The Wiles of Lewis Desmond

Titles are the weakest link, but to give veracity to the story, it is needful be up front with things like the main characters’ names, viz. Lovecraft Howard, Trevor William, Green Henry, Spark Muriel and King Stephen, among many unnameable characters as spear-carriers or Bic pens. You see, these needful things to be told really did happen, and when things really did happen, the absurdity or not of someone’s name takes second place and never casts a shadow upon the truth of such events. Thus, any verisimilitude is inherently unimpeachable, because it reflects a non-fictional world where events are not even altered slightly to maintain an enhanced commercial entertainment value as a story on a page or a film on a screen. The problem, though, that we all face, is the fallibility of memory as a filter of what we think we incontrovertibly know. But what we must most beware are the airbrushing of denial by wishful thinking and the false insertion of factors that never ever blotted the blotting paper of the brain, because Bic pens, unlike fountain ones, hardly ever blotted. Blotting and blocking never ever worked, because those who wanted to inveigle themselves into the mainstream of the plot as figurative leading-actors rather than as so-called film-extras always have the potential to hold sway to ransome. If a name is placed in the body of the text for one of these extras, this character can then often burgeon more than those deliberately named at outset in order to cover the documentary facts in the most believable way possible. Even when belief is logically intrinsic within truth-as-cursor, an intrusive manipulation of naming by a character who was rightly destined to be killed can further the plot as well as themself into incrementally unpredicatble realms or, to repeat a key word, they can just as easily ‘kill’ the plot in its tracks — a random drop of a double-headed coin from a pocket after disbelief is suspended upside down. On the whole, best to leave the unnameable nameless, say I.