Cinematographer, "The Rains of Ranchipur," 20th Century Fox, 1955, produced by Frank Ross (1904-1990), starring Lana Turner and Richard Burton, a remake of the studio's 1939 film starring Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power.  Set in the fictitious Indian city of Ranchipur during the monsoon season, the film tells the story of the "spoilt and stubborn" Lady Edwina Esketh (Turner/Loy) who falls in love with the Indian doctor Rama Safti (Burton/Power).

    

"Theirs was a sin not even the great rains could wash away!"

In the simplest and most general sense, any model of the composition process involves an audience.  Whatever other variables may be considered, starting with a box or circle representing the AUTHOR -- itself enclosing a variety of other boxes or rectangles for sub-items like the author's range of knowledge, skills, prejudices and predilections -- somewhere else there's a square or circle or oval designating the One Who Is the AUDIENCE, for that third lozenge or trapezoidal shape which stands for the COMPOSITION.  

And I mean, even if what we're diagramming is a teen-aged girls Secret Diary, the Audience still obtains if only in the form (not god forbid of Older Brother or Mummy but) of a Future (hopefully wiser, perhaps even happily married, with children) Self.  And yes, even the solipsistic "I Write For No One" poet writes for his own peculiarly isolated Self in the moment, and is hence his own audience, critic and fan.

Three Simple Shapes -- AUTHOR, AUDIENCE, COMPOSITION.   Then there's the Why -- why the Author bothers, represented by another shape labeled INTENT.  By way of answer and analogy, let us recall what the poet W.H. Auden says about relationships:

"... What draws 
    singular lives together in the first place,
    loneliness, lust, ambition,
    or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
    or murder one another
    clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
    between them, like Bombelli's 
    impossible yet useful numbers, no one
    has yet explained..."

["The Common Life" in the collection About the House, Random House, 1959]

Accepting that the sixteenth-century mathematician Rafael Bombelli invented imaginary numbers and that they're quite useful in solving some otherwise pesky theorems, try to imagine the poet describing not just the impulse to seek love but the impulse behind a Writer reaching out to an Audience through his writing, the initial desire being the connection ("Intent") between those two geometric figures in the model connected by a dotted line on either side of that thing created, whether we call it a Story, a ScreenPlay, a Novel, or a Post on his Blog.  Relatively easy, isn't it, to think of reasons for putting pen to paper, fingertips to keyboard -- we all know why: to be noticed, to settle a grudge, to be loved, to be understood, to be instructive, to dazzle, clarify, delight, amuse, shock, become famous, get even.

Desire's the easy part.  But when the composing is an on-going process, and not a one-shot deal?  When it's not a One Night Stand but a nearly daily thing, a relationship that evolves... what then?  That's the mystery, says the poet.  That's the part no one's explained.  

Watching the rain the past couple days (which seems like forever here in sunny California where we hardly ever have weather) I've had time to think and rethink my views on Blogging, including whether once you start you can ever stop, and what the point is, and why people keep at it or don't and burn out and throw in the towel.  Or not.  Where once I felt I had certainly plumbed the surface of the issue, I now find I may not have gone quite deep enough, which for someone pretty comfortable with Shallow is saying something. 

What if I told you that what I write here is not only unplanned but unforseen?  I mean, what if I confessed to not having any idea what I'm going to end up putting down on the page?  That some weird visceral gut instinct takes over and I never know what's going to come out? 

Well, let me tell you, there were about three nice days of weather annually in the Pennsylvania of my youth.  I mean days when my mother would say, For crying out loud, put that book down and go outside, get some fresh air before it snows or the Rains of Ranchipur come again.  See?  I didn't know until quite recently that Ranchipur was an imaginary place or that my mother could just as easily have been referencing the version of the film with Myrna Loy as the one with Lana Turner.  Or even the novel by Louis Bromfield, as she was a longtime member in good standing of the Book-of-the-Month Club.  Crazy, huh?  But wait, there's more!

I also had no idea Milton and Frank both worked on the film and came into this world in 1904, which happens as you know to be a year of untold significance, both personally and I am increasingly wont to believe cosmically, even universally as well.  I just stumbled on that connection, by accident, a little while ago.  Seriously. 

So I'm not a good judge of why people do anything.  You ask, What's my intent?  And I say, that's a good question.  Sure, maybe it's because I thought you might find it interesting to understand what she meant, my mom, shooing me out the back door toward the open fields and woods that existed back then and don't anymore -- it's a housing development now I hear.  Maybe just that.  Or maybe because I'm thinking the next time you hear the expression, the Rains of Ranchipur, you'll know what that means.  

Maybe there's nothing more to it than that.  Just that there'd be a witness, should the case ever come to trial.  So there'd be someone to say, "I know all about it and let me tell you."  Short term or long term, or until everyone gets tired.  And yes, I think it's possible to get tired and be done with it.  Maybe I didn't think so yesterday but I might have changed my mind.  Maybe there are reasons why not everything is sustainable, the way some relationships don't last long, or fail, or fall short of a lifetime, and no surprise there.  Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out, and some things last longer than others, and some don't.  Even the rain ends eventually, after all.  Even the rains of Ranchipur, like most kinds of weather, good and bad, can't last forever.

Still, in case they ask, "What's this all about?  What was he talking about?  What did he mean?  What was the point?  Why did he bother?"

"He just wanted somebody to know," you can say.  "He wanted you to know."