M.A.C. Farrant : Three from Devoted Egoists Transforms into Temple of Wonder

 

The Age

When laughter was finally banned it was a crime to crack jokes.  Humourists were strung up from lampposts.  Stand-up comics were hunted down and shot.
         We wore sunglasses, bit our hands, stuffed socks in our mouths, anything to keep levity hidden.  But the new American Jesus was relentless.
           He wore a red leather cape, rode a Harley, and was followed by his disciples, a storm cloud of hungry buzzards. All of them carried guns in their talons.
          They were touring the country.  Their proclamation: A just and moral century lay ahead.
           Almost everyone thought this was wonderful.
           When the evening canon went off to remind us that nothing whatsoever was funny, we couldn’t help it; we laughed outright.  One of us had fiddled with the firing mechanism and the sound the canon made was a loud, wet fart.
           That time several merry makers busted a gut on the way to the killing fields.

 

 

Plots

I have always believed I am involved in a plot, the plot of living, but that the resolution of the plot is unknown.

“Don’t bother about the plot. The plot is nothing”, said Virginia Woolf in her last novel, “Between the Acts.” “The plot was only there to beget emotion”. 
           “Well, fuck the plot”, said Edna O’Brien.  “Plots are for precocious school boys. What matters is imaginative truth”.        

Virginia Woolf wrote her last novel while sucking hard candies.  Many of us spend our entire plots sucking hard candies.  It’s hard to say how many we have sucked over the length and breadths of our plots.  For example, I don’t remember sucking the seven thousandth hard candy, or even the tenth. Do you?

A panel of plot experts—theologians, gurus, motivational speakers, novelists and ghosts—have assembled to speak about the matter of plots.
          This is when the sex happens.

Chemical composition of a hard candy: corn syrup, malic acid, mineral oil, tartrazine, lecithin (soy), Allura Red, Sunset Yellow FCF, Brilliant Blue FCF, dextrose. 

           Lime, my favourite.

It’s night and I have awoken. I see the shadow of a dog running towards me.  It has the shape of a dachshund, low to the floor, and I’m happy to see it, as if love was about to run into my arms.
         When it jumps on my bed, I admire its sleek black coat and the brown markings on its paws and eyebrows. I’m about to pet it but the dog’s eyebrows alarm me. There are two sets above each eye, and then I see there are two heads, as well.  Oh, this is the dog from hell, I’m thinking, come to inject a little terror into what should have been a plotless dream!

A lot of people like plot movies.  I like a journey movie where there is no destination: the bird comes out of it’s wire cage and flies with the clouds; the Zen Master endlessly sifts sand through her fingers. But sometimes I sense that I’m caught in a plot that has no meaning.

When Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with heavy plots and descended into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941, did the plots begat the emotions she had longed for?

The panel of plot experts summons me to speak about my personal plot.  It’s in the back yard, newly dug, six feet long and just as deep. I plan to grow carrots, chard and pumpkins there and I speak about that.   A panelist interrupts—the motivational speaker.  He’s frustrated with my presentation.  “That’s not what the plot is for,” he says.
       This is when Harry Dean Stanton stands beside me.  “Be still and see what happens,” he tells the panelist. “Stillness is the most powerful plot of all.”

We have a hunger for new plots so we don’t have to think about the disintegration of all the plots around us.      
         Every night we ask ourselves: Which plot is good to watch?
         Every night we roam the screens searching, afraid.

The Classmate site listed Norm’s sub-plots.  Since high School he has adopted a dog from a shelter, purchased a home, become a parent, had a garage sale, felt buyer's remorse, lost his mother, seen a tornado, slept under the stars, visited Niagara Falls, explored a cave, read a romance novel.

Plot points:
-       Meet the twenty-year-old who unionized Starbucks!

-        Meet the old men dressed as rock stars who have stoned things to say!

-       “I'm probably more famous for sitting on the plot than for anything else that I do,” said Frank Zappa.

-       Gerry Garcia: “Either you’re a hoodlum or you’re a plot on the sidewalk.”

-       Getting out from behind the wheel of a plot to join a choir is not as culturally encouraged as it should be, said the plot-driven choir master.

-       “Plots,” said my father, “You just hope they aren’t utterly awkward”

“Darling, we cannot own the moon.  Put your credit card away”.
       His suffering about this is a huge mosquito sucking the life out of his plot.
         A week later we attend his funeral because he has lost the plot.

“Plots are for dead people,” said Lorrie Moore.
           I think this is imaginatively true.
          When someone falls in a plot, they are probably dead.

“What is that rumbling sound?” I ask in a worried voice.
          “A plot,” you answer.  “Mounting the horizon.”
           I have a look. “I don’t like the size of it,” I say.  “It looks angry.  It’s too black.”
          We find a pair of white horses then and ride towards a familiar western plot, the one in which we are slow moving beneath a big sky.  Our plots passing wonderful.

 

 

Five

I woke in bed to find five young men shovelling dirt over me. One of them remarked as he worked, “Surprising how fast it goes by, isn’t it?” 
           He meant a life and not the speed with which five young men can bury a living person.          
           I yelled, “Not so fast!” and pushed the dirt from my face.  Instantly, the five disappeared. Where did they go?  Who were they?   Part of an early warning team sent to terrify their elders?
         Five is a prime number, a cardinal number, meaning it is divisible only by itself.  All multiples of five will end in either five or zero. There are five senses, five tastes and almost all mammals, reptiles and amphibians have five fingers or toes.  Five is the number of arms on a starfish.  It’s an odd number.  But none of this figuring matters.
           My five visitors were all blandly handsome—curly-haired, pink-cheeked, muscular, like cherubs. They were calm, almost friendly.
           Even so, while they shovelled dirt over me, “my heart went grey as hair goes grey”.   
           Clarice Lispector, master of the elliptical sentence, said this about a similar incident.

 

 

 

 

 

M.A.C. Farrant has published twenty works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays; countless book reviews for The Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; and over a dozen chapbooks.