Color Beyond Shade
If you've followed this blog for the last year and a half, you'll have noticed that I recently changed its title from The Slush Pile to Color Beyond Shade. As a writer I find words and their meanings to have deep significance and it naturally follows that titles and names would also hold a deep significance for me. After finishing the writing process for Shatter, I recalled the reasons I had initially given for starting this blog. I had chosen the title The Slush Pile, because in the publishing world a slush pile is where rejected manuscripts go to die and in my time as a writer my fiction languished unfinished in limbo, while I had finished numerous academic, nonfiction, and creative nonfiction works. That writing, and completing that writing, had rarely proved a challenge for me. Now, don't misunderstand, I don't mean that the writing just flowed like silk, but that finishing those works failed to stump me. When I started this blog, I realized the difference that existed between those two general categories of my writing - one had deadlines, the other did not.
For this listless, purposeless, deadlineless fiction writing, I started this blog as a way to hold myself accountable via public expectation. If I declared publicly that I would have a new section in a short story up each day, then I had a deadline. Those self-imposed and internet enforced deadlines resulted in "The River" in The Noctunarum Vows series, a finished short story that I shockingly liked. This little thrill of success in finishing a fiction work propelled me to dig out and dust off The Children of Man, which lead to NaNo and the self-publication of Shatter. Granted, it's not being published by a reputable publishing house, but still it's a novel that I wrote that I've put out there to be loved or hated. The title The Slush Pile was both a self-deprication and a challenge to spur me on to get something finished. I reached that goal. I finished a substantial work of fiction and having reached that goal that title no longer applies.
So, I've thrown off the shackles of The Slush Pile and have rechristened this blog: Color Beyond Shade. Now, you might be wondering where in the far flung cosmos that title came from and what it means or maybe you're just wondering where you left that bag of Baked Lays you were eating yesterday. I can help you with one of those two questions. You're on your own for finding the chips.
One of my favorite poets is T.S. Eliot and one of my favorite of his poems is "The Hollow Men," which he wrote in the devastating aftermath of World War I. In section one of "The Hollow Men" there is a stanza that reads: "Shape without form; shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion." There is something tragic and true and raw in the hopeless paradoxes of life expressed in that poem. What can I say? I'm drawn to tragedy, because I see it so clearly in this world. While I'm drawn to the tragic, I could not name this blog "Shade without Color," because while life is filled with tragedy, I believe that life ultimately is a comedy.
Now, I don't mean this in a flippant sense that discounts the true and real darkness that inhabits life. When I say that life is a comedy, I mean that in the classical definition of comedy. The Greek playwrights defined tragedy as moving from an ideal state into an unideal state and ending the story in the unideal, while a comedy begins in the ideal moves into the unideal and progresses back to an ideal state. Much like Dante Alighieri, I believe that life ultimately is a divine comedy. I believe we live in a broken, abnormal world, but that the world will not remain broken forever. Right now we see through a dirt-enncrusted mirror, but soon we will see face to face.
Because of this hope that resides within me, I could never use anything from "The Hollow Men's" nihilistic view of life to name this blog. I acknowledge the truth of its observations regarding the current state of the world, but I cannot stay in that hopelessness. So, instead of claiming that life is nothing but chaos in the guise of order, shape without form, or darkness without beauty, shade without colour. I have chosen to say that there is life beyond the chaos and the darkness, beyond the dirt-encrusted mirror. That life can and will have color beyond shade.
For this listless, purposeless, deadlineless fiction writing, I started this blog as a way to hold myself accountable via public expectation. If I declared publicly that I would have a new section in a short story up each day, then I had a deadline. Those self-imposed and internet enforced deadlines resulted in "The River" in The Noctunarum Vows series, a finished short story that I shockingly liked. This little thrill of success in finishing a fiction work propelled me to dig out and dust off The Children of Man, which lead to NaNo and the self-publication of Shatter. Granted, it's not being published by a reputable publishing house, but still it's a novel that I wrote that I've put out there to be loved or hated. The title The Slush Pile was both a self-deprication and a challenge to spur me on to get something finished. I reached that goal. I finished a substantial work of fiction and having reached that goal that title no longer applies.
So, I've thrown off the shackles of The Slush Pile and have rechristened this blog: Color Beyond Shade. Now, you might be wondering where in the far flung cosmos that title came from and what it means or maybe you're just wondering where you left that bag of Baked Lays you were eating yesterday. I can help you with one of those two questions. You're on your own for finding the chips.
One of my favorite poets is T.S. Eliot and one of my favorite of his poems is "The Hollow Men," which he wrote in the devastating aftermath of World War I. In section one of "The Hollow Men" there is a stanza that reads: "Shape without form; shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion." There is something tragic and true and raw in the hopeless paradoxes of life expressed in that poem. What can I say? I'm drawn to tragedy, because I see it so clearly in this world. While I'm drawn to the tragic, I could not name this blog "Shade without Color," because while life is filled with tragedy, I believe that life ultimately is a comedy.
Now, I don't mean this in a flippant sense that discounts the true and real darkness that inhabits life. When I say that life is a comedy, I mean that in the classical definition of comedy. The Greek playwrights defined tragedy as moving from an ideal state into an unideal state and ending the story in the unideal, while a comedy begins in the ideal moves into the unideal and progresses back to an ideal state. Much like Dante Alighieri, I believe that life ultimately is a divine comedy. I believe we live in a broken, abnormal world, but that the world will not remain broken forever. Right now we see through a dirt-enncrusted mirror, but soon we will see face to face.
Because of this hope that resides within me, I could never use anything from "The Hollow Men's" nihilistic view of life to name this blog. I acknowledge the truth of its observations regarding the current state of the world, but I cannot stay in that hopelessness. So, instead of claiming that life is nothing but chaos in the guise of order, shape without form, or darkness without beauty, shade without colour. I have chosen to say that there is life beyond the chaos and the darkness, beyond the dirt-encrusted mirror. That life can and will have color beyond shade.
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