Recycle, Reduce, Re-use

In the shadow of this ethereal city, travelers may tell of a spiral of steam that slowly rises from the rooftop of a quiet settlement, who’s dismal tarmac tops set against the city backdrop seemed to cast a cloud over all of the sky that stands between them. A city by name alone and once the home of a diverse biological community that lived by compos mentis and perfect balance, now there stands a piece of land barely reminiscent of the earth that prior to French settlement boasted fertile fields.

It was in this settlement under one stained sable ceiling (that, truth be told, showed wear of the worries that it had always housed within its’ walls) lived a man of reasonable kindness though not entirely optimistic character, named Perch  Van Lagelsetan.  The upbringing and education of Perch was the result of years of intense cultivation of social landscape by the Van Lagelsetans that had settled upon these streets with industrious intentions some years prior. Though Perch bore many of the marks of appearance that had always defined descendants of the Van Lagelsetans, the content of his head and heart when put to test seemed to bear nothing of resemblance to his ancestors actions and he mirrored them in entitlement alone. In time I have come to know Perch as a man of kind heart and amicable acquaintance whose ruin and rescue alike seemed to rest in the hands of the lady with which he kept company. Perch often offered a hushed discourse to passers-by of the trials to which he was subject by his fairer company but in truth it was perhaps the burden of reality with which her words crossed Perch that had kept him from both the grave and the poorhouse. Despite Perch’s aversion to the responsibility that they implied, it was from her notions of conscience that Perch had mustered what little patience and inspiration existed within him to carry him across the languid and literal precipices of the city sidewalks.

It is quite honest to say that Perch was a character of great acclaim amongst the small community with which he socialized, this fame was not a product of accomplishments as it was with many of his peers but the fruit of his familiarity with so many of the residents of his small city . The kindness of Perch’s smile as it was settled within a frame that did not betray him for his years, had made him a great favorite among the women of the neighborhood and they saw fit to validate in their daily discussions the delusions of distressed ambition that he advertised as the fault of circumstance or his not yet wife, the lady Doven Van Carter.  At first glance and in his neighbors eyes, Perch was simply satisfied with the world of careless consumption and aimless chatter in which he immersed himself and companions were often found clutching at his coattails for an hour or two across the workweek in hopes of remembering what it was to be careless and unattached for a moment. To his companions this behavior held a break from monotony and a brief breath for perspective from everyday life, for Perch, this had become all of life.          

While Perch’s sometimes sunny, in a moment sometimes somber demeanor did not do much to disturb the peace of the world outside the doors of his dwelling, behind blinds drawn closed, Perch often grew dark and despondent at the absence of purpose in his world. Dove Van Carter was alone faced with the repercussions of Perch’s detachment from inspiration and sought to encourage him the best in the ways that she knew how.  There was never question of the rightness of intention that lay in Perch’s heart as he was always quick to assist in the betterment of the lives of those closest to him. The flaw in Perch’s character was that he could not seem to escape from the routine indulgences of his every day for long enough to honor the potential he had buried somewhere beneath his weighted fear of failure.

Perch would often watch the children of his neighbors while the parents were away at a days work (with which he was unfamiliar). To these children, Perch was a man like a mountain, a fantastic force of understanding and inspiration always with a story to ease their troubles while his own children had grown to their teens barely ever knowing the man that their father was.  Perch’s children lived only a days travel away with the woman that had once stood in the place that Doven Van Carter now occupied as she tried tirelessly to pry Perch Vanlegelseten’s feet from the sad space in which he had cemented himself. Doven Van Carter had hoped that perhaps with consistent reminder of the wide world that existed beyond the limits of the city Perch would one day recognize how his talents might be best put to use , if not for himself than for his estranged children. Doven Van Carter herself was a woman occupied with a variety of educational interests of the persuasion of environmental and humanitarian advocacy. Sometime long ago ,Doven had seen a glimpse into Perch that had led her to believe that he carried a similar fire for preservation and conservation but as the years had passed she had seen that whatever flame had once burned in Perch had been stamped out from years of inaction and careless consumption. Like so many women of her generation Doven had discovered that the man she had tried to love wore on her a bit like Watson, not himself luminent but  a conductor of light. The glimmer she had mistakenly seen in Perch might have only been a reflection of her own hope.     

On one such hopeful day, when Doven Van Carter had grown nostalgic of the spark she once perhaps saw in Perch , she tried to pull her companion from the comfortless space he occupied when the shades were drawn and bring him to converse with her. Doven had been struck by a sense of urgency about the state of environmental peril that continuously befell the world around her and she urged Perch to recognize the fate that lay before the humanity that wholely embraces complacency and inaction. She had a desperate will to do something to help her little city move from beyond such a fate and she wished her partner to offer his perspective on her plan. In response to the heartfelt concern that spilled from the lips of his partner, Perch rose slowly from his recliner, saying nothing but crumpling the aluminum beer can in his hand and tossing it at Doven’s feet. Doven sat, stunned at the silence and disinterest as Perch walked to the refrigerator filled the pockets of his coat with black label cans and the screen door squealed and crashed as it fell closed behind him.

