Historical Context and the Art of Exclusion

Books pile up on my bedside table, stack on the floor, spill from the confines of bookcase, jostle other house-related sundries, and in short encroach into adjacent spaces where they have no business being. Books have the trump card privilege in my cluttered home; all other items will readily be dispensed with but the books are accorded exceptional status. At the rate of current accumulation archaeologists will be excavating the bones of me from beneath a mountain of much-beloved tattered pages.

Embroiled as I am in non-fictional treatises ranging from political, social, medical, and technological histories of  mid-nineteenth American history, I am perpetually finding more books to add to my collection. Unashamedly esoteric and regionally specific as they are: The Transformation of the Medical Profession from 1815-1860,  Frontiers of Change: Early American Industrialization....books on the rise of women's suffrage, on slaves and cotton, on communication and technology, on homesteads and evangelists...the multitude of factors that may have influenced and comprised past lives of the San Franciscan coast residents.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the fine art which must be employed is that of systematic exclusion. The vast compendium of reading provides a visceral feel for a different place and time -  characters appear in my mind as stilted figures in sepia-toned photos of old: posed and staring fixedly. It is only as I become more acquainted with their time, with their cares, concerns and politics that they start to acquire the three-dimensional vitality necessary to transcend the page. With painstaking progress small elements of personality are ascribed to them, their history is incrementally fleshed out, their motivations determined. It is then that my sepia-toned figures start to move languidly within their frames: an almost imperceptible turn of head, a blink of eye, the clattering movement of street-side wagon, and then, if you have read enough, they will whisper to you. Diaries, travelogues, those indispensable first-hand accounts where unfiltered voices relate the quotidian angst and pleasures of a previous age. One begins to garner a sense of their reality, the blank slate of an unknown era becomes gradually inscribed with accumulated knowledge.

Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, attested that "men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details." I am a most avid collector of seemingly insignificant details: these sepia-toned photographs from the nineteenth-century were produced by adding a pigment (sepia) made from the Sepia officinalis cuttlefish found in the English Channel.  Mass production of watches in America dates from the late-1840's when Dennison and Howard established the Boston Watch Company. Of the multitude of acquired minutiae only a selective few will be utilized in the final manuscript, and even those obliquely: the large-scale manufacture of watches suggests, particularly as a corollary to burgeoning industrialization, an emerging preoccupation with timeliness.

The art of exclusion, particularly critical in historical fiction, is the process of determining which threads are utilized and which are discarded. The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry declared that "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away." And from the stacks and stacks of books perused, from the notes compiled and scrawled on paper and laptop, very little of the gathered lore makes it through the bottleneck of final edits. It is our own internal slush pile; only the particulars that directly propel storyline and characters proceed. Despite a majority-discard, this compilation of browsed knowledge is indispensable for environmental nuance. A writer's expansive understanding of a period shades the narrative, interweaving through character attitude and circumstance, and contributes to a broad believability of plot-line.  

So with eager anticipation I select another book from the shelf and wonder what insight I might glean from between the pages, how my characters (immobilized in sepia-tone within the confines of my mind) might, based on this particular work, come gradually and fluidly to life.

The Literary Evocativeness of Weather

Friedrich Schiller's drama opens with a tempest on Lake Lucerne as Wilhem Tell braves the watery onslaught to row a peasant to safety: "The storm is master. Man, as a ball, is tossed twixt winds and billows." Within the literary sweep of a novel weather can play an evocative role in the support of dramatic action. Perhaps it is because atmospheric tumult often parallels and accentuates the tensions and anxieties of the characters themselves; perhaps it serves as an immediate connective thread between narrative and reader: the experience of powerful climatic conditions one that all are viscerally acquainted with; perhaps because it serves to highlight human frailty beneath the broader expanse of open sky. It reminds the humble inhabitants of this third planet from the sun that even the most powerful of us are not invulnerable to the tirades of tornado or the devastation wrought by hurricanes.

Shakespeare utilized the storm motif  not only to portend ferocity but to epitomize political and moral corruption, a physical manifestation of fishiness in the state of Denmark or the anatomy of the body politic gone somehow awry. Thunder and lightning accompany the witches’ appearances in MacBeth: "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightening or in rain?" and terrible storms rage on the night of Duncan's murder. Violent tempests lash King Lear as he wanders the desolate heath, the physical turbulence mirroring his internal confusion and evoking a newfound humility in which he finally recognizes his own mortality. Meteorological chaos is a prevalent theme in The Tempest and exemplifies the suffering Prospero has endured as well as the potentially malevolent magic at his command.

The dramatic potential of weather systems is well-known to novelists, and one utilized to full effect in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. In the opening chapter Mr. Lockwood refers to the impact of stormy weather on Wuthering Heights: "Indeed, one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun." Wind literally brings change within the confines of the novel: When Mr. Earnshaw dies there is a 'high wind,' and the weather is described as 'wild and stormy.' Turbulent weather accompanies Heathcliff on the night he leaves Wuthering Heights, and heralds his death: wind and rain coming in through the window and beating his lattice back and forth. The wild and desolate moors full of pits, depressions, rises and deep swamps provide the perfect terrestrial counterpart to the brooding clouds overhead that buffet the landscape in a tumultuous fury; a ferocity that is echoed in Catherine's tempestuous relationship with Heathcliff.

In The Goodwin Agenda, the initial meeting between longtime political foes is accentuated by the electric weather beyond the weathered castle walls: "The afternoon winds had brought evening storms and the panes streamed with rain; the courtyard he looked down into lay wet and empty and the flickering flames of the gas-lamps behind him seemed to dissolve in a watery atmosphere. The sky was dark and foreboding, swollen black clouds were barely visible in the fading light of dusk. Thunder grumbled discontentedly in the distance as a sudden streak of lightening spiked and flared illuminating the base of a nearby cloudbank before sinking again into blackness." Later in the novel the severity of an early Parisian winter accentuates the suffering of the poor, the frozen corpses evincing the growing disaffection between the people and their self-aggrandizing, warmongering Emperor.

Violent skies do not necessarily presage brutality below, a clear and quiet morning can be used to dramatic effect as a foil to the struggle that follows. A passage read, from which novel I now have difficulty recalling, details the ride through the tumbrel en route to the guillotine, or perhaps the hangman's noose...but the prisoner, very soon to be deprived of light and life, is poignantly and heartbreakingly reminded of the beauty of the world and the potential joys of life by the blinding clarity of blue sky, of sunlight igniting dew in a cascade of brilliance...in short the weather serves to heighten the character's yearning to prolong life and his poignant awareness of the beauty he will soon be leaving behind. The serenity of the morning frames the savagery which is to come, further elevating the gruesome aspect of the deed; a discordant association of natural tranquility and the manifest brutality of man.

It is not an easy thing: to capture in words the dance of sunlight and cloud-cast shade on the cresting waves of a gray sea, or to depict the multitude of cumulus in their various brooding dispositions, or the fleecy frivolous kind that stretch in fuzzy expanse across the bluest of skies. The subtle interplay of light and shadow, the infusion of deeper hues as the sun dips or rises, the various types of rain and sleet, how it falls and how it accumulates; how the buildings respond: timbers darkened by rivulets, mortar crumbling  into dust in the arid heat of an unrelenting sun, how they seem to hunker down under a mantle of snow, and how people walk differently in different types of weather (from The Goodwin Agenda): "She walked as all of the Paris poor did at this time of year, in a curiously half-hunched scurrying motion intended, above all, to conserve what little body heat remained beneath thin ragged attire. She tucked in upon herself, elbows tight against her torso, head bent down towards her chest, back and shoulders hunched and rounded against the cold."

I often think of  the physical terrain as the setting and the accompanying weather as environmental mood - as if the panorama itself was a character within the novel and the changing skies an emotional manifestation of the landscape. They belong together - two halves of the whole. For if terra firma is defined (or aqua not so firma for that matter) then one does wonder: what of the sky  and how does that interact with the world beneath? The weather is an integral extension of the landscape, and critical for establishing sensory immersion; the reader is figuratively encouraged to close their eyes and imagine the sharp pinprick of sleet, the icy wind howling with agitated frenzy, whipping clothes and snatching away voice... 

For the reader, as well as the characters within the narrative, the climactic conditions evoke a preparatory emotional response suggestive of imminent dramatic events.There is the sense of exposure and vulnerability, where secrets are finally revealed, where, like Lear, in a crucible of sound and fury we come to terms with our mortality "tossed twixt winds and billows."

Rembrandt and the Literary Sleight of Hand

"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."  Robert Louis Stevenson succinctly summarizes what is, to my mind, a central literary challenge. In some fashion we serve as our own translators: the nebulous shape of plot and place are formulated within our own imaginative expanse; we ruminate upon scenes in the quiet of predawn hours, gnawing on the bones of the narrative, savoring the confluence of character attributes that elevate the persona from page to proto-breath.

