INSIDE TWICE - The Unseen Hand

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE FIFTY NINE:

Hello my friends—and welcome to Episode 59 of TWICE—one of my favorite moments in Matt’s Tale! Having spent the past three editions of INSIDE TWICE laying out a framework of sorts for the whole serial project, I plan to focus from here onward on thoughts about the current week’s episode and its relationship to the larger tale.

As I mentioned in an earlier I.T. post, TWICE is really a braid of three intertwined stories: The story of Dusty, Colleen, Anna, and Thom—set in ‘current’ time; the story of Piper, The Lady, Rain, Anselm and all the other ‘fey’ characters as their community and its existential crises come to a head—also in ‘current’ time; and Matt’s Tale—basically a long narrative ‘flashback’ to one man/boy’s odyssey set a decade, more or less, before the other two tales. I am always very happy to return to this third thread of the story for a while, for several reasons. One is that it is the part of the story most fully finished in past manuscripts—so all I have to do in readying these episodes is ‘polish’ existing writing—or that was the theory anyway. :] Of course, as I have also mentioned previously, it became very clear not long after the serial’s launch last year that my ability as a writer, and my understanding of the larger story, have grown so much since I wrote the earlier version of this tale that ‘polish’ has turned out to mean rewrite, more often than not. Happily, this week’s episode involved only very minor tweaks—though even those were related to the huge transformations this tale has gone through inside my head.

The FIRST time I wrote this scene, and the scenes that come after it, Stacy—the proprietress of Nocturnal Lullaby—was a very minor secondary character, largely a vehicle to facilitate the connection of Matt and some other more important characters on ‘the Avenue,’ and something of a narrative ‘red herring’ to distract from the setup of certain twists in the coming scenes. Now, I have come to realize that Stacy is a much more important character—in all sorts of ways, and to all sorts of other characters—than I’d realized before. No longer a red herring at all—though perhaps a purple one at times. ;]

Lita, on the other hand, though still as crucial to the story in some ways as she ever was, is now likely a less central and focal character than she had seemed to me years ago, when I first wrote these scenes. This is because her part in the tale was written to illuminate an earlier and entirely different set of core story themes which, as I’ve mentioned before, have been displaced now by newer—and, I think, truer—‘core themes’ for me. All of which predicts a hefty amount of rewriting in the next few weeks, as we follow this part of Matt’s tale to its coming impacts. :D So—please wish me luck and speed from here!

In this week’s Illustration Notes, I alluded briefly and obliquely to the fact that this tarot reading was full of clues about the coming story, but would like to address this topic in greater depth with you here:

Many of you will NOT be surprised to hear that many ‘fiction’ writers borrow very heavily from their own real life experience. A famous writer—whose name has long fled my memory—once said during an interview that ‘a writer’s job is to loot his own life to the walls.’ …I do—frequently. :] In that context, I will now concede that both ‘the Avenue’ and ‘Nocturnal Lullaby’ are places I once knew, and lived literally around the corner from. Many of the people Matt meets there are based on actual people I knew there—many years ago. (I have lived in MANY cities—and almost never in the ‘nicer’ parts of town, so don’t strain anything trying to figure out what city ‘the city’ in Twice is modeled after. I guarantee you that NO city you choose will be correct. :]) All these places and people had other names in real life, of course. But when I first worked on this part of the story, and got to this chapter, I decided it would be helpful to walk over to ‘Nocturnal Lullaby’ and ask their resident tarot reader to do a reading for me—so that I could write the scene with a better feel for what that might be like. The experience proved VERY surprising!

I have never been the kind to rush toward embrace of ‘supernatural’ explanations or events. My father was a science teacher. I have had a rather passionate interest in various scientific fields myself since early childhood. Don’t get me wrong. I have experienced more than a few completely inexplicable things over the course of my life. But I have always been most comfortable leaving them right there—as they were: inexplicable. Deciding what those experiences mean—much less how or why they happen—adds nothing to them for me—because, in the end, I have virtually no choice but to ‘make up’ any such answers in the absence of verifiable data on which to base whatever explanations I might have concocted. All of which is to say that I went to my scheduled tarot reading expecting NOTHING but a valuable ‘flavor’ experience to use in writing my scene. But the man (against all stereotypes, it was a very intelligent, rational, understated, articulate and comfortably ‘normal’ man who read my cards) explained the mechanics of the process to me without any visible theatrics, and then proceeded to PEG ME—about numerous things that NO ONE should have had any inkling of.