On days such as this when Perch could not dodge the realities with which Doven felt he should finally come to terms, Perch would  bring along with him , his sole domestic adherent , a six pack of blacklabel cans, he was convinced that a more gainful companion than this a man will never know. Perch would wander around the city’s stores and streets, not really in search of anything but simply to feel the pavement pass beneath his feet. It was when he was occupied with this familiar walk- about that Perch heard his name unmistakably shouted from behind him. He was almost certain that this beckoning call had come from the direction of a steep staircase on the corner that despite his frequent passing he had never before noticed. At the top of the staircase stood a fellow of somewhat unusual appearance shouldering the burden of a large black box bearing only the marking of a single green “X”. The man gestured for Perch to come forward and assist him with his burden and as was his neighborly tendency, Perch quickly did so. As he attended to his half of the weight, Perch followed the man down the winding stairs that appeared to lead to a garden level apartment from which he could hear the murmuring of men’s voices and the muffled sounds of gunshots. It seemed strange to have such steps in the city that felt as though they wound forever into the ground and Perch thought for a moment of turning around and finding his way back to Doven Van Carter, but as always, Perch’s occupation with direction was quickly fleeting and he thought it better to just continue in concentration on one step down and then the next. These moments of descent felt oddly like hours but at last Perch, the unusual stranger and their burden settled upon the level ground that lead them to the door of the apartment. Without prompting, the door swung on its’ hinges wide enough to allow the man and Perch to enter but not so wide as to cast more than a dim halo of light around the room they entered and the people that sat within. The room was sparsely decorated and near empty if not for the wall of televisions that paved the far side of the room and the tattered L-shaped sectional on which the apartment’s tenants sat opposite. Each man in the room had fastened to his head an in-ear monitor and mobile mouthpiece and in his hands a controller of some sort. These strange fellows sat engaged in participation of some vitally important pursuit, with identically listless looks glazed across each of their faces. Their movements were calculated and subtle and at times each would reach forward and pull a can much like the one Perch himself held, from the chests filled with ice, the nine- tins before them.              

His gaze had been so long transfixed on the scene that lay before him that Perch had not noticed the package he had helped to carry had already been unpacked and it’s contents lay waiting before him. The man he had followed in his descent sat already plugged in to the console now wearing the same vacant glaze as his company. Perch glanced down at the extra set of headphones and handset that sat beside him  and he saw a world upon the screen that he could at last control without the nagging realities presented to him by Doven Van Carter. What little light once was had disappeared and Perch stood bathed only in the green glow of the wall of television screens , he knew he should not , but perhaps just for a moment he would escape. He placed the headphones upon his ears ,bent his knees to sit and in that moment escaped into a world that he alone could pause and start when he felt fit.

He had fallen into something of a daze in this world and was awoken by the aching of his bones that had grown tired and stiff, surely he thought from his walk and a few moments of sitting. Perch looked around the room to find his quiet company gone and that he sat alone in the view of the florescent screen.  A sliver of light crept into the dismal room in the shape of the broken doorjamb, Perch had not remembered that piece missing before, so many strange changes in such a short time he thought. As he stood and stretched away the stiffness in his joints, Perch thought of the unfortunate circumstances he would most likely meet when he returned home to Doven Van Carter , she would most certainly blame his night away on the “evasiveness” she always accused him of carrying on with. Perhaps she was a bit correct  he thought, but we can’t all be heroes.

Without rush or regard for urgency as was his habit, Perch made his way to the door and stepped into the outside world where he was presented with a sky of a color green  of the likes he had never before seen. As he began to climb the stairs that led to the street Perch knew some mischief must be afoot, that odd man must have moved him to some foreign land. It was if the air he was breathing was not air at all but smoke of the most toxic kind, sun into which he stepped did not warm him from the chill of the dark apartment but scalded him as if he had leaned too close to the the kettle steam as it screams. As he reached the top of the stairs Perch backed himself against the edge of the building to hope the shade would provide him some solace from the blinding heat. As he looked across the barren landscape before him, gasping and wishing to breathe easily , O! what he would give for just a breath of clean, cool air ! Perch shielded his eyes as well as he could from the light and saw that the city ,standing, if you could call it that, before him held something of the same shape  as that of the city that the Van Lagelsetens had for soo long called home.

For days Perch hid in the shadows of the crumbling architecture that surrounded him, only moving from building to building when reprieve was offered by a passing cloud. He only survived a few days in that new climate of his city, not much could survive following the death of all uncultivated microbiotic life, but in the hours that he did remain waking, he gathered enough scraps of paper to put together some semblance of the history of his city’s demise.  He had been absorbed in that inane game for the passing of ten years and in that time the future that Doven Van Carter so feared had become a startling reality. The people that had seen it coming constructed a sustainable ecosystem some miles from where Perch’s city had fallen but he knew he could not make it that distance ….so it was probably best not to even try. Perch had happened upon the A-E section of those who had departed for the community and Doven was among those that had left and survived, his daughters had made it to safety as well. It seems the world had gone on entirely without Perch Van Lagelseten and as he filled his lungs with his last breath of sour black air ,  the contents of his life came before him in a flash and he was filled with sorrow for the days that he had wasted afraid of his own life , and for what good? 