Rembrandt is a Dutch master much admired, his portraits imbued with light and life. His work might represent an immobilized literary scene depicted in oils, for like the writer he applies hue and vibrancy with a deft hand; or, better yet, a character-study of an individual passing through the narrative of life. Few other contemporaries devoted comparable attention to the human face; his sitters are frequently depicted partially eclipsed with the nose, unequivocally bright, thrusting into the mystery of halftones. It serves to focus the viewer's attention upon, and to dramatize, the division between a flood of light—an overwhelming clarity—and a brooding duskiness. Flesh-tones are comprised of a wide range colors, from carmine reds to dense yellow ochers and even shades of green, each laid down with marvelous sensitivity to differential wear and tear of age on various parts of the face.

 Like the writer, Rembrandt was a compulsive peeler, itching to open the casing of things and people, to discern the content concealed within.  He like to toy with poignant discrepancies between outsides and insides, the brittle husk and the vulnerable core; being particularly drawn to the ruined, the underbelly of life, the poetry of imperfections. Rembrandt's most vivid depictions, like Hugo's Thénardiers in Les Misérables, are of the poor and bedraggled; with meticulous attention to the pits and pockmarks, red-rimmed eyes and scabby skin, the mottled blemishes of the human countenance. The piebald, the scrofulous, the stained and encrusted were a matter for close and loving inspection; furrows on the brows of old men and women, sagging timbers of decrepit barns, lichenous masonry of derelict buildings, the mangy fur of a haggard lion - all came under the close scrutiny of eye and brush.

 Rembrandt paid detailed attention to the topography of the middle-aged upper eyelid, the oiliness of a prosperous nose, the overlapping folds of a jowl or wattle, the wateriness of the eye's vitreous membrane, the shiny tightness of forehead pulled back into linen cap. Despite this painstaking face-mapping, despite this vital veracity to form, Rembrandt's work is seldom described literally by sharp-edged lines and contours. There is a freedom and versatility of brushwork: some places defined by short dabbing marks, others long fluent curves. While his subjects are depicted with a forceful clarity, Rembrandt's technique is audaciously loose and suggestive. The sketchier and more suggestive the hand, the more potent its invitation to sympathetic projection.

There are writers who have perfected a comparable literary technique of suggestive character sketch. Constrained by the forward momentum of plot and the patience of our reader, the writer supplies a daub of detail here and there; a character deftly sketched in hunched posture and heavy-lidded gaze, defined, perhaps, by indolence and dressed in grime. Fortunately for the writer language is a flexible medium, growing and breathing much as a living thing, expanding to meet need and circumstance. While we cannot convey the breadth and complexity of Rembrandt's portraiture we choose words with specific intent. The resultant image is necessarily one of many, a diversity of impressions in minds of different readers; a linguistic fluidity in the interpretation of visualized form. The essential nature of the character might be brilliantly defined in a minute detail; the languorous heaviness with which they recline, the narrowed silvery-bright gaze that pinions, the elaborate fussiness with which they attire themselves, or perhaps their distinguishing feature is an oily complexion perpetually mopped by anxious hand. I am reminded of Dickens’ Smallweed in Bleak House who is, in some measure, defined by his insistence on being ‘shaken up’ or the exquisite Lady Dedlock who is languidly and elegantly bored. By casting a specific attribute into bright relief, the writer can leave the rest in dusky halftones, allowing each reader to project their own particular imaginings.

Like Rembrandt, I find myself most engaged by what lies beneath. Within the confines of a novel this might be represented by hidden agendas and unrevealed motivations. There is a particular fascination with the dilapidated and the impoverished; the story of decline is an irresistible one – the character tested in adversity, deprived of fundamental comforts; in this furnace of penury all extraneous affectations are stripped away until the essential truth of a character is revealed. Masks are utilized to self-advantage just as they are with the prosperous, but there is an edge there, a certain poignant desperation, a clawing survival instinct. I admit also to an unadulterated deliciousness in writing the historical grime of gloomy backalleys. Perhaps it is a sense that the denizens of these narrow half-forgotten streets might startle me with a furtive deviousness…with a sly sideways glance that sends the plot moving in an altogether unexpected direction. Perhaps they more readily commune with my internal Golem who conspires in their fabrication.

