Thoughts on grief and shopping

In an uncanny, almost freakish coincidence, our cat Bella, littermate to the late lamented Zee, has died of the same illness (lymphoma), almost exactly one year later, i.e., during the recent holidays, which are already horrible by nearly all measures, at least for me.

So, first off: Rest well, beloved Bella. We miss you.

I've just noticed that I am coping with my devastation in a way that replicates the premise of my first novel, Bigfoot and the Baby. That is: we shop because we grieve. I suspect I've bought more unneeded items for myself in the past 24 hours than I did all last year. And, sad to say, these purchases somehow make me feel better, if only temporarily.

Notions of "filling the void" come to mind, but seem inadequate, as an explanation. Perhaps there's an illusion of control--I find something I want, I buy it, I own it--that eludes us when a loved one is ill or dying. When we shop, we complete a concrete transaction with a gratifying result. There's no helpless guessing what might happen if we make one choice or the other; and if we don't like what we bought after all, we can usually return it (or the consequences of our mistake are usually minimal).

But the grief we feel may be more inchoate, which was an underlying theme of Bigfoot. Though I'm not religious, I believe Judaism and Christianity capture this feeling well with the story of the Fall. Our lives are rooted in a tremendous sense of loss, of reaching for that paradise we can never quite envision, let alone regain. Every actual loss resonates with that fundamental condition, making grief seem both bottomless and holy.

What evolutionary advantage this might give us, I can't really say. But it does give a real boost to consumer capitalism.

Where does self-reflection come from?

This post on the Zimmerman verdict by William Saletan makes the insane suggestion that both parties in the murder of Trayvon Martin were equally at fault because each made a snap judgment about the other. Yes, Saletan says, Zimmerman "profiled" Martin, but Martin also "profiled" Zimmerman, assuming he was a pervert out to get him. Well, Zimmerman was out to get him--expressly so. Martin's assumption that Zimmerman was dangerous was entirely correct.

Nevertheless, Saletan did make one point that got me thinking:

In Zimmerman’s initial interrogation, the police expressed surprise that he hadn’t identified himself to Martin as a neighborhood watch volunteer. They suggested that Martin might have been alarmed when Zimmerman reached for an object that Zimmerman, but not Martin, knew was a phone. Zimmerman seemed baffled. He was so convinced of Martin’s criminal intent that he hadn’t considered how Martin, if he were innocent, would perceive his stalker.

Saletan wants us all to be more reflective, to pause to see ourselves as others might see us before we go flying off the handle and shoot somebody, or maybe call them a name. That's all well and fine. But what could have happened differently in Zimmerman's life that would have enabled him to consider how Martin might have seen him?

Here's where people like me often go into a high-minded spiel about the value of a humanities education. Sure, it won't get you a job, especially in this economy, but it's these intangible things that make the study of literature and philosophy so worthwhile. Studying fine literature (as opposed to, say, genre fiction populated by vigilante cop-heroes), presumably under the wise tutelage of an expert in the field, would have helped Zimmerman take a step outside himself. He would have thought, "Aha--if some stranger were chasing me and reaching for something, I might feel threatened! Therefore, I ought to back off!" Or, even better, he would never have blended the rather modest position of neighborhood-watch volunteer with his Dirty Harry fantasies. He would know the difference between life and (bad) art.

But that all sounds rather feeble to me right now. Because what would motivate someone like Zimmerman to take such classes in the first place? Why would he even care how he appears to others? (And by "how he appears" I do not mean Do I look cool? Do I look manly?--which he plainly does care about in abundance. It means genuinely seeing another person's point of view as legitimate and important.) Self-reflection holds little appeal in our culture; it seems opposed to action and suggests dithering and weakness. Why would someone who feels weak to begin with want to become more so?

Does it all come down to parenting and one's earliest experiences? And if so, what would motivate parents to teach their children empathy, as opposed to always being tough and, you know, standing your ground (which somehow seems to imply encroaching on others')? I don't think God and religion help here, either, since Zimmerman said his killing Martin was "God's plan." A different interpretation of God might help, but then we're back to asking where that interpretation comes from. So, what to do? How to make reflection--that least visible of human activities--cool? We can't make TV shows about people thinking. Even I would be bored by those. More shows that suggest negative consequences of violence and vigilantism might be nice. But, again, how to interpret those, assuming one already loves that craggy old vigilante sheriff in the battered old hat?

So I guess education--free, excellent, public education, from pre-k through, oh hell, college--remains our best bet. I still hope that education can help people use words rather than guns to solve conflicts.

Mystery novels and the mystery of death

I expect to return many times to this nearly twenty-year-old interview with Don DeLillo in The Paris Review. It basically answers all my questions about writing and validates what I thought were some of my worst tendencies, especially in relation to character. So it's awesome!

But today I want to dwell on this almost throw-away insight DeLillo offers about mystery novels:

When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format.

For a long time I've wondered how and why mystery fiction transforms murder into a form of amusement. How does that dynamic operate? How does it make murder appealing rather than merely appalling? What makes us accept that the satisfaction of solving the crime seems to justify its occurrence, at least in fiction?