Metacommentary :

The work that I chose to parody for the concluding assignment of our semester is Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker by Washington Irving. I chose this story as it addresses an array of ills that recur in the societies of men transcendent of time and tenure. While the task of attempting to mirror in any fashion the work of a writer as well-reputed as Washington Irving is rather daunting, the significant literary techniques that Irving employs provide a skeletal framework from which to build a story of some likeness. In my parody of Rip Van Winkle, I attempted to integrate the use of two specific literary mechanisms that Irving utilizes throughout Rip Van Winkle, alliteration and the simile. The presence of alliteration in the work of Washington Irving is rather undeniable and the story of Rip Van Winkle is no exception to this standard.  Irving graces nearly every paragraph with the casual cadence of coincidental description allotted by alliteration speaking of Dutch history as rich in “legendary lore” (Irving par.2) and of the “snugly shut up” (Irving par.2) families that lived within the same village that Rip called home. I endeavored to achieve a similar sort of effortless and clever portrait of characters and setting in my parody of Irving’s work but as I wrote of the character that I created to resemble Rip and described him as “ simply satisfied” and of his growing sullen “ behind blinds drawn closed” my attempts , while valiant , remain somewhat uninspired by comparison.  The second literary tool that Irving applies rather frequently within his writing that I aimed to exemplify in my parody is the use of comparison of unlike things, or the simile.  Irving employs the simile as he writes of the setting sun at the summit of the mountain that “will glow and light up like a crown of glory.”  (Irving par. 3), in this comparison Irving delicately describes the resounding beauty of the setting sun, painting the picture of a crown of gold settled at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. My attempts at utilizing representational simile are somewhat less eloquent but equally well-intentioned. Knowing that there may be some departure from similarity in syntax as my literary finesse is not that of the author I am attempting to imitate, I tried to create a likeness in simile by also using the mountainside as the subject for my comparison. In description of the lead character of my story , Perch  Van Lagelsetan, I combined both alliteration and simile , telling of the local children’s perspective of the protagonist as “a man like a mountain”  to convey the grandness that he displayed when viewed from a particular perspective.   As I sought to replicate the descriptive mechanisms in Irving’s style of prose I attempted to find some closeness in technique by imitating the antiquity of language present in Iriving’s writing while simultaneously adhering to dialogue that presents itself as palatable to a modern day audience, whether these attempts ended in success or something less is yours to determine.  

Parody 2

One Should Never Trust a Perry Como Look-alike

A tune began to play today

In my mind its notes did sound

A crooner hummed his melody

And an in an eerie dirge it did resound

This song it left me frozen

To the floor beneath my feet

And as he sang his somber tune

To my thoughts I did retreat

And then the needle screeched and stopped

And skipped across my heart

With the stutter of this vinyl track

Our sweet façade fell quick apart.

For the second segment of this semesters’ final assignment, I chose to direct my concentration towards the work of Emily Dickinson and in particular her poem that lacks proper title but is known by the famous first line “I felt a funeral in my brain”. In addition to the immanent value that exists in the speaker of this work’s contemplation of metaphorical descent into the unconscious, through it I also gained a great deal of perspective on the importance of inversion and rhyme scheme in Dickinson’s work. Although the presence of inversion is not as apparent in this work of Dickinson’s as it is in some of her other writing it still remains a literary device for which Dickinson is well recognized for employing here.  In the closing stanza of the aforementioned work Dickinson departs from the AbAb rhyme scheme that she utilizes in the previous four stanza’s of the poem and concludes instead with an arrangement of words particularly placed out of the order of their familiar context at the end of the “A” lines to accentuate their finality.   In I felt a funeral in my brain Dickinson displays this use of inversion as she writes of “a plank in reason, broke” and a three lines later of the conclusion of her madness as the speaker “finished knowing—then—“ (Dickinson par.5) discarding any adherence to syntax but providing great emphasis on the resolution of the piece. This pattern of weighting the “A’” line is present within the body of Dickenson’s AbAb rhyme scheme and in the first four stanzas Dickenson writes the end of the “A” line with rhyming words that strike similar chords. While all of the rhymes do not exhibit a precise execution of this rhyme scheme the pattern of language does show an obvious pattern as she writes stanzas that pair words such as “to and fro” and “breaking through”( Dickinson par1) . In my bid not at attempted replication but at achieving any resemblance to Dickenson’s work within a modern day context, I worked to take advantage of the author’s use of extended metaphor and first person’s perspective to describe the disturbance of the speaker’s cerebral reality. While my parody does not carry nearly the gravity that the metaphor of the funeral in Dickinson’s work does, I did try to draw a connection between my parody and Dickinson’s, modeling death in the sound of an “eerie dirge”.