Sunday Whatever – A True Tale of Stories Literally by Dale Wiliams Barrigar

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

– Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society

“We are all of us alone.” – Harold Bloom

“As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

            “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” – Harold Pinter

            “NO EASY WAY TO BE FREE.” – The Who, “Slip Kid”

Warning to the Reader: The following essay will sometimes appear to jump and leap from thing to thing with no apparent reason. As in life, there is a reason, even if it isn’t apparent. While under the influence, the author believes this discontinuous form is a part of the modern condition. Thank you. – D.W.B.

The Grim Grimms Beginning

In the original folk tale “The Frog Prince” as told by the Brothers Grimm, the princess doesn’t kiss the frog. Instead, enraged by his demands to hop up into her bed with her because he’s just as good as anyone else and should be allowed to sleep there too, she picks him up and hurls him with all her might against the wall. Magically, and thankfully, in the tale this violent action turns the frog back into the handsome prince he was born to be.

We can imagine, and are meant to imagine, what such an action would do to a real frog in the real world, a place where the laws of physics almost never, if ever, have been breached. (I can think of one possible exception, but who knows, there may be trillions and zillions of exceptions happening in and around us every single second which we simply aren’t aware of…)

In the original version of another eternally famous Grimm tale, “Snow White,” the queen demands to be handed over Snow White’s lungs and liver so she can feast upon them, raw.

In other Grimm tales, children are tortured in other ways, killed, murdered, assassinated, executed, and eaten, sometimes by their parents, often by their siblings or step-parents, sometimes even grandparents.

Witches are burned alive, or hung upside down to starve and die of thirst, or have their skin peeled off; people are stripped naked and stuffed into barrels studded with razor-sharp nails pointing inward only to be rolled down the street in this hapless, horrific condition.

The famous Rumpelstiltskin is psychotic, insane, crazy, mad, sadistic, narcissistic, really pissed off, and malevolent all in one (almost like a modern politician) and the fate he eventually meets involves his bad self being torn in half from stem to stern – and in many ways, he’s one of the nicer characters in the tales who meets one of the kinder, gentler fates.

In another tale, a king wishes to murder all twelve of his not-exactly-beloved sons, and does so. A hated, hypocritical mother-in-law is executed by being immersed in a vat filled with boiling oil and poisonous snakes (as if the boiling oil wasn’t enough). A boy spends the night under a gallows where seven ghastly bodies dangle and hang (and it doesn’t bother him, which is even scarier than the bodies themselves).

Half a human body falls down someone’s chimney during dinner, drenching the room and the people in blood. Bloody-fanged, terrible-clawed, yellow-eyed black cats and dogs suddenly emerge from the corners of a dark room and attack a child who in turn slaughters them all while being torn to pieces. 

A corpse awakens and tries to strangle a girl, almost succeeding. Animals starve, fish are out of water, ravens attack people and pluck out their eyes then laugh about it and feast. Animals stick pins, needles and knives into an old man’s chair and he sits upon them while they cackle and high-five. A beautiful, vengeful wife throws tons of dead fish and fish guts, icy water and ice cubes all over her sleeping husband, knowing full well he has a heart condition.

Even Stephen King himself can’t compete with the horror of it all.

But the world can compete with the horror of it all, since every single one of these things, or things like them, have happened in this mortal world, not once or a few times but countless, endless, infinitude numbers of times. Horrors and horrible things are happening everywhere, right now, even as we speak. And that fact never stops, not even for a single second. No wonder some people nervously wait for a redeemer to arrive (or return) and heal this horrible world.

Aristotle had it right when he seized the word catharsis and elaborated upon it (for almost two and a half thousand years of future generations so far).

The definition of catharsis is (roughly): “releasing, and providing relief from, strong, powerful, primordial, and/or repressed emotions.”

Why would the good German Brothers Grimm have written that way (often in such apparent and amoral glee)?

Because they were realists who were dealing with the real world in a fantastical, dreamlike manner which is very, very real.

AND: all of those things that happen in their versions of the folk tales can be seen in at least TWO ways; one: LITERALLY; two: as SYMBOLS, representations, signs, metaphors of interior, emotional, cognitive, psychological, and spiritual states. 

Literally Stories

Literally Stories, the online literary “magazine” site of short fiction, publishes an incredibly wide and eclectic variety of works.

From realism to magic realism and horror, from fantasy to science fiction and other forms of speculative stories, and crime, thriller, mystery, detective, historical, humor, romance and love stories, and ghost stories, tales of suspense, tales of the grotesque and arabesque, secular stories, mystical stories, family stories, work stories, cinematic stories, poetic stories, all these and more regularly appear in the “pages” of LS and have done so with ironclad regularity for a solid ten-years-plus as of this writing.

