Intimate Indifference

I wrote this brief essay after I had written the title piece in my first collection of short stories, “Peach.” I’d offered it to a periodical that required authors to come up with a “process” essay on the story, and I was so convinced that those editors would take “Peach” that I went ahead and penned “Intimate Indifference.” The story was not taken, was published and nominated for a Pushcart by another magazine.  This short essay, it seems to me, is still germane to today’s short fiction scene.

On-line – we are friends with people we’ve never met, like events that may well not have

occurred, indeed, might have been concocted only for video, date other humans based on a

picture and their indications of what they think they like and are looking for – the photos may not be current or even real.  We “reach-out” electronically.  We’ve relegated memory to alerts, pixels, jpegs.  We’ve allowed our money to travel alone, banks and monthly payments to chat, our vote to the wings of mailed electronics.

            Just as we’ve slid into the warm bath of USA Today, half-hour news programs, flash

fiction, headline news bereft of scrolling, Kindle, Nook, and Audible Books – once the domain of the unsighted -- so we should and will, I suppose, embrace the concept of “intimate indifference.”

            Sensing the rift in patience and attention span between writers, or “creatives” -- because it’s no longer enough to be a writer, and God knows we need one more general, meaningless term in the lexicon, and the reader, I have been experimenting with what may be becoming – the 21^st century “Everyman.”

            “Intimate indifference” is the dependence on character devoid of such physical and

socially obsolete signifiers as height, weight, age, name, color, race, religion, style, and way of moving about the world, in short, all those aspects known as physical description that used to clutter up the introduction to a character and which we can be fairly certain won’t match the Netflix, Hulu, or Prime Video version of said character.

            What is left?  Only for the character to be sketched in, colored really, by his or her words, actions, thoughts, location or setting.  Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants” is an early example with its, albeit flawed, third-person objective point of view.  Hemingway is writing for television whether he knows it or not – relegating description, physicality of character, to what the reader can glean and assume.  He may well be depending on our imaginations.  Little would he have known that those would be archived in this century or given over to the hands of casting and wardrobe.

            “Intimate indifference” is sex with the lights off.  It’s only the necessary, tactile sensation – no frills – much like internet porn, phone sex, nude selfies, digital erotica.  It’s “one-sense” dependent.  As such, it stands to reason that writers will eventually cave and cater, much as paper, numbered pages, and shelf space have, to the digital.

            In my latest venture into short fiction, “Peach,” the characters are little more than words and thoughts.  With the omniscient point of view, it’s important to remember that the narrator, even though he may know and see everything, is under no obligation to divulge everything.  He is not Hemingway’s “fly on the wall,” but he’s not a gossip either.

            The characters – all of them identifiable only by gender and position, with the single exception of the protagonist’s nickname, are boy and girl, a set of parents for each, a science teacher and school counselor mentioned, as well as ill-defined law enforcement and emergency medical personnel.  We know a few of these – two really – primarily by conversations between them and the thoughts of the boy and girl – the only two characters we come into any contact with, the only two we “see.”

            One could also claim the internet as a character here, but one might understand it as an omniscient entity.  We believe everything it says so blindly, so completely, that even the crass, opportunists in our government are worried.

            My single earlier attempt at flash fiction predicts this, dare we call it, device.  “Intimate indifference,” I imagine, is almost required in flash fiction.  What room could there possibly be for names and physical description.  The choice would be between traditional description and conflict, and without conflict, boys and girls, regardless of what’s clogging the digital realm currently, there is no story.  Many of what I’m reading electronically currently are little more than “sketches.”

            When the ship is sinking, when the hot air balloon is losing altitude, when the truck is too heavy for the shoulder – we begin to jettison things.  Why would it be any different for fiction?  Attention span diminished, even digital space (and spacing) impaired, modes of delivery challenged, fierce and multiplying visual challenges – description, traditional character development, even setting, are the items first off the load.

            I may sound judgmental here, and perhaps I am, but I am also looking at de facto

rule in the making.  “Intimate indifference” is the coming method – one that has already arrived – and needs to be named and embraced.  It comes from outside the art, from the vicissitudes of current, everyday life, and as such is ignored at the writer’s peril.

            Until such time as the “hybrid” is not, until “flash fiction” is not, until “Twitter” stories

are not – avant-garde, but established and revered forms of writing, writers will need to jettison conventions just to be read.  Once the entire art has diminished to 140-word “stories” and one- page “chapters,” we will all be in the “audio-visual,” and thousand-page books will be doorstops, shelf weights, old sculpture.