I have been writing stories for my series, "Inner City," for a few months now and recently finished the fifth piece, "Proclamations of Wonder." The series is about the experience of place and the way information that surrounds us affects us whether we realize it or not. I had already written a few pieces when I realized how much the ideas correlated with some Joseph Campbell ideas, in that as a human culture, we are a product of our environment and not alive in spite of it. Societies develop as part of a system, and we are trying to constantly understand and explain our world and our experiences.
In Inner City, I've taken old stories and ideas and I have begun to retell them in a way to show this. In the second story, "The Illuminated Grimoire of Newtown Road," I presented one of the key symbols of the series: a map of a city annotated with experiences that took place there. The words of feelings and memories are written on top of symbols which express roads and buildings and homes which are created by people. There is an infinite amount of information about any one place, and the grimoire, a symbol of realizing that idea, at once awakens its reader to the joy of vast experiences of place and intimidates by showing that we are all a part of something and that it is impossible to be alone. It all seeps in and affects us.
In Proclamations of Wonder, I took a favorite topic, early 1900s Coney Island, and wrote about the fires that destroyed Steeplechase Park. Sylvester Meade of the story is based on Sylvester Mead, the one fatality of those fires, culled from a New York Times article that described the inferno. A few years ago I wrote two poems, one from the point of view of Tilyou and one from Mead, and Proclamations of Wonder is an outgrowth of exploring Meade. The article described him as a runaway from Brooklyn's President St. I wanted to know more about him, who he was, why he left, and what he felt like to die in that way in that place. He seemed like such a tragic being, and I wanted to give him life and understand those things.
There is a dual narrative in this story, there is in much of Inner City. That's the [I think] obvious wordplay of the name "Inner City," that the stories are internal understandings of external experiences, and that our brains and souls are a stew of history. In cities with so many of us from so many places, sometimes surprising stories get paired with circumstances. These legends are what we have told ourselves to understand a series of experiences that are all very human and that have been felt time and time again.
The external narrative of this story is that while asleep in his shanty under the boardwalk at Steeplechase Park, a fire spreads early in the morning while Meade is asleep. The smoke and the fumes begin to affect him, but he is not fully conscious yet and he tries to sleep through it (the descriptions are based on when I once lived in a boiler room, and the boiler started seeping fumes and I wanted to keep sleeping, but I could feel my consciousness physically wrest me from sleep to realize I had to get out or risk being suffocated). Tilyou gets to the park and starts to fight the fire, as do the firefighters of the Dreamland Midget Village (the Dreamland Lilliputian village did in fact perform a firefighting show in their scaled down town!). Meade wakes up finally, but he's still caught up in a dream and doesn't understand what is happening. The park is burning around him and rides are falling apart. He sees Tilyou, his hero, who built the park he ran away to from a bad family, and tries to help fight the fire, but he succumbs to the smoke. Seeing the casualty, Tilyou and the little people carry him out to the beach to cool him in the water before he dies.
The internal narrative is borrowed heavily from the Persian epic Shahnameh, specifically The Flying Throne of Kai Kawous and the Tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab. The Flying Throne, I used very directly, hoping to point at the more subtle and liberal retelling of Rostam and Sohrab.
Meade dreams of the throne as one of Tilyou's inventions, maybe a new ride, and imagines himself riding away with Kai to The Orient, as Kai Kawous did in the Shahnameh. Reality affects the dreamer, though, and the burning of Samarkand begins to turn the dream into a nightmare. He wakes up, still half in a dream, and pushes out of the throne, which is really his shanty (I hope the blue/indigo description hints this) and just like a dream may tell our minds, "I knew it was my house but it was also my school," his mind continues to tell him that he is in the dream to protect him from the horror of reality.
In Rostam and Sohrab, R is a hero of Persia and doesn't know that he has fathered a child, but he left a memento with the mother-to-be before he leaves. The mother gives it to the child, S, and tells him about his father. In the legend, rather than entire armies doing battle, they would choose their respective best warriors to fight, one on one, to decide the outcome. S, wanting to meet his father, joins the opposing army and confronts his father in battle. He defeats R, but is tricked by R basically saying, "You have to win two out of three!" to preserve himself. In the ensuing battle, R defeats S, who then reveals the memento proving he is R's son. R is devastated that he has killed his own son and tries to save him before he dies.
In Proclamations, the symbol of Steeplechase, the Funny Face, gets burned into Meade's skin. Meade and Tilyou, of the Dreamland and Steeplechase armies converge to put out the fire, the burning Samarkand. Meade puts out one fire, but Tilyou points out the rest that need to be done, but Meade cannot withstand it anymore. As he falls, he reveals the Steeplechase Funny Face, the memento, and Tilyou is distraught that what he created for the sake of wonder and joy has taken the life of the child. Meade, all along, wanted to be known to his hero, like Sohrab, and falls victim to him in the process. But, thanks to Tilyou, that very same wonder and joy shielded Meade from the horror. Sohrab wants to meet and understand his father, and though it is tragic, he finally feels the love he has missed. The father, Tilyou and Rostam, never understand it, but maybe their child does.
When I was young, I caught myself at the moment I was falling asleep once, and I felt as though I was being pulled in two ways by a flow of water. That is where the image of the black waterfall comes from, and as he is dying, Meade again slips into a dream, perhaps on the flying throne, thanks to Tilyou's proclamations of wonder.
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