Xavier Moon

Context first. Xavier Moon is the name of a character from my oft-restarted, oft-aborted, novel. In truth, Xavier Moon is, in some small way, me, and in many large ways, not me. Regardless, he's become so archetypal and abstract to me that in order to write him as a character I'm going to have to fight with him a lot.

What I'm about to post here is something I wrote back in October, but chose not to post at that time. Rereading it, I figure, hey, why not? So here's a paragraph about Mr. Moon. Be warned, this is me writing the way I really write. Kerouacian, if I flatter myself, or maybe just poorly. Hard to say. Regardless, here be (intentional) run-on sentences.

Xavier Moon is an impossible character to describe, because he's really only an idea, an archetype, a reflection of myself into some mystical, mythical world of forms, but not quite that, because Plato's forms have no meaning in our historical age, when we can see the past and make - or more often not make - sense of the stories about the past that we hear and accept. Xavier Moon has been a writer, a musician, a student, an athlete, a dreamer, a dream, a lover, beloved, powerful, meek, an astrologer, a scientist, a lonely man in shirt sleeves (after Eliot), and a man burning some preposterous version of his own second Troy. Xavier Moon stays up until 3 AM, but doesn't particularly care for clocks. He wears the finest clothes, but no jewelry, and has long, black hair. Or else his hair is brown, tawny and well-kempt. Regardless, his glasses give him a dignified, intelligent bearing, and he would never be caught writing in a generic notebook with a generic pen, not because he has some superficial aversion to the cheapness of genre, but because he somehow finds himself always surrounded by finery, as if by accident. He is no great man, but he draws the greatness of others to him. Except, there's a catch, because in the process of attracting and enabling power to come to be his own lunarity inflicts some shadowy maleficence upon the shining virtue of his interlocutor. He might rationalize his corrupting bearing by explaining that, in truth, there is no such thing as greatness uncorrupted, or else he might remind those poor souls to whom he is midwife that all births - especially significant ones - are painful.