(They publish one story every weekday, an essayistic “wrap up” by the editors on Saturday, and something special, different or unusual, often nonfiction by fiction writers, on Sunday.)

Currently, regular contributors to and commentators on the site include: Christopher J. Ananias, Geraint Jonathan, Tom Sheehan, David Henson, Mick Bloor, Gerry Coleman, Harrison Kim, Doug Hawley, Paul Kimm, Steven French, Diane Dickson and Leila Allison.

The last two are two of the three current editors of LS. Diane is a co-founder of Literally Stories and a distinguished novelist and short story writer with numerous books to her name; Leila is one of the greatest American short story writers of all time, a claim that sounds far-fetched until you begin reading her profuse, Arabian-Nights-style work in depth.

(Time will tell, as Bob Marley sang in a song, twisting and ramping up the meaning of this everyday saying with his incredible, marijuana-tinged voice.)

Founding editor Hugh Cron holds the record for the most posts ever posted on the site. Hugh’s first short story that was published on Literally Stories (back when it was called Literally Stories UK), in 2014, is called “Dilemma – An Experiment.”           

In very many ways like a modern-day Grimms fairy tale through the lens of a crime and a horror story, this amazing tale presents one of the most taboo subjects anyone on this earth can possibly think of in a fearless manner that can be compared to the writing of Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Sam Shepard, and Flannery O’Connor, among others.

Like a brief one-act play, and like a twisted parable at the same time, this disturbing, fast-paced tale is presented in sudden, abrupt, accurate, convincing dialogue with no words wasted and it has a human meaning in, under, behind, in front of its horrible surface that will cause all sensitive readers to stop whatever else they were doing and think about this for a while before going on with their day (or night).

Scottish author Cron’s story is not just edgy entertainment that will get your adrenalin up; it is provocative drama that causes the reader to think and reflect. The tale demands a close reading and rereading so none of the nuances fly over the reader’s head. The challenging nature of the tale can almost be called “politically incorrect,” and while it seems outlandish on a first encounter with it, life itself is often outlandish, and Cron’s tale captures the nature of the beast in this life where a sabertoothed tiger can leap out of the bushes at any moment and tear your head off before you’re even aware of what happened to you (or you can get hit by a bus). 

Five characters: a mother, a father, their baby, their friend, and a psychopathic, pistol-toting murderer who suddenly appears on the scene; and now an impossible choice. “Dilemma – An Experiment” is a short story you won’t soon forget. It’s enough to say here (no spoiler alert) that only one of the characters in this story dies; read it yourself to find out.

Peter Tosh was murdered in a situation similar to the one presented in Cron’s story, which backs up the horrific reality of it.

Antonin Artaud’s underground Theater of Cruelty, which he expounded upon in his essays, was based on “violent rigor” and “extreme concentration of stage elements” which would lead to “an impassioned, convulsive concept of life.” (He compared it to taking peyote without taking peyote; but sometimes he took the peyote anyway, up to and including the point/s where it started to cloud his judgement more than a little bit, but that’s another story…)

These techniques and purposes can be fruitfully applied to Hugh Cron’s writing style in general; Cron has many tales in the online LS vault (or archive) that can match the artful, disturbing abruptness and sudden, lasting, thought-provoking effect of “Dilemma – An Experiment,” his first LS tale.

Part Three

The short story, which rises out of much earlier forms like the fable, folk tale and parable, has always been about the “single effect” ever since Edgar Allan Poe laid down the rules and came up with the terms two centuries ago. Brevity, compression and selection for increased focus and intensity is perhaps the number one rule.

It’s a good rule for life, too, especially now; well worth pondering over. Nietzsche said, “The formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…”

Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler and Dr. Watson still live because they mostly appeared in short stories. Cron’s work, and the work of all the writers for LS, continues this eminent literary/art tradition.

And as far as the U.S. of A. at least, most (not all) of its great written work has been produced in the short forms, whether story, poem or essay, perhaps starting with Washington Irving and his two incredibly famous short stories (Headless Horseman/Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) and including Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Abraham Lincoln’s most famous piece of writing, which, like Thoreau’s essay, has had massive worldwide consequences, is 272 words long.

(Jesus’ parables are usually shorter.)

(Shakespeare wrote in quick bursts of the mind, endless moments that stand out as separate entities, which is why he’s so quotable, among other things.)

Part D.

And another indispensable aspect of Literally Stories is the ways in which this site provides a forum for its creative writers to reflect upon and consider the “issues of the day,” in the “Comments” sections and in other ways. The stories themselves are always the number one feature on the site, but most or all of the stories are infused with ideas in various ways.

Literally Stories covers and includes many genres of fiction writing, but almost none (or none) of its stories are mere escapist “trash” pulp literature; this is real story-telling instead, the kind that makes you think and feel in a complex way, the kind you have to get off your ass and engage with if you want to get it.

