May they never remix Sherlock Holmes into someone touchy feely.
“Watson, my heart hurts.”
It would ruin the archetype of logic so keen, so steely, it cuts everything it encounters with a unstoppable rifting of truth from lie, fact from fiction. Indeed, the mental knife seems to have cut the owner already, leaving him drained and bloodless.
Sir Doyle likely didn’t mean to use his Sherlock as the embodiment for platonic logic carried too far, but maybe he did. (I don’t know, and if you do, tell me.)
Watson is the warmth, the humanity, the illustration that the benefits of imperfection outweigh the costs.
Sherlock is the hero, but man, I don’t want to be him. He’s taught me something about thinking and writing, though.
The Mundane?
While talking with a writer friend yesterday, the topic of the Mundane came up. We kicked it around a bit, turned it this way and that. Is there such a thing?
Perhaps it’s a function of zoom. If the Earth was shrunk to the size of a cue ball, it would be much smoother. Life-sized, and it’s dynamic, with Everests and deep sea trenches and the little hill that winds me on the way up from the creek to the beehives.
Any writer or songwriter or person living is faced with the topic of the Mundane.
Is this it? Wandering the mall as a fifteen year old, I scoffed at the calm of the era. Now I pine for it. The smell of Cinnabon and the swish of baggy jeans against the brown subway tiles of the food court linger somewhere in the back of my mind.
Looking back, nothing seems trivial, and photos, even the most ordinary, pack layers and layers of meaning: a young man unsure of the future, unsure how to fit, grasping at some way to matter, skeptical of frameworks without realizing where they came from, looking in most of the wrong places for the right reasons, and…cool guitar, man.
Zoomed out, it’s just a picture.
Sherlock Holmes snagged “trivial” details, and solved murders from threads, worlds exposed from a careful tug.
Perhaps a writer’s task is to be a psychological Holmes, prying at innocuous statements and “everyday” scenes until the meaning shows up.
Not that everything has to weigh a million pounds or be “murdery”. But why is something sentimental? Why do we drift away for a moment when we smell daffodils again in the spring?
Maybe we can’t ever know exactly, and that’s okay, too. A frog appreciated is a frog intact. Put the scalpel down and relish the mystery as he jumps back into the pond with a splash.
Mark Doty put this idea in my head with his analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Fish, saying:
“…the fish may be a metaphor, but it can’t be just that. It remains charged with fascination, refusing to be subordinated to a point. Its strangeness persists, both before and after it is interpreted.” (Mark Doty, The Art of Description)
Sherlock Holmes finds the murderer, but doesn’t explain away death.
Examples
This is viewed through the lens of writing, because that’s what I’m doing, although writing for me is thought transcribed, marshalled, cleaned up and polished until it makes sense enough to heave on the workbench with a clunk, and say “what do you think of this?”
But you don’t have to write to apply this. I see it through the lens of songs and literature, but it’s all thinking.
Some cats put all the pieces together in a perfumed letter of their feelings, outlining everything. Dig this band outlining the angsty moral-relativistic musings of a postmodernist driving home late at night.
(I used to love listening to this as the city unfolded beneath my wheels at 1 am, just me, the streetlights, and the ghosts of what might have been. I also used to think like this, but not anymore.)
Flannery O’Connor takes more of the Ikea route, letting the reader assemble the meaning themselves.
“She wouldn’t say at home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.”
“All right, Miss” the grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your hair.
June star said her hair was naturally curly.
(Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)
And there you have it. A few thoughts on the “ordinary”.
I’m off to emcee rehearsal and causing trouble locally.
I hope you have a great day.
-Josh
PS. Some Sherlock for you: