AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPLEXITY

WOW! OK Ernest, you have my attention. Torrents of Spring is complex. If I were sitting across the table from you, let’s just say I got up and moved my chair next to yours and angled it towards you so that I can better connect. I will be honest with you in that I find your visuals both engaging and disturbing.

I know that by the time you wrote this story you had served as an ambulance driver in Italy and had been wounded. That you had seen far more than a young man should ever see in terms of devastation, death, and destruction and that you had been jilted and “thrown over” by a woman you loved and that you were to carry these wounds with you your entire life.

We do share a lot in common when it comes to how we were raised and the homes we grew up in. Like you, both my parents were well educated and provided a “well healed” life with numerous benefits. I do believe that we both arrived at similar conclusions about that life style and the limitations it presented, and we both chose to move away from it, each in our own way, and build a different kind of life for ourselves. You were forced to take up the cello; I to spend hours at the piano keyboard running scales and bemoaning my fate. Neither of us were the musicians our musical parents might have wanted us to be. In the end, their vision was not ours, and to their disappointment, our drummers were beating a cadence we could not resist.

So let me step back to when I was 27 – the age you were when Torrents of Spring was published. You went to Paris, I to Nevada. We both were on a sort of “wing and a prayer” as we chose to get away from the confines of the lives that had been chosen for us. I swear my parents were hoping I’d call in defeat and return to the life they had raised me for. I too lost the “love of my life,” though I chose to break it off. I recognized in myself that I would make a less than desirable partner in a marriage, and that life held something else for me. I too carried the impact of that choice throughout my life. I have come to terms with it and have built a life of meaning around the wound, but it is still there. Like a long suffered scar it pulls at me at times, causing discomfort and pain, but I am used to it.

I see, Ernest, that you lean heavily on Henry Fielding in this short story, “known for his rich, earthy humor and satirical prowess.” Satire is the stuff of stand-up comedy in today’s world. Torrents of Spring is certainly rife with satire. Ernest, we don’t know each other well yet. Our summer together is just starting, but I have to wonder if your satire isn’t a mask for your woundedness? Don’t worry, I’m not asking expecting you to respond, but simply putting it out there as a possibility – a theory, of sorts, that I will return to throughout the summer with the hopes of proving or disproving.

I can’t relate, personally, to all of the experiences you had that lead up to the writing of Torrents of Spring. War is a uniquely life changing experience. I thank God that I have not known war personally. That being said, I am not impervious to the suffering that is a part of the information flow coming out of war zones and refugee camps, but those of us who are so removed show true lack of understanding when we attempt to commiserate with those who have walked the walk. Let me say that I bow to your truth regarding war, I thank you for your service, and I allow you the space and grace to own your path that is the result of this experience.

So I will close this post with a note on writing structure, as that was a key theme of Torrents of Spring. This was evident to me because in several places in the story you break with the storyline to speak to the reader directly. Some of what you speak to is writing structure, like that of music, that makes up the bones of the story: where the elements are introduced, they engage to produce key structural patterns, they break away to get lost in the complexity of the elements, and then they come back together to a definite crescendo and fade. But even this, dear Ernest (and I use that term with the deepest kindness in my heart), you satirically point out as contrived, affected, and somehow flawed. In this satirical context I see that you mock life itself – it’s rhythms, it’s seasons, its struggles and rewards. My own caution to myself when I venture in this direction is: However much you protest the wind, it will still blow.

Satire as a coping mechanism is useful. It is an island in a life of immersion. It’s one of those islands of the mind that allow you to drag yourself out of the mire of humanity, even if just for a while, and look at life as something other than yourself. I have experienced a number of people in my life who were successful satirically and still able to lead lives of immersion – it was only a small part of their larger story. I have also known a larger body of people for whom satire became their excuse for “failure to engage”. It became their personal differentiator between the “us” and “them” dichotomy that they came to accept as the truth of their lives. As I read Torrents of Spring I bow to your satirical skill and prowess at weaving a bizarre and often times touching and disturbing story, but offer you a word of caution in that I would hate to see such a fine mind become so self-absorbed that it fails to separate the finite from the infinite and to have the skill to live a life of immersion while resting in the truth of impermanence and illusion.

Let us toast this evening we have spent together and let us commit to meeting again and further exploring Torrents of Spring. Let me say, dear Ernest, in all honesty you had me at “PART ONE: Red and Black Laughter.”

Ernest Hemingway’s earliest published writings (outside of his journalistic work) came in the 1920s. There was a satirical short story titled Torrents of Spring, published in 1926; and a collection of poems and short stories titled Three Stories and Ten Poems – a short story collection, published in 1923.