Nasreen go ahead without us. Us guys will wait here. Here’s my flashlight and extra water. And don’t look back.”

Back to the portrait analogy, the cat jumps up on the bed. She is insistent. “You get up now. “ “You feed me.” You let me under the blankets now!” She has found second person point of view. Cats are very good at making “you” a character in their tales, trying to dictate what you should do. You the writer are trying to pull you the reader into a single entity.

Another entity appears. My lover enters the room; he understands me and how I will react. He knows more about me in some ways and, in other ways he knows only what I have revealed. God looks down from above. She is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent. She knows exactly what I am thinking and what I will do. A burglar sneaks by the doorway. His view of the person on the bed is defined by her possessions. All of these entities are third person points of view which can be ......

The “I as artiste,” the burglar, the lover, God, and even the cat are all me the author writing this essay. Perhaps I made up the lover. Maybe I made up God. The cat is real. As Lamott defines the role of writer, “We’re mimics, we’re parrots—we’re writers.” But right now, the voices in my head are quiet and the parrots have migrated to warmer climes.