Well, of course. The tightly woven plot is a containment strategy. Part of the pleasure we derive from such stories is in experiencing that containment, that transformation. Murder and death become artifacts through the evident artifice of these plots.

In other words, the murder mystery is a proxy for the mystery of death itself. What happens, really? And why must it happen? By the strict terms of the human condition, we can't have these answers. But we can have more practical answers about death in a murder story: we can use our minds to discover who did it, and why. The criminal's motive replaces God's and/or the universe's. If we can't understand death in general, at least we can understand a particular death.

All of which suggests the mystery novel as a kind of ritual or amulet or charm against death, which goes a long way to explaining its appeal. And a character like Sherlock Holmes, a master at comprehending murder mysteries, becomes a kind of priest.

Writing as meditation

At one time I had something like a real meditation practice. That has not been the case for awhile now, largely because I can't figure out how to meditate with cats either a) climbing on me or b) hurling themselves at the closed door. No, really: this is a good excuse.

At any rate, I am now applying meditation techniques to my writing. For the last several weeks I have just not felt good about anything I've written, which has led me to put whatever creative energy I have into thinking up excuses for why I don't have to write today. The bottom line is, I don't want to write if it's going to suck, and there seems to be a better than even chance these days that it will.

So what I've decided to do is institute my own personal NaNoWriMo, except without, necessarily, the "No(vel)" part. From now till the end of January, I am going to write 1,000 words per day which are nominally related to the story idea I am currently least repelled by. I am not going to craft my sentences or delete sections that seem irrelevant, and above all I am not going to pounce on the thing and strangle the life out of it by declaring: Aha! I know what this is about! This is definitely a novel/novella/short story, from the point of view of the alien baby, and there's a big shoot-em-up at the end! There is to be no, repeat, NO anticipation.

This is related to the technique in Insight Meditation in which you don't try to stop yourself from thinking, but rather notice the fact that you are thinking, without pursuing any particular thought. You notice, and then return to the breath, as they say. So I notice the anticipation (This is a novel! I know it! Ooh, I can really build on that scene!) but make no commitments to it. I just go back to churning out words.The words are the breath.

Like meditation, this process sometimes really feels like crap. But I have become aware of how little tolerance I have both for writing poorly, and for not knowing what I am doing--that is, not being able to anticipate the outcome. In the past, it seems like I have been able to work around this and get stuff done anyway, but now, for whatever reason, this is not so. Therefore I am resorting to the kinds of writing advice one always gets in beginning writing classes, and which I have generally scorned.

I really don't know what will happen, but at least I'm writing.

Posted without comment

An interview with David Kato, the Ugandan gay-rights activist, who was recently beaten to death with a hammer.

30th Anniversary (+ 1 week) of Cosmos

OK, so apparently the official 30th anniversary of Cosmos was last week. But think of it...thirty years! I am re-watching the whole series to celebrate.

To my mind there has never been another series like this, weaving all branches of science together with history, culture, beautiful scenery, and great writing, all orchestrated by an intellectual/charismatic/goofball host in a red turtleneck. To think that back then, Sagan was already warning us about global warming (more often called "the greenhouse effect")--in fact, his studies of the atmosphere of Venus helped lay the groundwork for understanding the whole concept. Of course the more immediate worry was nuclear war and the possibly resulting nuclear winter, another idea drawn from studies of Venus. The series's ultimate purpose really was to SAVE THE WORLD by showing us everything we had to lose.

For me, the show continues to inspire a form of secular awe that I imagine other people get when attending church or reading sacred texts. Who are the scientists, artists, and intellectuals who can inspire us this way today? Will pseudo-intellectual religious demagogues continue to fill this vacuum?

Yes, I know Sagan was a jerk in his off-hours. I know the set of Cosmos was an unpleasant place to be much of the time (sparkling ocean/Mediterranean Sea notwithstanding). The book below tells some of those stories. Such are the contradictions we must often hold in our minds in the presence of masterpieces.

Anyway, you can watch it on Hulu.


Shop Indie Bookstores

Borrowed Fire: Dostoevsky does Dracula?

It is high time we got back to Dracula.

The vampire hunters band together to kill the title character. In her diary, Mina quotes the inspiring botched English of Van Helsing:

How then are we to begin our strike to destroy him? How shall we find his where, and having found it, how can we destroy? My friends, this is much, it is a terrible task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder. For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win, and then where end we? Life is nothings, I heed him not. But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us forever are the gates of heaven shut, for who shall open them to us again? We go on for all time abhorred by all, a blot on the face of God's sunshine, an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we are face to face with duty, and in such case must we shrink? For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?"

Whilst he was speaking, Jonathan had taken my hand. I feared, oh so much, that the appalling nature of our danger was overcoming him when I saw his hand stretch out, but it was life to me to feel its touch, so strong, so self reliant, so resolute. A brave man's hand can speak for itself, it does not even need a woman's love to hear its music.

When the Professor had done speaking my husband looked in my eyes, and I in his, there was no need for speaking between us.

"I answer for Mina and myself," he said.

"Count me in, Professor," said Mr. Quincey Morris, laconically as usual.

