Notes (I)

I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here, but I suppose I should begin.

I’ve been asked to prepare a report, to be publicly posted on Cafe Chesscourt, to get everyone up to speed. To inform those Cafe patrons fortunate enough not to have attended Spelunk 04! just what happened there, and what led to it, and what followed.

This would be a delicate enough task in itself, but it gets worse. Because, of course, my audience isn’t just comprised of Cafe members—known quantities, and if not all precisely friends, in any case all initiates in our pleasant little cult. People are going to read this thing, all sorts of people. Bored teens whiling away 4th period on Google. Oddity-fetishists tiring of last week’s online eccentrics. And, inevitably—this is the one that really gives me the chills—a broader public.

I’ve already been contacted by my first journalist, and I’m sure there will be more. As everyone in the Cafe knows, and has lamented, there’s already been a slow-news-week piece about Spelunk 04! in an alternative weekly, riddled with inaccuracies. They seemed to have talked to someone, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Jenny or Aaron, and it certainly wasn’t me. (Was it Marsh? I hope not. I hope it was one of the others. This parenthetical is definitely not going to make it into the report.)

And not only could they not get their facts straight about Spelunk 04!, they didn’t even seem to have a clue what Salby was all about. So not only does it fall to me to recount what happened to us that week, it also falls to me to explain our beloved LS to people who may never have even heard his name.

I don’t even know how to start. I keep wondering where my “report” should begin—with a primer on LS? an FAQ dispelling the false rumors swirling around Spelunk 04!, and confirming the true ones? with some sort of definitive statement that we are not freaks, that we’re people just like you, with 9-5 jobs (in . . . some cases), significant others (on occasion), etc.?

What I’m trying to do here, I guess, is let myself write with the idea clearly fixed in mind that these words are not the report. Not the report, not the report, not the report. These are just notes. Just collecting my thoughts. When the time comes to write the report I will chop bits here and add bits there and splice and rearrange—edit so thoroughly that the result will bear almost no resemblance to these notes. Which means I can write freely, without thinking about that audience of millions arrayed before me, the unfamiliar podium in front of me, the harsh glare of the stadium lights in my eyes. Just notes. Not the report.

So then: what would I like to accomplish, in the report which I will eventually write, and which I am not writing now? Of course I’d like to tell the story of Spelunk 04!, with as much even-handedness as I can muster, keeping in mind that I may be writing for eyes who have never read LS or chatted casually on the Cafe. I’d like to provide, too, some sort of account of what the Cafe was, and is—not just to show how it produced Spelunk 04!, but to show how much more it was than that.

I’d like to confound the expectations of those looking for some humorless fan-cult, for some self-serious enclave of cargo cult academics. I’d like to give some sense of the fun I’ve had with these people, these people who are, in the end, the best friends I’ve ever had. I’d like to—well, if I could, I’d quote the entirety of Life Among The Lorrums, but barring that I’d like to convey something of the spirit and spark of Jennific. Not just as an example of how grim old LS can be taken in lighter directions (oh, what games these quirky little nerds play in their spare time!) but as a successful, accomplished, and ultimately quite moving creative work, in its own way as dear to me as anything LS wrote, by a talented writer who I hope gets that book deal she longs for.

I’d like to show why Aaron’s theory threads, and the Aaron/Marsh Wars, weren’t nearly as crazy as they looked. Although that is a more delicate matter. Woe is me, my burden is heavy in so many ways. (These notes are just for me and me alone—they are not the report—and so I can whine as much as I want. For instance, I can say this: that I feel like I’ve been punished for my good deeds. I’ve been assigned to write the report because I’m a major Cafe figure who was present at Spelunk 04! and yet, unlike Aaron or Marsh or Jenny, remains “unbiased.” I restrained myself, played the reconciler’s role, when conflicts arose, and for that I have to play the reconciler’s role one last time, and this time the task may be impossible.)

