Setting the scene
It has taken me a while to get to this part of the storytelling process, but now I think I am ready.
In my long-form story of Macomber I do quite a bit of analysis, quite a bit of attempting to figure things out and understand with the benefit of the forty or so intervening years between the experience of having had him as a teacher, and now. This process has been really valuable to me and, lo and behold, I have learned some things in the intervening years and I do in fact better understand what I saw in him, and what he did, better. This is all well and good, but the distillation process calls for something deeper in a way, and more difficult, and its possibly for this reason that it has taken me a while to get to it!
It's clear to me that conveying what I now understand about Macomber, what he did, etc. is not what I want to do in the distilled version of my story. That type of understanding seems better suited to the long-form version. In the distilled audio and video versions of the story I want rather to convey a sense of the source of the enchantment, excitement, and creativity Macomber provided, a sense of the place from which he could for example deliver such sometimes shockingly clear insights, i.e. -- if you want to learn how to write, fall in love with someone far away -- in an utterly matter of fact way. But I don't even want to convey this as a concept in my distilled story, if you know what I mean, I want to at least attempt to convey some of the surprise, the dynamics, the awareness, the place, the source of this in him.
In voice-only audio this may be a tall order for me. My instincts all go to visual forms, given my training in visual art painting and drawing, so in that arena I would think of conveying the spirit or emotional content of surprise and insight with quick-cuts, juxtapositions, visual surprises, changes in color and light, maybe even flashbulbs going off like they do at a press conference, and so forth. It's also easier for me to think of what I want to convey about him in music and sound: again I would of surprising overlays, jumps, cuts, etc. So in a media-studies sense, it may be that the type of content I have in mind and heart here will be difficult to express in voice-only audio, unless I can get juxtaposition, overlay, etc. somehow into what I choose to say. We'll see. I could also play with staging my audio as a conversation with myself --this might allow for the kinds of juxtapositions and so forth I feel may be necessarily to tell this story.
Ah, almost forgot (my relative inexperience with all things audio is evident here) on a formal level I can also overlap the segments of my narrative (listed below), add fades in and out, etc.
Listing my top-ten prompts
As per the assignment, and based on the framework provided by the Center for Digital Storytelling, the following items/prompts represent my attempt to distill my Macomber story to its emotional core, and then build it out from there. I'm starting with four prompts (not ten!) but these may generate others along the way, as I speak, so to speak.
The context
I think it will be possible to verbally paint a picture of the relative dreariness (even when it was good, competent dreariness) of many college courses in relation to what Macomber was up to. Just on the surface of it, here was an exquisitely trained professor of Philosophy who was encouraging us to take a Cliffs Notes approach to intellectual life, encouraging us to talk with one another, encouraging us to think about life rather than school. I can say something about this, but again I'm thinking I may want to grab an image or two of Cliffs Notes and slide these into the movie-version, and maybe there are audio ads for Cliffs Notes online that I could snip a bit of and include in the enhanced-audio (speech+music+sound) version. I might, though, for the voice-only version, dive into the transcripts of Macomber's lectures that Greg Desilet is working on and pull some additional quotes. Then again I may just want to talk. I suppose in this context arena I may also want to mention Santa Barbara, Redlands, and other actual places that have roles in the story. I want to put the first-person in this, though, and describe it more or less as it looked from where I literally sat in the lecture hall as an 18 year old.
The spectacle
In some ways there is no mystery in Macomber's appeal. He was, as my friend Brady referred to him as a rock star when he read the long-form version of my story. Or maybe a shooting star is another metaphor. In any case I want to mention the sense of awe and spectacle that Macomber generated. had about him. From the 15th row, or the 45th row, of the lecture hall, one had the sense of being privy to a rare and amazing performance. I think mentioning Alan Ginsberg's description of Bob Dylan's alignment of self, work, life into a "column of air". I just found this quote from a blogger:
"In the Martin Scorcese documentary, No Direction Home, Ginsberg talks of Dylan’s arrival on the scene and what the older poet witnessed about his performing presence: “He [Dylan] became identified with his breath, like a shaman, with all his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath". It’s a brilliant evocation of what Dylan personified from the very beginnings of his startling career: a shift in poetic life away from the page back into the ether of song. In Ginsberg’s word, Dylan transformed himself into “a column of air”.
http://www.markmordue.com/2009/08/lyrics-to-imaginary-songs.html
The coming-out
The coming-out process we witnessed in Macomber's class was only tangentially, or in a minor way, a matter of sexuality. It was much more this matter above of his coming-to-speech about his inner life. In Desilet's transcripts of his lectures, Macomber mentions that 'he's a fag' in the context of liberation, but he sees this need for coming-out or liberation in everyone. For some time I've had this formulation in my head that goes like this: whenever a truly or intensely inner person comes out it creates a light that lights the world. Macomber certainly lit up many lives, and he certainly lit up the stage of the lecture hall, but I tend to think he was giving a spirited and hence spiritual performance. And, like the blogger mentions in writing about Dylan, in Macomber's case too this was a matter of moving away from the page and into the spoken-word, with inter-connotations of spirit and breath. This is for me the emotional core of the story: it's a coming out story, but in a spiritual sense.
The mystery
I'm not sure how to do this, but I think I need to mention the very uncanny coincidences that transpired around this story -- the missed connections, the newly established connections. When we look up to people, admire them, we put them on a pedastel. That's the usual way to put it, and we sometimes think of this process in negative terms. But do we maybe in part do this to establish a historic site, monumentalize or bookmark an experience, in order to mark it clearly as a place we will return to, perhaps again and again. But the story ultimately is ours. My life has these missed connections --with Macomber, with my own father as well-- that seem to present a kind of pattern. The lesson would appear to be that it's important to avoid confusing the monuments with the task at hand of becoming oneself what the monuments remind me of. We make such bookmarks for a reason. In Wittgenstein's terms they are our "assembled reminders."