by
Lauren Elkin
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[...] all of these things at once, made me say, as she was putting her shoes on, all your radical politics and he’s the person you go home to?
She shrugs. The heart wants what it wants.
It does, sure, but it’s our responsibility to think about what we want and why we want it, we can’t just close our eyes to our desires.
Yes, we can, she says, and I think you should try it sometime, she says, bristling. Why do you have to explain everything to yourself? Or demand that other people do the same thing? Why can’t something just be?
The compulsion to repeat, I begin, it has a hold on us that we can try to break—
Oh fuck off with your Freud, Anna, seriously, she says. I’m not your fucking student. Just fuck off for once.
She starts to leave, and turns back, and puts her arms around me.
Maybe I like the way it holds me, she says.
Towards the end of the day there is Clémentine at the door. Anna! she says, rummaging in her tote bag. Lamia gave me this book and it’s incredible and I wanted to tell you about it right away. It’s about this woman – fuck that’s not it – she’s in love with this guy and so much so – ah there it is, and she pulls out a copy of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick – so much so that she is willing to debase herself by writing him all these letters! And so it isn’t really about him at all, it’s really about desire and daring to make art, and the importance, for a woman artist, of being blatantly narcissist in order to actually become who she is. But! she says, flipping through the dog-eared pages, this is what I wanted to tell you about. She finds the passage, reads aloud in her accented English. Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy – a claustrophobia inside your skin.
That’s it, she says. That’s why I can’t get on with Lacan. I don’t see my desire as a lack of something. Not a phallus, not some substitute for it, but like – it’s like some people plant this seed of energy in you, that loads of other people don’t. And as it takes root I feel like I’m shimmering with excitement, and need to get physically close to them, to share it, to feel their shimmer. Do you know what I mean? And I think I know what she means, I think I have been trying to share Clémentine’s shimmer this whole time, and I pull her closer, and then she says something that makes me wonder what exactly we’ve been doing this whole time.
i need to re-read that, i feel like it would hit me very differently now lol
I have to go for a walk after that. In a second she has gone from being someone I love, or think I could love, to someone who’s playing a role, and watching herself do it. I love Clémentine’s shimmer but it seems to me for the first time constructed, not natural; willed, not produced. She read the giddy parts of I Love Dick without the heavy stuff, the feelings of shame and failure, the marital estrangement. She missed the parts about what it takes to live with other people, the unsolvable problem of alienation between the self and the other, the constraints they place on you, the small spaces you have to occupy together. Kraus calls desire a claustrophobia inside your own skin – a need to get out of the body house, to jump inside someone else’s for a change. How does she account for that? She didn’t, she left that part out. There was still so much to talk about. I was left frustrated, as if there were soap left on my skin and the hot water had gone.
Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness —
to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.
Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we’re to become part of it all,
won’t our paradise also involve
participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas
along the interstate at night?
We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:
a hell we’ve made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.
But that’s me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that’s what there were to experience.
Perhaps that’s why she’s a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger
world of things it won’t be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see.
I have devoted myself to affirmation,
when I should have kept my eyes on the ground
ah i like this
Blackboard covered with a dust
of living chalk, live chaos-cloud
wormed by turbulence: the rod glides
and the vet narrates shadows
I can’t quite force into shape:
His kidneys might . . . the spleen appears . . .
I can’t see what he sees, and so
resort to simile: cloudbank, galaxy
blurred with slow comings
and goings, that far away. The doctor
makes appreciative noises,
to encourage me;
he praises Beau’s stillness.
I stroke the slope beneath
those open, abstracted eyes,
patient, willing to endure whatever
we deem necessary, while the vet
runs along the shaved blonde
Today I’m herding the two old dogs
into the back of the car,
after the early walk, wet woods:
Beau’s generous attention must be
brought into focus, gaze pointed
to the tailgate so he’ll be ready to leap,
and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs,
needs me to lift first his forepaws
and then, placing my hands
under his haunches, hoist the moist
black bulk of him into the wagon,
and he growls a little
before he turns to face me,
glad to have been lifted—
And as I go to praise them,
as I like to do, the words
that come from my mouth,
from nowhere, are Time’s children,
as though that were the dearest thing
a person could say.
Why did I call them by that name?
They race this quick parabola
faster than we do, as though
it were a run in the best of woods,
run in their dreams, paws twitching
—even asleep they’re hurrying.
Doesn’t the world go fast enough?
We’re caught in this morning’s
last-of-April rain, the three of us
bound and fired by duration
—rhythm too swift for even them
to hear, though perhaps we catch
a little of that rush and ardor
—furious poetry!—
the sound time makes,
seeing us through.
Big blocks of ice
—clear cornerstones—
chug down a turning belt
toward the blades of a wicked,
spinning fan; scraping din
of a thousand skates and then
powder flies out in a roaring
firehose spray of diamond dust,
and the film crew obscures
the well-used Manhattan snow
with a replica of snow.
Trailers along the edge of the Square,
arc lamps, the tangled cables
of a technical art, and our park’s
a version of itself. We walk here
daily, the old dogs and I glad
for the open rectangle of air
held in its frame of towers,
their heads held still and high
to catch the dog run’s rich,
acidic atmosphere, whitened faces
—theirs and mine—lifted toward gray
branches veining the variable sky.