"I am with you," said Lord Godalming, "for Lucy's sake, if for no other reason."

Dr. Seward simply nodded.

The Professor stood up and, after laying his golden crucifix on the table, held out his hand on either side. I took his right hand, and Lord Godalming his left, Jonathan held my right with his left and stretched across to Mr. Morris. So as we all took hands our solemn compact was made. I felt my heart icy cold, but it did not even occur to me to draw back. We resumed our places, and Dr. Van Helsing went on with a sort of cheerfulness which showed that the serious work had begun. It was to be taken as gravely, and in as businesslike a way, as any other transaction of life.

This scene is rife with Dostoevskian potential. Because he is not Dostoevsky, nor does he care to be, Stoker breezes through the whole vampire-hunting dilemma in less than a page. Now, if he were Dostoevsky, he--in the guise of someone like Ivan Karamazov--would dwell awhile on the fact that if one is killed by a vampire while trying to rid the world of his evil presence, one gets damned by God for one's trouble. You might think it was the bravest, most selfless act of all to risk not only one's life, but one's immortal soul, to protect others from the same damnation. One might think God would want to offer an extra special reward for such a risk. Apparently not. However, apparently "duty" (as Van Helsing puts it) goes beyond the duty to God--the duty to humankind takes precedence.

Perhaps there's a reason why Stoker blew through all this rather quickly. It's a knotty theological problem. Our heroes have, sort of quietly, renounced God, or at least God's blessings, and we admire them for doing so. It can't have been Stoker's intention to reveal the limits of God's love, to suggest that by making the greatest sacrifice of all, you could end up damned forever. Then again, maybe that is what sacrifice really means--giving up God's love voluntarily for the sake of humanity. Leaping without the net, and never expecting the net to appear. It won't, because you are beyond it.

Or is that wrong? Because you give up God's love when you do bad things, also, so...

Anyway, here's a fun writing challenge. Put Van Helsing (minus the accent, please), or Mina (who would be more interesting)* into a dialog with, say, Jesus. Model it on the Grand Inquisitor, and let it explain the role of the vampire in leading us to or away from God.

*Note that in the scene above, Mina is afraid--not of what Van Helsing is describing, but that Jonathan (I will always think of him as Keanu Reeves) is losing his nerve. The touch of his hand reassures her that he is indeed a brave man. But we don't need that reassurance from Mina; we know she's brave. Stoker then has her clam up like a good wife, and let Jonathan answer for her. Too late: she's gotten out of her cage again.

Borrowed Fire: The Brothers Karamazov: The Grand Inquisitor

This week we arrive at a major milestone in this many-mile long book: the story-within-a-story called "The Grand Inquisitor." It's often taught in high schools and colleges as a stand-alone piece, and even people who haven't read BK have read, or somehow know, the GI.

I've read it a bunch of times now, and it still blows me away every time. Maybe it's just because I'm a lifelong secular humanist / atheist, who occasionally dabbles in Northern California Buddhism. Maybe people who've grown up with religion find the issues here old hat, or else beside the point. It is the same old stuff--the problem of evil and suffering, how we can have free will if there's a God, how Jesus's teachings get twisted by those who teach them. Of course it's also an extended fusillade at the Catholic church, which tends to present a big target in all centuries; and a warning about totalitarianism, which in this case comes cloaked in religion. The Grand Inquisitor's vision looks a lot like the Fox News Channel to me, but never mind.

Anyway, there's no point in my trying to summarize the piece here. I really think you should just go read it. It's only about twenty pages. If you read nothing else in BK, you can do this. I can wait.

[elevator music plays]

I tell you, it just knocks me out, even though it's not a story at all, but a philosophical tract the form of a monologue. One guy (GI) talking to another guy (Jesus), who doesn't even talk back. The occasional interruptions by the storyteller (Ivan) and his listener (Alyosha) are mainly points of clarification; they offer a less clunky way for Dostoevsky to make the GI's philosophy clearer to us, without having him rant on even further.

So how about that Jesus, huh? He actually wants to make things hard for his followers. He doesn't make it easy to believe in him. He refuses to perform the miracles that would convince people to follow him on the spot. They must choose him of their own free will, and deal with the fact that he probably won't show his face to them--unambiguously, anyway--in their lifetime. The GI, meanwhile, just wants to help people who are suffering from this uncertainty. By taking people's free will from them, he gives them what they really want: security and community, which comes through a confirmed belief in miracles. And yet the GI suffers, too. Unlike stock villains, he doesn't enjoy his power in the slightest. He knows he's doing evil, and he suffers--because he wants people to be happy, and not suffer as he does. It's just not easy for anybody in this world, not even the devil. And yet we're still supposed to have faith. That is faith, apparently, this suffering.

All well and fine. But what is the lesson for fiction writers here? Am I suggesting we all write a "poem" (as Ivan calls his story) like this and plunk it down in the middle of our novels or medium-to-long stories? I say yes! I am a big fan of the story-within-a-story, especially if it's self-contained, difficult, and from another time and place than the larger story, with other rules.* I love the unexpectedness of such things, the plunge down the rabbit hole, after which we climb back out and continue on our path through the larger fictional world--only slightly dizzy, and wondering exactly what just happened.

