Monkey See, Monkey Do (In My Case - Like Camus)

It's funny how hard it is to write well. Every time I go back to a dusty piece of writing on my hard drive I am taken back to the time I wrote it. I relive the moments that led up to its production and I remember, particularly, what I was reading in those moments. Take, for example, a piece of writing I stumbled on this morning. It has Camus written all over it [brace yourself(ves), it's long]:

An Odor Less Serious

The clock is nearing noon. It is a cafeteria somewhere. There are noises and people everywhere. Some people are buying their lunches. One girl, one particularly serious girl, nears a row of splatter stained microwaves. There she waits her turn to warm up some macaroni and cheese. The boy ahead of her opens the microwave door and takes a forkful of a brown stewish substance. He eats it quickly, pauses a moment, then turns on the microwave for another minute or so. But during the instant the little door was ajar, between the time he opened it, took a bite of his stew, and closed it again, a strange thing had happened. An odor had escaped from inside the microwave. It was an odor like none other. Strong and grizzly, it had swept through the ten-foot radius in which our serious girl was standing. It had diffused the air from floor to ceiling within this radius, including, the air that had, at the time, been occupying space in our girl’s nostrils. The effect of this odor was not the same as that of a peppery smell, for no one was sneezing. The effect of the stewy smell was rather one that made a severe mark on one’s being, claiming any territory it touched, coating thickly and clinging heartily onto clothes, hair and the like. One can only imagine what that odor turned into upon clinging to one’s breath.

“That is a very strong smelling stew you have there,” Our girl said in a voice much more serious than was ever intended for cafeteria chatter.

The boy turned around, took a look at what he determined was a hot thing, and said,
“You know what they say about guys with a strong smelling stew don’t you?”

She looked at his face. It had a curious expression: playful. Yes, that was it.
“No, I don’t. What do they say?” She replied with a seriousness of tone that didn’t quite fit the cafeteriousness of their surroundings.

He dropped his playful expression and one could almost hear it clammer on the floor. He didn’t answer. Instead he went back to watching the little green light bulbs in the side screen of the microwave. They changed every second or so. They were numbers, descending in order.

Our girl looked at her macaroni and cheese with a seriousness much more serious than God ever intended for such gazes and did something she never would have done before. She lifted up the container of lunch high above her head. Then she flipped it over and dumped its contents onto the head of the playful boy in front of her. She watched it sink into his hair like yellow paint on a paintbrush. It was a rather saucy helping of macaroni and cheese and so the gooiness was thick and ready for dumping on heads. He turned around and she saw that he had globs of the stuff on his eyebrows and nose, parts of his face that jutted out a bit from the rest.

She raised her eyebrows in a less serious manner than usual and walked away. She walked out the doors of the cafeteria, down the hall, out of the building, onto the snowy sidewalk, down the street and into the metro station. When she sat on the metro, she noticed that the man next to her inched away slightly after a few moments. He had plenty of room so his inching away made no sense. What’s more, usually men, all men, are very happy to be near our girl. Normally men try all sorts of tricks and games and lines to get as near as possible to the serious thing. So it was quite perplexing that this man, today, was inching away.

She could only assume that it was the stewy odor still clinging to her person that was pushing him out of its occupied space.


Clearly this is autobiographical, and clearly this was written a couple of years ago, and, crystal clearly, I was reading Camus at the time. I'm ashamed that my writing style and its influences are so transparent. Living in Montreal I encounter so many people and experience so many adventures that I want to describe with words, but that end up expressed in the words of others. Even if I think I am writing in my own words, it becomes apparent that I am just using the same metaphor, the same structure or prosaic frame as somebody else and filling it with my own content.

I remind myself of Arundhati Roy. When I read "The God of Small Things" I felt like I was reading Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" for a second time. She even used the same analogy as Rushdie in referring to the discomfort of having stubborn mango hair stuck between two back molars. Do I do that? Are other people's analogies, metaphors, stories, stuck in my subconscious like the stubborn hair of a mango wedged between my teeth? Have other people's ideas penetrated my being so much so that they are a part of my physiological makeup? And now, for the life of me, can I not prevent from recycling their riddles and artistic structures?

A voice is something that is unique to each of us, but when mine becomes a chorus of Camus, Rushdie and whoever else is wedged into my subconscious, how can anyone isolate the sounds my personal voice box makes, other than gargles from struggling against being drowned out?

The only time I'm ever writing without thinking, without trying to sound clever or witty or funny or poetic, is when I am writing these blogs, or my diary. And frankly, I don't know if these writings are all that interesting.