A New Beginning

Looking at an opening, thinking about all openings

Bardelys found, contrary to all his expectations, but maybe not contrary to reason, that writing his blog through a fictional mask had rather than substituted for his urge to write tales, real tales, had increased it. It was like an appetizer: it tasted so good it whetted his appetite. He wanted more.

And yet at the same time he was wary. In the months since he had done any real tales, he had blogged extensively on talesmanship as though he were some kind of authority, a know-it-all. This was the farthest thing from the truth, the truth was he was only an amateur, and most likely a bad one at that. And yet, writing as if he were knowledgeable, he had come to feel as if that were true. If he now looked back on his work, he might find it was bad (it had happened before) and that he couldn’t see a way clear to improve it — which would prove that he hadn’t gained wisdom at all.

The Juniper Tree

Professor Tolkien had written, in On Fairy Tales, about the opening lines to the Grimm Brothers’ tale of The Juniper Tree, expressing some awe at its ancient feeling. Bardelys, in reading Tolkien’s essay, had also felt that shudder run up the back of his neck. The thing was old and nasty indeed, and he never forgot it.

In later days, he had taken up the tale and fashioned out of it and certain personal experiences of his own, a movie script. And only recently he had taken the script and recast it into a novella. Here is the opening as he found it now:

It was a long time ago. It must have been two thousand years ago, maybe even more. Back then nobody was sorry, nobody was mad. Everybody got along back then. Everybody was happy and everybody had everything they wanted, before I was born.

A couple lived on a cliff by the sea. Their house was known as White Quill on account of its color and they called the cliff the Beak. You couldn’t see the house from the road. The woods around the house closed it off from the rest of the world and you had to drive through the woods down a long winding driveway paved with gravel before you came out between the trees and saw the old house tall against the sky. Behind the house a green lawn led to the Beak. The Beak fell straight down to where the waves’ foamy mouths licked and gnawed the grimy stones. You know how greedy the sea can get.

On top of the Beak stood the Juniper Tree.

The Juniper Tree lived there before the man and his wife. It lived there before the house. The Juniper Tree grew up in the wind all bent up and twisted as though the tree was trying to look out the water and behind at the woods and back around at itself at the same time. The wind came off the sea and breathed into the branches of the Juniper Tree, and the branches whispered and muttered and talked it over with the wind, finding out what went on in the world beyond the Beak, behind the sea and past the woods that ran up and down the seashore ever since the ice melted and grumbled into the North a million years ago.

The first thing that stood out to Bardelys was the double opening. He thought this was a weakness: a tale should have one start and one end, and no more! And yet here he had wanted to establish the voice of the Boy, grown up years later, remembering what had Happened. The opening lines in the Boy’s voice also was the only way Bardelys had been able to squeeze in one of the most telling lines of the Grimm Brothers’ tale, the first line:

It was a long time ago, all of two thousand years or more.

Impossible to get the shudder of anxiety and fear that this line gives, in any other way. In the folk tale, the events were told as if they had indeed taken place ‘two thousand years’ ago, but when he had cast the tale into a script Bardelys had set it in modern times, so the notion of ‘two thousand years ago’ could only come in the way a young man would think, childishly, of his own first years, a metaphor to get across how long ago it seemed to him, and how much had changed about him and in him since then.

So the double opening must stay.

The second paragraph began the tale proper, and he found it a little to mannered. But it seems that in such tales as this, the atmosphere is vital. Strange and magical things are about to take place in the tale, and very quickly, and Bardelys had believed that the atmosphere of isolation and strangeness, the named house all alone on the edge of the sea, would be a first step into Eartherea for the audience. Maybe he was wrong, though. Maybe it would be enough to blunder right into weirdness awkwardly and directly, as if weirdness were not, after all, uncommon or unexpected.

The first character the Narrator gives is the Tree, a brooding presence, a witness to acts of depravity and bloodshed and horror. It partakes of the weirdness in the atmosphere, and so it’s most efficient, Bardelys thought, to bring it in first and foremost and in the middle of the atmosphere. The other choice would be to speak of the tree when it first plays a role, when the Little Witch goes out below it to make her blood-sacrifice in the fresh snow.

Bardelys noticed (did you?) the direct address to the audience in the second paragraph (the first of the tale proper). He had a theory about this, that the Narrator had to be introduced strong and openly at the very start. After that he felt he could back off and only bring back the Narrator when the need arose.

The Narrator comes in strong when he introduces himself directly as ‘I’ or implicitly when he addresses the audience as ‘you.’ The ‘you’ implies the ‘I.’

There was something else about the opening to The Juniper Tree. Bardelys had loved the movie by Terence Malick, Days of Heaven. He had loved the girl’s voice narrating the story. He had loved her awkward, gloomy, hopeless and toneless philosophy expressed in that voice. This voice was what Bardelys had taken as the model for the Boy’s Voice in narrating the tale. So the sentences ran on a bit, and expressed the same hopelessness, and showed that the Narrator was telling us what happened, without understanding it all himself.

But ‘down a long winding driveway paved with gravel’ should be shortened to ‘down a long gravel driveway’ or even ‘down a long stone drive.’ The ‘long winding driveway paved with gravel’ is a little too ornate for the Boy to say, although long, winding seems to do it, then paved with gravel comes as an afterthought, something the Boy forgot to mention right away. So maybe that was all right. But right now Bardelys thought ‘Down a long stone drive’ was better… no. ‘Down a long gravel driveway’ was best of these three. The ‘long stone drive’ was too efficient, too compact. It smelled of a tale told and retold and worn smooth in the retelling, and not the raw, fresh, wound that Bardelys wanted the Boy’s voice to get across to the reader.

All in all, Bardelys didn’t find much wrong with the start, and no way to make it much better. This meant that he had not, after all, gained wisdom.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, August 4, 2008)