But how to you keep the s-w-a-s from being a mere "lump" that the reader trips over? Especially if it's almost pure research or philosophy, rather than an actual story? A few tips from Dostoevsky:

1) Have a character tell the story, and have that character be mysterious and maybe a little bit unhinged.

2) Make the story a different kind of story than you'd expect that character to tell (as Alyosha points out, Ivan, who has a big problem with God, has ended up praising Jesus in the GI).

3) Make the story slam the outer action to a halt. This sounds counter-intuitive; but the fact that Alyosha has just come from a round of visits to various frantic people, and is desperate to go and see his mentor on his deathbed, raises the stakes of Ivan's story. The story has to be good, and important, for Alyosha to stop and listen to it.

4) Allow interruptions by the "outer" characters. If you are presenting a big block of information (or philosophy), it helps to break it up and offer other characters' takes on the story. We do learn more about Alyosha and Ivan through their little exchanges in the midst of all this heavy stuff. Alyosha's frightened but interested; Ivan, while tormented by these ideas, laughs and is gentle with his brother.

5) Have good, fully developed characters within the story, not stock or purely allegorical figures. In this case, Jesus is still a bit of a cipher. But the suffering Grand Inquisitor towers as high as any of the Karamazov brothers, or Milton's Satan. He is one for the ages.

*Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a great example, which comes to mind 'cos I just finished it.

Borrowed Fire: The Brothers Karamazov: Where is the fault?

(For those new to the blog: Borrowed Fire is an ongoing series, in which I attempt to learn fiction writing by reading classic works of literature. All BF texts are posted on Project Gutenberg, so everyone can follow along, or at least locate the relevant sections. We're now about knee-deep in The Brothers Karamazov, God help us. Previous works include Chekhov's "Gusev," H.G. Wells's "The Door in the Wall," Melville's Moby Dick, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Gogol's "The Overcoat," Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Thoreau's Walden. One of my purposes is to figure out how older--and perhaps seemingly outdated--ideas and techniques might be brought to bear on contemporary fiction. This is not, by the way, to say I don't like Raymond Carver. I do. Really. But there are other models we might follow, too, or...dare I say, instead...)

So this past week I was reading along through the series of chapters called "Lacerations." And I have to say it was getting a tad monotonous. Our hero, Alyosha, has become the designated errand boy for the bunch of lunatics that comprise his family and the small town in which they live. We therefore get many, many pages of people falling upon him, pouring out their troubles, and begging him to go see so-and-so and explain to them about such-and-such, because they can't bear to do it themselves, you see... The problem is they all express themselves in pretty much the same way, at length, and at the textual equivalent of high volume (lots of exclamation points!). As we know from the latest season of Lost, constant high volume is as boring as no volume at all. We need ups and downs, what they call in music dynamics. And we need people's voices not to all sound the same.

Still, I'm pretty sure I see where Dostoevsky is going. For one thing, he's building toward "The Grand Inquisitor," possibly the greatest set-piece in all of literature, and certainly one of the most intriguing meditations on Christianity that I've ever read. Before that, the pious Alyosha has to be exposed to all manner of suffering, the bulk of it undeserved--because his faith, although he never loses it, is going to be challenged. The question of why God allows innocents to suffer (or maybe makes them suffer, for that has to be the same thing, really) preoccupies Dostoevsky. The three brothers Karamazov, representing sensuality, intellectuality, and spirituality, are instruments through which he works these questions out. The degree to which they are also very human--not allowing themselves to be completely instrumentalized, by either Dostoevsky or God--is one of the most fascinating aspects of BK. They really do rebel against their creator(s).

Which brings me to today's topic, which was going to be the topic even before I attended Richard Powers's talk yesterday. Now it's even more the topic, because I have it on good authority that this is a question writers are going to have to consider seriously as the trans-human age approaches. The question is, where do characters' faults lie? In the stars or in themselves, or in some specific combination of the two? In other words, does fate (or genes) or free will rule, and how do these forces actually function in your created world?

All right, let's make the question specific to BK. In the course of his errand-running, Alyosha happens across a group of schoolboys who are throwing stones at another boy. Taking the underdog's side, as a good Christian, Alyosha approaches the lone boy to attempt to find out why the others are attacking him. But the victim promptly grabs Alyosha's hand and chomps the hell out of his finger. As fortune--i.e. the tangled web of intrigue woven by Dmitri--would have it, Katerina sends him to the household of that very boy's father. Turns out Dmitri humiliated the boy's father, a captain, by dragging him out of a tavern into the street, by his beard, no less. The schoolboys, who witnessed the scene, call the beard a "wisp of tow," and I suppose the Freudian implications need not be elaborated upon here.

Anyway, in talking to the captain, Alyosha figures out why Ilusha bit his hand.

"I think I understand it all now," said Alyosha gently and sorrowfully, still keeping his seat. "So your boy is a good boy, he loves his father, and he attacked me as the brother of your assailant.... Now I understand it," he repeated thoughtfully.