Rembrandt conveys both polarities of society with consummate skill, the wealthy as well as the impoverished are captured beneath the sable of his brush: the gentle luminescence of faces in candle-glow, the improbable perfection of cascading lace rendered in shades of white, gray and yellow, the rich sheen of rippled satin, and the warm darkness of velvet; the impression of art is a static one, a moment captured in the perfection of paint. The writer, however, is responsible not only for a single visual depiction but must combine a means of dynamic locomotion to move the character through the narrative.  Like the great Dutch Master a novelist must illuminate salient attributes of his personages, a telling detail that helps define personality, and then leave the rest to dusky obscurity, allowing their reader to project the rest - to vividly imagine a construct whose tendencies have been outlined but whose flesh and outward appearance remain to be seen. The reader is the painter, filling in the details suggested but not utterly defined by the narrative. This is the power of literature, enthralling and engaging the reader as the characters become a part of their own imaginative landscape in a literary union of souls.

Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard and the Literary Search for Variable Truths

Writers sit in the quiet of self-imposed solitude, eye and mind inextricably fixed upon one point: the examination of humanity in all its glorious imperfections. Under the figurative microscope, gaze sharpened by literary intent, we examine the minutest element of human life, scrutinizing its most fleeting movement, its innermost fluctuations; we seek anomalies, wry moments of truth that like a black hole singularity appear densely impenetrable. They sit small and dark, closed in upon themselves, but like their celestial cousins they exert a powerful gravitational pull. These are the barely discernible hiccups in the human narrative that, when examined with studied attention, reveal something more, an insight that illuminates some broader aspect of human behavior. The secrets, the whys, the wherefores: the elements that transform this inconspicuous moment of truth into a fireworks-cascade of literary imagining take some work. The writer must pry them loose.

Why do we write? What do we hope to achieve by the endless production of fabricated realities? Another in a long line of paper-milled, ink-stained volumes, another crowded stack of paperbacks categorized and organized by last name, by demographic, by genre? Writers are restless seekers of truth and like all primates have a socialized proclivity for mutual grooming: quid pro quo, a back-and-forth, read and be read; we want to share, to communicate, we want the validation of our own kind, of the human kind. For many writers it is this resultant dialectic that is important; like scientists seeking objective truth we want to understand that we are approaching some greater comprehension of things. We want other writers to re-enact the thought experiment and feel that something has been accomplished; that somehow the collective understanding of humanity has been enriched, in however miniscule a way, by our own humble offering. Individuals write to promote social change, to punish injustice, to celebrate heroism, to lament political oppression, but is not the ultimate common theme a yearning to understand one another? And how else to do that other than in our own individual search for the truths that unite us?

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, proposed that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot illuminate that which is most essential to a person's life. Objective truths (mathematics and science) form a conceptual framework with which to systematically comprehend the laws that govern the universe; they are indubitably relevant and necessary, and possess a particular beauty (cascading fractal sets defined by mathematical constructs for example). But these theories and formula are rigid in application and constrained by prescribed laws of thermodynamics. They do not accelerate the heart or quicken the breath in the back of the throat, they do not pretend to delve into the individual's emotional relationship to existence, the angst and the passion, nor the confrontation with the dark abyss that lies beyond. They are the world in outline; it is the individual visceral interaction with life that provides the rich array of intervening colors. It is this encounter with the world that comprises each writer's subjective truths; borne of curiosity, their perceptions of the world are dynamic, a living intuitive response to life that is always in the process of becoming. They possess the vibrant unpredictability of individual perspective unrestrained by mathematical construct or theoretical expectations. These subjective truths are filtered through a writer's lens of prejudice and perspective, but they are universal insofar as they derive from the human condition and to which each of us react with a start of recognition.

Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russia. He probed and extrapolated upon issues such as the existence of God, nihilism, the requirements of fraternity, the morality of murder, suicide and poverty. They are familiar themes; while the times have changed, while the setting is different, we, like the brothers Karamazov, like Dostoyevsky himself, struggle to understand what it means to be human. In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolfe stated: "The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture." To be an unworthy echo of Ms. Woolfe's eloquent testimonial: "composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul." These are Dostoyevsky's subjective truths that resonate so deeply with contemporary as well as later audiences.

