The Contest

Check out Ellen Sandbeck's papercuts of the Buddha on the Facebook page "A Buddha A Day." Choose your favorite image, then send a wonderful piece of your writing, one page or less, on any topic, to abuddhaday@gmail.com. You may win the original papercut of your choice!

Winning entries will be posted on this page.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Winning entry from Ed Newman

 

IT ALL BEGINS WITH A SENTENCE

It all begins with a sentence. With so many possible directions to go it’s hard to decide what will follow.

What is it that makes a good story? Well, part of it is engagement. In a world with so much background noise, with so many distractions, how do we engage the reader, to make him or her stop and take notice?

Oscar Wilde did it by being outrageous. And so it is that rock stars and artists to this day have followed this self-same path. Not all have done so with Wilde’s sense of panache.

Outrageousness is not an essential quality of great art, but at times it is useful for gaining attention. It’s a typical rock star ploy. Artist Francis Bacon took advantage of it. Marcel Duchamp did it especially well with his “found objects” making a mockery of critics and the art scene, without winking or letting on what he was about. The king had no clothes on.

Thus did Dylan sing, “even the president of the United States must sometimes stand naked.”

But how far can one go and still get away with it? What if the outrageous and audacious is so far afield that one loses his or her audience altogether?  Where are we then? Perhaps in a meadow, more often than not in a quagmire. Muck and mosquitoes and bad lighting, with indigestion, and usually without a compass.

So it is apparent that invention has its limits. That is, if we are to influence we can’t be arbitrary or so absurd as to be nonsense. Finnegan’s Wake is all we need look at to understand this. Fourteen years to create a meandering epic, strings of loose ends and word games, a postmodern debacle. Yes, this is what happens when literature turns abstract. There is little left to engage. Or an insurmountable mountain of indecipherable rubble to sift through for clues… to what end? We search for meaning at our own peril here…. But then, perhaps that is what Joyce was clowning about. Finnegan’s Wake is a mirror of his world view… Or is it?

No, nonsense is not our lot. Only when we abandon sense do we lose ourselves in it. But who wants to live there. I much prefer, as do most people, a hierarchy of values, giving a measure of importance to friendship, family, heritage and the hope of a better tomorrow.

In the end, it all begins with a sentence. And where we go from here is up to us.


Ed Newman