Storytellersunplugged

Wayne Allen Sallee
04.28.07

Okay, bad pun. I’ll admit it. But at least a large amount of the SU group will get the reference; I used this as an entry title on my blog, and I know the cigarette slogan went right over the head of most of my readers. (I digress, as usual, but that advertisement had to be meant for people who drove cars. How the hell FAR is a mile that makes Camels so special? I’d walk a mile for a damn Butterfinger). But my attempt was to find a witty way to throw a new word I’d learned into my title.

I am sometimes amazed at how long it takes me to read up on certain things. In my twenties I learned about solipsism from reading Philip K. Dick. Ten years after that, I learned about vestigial twins–too much, actually–from researching a story for one of Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, LITTLE DEATHS. (A cousin in Kentucky that I use as the Cook County Medical Examiner in my stories because of her medical knowledge mailed me a packet of photos from a manual that would make pictures of suicide bombers on Rotten.com seem tame).

And a week ago, while reading a website about the tv show LOST, of all things, I learned about Julian Jaynes and his theory about the bicameral mind. Right now, this aspect of my thought process is at work; I am thinking in my head as if I were talking out loud, hesitating as I choose words to make each paragraph into its’ separate brick.

Jaynes was a professor in Princeton who wrote a book in 1976 entitled THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL BRAIN. The simplest way to explain his ideas are to compare modern-day schizophrenics with ancient cultures who believed that the “other voice” in their head, i.e., the one I’m using now, was a religious vision. He gives a literary example in Homer’s THE ILIAD, stating that “there is in general no consciousness” in the tale. There is no subjectivity, the heroes of the book heard voices from various gods whom pushed the men about like robots. The men from The Iliad had no internal mind-space to provide for introspection. An argument could be made for, say, the Epic of Gilgamish, a tale from out of Mesopotamia which predates Homer’s work and illustrates the ideas of individual volition and emotions. The flip side of that is that the original writer is unknown and changes could have been made as the story was told repeatedly over centuries, a retroactive continuity of sorts.

Some brief brain biology here: there are three speech areas in our grey matter, the supplemental motor cortex, Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area, the last of which is responsible for human speech. Jaynes focused on the corpus callosum, that little bridge as narrow and curved as one of Homer Simpson’s two remaining head hairs, that collects information from the temporal lobe cortex, but also the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke’s area.. If I think to myself how I’d like to walk a mile for a Camel, one of my ancestors might be hearing a voice he thought was God, possibly a benevolent one who thought that all tobacco lobbyists should burn in Hell.

I do my best writing when I am using first-person narrative, I write a bit faster and more excitedly, the atmosphere of Chicago–its’ smells, sounds, its’ entire being– is lost if I try and write something descriptive without it meaning something to the person describing it. As another example, it would take me much longer to write this if I was asked to write an article without the use of first-person. (Yea, yea, I can hear Dave from here, saying, if you’re so fast, why am I getting this in my email basket when I wake up on Saturday morning?!!!). Blame my bicameral mind, I think too much in my narrator voice–tonight I “sound” like William Demerast, Uncle Charlie, from MY THREE SONS, frazzled as I try to squeak this out before Dave wakes up at the crack of dawn– before actually writing, and then typing, it down.

My first published story, “Rapid Transit,” is the personal albatross around my neck. A lot of people seem to like it, and it has been reprinted seven times in four languages (Brian Hodge and I share having our stories reprinted in a Danish book, along with Joe R. Lansdale’s “Bubba Ho-Tep,” God help those throughout Finland). But there is not one shred of dialogue in the story, about a man who witnesses a murder from the elevated train platform and is too cowardly to do anything to stop the deed. But there is a huge sensory overload, a heaping helping of the intersection of 23rd and Western on a warm October Chicago night in Sallee-o-Vision.

Compared to my later work, I see that very few of those sights and sounds came from Dennis Cassady’s mind; it was me describing the area in photographic detail– I still take photos for later reference–tossing in a few nuggets about the smells of certain restaurants and fast food chains. But it wasn’t cowardly Cassady using his five senses; he only accomplishes this later in the story when he has nightmares about what he saw. My next published story, “Heartless,” about–get this–a guy who doesn’t get a Valentine and wakes up after a drunk night out to find a human heart in the mail slot of an apartment, at least had a sense of the main character initiating the descriptions of the bar scenes and the, um, gooey mess that dripped from…well, enough said already.

Years ago, as I waited on downtown train platforms in weather too cold to scribble in, I would talk into a small cassette recorder, much to the disdain of people who most likely now are carrying on conversations wearing one of those cell phone things that fits in your ear like a piece of designer shrapnel. Back in the eighties, I might have been a lunatic when it came to seeming one-sided conversation. I despise technology, as most of you know, but I found a battered cell phone a few months back; I carry it with me to pretend I’m getting a call to avoid having conversations with opinionated buffoons who seem to populate only the bus stops where I am waiting each day and evening.

There are still times that I will talk out loud, just to hear myself say something that I will then understand to be foolish or wrong to write in some certain passage. More often, it is that inner voice that sounds it out, which might be a lot easier if my consciousness sounded like Robert Mitchum and not Phyllis Diller after smoking a blunt.

My inner voice is now asking Dave if it is time for me to climb back in off the window ledge and let the next guy have some room. If you need me, I’ll be somewhere out in back.

Of my skull.

—-Wayne Allen Sallee
jonalgiers@aol.com