Alyosha understands that Ilusha is not really justified in biting him. But Alyosha is a Karamazov, a fact of which people keep pointedly reminding him. He is as different from Dmitri as can be, but he bears the same name. Therefore he bears some responsibility, if not guilt, for Dmitri's actions.* There is talk throughout the novel of a "Karamazov curse." Alyosha can disavow neither his brother's actions, nor his name. In this world, there's no going elsewhere and reinventing yourself. This does not mean Alyosha is powerless, but he has to play the cards he's been dealt; and his, though unfairly, will always be marked with a "K." Thus all the errand-running.

This notion of having relatively little control over your basic identity has at least two sources here: a firm belief in an all-seeing God, and the kind of rural / small-town setting that keeps extended families close together. Everyone knows who you are; God knows who you are. And so you are that guy, forever enmeshed in that web. Contrast this with (for example) the atomized three-sibling family in The Corrections, another sprawling family novel that I love. The Corrections concerns questions of responsibility as well, especially responsibility toward one's aging parents when one's own life is going down the toilet. But the sins of Chip have nothing to do with the sins of Gary. They and their sister each struggle along in their own narrative silos; while each appears in the others' stories, the bulk of the novel is made up of separate narrative sections in which each sibling is the lead protagonist. If someone told Gary that Chip was an asshole, Gary might say, "Yeah, he is, isn't he?" and that would be a perfectly reasonable response. Gary has his own problems, besides. But Alyosha must constantly circulate from brother to father, from wronged fiancee to humiliated captain, because the fault is not *only* with oneself in BK. It is familial, national, and ultimately global. Humans are all fallen, and all are therefore responsible for each other.

In other words, deciding where the "fault" lies will shape the structure of your fiction, as well as the precise nature of your characters. An interesting experiment for your (or my) next story might be shifting the location of the fault from where we normally would place it. If you tend to think people are the masters of their own destinies, make it so they aren't. If you believe in an overarching fate or power, remove it, or change that power's nature. Just being conscious of where we place the fault, I think, will yield some very interesting results.

*See the Slacktivist for a fascinating discussion of guilt vs. responsibility, which ties right into Dostoevsky.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Take two

So I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz, and I would like to retract my first appraisal, in which I rather casually used it to represent all of "genre fiction." That was uncalled for. I now think the book can hold its own with anything we call "literary." And I really think you should read it, if you haven't already. Maybe you have. I tend to be late to these parties.

What I find most interesting about my changed opinion is that it falls in line with the argument I was trying to make in that earlier post: that determining whether a piece is "literary" or "genre" need not hinge on the function of character. Yes, CfL's characters are tools to advance the plot--or in this case the "theme," as Miller's plot is just the long spelling out of a philosophical conundrum--rather than the other way around. However, they are no more so than, say, Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (or possibly anyone in BK). In the third section of CfL in particular, the characters are literally torn apart by their desire to love--and forgive--a God they are not willing to admit is seriously flawed (if he even exists). The questions, to me anyway, are as powerful and relevant as anything Dostoevsky wrote. I didn't get attached to Walter Miller's characters; but I was very moved by their struggles--especially at the end--which take place amid nuclear holocaust, and so are pretty damn relevant. I cared more about the outcome of these struggles than I often do in the character-focused domestic dramas that seem to dominate contemporary fiction. CfL takes on the biggest of all human ideas and refuses to provide easy answers. Also there's a lovely image at the very end, of a derelict sea plane, and big fish eating little fish--all diseased, mind you--and a shark swimming out to deeper water looking for food. Chekhovian, or even Melvillian.

I admit it: I'm a sucker for novels about religion. I was raised by secular humanists in a very Catholic town and still have a bad case of religion envy. (Yes, I know I was lucky in many respects--but you guys who had it jammed down your throats all those years: what a wealth of material you have! The imagery, the rituals, the lingering sense of the supernatural in everyday life! Not to mention the whole rebellion experience! Whereas I had...Washington Week in Review.) So maybe that accounts for some of my fascination. And I also gave Miller a pass for a somewhat tedious middle section. There's a little too much blah blah back-and-forth which began to feel like filler to me. But the last section really tied everything up--not in a tight little plot package, but poetically, with a series of striking events and images that would have been pure schlock in other hands (two-headed woman, spaceships, end of the world as we know it, etc.).

Anyway, a pretty impressive book, and an important one. If you ask me.

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: Did he see it like that?

One more exercise from "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

It's a convention in non-realistic storytelling (fantasy, science fiction, and literary versions thereof) to end the tale with the question: Did this really happen? We've seen this, for instance, in "The Overcoat," and I've previously touched on it in "The Door in the Wall." If I were going to wander down the po-mo garden path, I might blather on about the "narrative frame" and the "frame" that is the door itself--which means this story is about fiction itself, as all stories are. But where does that really get us? Down the rabbit hole, to either death or paradise.

Anyhow:

The trick of these endings is to create a knife's edge balance between "yes" and "no" that can never be resolved, but instead spins out more questions. What is reality? What is fiction? What role does fiction play in creating reality? And if fiction plays too great a role, does that equal madness, or a different form of sanity? Wells states the matter starkly:

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way . . . . .

