For a week now, I’ve thought there’s a metaphor hiding inside 35 millimeter slides. The square, flimsy cardboard ones — sometimes plastic or glass — that go in projectors to spew pictures on the wall. Some of the film goes green, red and even purple with age; sometimes, the film tears or collects dirt. I’m in something of a writer’s block, though sometimes I doubt my claim to that disease, wonder if instead I just have block. For now, I’ll call those 35 millimeter slides memories. It’s a low-hanging metaphor that will have to do.
There’s one way to fix both writer’s block and inability to come up with metaphors: just shut up. Easier said than done. But I’ve noticed, after giving it a spin, that shutting up can actually do wonderful things for your writing. Reticent narrators are read as irresistible, and poems with tight lips are just playing hard to get. As humans, we read absence as desire. That person you love who doesn’t feel the same? Let me tell you a secret, but you didn’t hear it from me: Yes, they do. The quiet kid in your class is always the genius. Why do we never think they’re quiet simply because they’re as lost as you are?
So I wrote stories of narrators with secrets, to which I never knew the answers and in which it’s never really stated the narrator has a secret, and the story doesn’t hinge around that. Call it intuition. I wrote poems, too, about one thing that was really another — but not in a metaphoric sense or triumph of Iceberg Theory that the reader is supposed to catch. I wrote poems about one thing which is really another, which in turn is really really something I didn’t even know I was writing about. You’re crazy if you say my poem is about that, which it was. The proof is in the pudding. Truth-tellers are always the craziest.
The thing about 35 millimeter slides is that they’re completely black until some light hits them. As soon as a lightbulb in the other room ricochets wavelengths like an eight ball going into the wrong socket, these slides tell all. Isn’t that the way we are, too, with our memories?
I did not know the way I do this was really because of that — that is, until the light hit, and now that’s all anyone can see, whether I want them to or not. The day of yours that was ruined three weeks ago because you got a busted dryer that left your clothes wet is showing in how you hold yourself right now. The thread we’re stitched with day to day stays unless we rip it out ourselves. You’re a 35 millimeter slide, so you might as well surrender yourself to the light.
None of this is about 35 millimeter slides, and it’s hardly about writing. I don’t know what it’s about, which is a lie packed inside a lie like a true Princess Bride poison-cup fiasco. In fact, I only watched the movie in elementary school and can’t remember now what the resolution to it was, so it’s truly a Schrödinger’s Cat, which I don’t know the physics behind, so… How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
Let me know if you find out. Regarding any of the things above.
Call this article “The art of pretentious, circuitous writing: meaning, metaphors and more for escaping writer’s block.” Or, the subtitle: “Hitting the word count.”
Riley Strait is a sophomore majoring in Writing Seminars and English from Olathe, Kan.
