Last evening, I spent over an hour agonizing over how to close a 700-word mini-feature. It wasn't the productive type of agony either, the kind where there are balled-up papers scattered around a wastebasket to indicate some sort of expended effort. No, this was 60 minutes of staring past a flickering TV screen, trying desperately in my mind to transfuse some blood from the first paragraph into the ending, trying desperately to bring the piece full-circle with something resembling panache.
Writer's block is one thing, but finisher's anxiety is a whole separate circle of creative hell. Every song, story, novel, drama, or piece of filmed entertainment is implicitly required to have an exit point, one that leaves the consumer with some sense of satisfaction. But every ending ever crafted fails to adequately capture what it is to truly end. Even death, the great book-closer, has an aftermath. Stuff, by its very nature, keeps happening.
Take "happily ever after," for instance. Complete copout. To leave your characters suspended in some contented amberfix exposes the lie that every fabricated narrative structure is built over. I prefer "And, having completed their jobs as symbolic ciphers, they were no longer relevant and ceased to exist." The truth doesn't hurt as much as it kills.
But no happy ending could ever be as unsatisfying as the one I hold up as the worst of all time. I'm speaking, of course, about the closing scene of the movie adaptation of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. If you haven't seen it (shame on you), a golden weathervane comes to life as Billy Preston, pulling Peter Frampton from the brink of suicide by resurrecting his dead girlfriend. I dare anybody to find anything that goes to greater lengths to leave its audience with a false sense of joy.
Yes, endings are difficult, and you don't need the filmography of M. Night Shyamalan to know that. The only arc approaching a proper amount of closure is what the late Joseph Campbell liked to call the hero's journey, where the protagonist ends up in a better place after surviving trials. But there are far fewer heroes than stories to fill time and space with.
So after a fair amount of thought, I've arrived at the perfect ending to anything: "And so on."
This differs greatly from the three-word closer "so it goes," adopted by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut for death scenes in Slaughterhouse-Five. That phrase is practically designed to be delivered with a world-weary sigh, and it's an admission of sad defeat in the face of a decaying universe.
"And so on" is soft comfort. "And so on" suggests that time is linear and the world will continue spinning, it comes from the same place as David Byrne's zen koan "same as it ever was." "And so on" is the black screen at the end of The Sopranos, it's the sustained note at the end of "A Day In The Life." It's a signal that the show is over, it's time to turn the house lights back on and let everybody back out into the sunshine.
But "and so on" won't help me with my current problem. I still have to find a last paragraph for that goddamn story.