(Related aside: While he lived, John Keats had around two dozen regular readers during the last few years of his 25-year life. The five-foot-tall firebrand with long hair knew one half that number was usually offended or confused, often both; he appreciated both kinds of readers.)

Section Five

An upcoming sentence in this partly fictionalized essay is 450 words long. It arises out of terror, worry, and righteous indignation (worthy of Hunter S. Thompson), and the need to make a statement. As with this entire essay, it was composed by a fallible HUMAN mind, heart, and hands, one hundred percent. Also, Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”

Contradicting yourself is often necessary in the wildly spinning modern world, and is far from a bad thing, depending on your motivation; it all comes down to your motivation, as Sherlock Holmes and Jesus knew.

In a modern world where billionaires and their precious corporations rape and desecrate the Planet for profit when they’re already so wealthy they have more money than entire nations while billions of other people are displaced, have nowhere safe to stay, don’t have enough food, and/or have to slave away with no safety net; where the vast middle classes of the developed nations are so obsessed with money, property, status, comfort, mindless distraction and consumerism they can’t see straight and/or have blinders on and don’t know who the good guys or the bad guys really are (often until it’s too late); where the underclasses are so ignorant and uneducated they believe the most impossible claims and so-called theories as if the world were a gigantic, pornographic cartoon of good and evil, black and white only, and never the shades of gray; where the soil is rotting and blowing away; the fresh water is disappearing; the oceans are overheating; the nightmarish natural disasters are increasing apace day by day and no one is doing a thing to stop it, because they’re all feasting or starving; where the extinction rate for life on this planet is far, far, far higher and faster than it’s ever been in the billions of years of life on earth (except when the dinosaurs got blown up); where there are asteroids that might hit us; volcanoes that might explode and be far worse than nuclear bombs, not to mention at least fifteen thousand nuclear bombs on land (underground), in airplanes, in submarines, most of these controlled by a very, very few madmen; where vast hordes of robots and drones are being prepared and trained to slaughter other humans when called upon or they might just do it themselves anyway without asking us first; where there are problems with overpopulation and underpopulation everywhere all over the globe at the same time (a situation that’s so complex and so true it will take the top of your head off if you let it); a place where following the laws is just as crucial as BREAKING the laws, depending on which laws you’re talking about, and often you have to figure out which is which all on your own; a place where telling a lie is often equivalent to telling the truth, and “telling the truth” is as rare as something that never happens, at least in the mainstream world for the most part; where change is happening so fast on so many levels there isn’t anyone who can chart or track, much less stop, or understand, IT; in this kind of world, we need human stories created by humans just as much as, or more than, we ever did.

And, as Jim Morrison, who was a great thinker, pointed out, too many people can see (on the surface level) but they can’t FEEL deeply any more.

Humans have always believed the world is about to end. Someday, it will. (We don’t know how or when.) Don’t wait for it to happen. But how get through?

Storytelling in its purest form is the answer, because of catharsis and pity (Aristotle’s second criteria for tragedy), AND for inspiration and understanding, in the good sense. Storytelling via and through READING, reading, reading, reading! is so crucial now in such a complex, destabilizing, atomized, discontinuous, nonstop, convoluted, lonely, confusing, dark, lit-up, spinning society as ours that its demise is probably the single greatest tragic factor, leading to everything else on so many levels.

Literally Stories is doing its part to preserve the art of reading good, HUMAN and human-made stories; there isn’t a more important, or more underappreciated, issue in this world.

(“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” said tall, thin, long-haired Shelley; this is still vastly more true today than almost anyone thinks it is, but only on a case by case basis. Without poets and story-tellers, it would have been over a very long time ago.)

When we quit reading, we have no way to truly understand history, which means we have no idea what the hell is really going on (“The past is not past,” William Faulkner said, reaching for his pipe and whiskey bottle before falling off the porch), which means we’ll keep repeating the worst aspects of it all ad infinitum, driving everything straight into the ditch. Even those who don’t read totally get this when they think about it.

Einstein called authentic stories truth-telling devices and most humans, in the deepest part of themselves, want to know the truth.

ALSO: In our work, we should always reach for the best, even if we never get there, because the struggle itself is ennobling, no matter the result; and ALL the great writers, thinkers, artists, scientists, and leaders have been great readers – ZERO exceptions! None.

The human mind, heart, and soul are physically and spiritually enhanced and strengthened, and even created, through reading. Only reading has the necessary challenges, nuances, and privacies for this.  

Though we don’t know it, we are all, truly, THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK now, and we need, need, need, need, need to keep reading TRUE THINGS (all good stories are true) – or languish, starve, or die in our own grim Season in Hell.

Dale Williams Barrigar