Today we’re stopped at the rim:
one guy’s assigned the task
of protecting the pristine field
a woman will traverse
—after countless details are worried
into place—at a careful angle,
headed toward West Fourth.
They’re filming The Hours,
Michael’s novel, a sort of refraction
of Mrs. Dalloway. Both books
transpire on a single June day;
that’s the verb; these books do
breathe an air all attention,
as if their substance were a gaze
entirely open to experience, eager
to know—They believe
the deepest pleasure is seeing
and saying how we see,
even when we’re floored
by spring’s sharp grief, or a steady
approaching wave of darkness.
In the movie version, it’s winter;
they’re aiming for a holiday release,
and so must hasten onward.
Someone calls out Background!
and hired New Yorkers begin
to pass behind the perfect field,
a bit self-conscious, skaters
and shoppers too slow to convince,
so they try it again, Clarissa passing
the sandblasted arch
bound in its ring of chain-link,
monument glowing gray against the gray
A little less now in the world to love.
Taxi on Bleecker, dim afternoon, after
a bright one’s passing, after the hours
in stations and trains, blur of the meadows
through dull windows, fitful sleep,
heading home, and now the darkness inside
the cab deeper than anything a winter afternoon
could tender. Nothing stays, the self
has no power over time, we’re stuck
in a clot of traffic, then this: a florist shop,
where something else stood yesterday,
what was it? Do things give way that fast?
PARADISE FLOWERS, arced in gold
on the window glass, racks and rows
of blooms, and an odd openness on the sidewalk,
and—look, the telltale script of cables
inking the street, trailers near, and Martian lamps,
and a lone figure in a khaki coat poised
with a clutch of blooms while they check her aspect
through the lens: Clarissa, of course,
buying the flowers herself.
I take it personally. As if,
no matter what, this emblem persists:
a woman went to buy flowers, years ago,
in a novel, and was entered
by the world. Then in another novel,
her double chose blooms of her own
while the blessed indifferent life
of the street pierced her, and now
here she is, blazing in a dim trench
of February, the present an image
reduced through a lens, a smaller version
of a room in which love resided.
Though they continue, shadow and replica,
copy and replay, adapted, reduced,
reframed: beautiful versions—a paper cone of asters,
golden dog nipping at a glove—fleeting,
and no more false than they are true.
Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar, dates, black tea.
Your house, then ours. Anyone’s now. Memory’s furious land.
Mrs. Ajo planted these:
single, utterly durable, red.
Mr. Ajo used to walk up the street
from the bay with a bucket of clams
and a cigarette fixed in his mouth
as though he’d been born
with these accessories.
They’re gone now.
The poppies, in June, forthright,
like a single stripe of the flag,
all along one side of their closed-up
house: insistent, unqualified color,
and a hundred furred green
buds lift, on their bowed necks,
preparing a further outcry.
When I say I hate time, Paul says
how else could we find depth
of character, or grow souls?
Of course he’s right,
but I can’t help thinking
the Ajos wouldn’t vote
for the mottled, complexified
shades favored by the years;
they liked this intransigent red,
they wanted it plain
and dependable, noisy.
Even Mr. Ajo, who once looked
at my garden in full bloom,
all old roses and peonies,
and said, talking around his cigarette,
Lot of money in that
he reuses the time bit in school of the arts but i think it's better and more apropos here
Waldo Salt believed in capturing “the truth” of the characters in a story. I had the good fortune of having several conversations with Waldo, and he was not only an extraordinary writer, but an extraordinary person. We talked about the craft of screenwriting a lot, and Waldo told me that he believed the character’s need (the dramatic need—what the character wants to win, gain, or achieve) determines the dramatic structure. His words resonated with me immediately, and I shared with him that I had recently come to the same understanding while I was analyzing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: The character’s need determines the creative choices he/she makes during the screenplay, and gaining clarity about that need allows you to be more complex, more dimensional, in your character portrayal.
It was a powerful moment for both of us as we sat in an unspoken glow of communication that was more powerful than words, and it led to a long and passionate discussion about capturing “the truth of the human condition” in a screenplay. The key to a successful screenplay, Waldo emphasized, was preparing the material. Dialogue, he said, is “perishable,” because the actor can always improvise lines to make something work. But, he added forcefully, the character’s dramatic need is sacrosanct. That cannot be changed, because it holds the entire story in place. Putting words down on paper, he said, is the easiest part of the screenwriting process; it is the visual conception of the story that takes so long. And he quoted Picasso: “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
Reading it from this perspective, I saw four things, four essential qualities that seemed to go into the making of good characters: (1), the characters have a strong and defined dramatic need; (2), they have an individual point of view; (3), they personify an attitude; and (4), they go through some kind of change, or transformation.
Those four elements, those four qualities, make up good character. Using that as a starting point, I saw that every main, or major, character has a strong dramatic need. Dramatic need is defined as what your main characters want to win, gain, get, or achieve during the course of your screenplay. The dramatic need is what drives your characters through the story line. It is their purpose, their mission, their motivation, driving them through the narrative action of the story line.