But look, let’s go back even further. People are going to read the report who have never read LS, and I must (my burden is heavy in so many ways) convey to them something of what he kindled in all of us. What we saw, reading Chesscourt, that could not be unseen, and left us talking endlessly, trying—in thread after thread, in argument and fanfic and countless other avenues of approach—to get some sense of just what it was, this beast LS had caught by the horns and presented to us, which we all recognized with an instant shock upon seeing it and yet could never name.

(That is definitely not going in the report. Need to find the right balance between “LS really is fascinating and so it’s not so strange we’re obsessed with him” and “we are not crazy, dammit.” Will experiment further at striking the balance as these notes continue.)

Of course, the Cafe being the Cafe, this will be controversial, but for now I’ll suggest this as a good focal point for the intro-to-LS aspect of the report: “Leonard Salby’s central theme was ‘unintended consequences.’”

It’s a good angle. “The Law of Unintended Consequences”: it’s a thing from economics, something serious men in business wear talk about in serious chats about policy (nothing so grubby as “politics”—policy!). But then those serious men are more likely to be conservatives than not, and one thing I must take great pains to dispel is that LS in his later years was merely some sort of “ultra-conservative crank,” as that awful alt-weekly article put it. Perhaps invoke the concept of “unintended consequences” without the phrase itself? Need to retain the aura of seriousness. Hmm.

In any case I think it’s clear that “unintended consequences” was in some sense LS’ central theme. The Cafe, bless its heart, will quibble, because it wouldn’t be the Cafe if it wouldn’t. But come on. The Chessboard, already present in A Thornbush Tale, which mirrors inside the Manor events taking place outside. The machines of the Lorrums in The Mainspring, and their ill effects. If Tom and Sally had never left Chesscourt Manor, there would have been no Skycrash; if no Skycrash, no flight to the sea; no flight to the sea, no Charles spending years wandering by boat; no Charles spending years wandering by boat, no creation of the Cherubim. And without the Cherubim—well, do I even need to continue? Without the escape from Skycrash to the plains, there would be no kingside castle, and without the kingside castle Aunt Mirth would probably have lost the match which would have sent her back to her shed, and there would not be chessboards all over the walls and ceilings of Chesscourt Manor, and the efforts of the Angelic Alliance would have succeeded, and the Sea of Glass would have persisted, and imagine what Sally would have then had to endure, trapped in the plains for a delimitable eternity. And so forth.

Some way to sum up all this, without getting lost in the details. But the very theme of unintended consequences requires the details, since what is too big to be a “detail” can be noticed and anticipated by anyone. Tough one. (My burden is heavy in so many ways.)

And if I’m not just speaking to Cafe regulars, if I’m speaking to the whole world, isn’t there also some need to humanize myself in particular, to establish myself as a specific person who the listener can choose to trust, as narrator? But how much personal background should I include, and where should I put it? If I load the beginning with David Copperfield crap, will everyone get bored and stop reading?

Maybe this would be a nice hook: “Unlike so many others, I did not read A Thornbush Tale as a child. In fact, I seemed to be the only child I knew who had not read it. I was not to discover Salby until a college girlfriend plunged a copy of Chesscourt Manor into my eager hands and told me that” . . . oh, look, my heart’s not in this. Return to this stuff later. Make intro personal, yet not boring. Present self as sane, sensitive. Emphasize academic achievements but avoid appearing pretentious.

Can I really do it? I mean, can I really sum up all of this? Maybe I should just present, in lieu of a report, a big stack of archived Cafe threads, full of chaff and wonder, force people to choke down all the bad jokes and petty arguments before they can say they’ve read up on Leonard Salby and Cafe Chesscourt and Spelunk 04! Or perhaps particularly relevant threads could be interspersed into the report, with a sort of artistry (present self as sane, sensitive).

I am getting very tired of my own voice now. I should go download some more threads from the Cafe, while there’s still time; some of the key threads have already been deleted. Yes, I think the idea of presenting undigested documents and materials is a good one. It’s hard to talk about all this, so why not let the record speak in its own words?

Like this, for instance: