Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

It was a fateful day, so the game-player sometimes says — it was a fateful day, although he has no recollection of it, when he first decided that the only set of words suitable for deciding the outcomes of his image-events was the sentence, and not the simple sentence with a subject and a predicate but the complex sentence with at least two subordinate clauses. He could not possibly estimate in advance the number of letters in such a sentence, so he supposed, and he was right. Like the words and phrases that he had previously used, the complex sentences had as their subject-matter the persons, places, and events of the fantasy itself — I mean, of course, the images of such things. So, he might compose, in order to decide the outcome needed in the earlier example, a sentence such as He approved of the style of her brief bathing-costume, which was pale green and contrasted oddly with her bare, sunburned shoulders .

At some point during the developments reported in the previous paragraph, the game-player made a decision that seems to him now to have been inevitable but was slow to occur to him. He decided that the number of possible outcomes for every event should be not two but five. His having only two possible outcomes resulted often in his female characters, so to call them, displaying a not-to-be-believed fickleness. Sometimes he was stimulated by the unpredictability of one or another female, but mostly he was not only baffled and annoyed by her seeming changes of moods but hard pressed to devise new ways for his imagined self to approach her without turning his fantasy into farce. And so, on another fateful but unremembered day, he decided that each possible event should admit of five possible outcomes: one extremely favourable; one moderately so; one neutral; one moderately unfavourable; and one extremely so. His offering, on the beach, to kiss a female personage would have five possible outcomes ranging from her falling into his arms to her slapping his face. Of course, he now had to count by fives in his sentences, which made any sort of cheating quite impossible.

His imagined adventures had become by now much more satisfying but also much more drawn out, sometimes so much so that he was apt to forget, on some or another day in the real world, so to call it, what he had decided, on the previous day, were the latest happenings, so to call them, in the other. And so, on an even more fateful day than the earlier two, as he says, he began to record in writing what he likes to call his image-imaginings. From this he needed to take one small step towards the final, perfect modification of his game. He made it a rule that each sentence of his text would not only record the latest seeming-event in the game but would, at the same time, determine details of the event following. While he was composing some or another complex sentence to report the chief character’s offering to kiss some or another female character, he was, at the same time, deciding what would be the result of his so offering and the series of events that would afterwards follow. The game, it might be said, determined its own course; the text, it might be said, wrote itself.

We others have mixed reactions to all of this. Some of us consider horse-racing games or games indulging sexual fantasies or any other such enterprises as wasters of the time and the mental energy that ought to be devoted to the writing of fiction. Others see the games as harmless recreation or even as a sort of training for the task of fiction-writing. One of us even considers these and all other such games as being themselves an esoteric sort of fiction. A few of us have been allowed to look into some of the series of labelled folders containing reports of the second sort of game and have reported as follows.

The account of each game consists of no fewer than a hundred handwritten pages and often of many more. Many a game has for its chief characters what seems to be a fictional version of the author of the game as a young man, hardly more than a boy, and one or more dark-haired young women, hardly more than girls, who are his cousins. Many a game ends with the humiliation of the chief male character by one or more cousin or with his being punished by one or more of their mothers, the dark-haired sisters of his own mother. The actual sentences reporting the games are faultless in shape but often contain words and phrases used often by the writers of what is commonly called romantic fiction. (Somewhere in this building is a colony of writers of this sort of fiction, although none of us has sought to learn where.) The author of the reports declines to answer questions about this last matter, and we are, as usual, divided in our opinions, some of us believing the passages in question to be mere parody and asserting that a place might well be found in some or another work of serious fiction for a summary, at least, of the sort of imagined events so to call them, that end sometimes with a scene, so to call it, in which a stern-faced woman throws a jug of ice-water into the groin of a young man, hardly more than a boy, who has exposed himself to a dark-haired young woman, hardly more than a girl, his cousin and the woman’s daughter.

While I was standing at my window early this morning and trying not to put off for too much longer the moment when I would sit yet again at my desk and would wait yet again for my first glimpse of the possible subject-matter of the first sentence that I would struggle to write, I saw far off in the mostly level landscape surrounding this house in every direction a flash of sunlight on what was surely the windscreen of a car or a truck passing along one or another of the back roads of this district. A farmer, perhaps, was driving himself and his dogs to an outlying paddock.

On many another morning, I would have wanted, even if briefly, to have been the driver behind that flashing windscreen. I would have wanted to have business other than the writing of fiction; to live among persons who read fiction hardly ever or not at all; to consider as my life’s work the management of a farm in the sort of mostly level grassy landscape that I see nowadays only in the distance when I look up from my desk and away from the sort of task that might well seem pointless to most of the inhabitants of that landscape. I would not have spurned fiction, I who sat behind a flashing windscreen this morning, far away from a house of two or, perhaps three storeys. Sometimes during an evening, when my other tasks had been finished, I would look into some or another book of fiction borrowed by my wife from the library in the town at the centre of our district. I might not set out to read the whole book; I might well let the book fall open and then begin reading the pages in front of me. However little I read, I would come to admire the achievement, as I saw it, of the author of the book in front of me, who was able to see in mind always the clear and solid details that made up the contents of his or her fiction. In short, I would suppose, wrongly, of course, that an author of fiction has always available an ample supply of — what shall I call them? — characters, plots, and dialogue in a storage-place called the imagination.

When I stood at the window this morning, I was trying to keep in mind the details of a dream that had occurred to me a few hours earlier, while I was asleep on my folding bed in a corner of this room. I had dreamed that I was conversing at length with a dark-haired and utterly unattractive woman in late middle-age. (I myself am past middle-age, but in the dream I felt myself to be a young man, hardly more than a boy.) At some point during my conversation with the dark-haired woman, my mother, herself dark-haired and past middle-age, appeared, as personages appear in dreams, and asked me the name of the dark-haired woman. The woman had not told me her name but I knew, as one knows things in dreams, that her name was Wilma, which happens to be a name that I dislike. My mother then asked me what was going on, as she put it, between myself and Wilma. It never occurred to my dreaming self to ask my mother by what right she had asked such a question of me. I simply denied to my mother that anything was going on, which was as true as any detail of a dream might be said to be true.