Many postulate one objective truth to all things whether it be a philosophical truth, religious truth, or political truth. However these truths are group-specific and do not necessarily cross county, state or national lines. The truths that unite individuals across the globe are of the variable kind, they are emotional truths spoken from one heart to another, they are an amalgamation of gathered truths, they are a literary truth, spoken without subterfuge or agenda. Each book represents an individual communicator transmitting their own particular blend of veracity. Giambattista Vico argued that verum ipsum factum (truth itself is constructed). Perhaps one might surmise the literary truth to be a constructed one insofar as it is born of much mental labor and is, however inadequately, translated from thought to word. Objective evidence facilitated by science enables further understanding of our physical environment, the subjective analysis of the human condition as evident in literature enables further understanding of the depths of ourselves - a search essential to nourish the delicate yearning that is the human soul.

Through countless dusty tomes we have acquired vague ideas of things that have sharpened and coalesced in the subsequent years of life-immersion, discussion, pondering and musing. Writers attempt to convey their own subjective truths, lessons learned, wisdom accumulated, their own particular insight into the kernel of things. And the utter delight is that, unlike objective truth (Schrodinger's cat nonwithstanding) the individual perspectives are often not only unconventional and quirky, but are limitless in their potential for the exploration of self. These truths, these literary truths, are perpetually in flux; the human outlook alters with time and experience and the truth of youth is oft supplanted by that of maturity. Individuality outruns all classifications, unconstrained and undefined, vibrantly alive with innumerable shades of possible expression.

Shadow Dimensions: Plato's Cave, Wayang Kulit & the Literary Endeavor

Upon completing a fine novel, the last page regretfully turned and closed, the characters and the landscape they inhabited linger in one's mind like a dancing play of shadows, a vague and nebulous interaction of dusky things. I have been pondering the shadow, on the forms created by the casting of light. A writer directs a focused intensity towards a time and place and creates individuals to occupy it; this setting, this landscape, this world (in Shakespeare's immortal words) is "a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances..." The 'players' of this novel are brilliantly lit upon the boards, but it is their shadowed forms, their imagined selves, our own perception of them due to (or despite of) authorial depiction, that continue to dwell in our minds long after the book is restored to the shelves. Captain Ahab never returned to the Pequod, nor did he plunge to his death in the dark depths, but remains still, restless and vengeful, in my imaginative expanse - frozen in that final tableau of rancorous fury, hurling his harpoon at the white whale: "…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

Other novels have also created their own particular shadow dimensions: characters and plot-lines that obstinately refuse to depart from your mind - because they transcend the pages upon which they were transcribed. They speak to a deeper part of ourselves, become anchored in our very flesh and bone, all co-existing in some improbable complicated kinship, adjacent, hovering, there in some hard-to-define fashion, like the literary equivalent of string theory in quantum mechanics. Or an impossibly glittering Gatsby-affair to which all literary 'players' are invited, all taking tea within the confines of your mind! The special books, the ones that speak to your heart, their shadow-world hovers the longest, permeating future thought and speculation, filtering through the porous inter-dimensional membranes to solidify within the familiar world through which we meander. Other books, the ones that came and went, sampled and enjoyed, but did not affect one in a visceral way, their shadowed world dissipates more rapidly like the morning mists after the rising of the sun.

The novelist creates characters (as much as I use the word I do so reluctantly, 'characters' have a two-dimensional aspect that implies archetype devoid of blood and bone) that interact in a dynamic interplay of plot and dialogue. These imagined individuals, for the time of reading, comprise our reality, our alternative vision of things, the story so masterfully woven that it becomes for a time our own internal chronicle. Much like Plato's Allegory of the Cave where the chained prisoners perceive the shadowed projections cast upon the wall and believe it to constitute reality. While writers would hardly liken their readership to those imprisoned and forced to bear witness, their narrative is not unlike the dance of shadows that plays across the walls of our minds.

Novelists create shadow worlds, alternative realities that exist within the cranial confines, which have no material counterpoint in our three-dimensional world. We cast shadows upon the wall for our readers, a reflection of a possible reality, a confluence of imagined people within a particular dynamic. Plato's Cave requires the escapee philosopher to return and educate the prisoners as to the nature of their deception, the shadowed narrative of literature, however, can perhaps be understood with the opposite intent; while the Cave display dupes its viewers, the literary shadowplay ostensibly serves a nobler purpose: to further our understanding of human nature, to examine unacknowledged motivations, to illuminate the deeper elements of ourselves that run like sluggish subterranean rivers through our subconscious.  I say ostensibly because there is a power in print, and has been since Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Access to literature of all kinds has molded and shaped nations as well as the liberties offered or denied their citizens. While books (and by extension their authorial voices) can sway and influence public opinion one must also approach them with a critical eye, and a firm sense of our own morality. I do not assume a nefarious purpose here, but merely bow my head in wary acknowledgement of its potential.