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has frequently walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?

Yes, it's a trick ending, but I think it's a lovely one. The narrator cannot get the storyteller, Wallace, out of his head. He knows he will never understand what happened, but he chooses, perhaps for his own consolation, to think that Wallace did reach his paradise.

"Did he see it like that?" is a pressing question for our own time. Even mild depression, shyness, fatigue, and restlessness are now called "syndromes" and instantly medicated, perhaps erasing the reality checks we all need. I'm reminded of Margaret Talbot's recent New Yorker article on neuroenhancing drugs. Students and workers are now using Ritalin, Adderall, and other drugs as cognitive performance enhancers rather than just treatments for illnesses. But, as one psychiatrist puts it: "Maybe it’s wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people." In other words, maybe the problem is not the peg, but the hole we're trying to hammer it into. There's also the fascinating article on Wired.com on schizophrenic brains, which aren't fooled by the optical illusions that the rest of us can't help seeing. Now, I have no desire to be schizophrenic; but it's deeply unsettling to think that "crazy" people see the world as it really is. What's really out there might be impossible to handle. These thoughts also bear on religious faith, of course. What did Wallace see, when to the outside world it appeared he fell to his death?

This is all starting to sound a bit like 3 a.m. in the dorm, bong optional. Well, what of it? Has anyone successfully dealt with these questions? If not, they remain the territory and the imperative of fiction.

So: if you're looking for a story idea, try writing about a character who sees something others don't see. I would suggest having him or her see something very specific and concrete, like the door in the wall. (Not: "I see dead people.") That person should seem otherwise quite rational, but he or she could end up unsettling the world.

A lack of faith

The New York Times is particularly striking today in the pieces that bookend section A. On the front page, the news of Dr. George Tiller's murder by an anti-choice fanatic, revved up by the violent rhetoric of Operation Rescue, Bill O'Reilly, et uglia. Then, in the op-ed, we find a "reasoned" plea from Bob Barr for the Supreme Court to intervene in the death penalty case of Troy Davis. Barr informs us that "I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional."

It occurs to me that the extreme right in this country is preoccupied with vengeance, of the eye-for-an-eye, life-for-a-life variety. "'Vengeance is mine; I will repay,' saith the Lord"--and yet these folks don't seem to trust the big guy to get the job done. They don't really believe God will dispense satisfactory justice for wrongdoers in the afterlife. Otherwise, why do they take it upon themselves to mete it out in this world? Seems they aren't quite sure about the existence of hell (or heaven), or maybe they don't think God will necessarily make the same choices they would. Maybe God would spare Tiller, a Christian after all, from hellfire; or maybe even reward him for giving his life to ensure women's safety and autonomy. Maybe God, like many on earth, would find Troy Davis innocent, or find the death penalty in any case a usurpation of his power.

Yes, I know, loons like Tiller's murderer think they are doing God's work, that he's personally fashioned them as instruments of divine retribution. But I submit that this extreme thirst for vengeance is, in reality, a failure of faith. Which I gather God doesn't take too kindly to, either.

Christianity without God

This weeks Beliefs column in the NYT discusses Phil Zuckerman's new book on Danish and Swedish nonbelievers:

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

The upshot is that Scandinavians really don't think about religion much at all, though they tend to think of themselves as Christian. They believe in Christian principles, like "helping your neighbor," and they enjoy holiday rituals, which seem to serve a community-building function. They simply aren't interested in God, or in related questions of what life "means."

This strikes me as utterly sensible. Remove God from the equation, and you have a very "nice" (again, as interviewees put it) set of principles on which to build a just society. God would seem to get in the way of those principles. Say you have a workplace with a remote, mercurial, power-mad boss--along with a likeable but extremely co-dependent Vice President. There's a handful of people who'll try their mightiest to suck up to that boss, eagerly doing his dirty work and hurting their coworkers further in the process. Eliminate the boss, and all you have is you and your colleagues, doing the best you can together. And the VP is freed to be him(her?) self--a good person with good ideas you can use.

Tearing Reagan down

Since I occasionally rant on this blog about Ronald Reagan and the general acceptance (even by our current president) that he was "great," I am heartened to learn of a new book, Tear This Myth Down, by Will Bunch. You can listen to Terry Gross's interview with him here, and then buy the book to help support NPR, which I would do if I wasn't so cheap. Anyway, Bunch's main point is this: during and especially after Reagan's presidency, the GOP frame factory went to work on building him up as a mythical figure. There is, in fact, an ongoing Reagan Legacy Project, and their methods are legion. For instance they continue to try to name as many buildings, hospitals, airports, etc. after Reagan as possible; the goal (though it has not yet been reached) is to have something named for him in every county in the US. You cannot drive down the Ronald Reagan Highway on a sunny day, as Bunch says, and not think, Wow, he must have been a great man--regardless of what you might remember, or what you might be too young to remember. His funeral was a critical moment in this process, planned with the legend specifically in mind.

