As The Story Goes... (Part Two)

... Nobody cared enough to give a damn, and the Official Text was easily manipulated to control such large masses of undefined characters as the ones that were created with nothing more than ideas scratched in bad handwriting and never thought of again. Now the Chapter Twelve of today is a world known for its dull and listless descriptions, and days that persisted as run-on sentences do, as highway traffic down the page. It was easy to sway the governing body, those powerful characters who sat at the Table of Contents and decided, word by word, what to edit. Once it became apparent the Writer had ‘given up on their world,’ it was ‘decided’ that somebody needed to take over and enforce the order. Without a Grand Writer, His Story’s Pen was lying there, wide open and vacant, for anyone to pick up and use. Control of this pen controlled reality, as whoever’s in control of the present moment defines the official version of His Story, which of course puts us in the right position to accept the future of the pen holder. As characters, the unfinished looping of our nature made the outcomes of our plots obvious to everyone but ourselves, and our predicates predictable to those watching from outside the Storyline… and it was easy to control us.

Well, nature (and crack heads) abhors a vacuum, and a dark force moved in. Words got cut. Whole morals of age old stories were mangled and twisted out of context so that they meant something so different from their original meaning that all real meaning was lost, or compressed into an agenda that benefited the holder of His Story’s Pen.

Sure, sure, there was some dissention from lesser characters as far back as the First Chapter, from those characters who had enough development to realize the dangers of those who rewrite the books of history from the present moment backwards.

“Not that that’s anything new,” it was said. “We’ve been repeating the His Story of the men who were in charge two thousand years ago… and those same men are still in charge today,” those intellectuals would say in the unmarked coffee shops of the back alley Bourgeois Chapters of Eight and Nine, as they discussed ideas of the mind – ideas of how to get the Writer of their world to start writing again.

It would mean completion for all involved.

Such an obviously positive thing as completing the Novel we live in, completing the world and the universe to a harmonic resonance… Who would oppose that? Who would find it inconvenient that plummeting sales were predicted if an entire multivolume series worth of undefined consumers, flailing incomplete, and conditioned from the very conception of their ideas to define themselves with things of pleasure and leisure, and those gadgets with distractive capabilities, available at cost in the Corporation’s monthly publications? What if they all stopped buying? What if they no longer needed to seek completion in things, and instead completed themselves with a quiet introspection of the greater meaning of their story’s overall moral, and the deeper symbology of their metaphors, and their beautiful yet untold inner backstories; all of which would be pristine and visible to everyone, completed and looping in perfection into eternity. Who would be opposed something as natural as that? Who would argue the passage of legislation that would fund an idea pool, with floating think tanks, and whose ducks were all swimming in rows; where professional thinkers would be paid to come up with heroic new ideas that might catch the Writer’s lazy eye, re-capturing that original spark that inspired Him to want to create in the first place?

Who, you ask?

“I’ll tell you who,” said those who gathered over espresso so strong it was brewed through a bench press. “Sit down, pull up a cup of mud,” they’d say in the secret coffee houses of the later Chapters. “I’ll tell you all about it.” And with ideas from the minds of few with many mouths, they did.

That’s how coffee shops, one by one, were closed with nailed boards across doors and yellow cautionary tape wrapped around whole first floors. Those places offering caffeine with quiet atmospheres had become breeding grounds for intellectuals to explore new ideas that may somehow inspire the Writer. Around that time there was a rise in the number of below-grade characters discussing underground ideas in the basement smoking rooms… and the folks in the attic were above everyone else. Soon the bars were the only place left to hang out. They were loud, dank joints where idiots sucked back sud-mugs, rabid, and foaming with beer mouths; their arms flailing and screaming at a flat screen above their heads where forty cars drove in the same circle four hundred times. Nobody cared who came in last, and the first place trophy was a piece of trash, and all anyone wanted was for somebody to be mangled with blood and metal and severed limbs spilled across the track. Who can have an intellectual conversation in an environment like that?

So, The Big Distraction was hyped and funds were funneled into advertisement, and the volume was turned up, until the Distraction itself became a multi-conglomerate Corporation… and some say, its own living entity… but they don’t like us to say things like that. It wasn’t long before the Distraction was only shown in large warehouse sized bars and theater halls, where crowds came naked and hungry to consume, and where the most obnoxious behavior was not only permitted, but promoted, as nobody exchanged lengthy ideas in an echoing coliseum full of bare titties. They just bought more beer at three times the cost.

After that, it was like the words were always just there, or I guess that’s what we were supposed to believe. They were added, is what happened, behind doors that never opened, to the subtext of the Chapter, and we all just had to go along with it. None of us had a choice. We were forced to stay in the character they determined, not in what was best for the Novel. Social gatherings became deafening, powerful displays of mayhem. Coffee was made a banned substance, as it promoted quiet and unmonitored conversations, which by the end of Chapter Eleven was seen as a threat, since new creative words were being used, and often even rebelliously made up against all laws forbidding such behavior. These clandestine and modern words referred to a new resistance to the old way of thinking, a practice long since made illegal.

