Never get in long-distance relationships with muses. In fact, if you don’t possess the quintessential Hemingway-esque qualities of the serious writer-imaginarian, then, by his words, you can just forget it. Ideas are good. But they’re nothing without proper execution. Anyone can hammer and jab at the keyboard of letters, churn out word counts and craft ‘tome’ manuscripts. But in manifesting an amazing work of fiction, beyond something that begins as mere amusement as Churchill described, the embrace of the great does not always happen.
Sometimes, no matter how great a writer’s talent, a story deflates through emotional turbidity. It wintles short of being elemental. Of being deemed necessary reading by our creative peers. Yet there is something to be celebrated about Steven J. Dine’s novella: ‘The Harder it Gets the Softer We Sing’, published in Black Static, Issue 63. There is a quiet energy that draws you. Above all the action and alluring mystique we find tend to find in pulp fiction, it enthralls through its use of symbolism and ‘second story.’ Reading it through twice, the words audibly wrangle, signaling to readers that they’re mere guiding marks to the raw crux of the tale being told.
A writer, his wife and son have moved house. They left, in part, to escape the pain of losing an unborn child – the loss of ‘the special’ as young Alfie calls it. The ‘House of Mould’ they left is a living cancer that leaves its mark on the physical and metaphorical. Their former home bears the intangible rot of ‘old life.’ But it’s also more. It represents the lives we keep hidden behind closed doors. Lives of pain where we abandon ourselves and others for meanings we often cannot, or choose not, to comprehend. It is the first story that, halfway in, appeared to me as a shape. At first, I could see it in the mould of a tear, a tear that has fallen and splatters as it disconnects from form. Then it became a hopeful imprint carved into the trunk of a tree that has since fallen and no one is around to recollect it.
The writer’s struggle with silence rings loudly. It reminds us of the words we cannot find or that fail us. Or the life episodes we replay time and time again, attempting to chip away the nonsense to grasp and the near-infinitesimal nothingness within. ‘Sometimes it gets so you have to get ill to get better,’ as the homeless Cutter philosophises. As if, in our brief mortal journeys, our emptying out – the act of releasing the poison in our souls to the darkness, or accepting it – is the only way to bring us closer to its fringes where there’s less shadow. What light of screwed up, hard-earned wisdom is ultimately won become itinerant memories that jolt us with the sudden flood of recollections. Of times when we will to remember the meaning that figures of our past presented to us, but are now gone, flung into the beyond like tumbled stones in the transient forever-surge of a gushing river flow.
‘The Harder it Gets the Softer We Sing’ by Steven J Dine
(Magazine available online HERE.)
Black Static 63 (May 2018)
Review by JKA Short, June 2018.
