ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα – The Rest of the Dream’s cover

Dear readers,

For those of you who didn’t study Ancient Greek, it’s somewhat of a tradition to spend a humongous amount of time talking about the opening paragraph of the Odyssey. I envy you, really, because you didn’t waste countless hours on this endeavor. But it’s what I want to talk about, so here’s the translation of the title:

Let’s first go for a word-by-word/morphemic version:

(Of) the man, to me, speak, muse

Literally:

Speak to me, o muse, of the man… yada yada yada, the rest  isn’t what I’m going to talk about.

I generally think that the Odyssey is too old to be relatable to a modern audience without much study and that there are many contemporary books that can take its place. But I decided to quote this because of the first three words (and I’m not even going to go into a diatribe about the case usages or who the grammatical persons are in the sentence):

Man (subject) – Me (audience) – Muse (storyteller)

Those are the classical three persons of communication and of writing. Okay, yeah, sensibilities have evolved in the last three thousand years, but I gotta stop myself before I get too wrapped up in things I know nothing about. I do want to make it clear that since the written word has existed, writers have made it clear that there are three independent wills to contend with. They want to express something, however banal or enlightening it may be, the object of the story will pursue its own will, and the audience has its own desires and tropes that they judge the story by. Yes, it’s the storyteller who manipulates the story and expresses it, but it’s easy to say when you’re the one who creates it.

I’m going to jump a bit forward. The next person I want to talk about is Primo Levi. I take no pleasure in reading about the Holocaust, but it’s vital (especially as we forget to never forget). When I first read Se questo è un uomo I thought being afraid of not being heard. I’d been raised with discussions of the Shoah every day (this is not an exaggeration) so it seemed impossible that people should believe it didn’t happen. However, given what happened to him, I think it’s obvious that it does exist. In the last few years in our own county, I’ve seen beliefs I thought impossible to have with any sincerity rise not only to the surface but mass awareness.

There was a push for people to be conscious of differences. Gay marriage, acceptance of transgender individuals, police brutality, etc., i.e. progress, is always met with reaction, and it tends to exaggerate because they’ve no desire to let any transgressions (in their eyes) rejoin the same levels as the past. I embrace any empathy that may come because I, too, want what happened to me to be acknowledged though I will say it’s nowhere even close to the Holocaust or overwhelming prejudice and oppression. However, it’s my story, and I say that the people who have gone through these things inspired me.

I remained silent (for almost a decade) about my coma. I told some people, friends and family for the most part. Almost all of the reactions were similar: “oh, okay, sorry that happened, moving on…” in fewer or more words. I think what most people don’t realize is that when something happens to you, you want to talk about it. I always thought that people needed time to adjust, but a new conclusion has become clear: people need explication. That’s why I wrote on my book that’ll be up on Goodreads soon (I hope).

What goes into a book cover? The ideal should attract readers (oy vey), reveal what they’re going to get into, and at best, it should add to your message instead of being coincidental. The vast majority of books have something of a generic one like a face or a person in a pose. They may be pretty, but what do they mean? What do they add to the majority of the message? Obviously, I’m not good at marketing (the first one), and a generic one is better at attracting readers because they get what they want.

I figured if I’m going to go into writing, it needs to be something that I could be happy with. If I’m not going into the usual publishing route, then I need to soothe my conscious and go with something more expressive than sells. So let’s start with the style. It’s a bit cartoony, but it’s not too. It’s based on photos that drawn-over, kinda like a rotoscoping but with someone who has no idea about how to do it or what it really involves.

The first decision I had to make was go for what we did, an illustration, a photo or a basic but generic cover. We needed to play to our strengths, and what is that? A gaudy, big design wasn’t something that’s easy to do for one person so an illustration was off the table. It would be really cool and fitting, but we’re not a publishing house with people contracted to do that. The photo or something normal didn’t really appeal to me because it didn’t feel right. Since I first saw them in high school, I’ve loved surrealist paintings. Everything by Dali or Magritte’s The Son of Man (the one everyone, ever thinks of) struck a nerve. There’s something we can understand, and there’s something we can’t.

That’s how I wanted my story, and I had to ask myself, how do the two relate? The book is an entirely a transition from surrealism to normal life. The first third is that way a bit (and trust me, I cut down on the mysterious and indecipherable enigmae I tried to put in), and the story of the book resolves the sensorial/postmodern descriptions but welcomes an abstract feeling of unease by the end. The style resolves this by being almost realistic but doesn’t quite make that step. The front is much more understandable, but the back of the cover is even less that. You have to put more effort into understanding, correlating the image to reality.

What is the image, then? You see a hospital bed with a remote on it and a wrist with an identifying band. Everyone’s who had a stay at the hospital recognizes them. The remote is almost photorealistic, but the bed cover is a strange purple, not what you’d see normally. The back is a hospital gown tied up in the back with the occasional small dots they have on one. Between them is the back of the book description.

What do you see? A place to rest, a home to be. What don’t you see? Confinement, IV stands, the wastes of disease or the outside world, the eyes that the protagonist is seeing the world from. The protagonist, John Albuquerque, has removed himself from his observations. All he sees is how everything interact because from his point of view, he doesn’t count himself as a worthwhile being or even alive.