The key reason for the mythmaking, Bunch points out, is to cover up for the fact that the Republican party has been out of ideas for some time. When asked about policy, they instead conjure Reagan and his golden aura, and everyone (the media) sighs and forgets what the question was in the first place. Witness, for instance, the Republican debates during the last election, Romney and McCain each trying to utter "Ronald Reagan" with more vibrato.

Naturally the legacy project dovetails with the current conservative mindset, which is authoritarian, always seeking a single, magical figure to worship. These guys often accuse liberals of "worshiping" Michael Moore, for instance, or Gloria Steinem, or Richard Dawkins, or some other bete noir of theirs. They also say we "worship" Obama. And the problem is not the worshiping, per se, but the falseness of our gods. But, to take the Obama example: no, we don't worship him; we like him. Some of us like him a whole lot, and most of us are just freaking relieved that he won. But the whole purpose of being liberal is not to subordinate yourself to any one authority. You examine, you compare. You gather from many sources, sift and weigh. Some of us even "worship" a god (although I don't), but I strongly suspect it's a very different kind of worship than the conservatives'. I'd think it would take forms like gratitude combined with questioning and--this is important--deep challenging. It would not be a substitute for hard thought.

Also, of course, Reagan was always already (thanks, Jacques D!) a myth in the making. His whole purpose in life was to mythologize himself--that was his way of serving his country and his party. In terms of his party, it worked, at least in the short term; but it deprived them of any need to challenge themselves morally or intellectually, so ultimately he hurt them. It was no accident that he was an actor. His most successful character was himself, and that character, like other fictions, knows no death.

Surviving

In this week's NYT Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler brings up a really interesting point made by Greil Marcus twenty years ago. Apparently I missed it the first time around, but it seems more true today than ever: the word "surviving" has come to mean the same thing as "living."

In his 1989 cult hit “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century,” Greil Marcus uncorked a memorable riff about the obsession with surviving in ’70s pop hits like “I Will Survive,” “Soul Survivor” and “Staying Alive”: “Through the magic of ordinary language, ‘survival’ and its twin, ‘survivor,’ wrote the 1960s out of history as a mistake and translated the 1970s performance of any act of personal or professional stability (holding a job, remaining married, staying out of a mental hospital or simply not dying) into heroism. First corrupted as a reference to those ‘survivors’ of ‘the Sixties’ who were now engaged in ‘real life,’ the word contained an implacable equation: survival was real life.”

Schuessler goes on to note that the NYT archives show 134 occurrences of the word "survivor" in 1980 and 652 in 2008. She does not make any suggestions as to why this has happened, and since I haven't read Marcus, I can only venture what is probably a platitude about post-war generations who feel guilty about being too comfortable. With few exceptions, the privileged classes in this country have not been called upon to do much of anything, other than hold a job and--if it suits us, or is allowed to us in the first place--remain married.

It's one reason Bush's admonition to the nation after 9/11--Go shopping!--was profoundly disappointing to the point of ruin. We aren't capable of anything else, he seemed to be telling us; and worse, he said it with no sense of how little we'd all come to expect of ourselves. Again, I think it started with Reagan, who, with great rhetorical skill, turned selfishness into patriotism. Want to help your country? Call your congressman, he told us, and tell him you want lower taxes. Don't help the poor; don't volunteer for the Peace Corps or the military (it's the poor's job to get killed, and we'll be sure to praise them to the heavens for doing so). Don't plant those damn polluting trees. All these things are counterproductive. But sit on your growing ass and gloat about not toppling over--you're a patriot!

For a generation, we, the relatively well-off,* have had no expectations placed on us as citizens. So many of us have turned to asking things of ourselves for ourselves--overcoming addictions, real or perceived, for instance. As the flip side of what we now call survival, self-improvement is certainly not a bad thing. But it has become an end in itself. With no larger implications, all one's personal struggles and triumphs become magnified to epic scale.

People do want something to be asked of them. They want to struggle with inertia, to translate their personal success into lasting significance. It's clear that part of Obama's appeal is that he promised to ask us to sacrifice, though what that entails, none of us really knows yet. In any case, with this economic collapse, we will suffer more, whether we want to or not. I really hope Obama and our other leaders use this opportunity to reframe our self-image as Americans. What we ultimately must overcome is the stultifying mindset brought on by decades of globalized consumer capitalism.

*UPDATE: By "relatively well-off" I mean the various, always shifting levels of middle class and higher.** This brings to mind another point about "surviving," inherent in the original Marcus quote. Being a "survivor of the sixties" means, in general, crossing the gulf from dirty fucking hippie (DFH, a phrase I think Atrios coined) to Nixon's Silent Majority. Not that the former DFHs believe what the Silent Majority believed, exactly, but they started to resemble them for all intents and purposes, and that caused no end of anxiety.

