The Umbrella Plot

"The pretty Rain from those sweet Eaves
Her unintending Eyes --
Took her own Heart, including ours,
By innocent Surprise --

The wrestle in her simple Throat
To hold the feeling down
That vanquished her -- defeated Feat --
Was Fervor's sudden Crown"


I cannot describe the effect of rain on our vulnerable souls as elegantly as Emily Dickinson did in this poem, but I can tell you about "the umbrella plot" - as I know it to be true. The events in this small narrative involve the anthropomorphic reasoning of a character driven by sentimental leanings, and the lack of a permanent job. The character, let's call her "She," affixes strange importance to the natural phenomenon and power of inanimate objects. For convenience sake, and to drive this mini-plot along, let's say, She focusses her attentions on broken umbrellas; how they dot the streets after a storm, with all their metal glistening points and elbows bent in humble reverence to the great wind that has done their disposable bodies in. She thought to herself, that if she were in the game of "transference," She, would be a broken umbrella for the moment, but a synthetic cubist one though a la Picasso or Braque. As a "S.C." umbrella, She would be capable of being broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in abstracted form, and She, along with people that saw her as "Um-brella," would recognize her special gifts in flexibility and as premiere contortionist - in arranging herself just so, and so, and so that She/Um-brella would be admired from a multitude of viewpoints, and She, and her broken parts would be represented in a greater context, THE CONTEXT. She/Her/Um-brella's surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, scant of a coherent sense of depth; and devoid of delineation between background/context, and, her/She as object. Um-brella's planes and lines and edges interpenetrate to create shallow and ambiguous space.

She is ambiguous space when She goes to a party, or is introduced to a friend as looking for a permanent job. She wants to just morph into her SELF as Um-brella, scheming to overthrow the "Permanent Job God," that has the power to keep her at points with herself. Strike him down! Arrange/conceive and take action as a plotter would do in a plot; and speaking of plots, what about all her sisters and brothers, all deranged and mangled by the effects of the wind and the rain, strewn here and there, in broken mountains arranged atop the trash bins, and lining the streets, like shot-up soldiers in hostile territory. This is one giant umbrella cemetery She thought. And we umbrellas are devices for mass protection, so why are we treated with disdain, or why are we not made to last? Or why are we made to feel unimportant in sunny weather, after all I, Um-brella could be Miss Parasol.