The act of ‘speaking out’ had morphed into a dangerous final act in many cases, as most of those characters who were vocal in their resistance to the new revisions were severely edited, or made to look foolish to the rest of their paragraph’s contextual groupings. Some were given fabricated and demeaning backstories that were completely character-created attributes, and the Original Storyline began to slow down, and drift into meaningless descriptions of embarrassing moments of the otherwise unessential characters that were bold enough to speak their minds. It was enough to silence those minor characters into compliance out of fear. Many were removed from the plot altogether, deemed extraneous and unreceptive to the New Word. Manufactured characters and fake plots were injected into the Overall Storyline, and some say, even into the Sacred Original Text.

Power switched hands silently after that, and the infallible Table of Contents, the name given to the governing body of those who sat around the elongated polished wooden table at the head of the book, and decided in all fairness what was best for the entire Novel, was corrupted.     

They sold all of those barely mentioned secondary characters the opinion that the Writer will start writing again when the Words are with him, and that being unfinished was a burden that we, as characters in His world, must suffer for the unfortunate crime of being written.

Even though the Chapter’s pages stopped fanning, the impressionable numbers of the population kept expanding due to this one specific sentence that we were told was written by the hands of our beloved Writer: “… and their numbers kept growing, as did their lust to consume.” This one fragmented thought was supposedly scrawled on the backside of a paper stapled to the sacred Original Outline, somewhere on the Writer’s immutable desk, though I’ve never seen proof of its authenticity.

Then there’s the one sentence that those who feel the words we’re receiving in Chapter Twelve are far from true, cling to in reverence of the idea of a Thirteenth Chapter. It’s a sentence that’s too well known for those in charge of defining the reality of the Chapters to simply delete, without making the sentence come true. Although, I’ve read there was a surge of riot gear manufactured by the Corporation’s Necessary Awareness task force (Narrator backs up and shows his hands to be empty of threats.), here for our safety of course… and who can deny we are not safe with their grips around our necks? Is it not Written that trouble is found when we stray? And we cannot stray if we must obey.

“If no one can stray far away from the Word, no one gets in trouble,” was another sentence supposedly included in the groundwork for the much anticipated Thirteenth Chapter. Its approved meaning was meant to sound far less threatening than its aggressive tone might suggest.

Clearly the Corporation, headed by the greed that clogged the minds of the most powerful men in the whole Novel, the men with the Pen, The Goatfooted Men, had already interjected their interpretation of the direction of what Chapter Thirteen would be about. But the trajectory of the Great Storyline had already been established. The shift had already occurred. Chapter Thirteen held the promise of previous chapters, where flash-forwards reflected a world where all characters realized their places as tiny pieces of a Whole Novel, not just individual characters that strive for their own fulfillment.

From the lead-characters, in a hardback back-pat wrapped in a dust jacket with the fawns of fans whose names everybody knows on it, to the lesser characters who break their backs to support them… it has been Written, by the great Lord our Syntax, bless his name, that “All shall have a purpose based in Truth, and their purposes shall be known by all, because all is all there is. That is all.”

The story had been arcing to where change would begin, it’s rumored in Chapter Thirteen, where the oppressive grip on His Story’s Pen would tighten at first, then loosen, as the characters became more aware of their place in the literaturistic world they were created into. They would collectively cause the “Accepted Definition” of reality to change as well. The sentence that gave us all hope was only half a thought, scribbled in a cautionary tone on a sticky pad too bright yellow to ignore: a crowd of growing thousands in the public square, signs of protests, waving cardboard opinions, added to the general unease in the city.

Perhaps the sentence was not deleted long ago from the Original Text because it could be misinterpreted to mean there’s a constantly growing number of people in the square, protesting free thought, if need be… but that interpretation created thousands of new mouths every day that ate food that cost what a day’s work would take to earn it, and new shoes, and new clothes, and so on would be needed… and the Corporation was the only game in town, with storeroom floors that held hoards.

One last sentence I’ll mention, as it smacks of the Goatfooted men and their dirty little pie fingers, was this: “Leave to the editor, the editor’s job. It is his to do what there is to do.” We’re led to believe this sentence was included in a letter the blessed Writer had written to a colleague way back in the day of hand written letters. This letter was sent, of course, in the mail, which is why we don’t have proof of its existence, yet it cleared the way for the Goatfooted Men to implement the militarization of the Editing Enforcement Squad, who made their suggestions with a pen mightier than any sword, spilling red ink across the very Page that was once pure and white and without incompletion. Original Words were changed, and changed again, until all the life and rhythm and abstract meaning had been stomped and beaten out of it in the name of Syntax, our Lord, and a decent sentence structure for all to endure.

“Just wait,” we were told. “Surely the Writer is thinking up something good… and in the end, each and every one of you, even the most meek and mundane characters will be completed… but until then, please allow The Corporation to see that your orders are filled in a timely fashion, with minimal fees for shipping. And for handling the problems that we think you shouldn’t have to worry about.” Corporation Brand, We’re here for you.

Or at least that’s how the story goes.