I've been dipping into Rick Pearlstein's fascinating book Nixonland, which explains in great detail how Nixon, aided by Agnew, Saffire, and others, created the Silent (White) Majority specifically in contrast to the DFHs and Angry Scary Blacks. Those who played by society's rules--an act which by definition entailed silence--were explicitly elevated to hero status. So it seems like two strains of "survivors" actually come from this. The first, as Marcus suggests, is the former DFHs who may repudiate their former actions, while at the same time wishing they were still doing them, or at least hoping those acts had some value. The second is those who bought Nixon's line that ordinary life, i.e. compliance with the status quo, is heroic. Obviously these two strains are not mutually exclusive by any means. I'm sure I've taken comfort from time to time in the thought that I'm a good person for doing what I've been told--and it's an easy hop from "good" to "heroic." One needs such compensation especially when compliance does not seem to lead to any very compelling rewards. One gets to keep one's job and one's health insurance a little while longer, is all.

**Of course, the financial crisis also reveals that the "well off" are not so "well off" after all. Built on absurd mortages and credit-card debt, much of this well-off-ness was quite literally fiction. We can certainly expect a spate of memoirs about surviving foreclosure and so forth. But is it heroism or just regression to the mean?

I'll leave for another time my thoughts on this even-more-wonderful-than-usual Slacktivist post, detailing the shift from progressive optimism to apocalyptic vengefulness in American evangelical Christianity. But it definitely has something to do with this inwardly focused concept of surviving, and the idea that trying to improve life on earth (as opposed to one's own soul) is a waste of time. I'll just say that in sympathizing with this view, Reagan, that supposed relentless optimist, was a pessimist.

Barack is down

OK, I took the Obama widget off the site. I suppose he has all the money he needs anyway. I'm still glad he's going to be president, and I'm even more glad we didn't get the alternative. Can you imagine McCain, let alone SP, "handling" the auto bailout, the economy in general, global warming...can you even imagine them handling the transition? The bizarre cabinet appointees popping up like a George Romero version of Whack-a-mole? I suspect it would have been an even more unsettling holiday season than it has been.

But. The Rick Warren invocation is unforgivable. Not only for all the reasons that thousands of bloggers have already mentioned. But because it fucks up the inauguration for us. This was supposed to be our--progressives'--moment to celebrate so many victories against considerable odds. Now the whole thing feels icky. I am not even sure I want to watch, whereas at one point I was seriously considering trying to go to DC for the event. Warren is Pat Robertson in a fat-and-younger suit. It is sickening that 1) there is assumed to be such a position as "America's preacher," which must be filled now that Billy Graham...is he dead? I forget... and, anyway, 2) Rick Warren is, by fiat, that preacher. If we must have a cartoon balloon hovering over the country to represent our values, how about Underdog from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade?

Slack is back

I am practicing being a glass-half-full kind of person. To that end, a Monday litany of good news:

• Barack Obama is still President-Elect. Evidence is mounting that we did not dream it.
• Our cat Bella took her first trip to the vet (that was bad) but she is OK. The vet is two blocks away, which is also good news.
• The Slacktivist has resumed his Left Behind Fridays with his first critique of Left Behind: The Movie. And it includes a pretty fine explanation of why bad books make better movies than good books (even though, in this case, a bad book also seems to have engendered a bad movie, which is good news for Slacktivist fans). (OK, and technically that's Friday good news, not Monday good news, but I found it on a Monday, when I needed it a lot more.) (One thing glass-half-empty people do is nitpick about details and then use them to buffer their announcement of having enjoyed something, even though they did not, because they were nitpicking in preparation for the apology they knew they would have to issue for having pleasure.)(Well, I still enjoy the Slacktivist, and will probably save the LBFs for Mondays in the future.)
  
• (Meanwhile Bella plots her revenge.)
  

I'm happy but...monotheism is bad

I think I'm more stunned than anything about Obama's landslide. (Is it a landslide? What's the cutoff?) I'm shocked that there weren't more dirty tricks from the Repubs. I'm amazed that after everything BushCo did, we still have a functioning democracy. Our slide into a new Dark Age has ground to a halt.

Except:

1. What Aravosis said. I'm still mad as hell at the right in this country. I do not want to offer them a seat at the table. We did that before. Each one of their asses took up at least two seats. They made us say grace to their mean, nasty little god. They threw food and knives. They spilled blood, human and animal, on our tablecloth and claimed it was their own. They hollered with their mouths full and cranked up Rush Limbaugh while we were trying to talk. Then they left us their mess to clean up.

2. And they will scorch the earth in retreat. See: passage of Prop 8, in California. This is shameful. But already the good guys are fighting back (again from Aravosis).

So here's why monotheism is bad. When there's just one god, it's too easy to confuse yourself with him. (Isn't it amazing how God always wants what I want? What a great God!) Whereas, if there are many, you have to wonder--well, Dionysis seems to want x, but Appollo wants y. What are ya gonna do? Either you throw up your hands, or you have to choose a side and let them battle it out on Olympos. Sort of like representative democracy.

A Halloween mystery!

I just noticed something amazing about one of my Red Rock photos. A human figure in the upper left corner:
See it? An archer. Jesus with a bow and arrow?

Where are the pastors?

Via Talking Points Memo, this is a start, as a former supporter calls McCain out:

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

However, where are the nation's great Christian leaders at this moment? Where is Rick Warren, for example, the oh-so-reasonable one? Does Christianity have nothing to say about "instigating violence"? The silence from the pulpits is astounding.