an essay on flash
by Randall Brown
To describe these writings, I prefer flash. It reminds me of what Juliet says to Romeo: “It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden; / Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say / It lightens.” An urgency exists in the word flash, something that must be read before it’s gone. Kerouac, unknowingly, describes the writers of flash in On the Road:
...mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’
Great flash pieces have that “centerlight pop”; without it, the flash does not burn brightly enough to justify its brevity, its suddenness. Something “mad” resides in the center, around which the spidery threads take form.
The Dionysian realm resides in that center. Pre-conscious, the world perceived by the senses, in which human passions burn, ever on the verge of exploding into unchecked monstrous appetite. And while the desire of every text is for the end, so strongly does the flash crave its ending that the flash razes the hundreds of pages it might fill.
The Apollonian—that ordering principle of rational structure—prevents the few pages left behind from turning to ash. Direction, purpose, meaning, design—these form the ephemeral strands that hold the centerlight pop together for that instant before it dissolves into chaos.
As readers, we enter with such abruptness that only at the end does the writer allow us to exhale.
“Awww!” Flash. “Awww!” Pop. Awwwll gone.