I had been VERY careful to say virtually nothing much more meaningful than yes, no, and uh-huh from the moment I walked in to the shop. Yet by the time we were finished, I found myself with a LOT of very relevant insight to think through. And I had learned something—something useful. There was no ‘magic’ going on there. My ‘reader’ never pretended there was—even when I mentioned, after the whole thing was over, what a surprising experience it had been. We both agreed at that point that what the tarot—and many other devices like it—really is, is a rather brilliant ‘projective self-analysis’ tool—like the Rorschach (Ink Blot) test some psychological analysts use. As Matt observes in this scene, the tarot cards are at once VERY vivid and evocative images and, at the same time, remarkably ambiguous in meaning. They almost force you to react—but any one of them can accommodate a huge range of interpretive ‘meanings.’ No matter what the reader tells you about what the individual cards or their combinations and patterns mean, your mind will react to and interpret these assertions in light of what you came there knowing already about yourself. The thing is, much of what we know about ourselves is not at all conscious—for all sorts of reasons. Just ask any therapist—or carnival charlatan. THEY know that you DON’T know much of what you do know about yourself underneath the surface that your conscious mind and superego navigate—and MANAGE—every day precisely by filtering which available data is important/relevant to acknowledge and deal with, and which isn’t—or isn’t right now (which turns out to be MOST of it, in my opinion). Your subconscious mind also determines—on your behalf—which of the available data is survivable to be aware of, and which might just ‘disable’ you to know too consciously. Devices like Ink blot tests—and the tarot deck—can short-circuit this division amazingly, leaving you with ‘insights’ that you have no conscious idea came not from ‘the cards,’ or ‘the reader,’ but from YOU. My reader said very little to me during our reading, except to answer questions I asked—marking him as one of the better such, in my opinion. He understood, I think, that if this was to work, no one but me should be talking to me during that reading. :] With all that in mind, I hope you can see Matt doing these things—consciously and unconsciously—during Stacy’s reading. She, of course, for a variety of narrative reasons, is saying quite a bit more to Matt during this event than my reader said to me. But even then, if I’ve done anything right here, you should be able to see Matt leaping to conclusions about what Stacy’s comments MEAN, informed almost entirely by what he and only HE knows about himself and his real story.

As it turns out, the tarot reading I depict here is almost unaltered—in terms of the actual cards and their asserted ‘meanings’—from the cards and their offered explanations at my own reading that afternoon. The interesting thing—to me at least—is that although I’ve used most of the same cards, and applied the same ‘meanings’ to most of those, I’ve made their overall meaning to Matt—and significance to the larger story—completely different from any I came away from my own reading with. An illustration, of sorts, demonstrating what I was saying before about the malleability of meaning in these images. They meant what they meant to me, and the same cards with the same ‘meanings’ tell an entirely different story to Matt and Stacy!

All that said, TWICE is a narrative fiction, of course, and a fantasy that posits the actual existence of ‘supernatural’ realities—including the possibility of ‘greater powers’ meddling in events—so I don’t mean to assert here that there’s nothing more going on in this fictional scenario than Matt’s psychological games with himself. That would be…hasty and presumptuous of me. :] There are, in fact, more than one set of unseen hands at work in this scene. But, as I suggested in this week’s Illustration Notes, Stacy’s reading for Matt is basically a Rorschach of Matt’s whole story—past, present and future—and, as such, really is stuffed chock full of actual ‘clues’ to all sorts of other relevant elements of this story—past, present, and future. So have some fun with that if you’re in the mood. A few of these clues are pretty obvious, I think—there largely to boost narrative anticipation. Others you should recognize at all, much less understand, only in hindsight at or near the tale’s end…a long, long time from now. :]

Thanks again—for reading along, and for subscribing and being my community of support, accountability and encouragement. I appreciate knowing you are there even more than you might guess.

See you next week, I hope. Until then, I wish you safe and healthy!