Perhaps another analogy for the literary shadow-dance is the Indonesian Wayang kulit theater: puppets crafted from buffalo hide and mounted on bamboo sticks are cast in shadow across a white screen. The puppeteer, or dalang, is the backstage genius, akin to the novelist who deftly pulls the strings of their fictionalized individuals to move them through the narrative. The writer draws upon their vocal lexicon, the dalang his vocal skills as he modulates his voice to create suspense and heighten the drama. These Wayang kulit narratives typically derive from the Hindu epics of the Ramayana or Mahabharata, with the inclusions of hero/villain and comedic-relief archetypes vividly recognized within humanity's literary compendium from the epic of Gilgamesh to the works of Shakespeare. The dalang, like the writer, seeks to entertain, and his profession is not for the ineffectual or the faint-of-heart: he is an orator of prodigious memory who must be able to repeat lengthy texts verbatim and simultaneously maintain the ability to improvise entire interludes ranging from ribald jokes to philosophical ruminations. He is a scholar of literature, but also of the political and social climate at a national and local level. The novelist today must work equally hard to engage their audience, producing a compelling narrative that resonates on a multitude of levels with innumerable individuals. The dalang is intimately familiar with the nature and symbolic importance of all his hundred-odd characters, and commands the necessary vocal dexterity to give each it's proper tone and pitch. Just as a writer constructs character-specific action, dialogue and context, the dalang presents each of his figures in stances appropriate to their character and situation.

A writer's effort and intent initially is in the production of the material manifestation of an imagined reality - the book itself, a collection of ink-stained pages, a solid three-dimensional construct indubitably a part of the material world (or a combination of bits and binary code for the e-book equivalent); but the writers that are truly great are those whose characters and plots become something more, shadowy inhabitants of our imaginative landscape, with more power in their ethereal immortality within the pulsing crimson warmth of our blood-nourished neurons than they ever possessed as an aggregation of atoms between the covers of a book. Like the dalang, we must seek to cast immortal shadows, not to dupe, deceive, or imprison as served in Plato's Cave, but to elevate and inspire, to scrutinize the human condition in all it's glorious imperfections.

Michelangelo and the Literary Affliction of Self-Forgetting

Michelangelo perceived potential in a rough-hewn block of marble with its textured inclusions, nodules and veins; he envisioned the imprisoned figure within where others were blinded by a blank facade of stone. Writers also see creative possibilities in the drama of a particular time and place, or wrapped around an intriguing event; novels carved from raw material, laboriously scraped and smoothed to a state of polished perfection.

Despite Michelangelo's appellation of Il Divino ('the divine one') by contemporaries, his biographer noted that "his nature was rough and uncouth, his domestic habits incredibly squalid" which served as a singular deterrence to any pupils that might have followed him. This man, this sculptor, this architect, this poet, this engineer, was an artist of the very greatest kind. Is this not a danger to all who become utterly embroiled in their task? Is this affliction of self-forgetting, this disorder of utter absorption that comes at the expense of environmental-mindfulness, this scourge of house-hygiene, common to most engaged artists? Are they not, after all, to some degree or another, enslaved by their muse? A fiercely jealous muse, like the Greek gods of old, who would suffer no competitors?

When buried deep in a scene, when the fictional characters are whispering in my ear, when I am pungently aware of a landscape that exists only in the dark recesses of my mind...mealtimes come and go unnoticed, the ebb and flow of life swirl around in a hubbub of noise and confusion, but I am not there. I have withdrawn into myself, retreated to the shadowy depths where my Golem lives, and where a multitude of worlds await.  Today it is the dark belly of the Parisian catacombs, macabre passageways defined by the polished bones of the dead, where two men wait for me, the yellow pool of lamplight casting spectral shadows across the bone-filled walls. Tomorrow the soft golden warmth of an aristocrat's drawing room, where beautiful women in stiff brocade flirt with their fans, where men in velvet coats, white stockings and buckled shoes, cluster in groups of twos and threes. Where the underlying hum of conversation is interspersed with the tinkle of glasses, the sudden sprinkle of laughter and the lilting strains of the pianoforte. Powdered wigs turn and gossip dwindles as I sidle into the room, conspicuously ill-attired in my rumpled jeans, t-shirt, and sleep-matted hair. "The author..." I hear mutterings, a sniff of disapproval, an eyebrow raised - not all of them are entirely pleased with their literary depiction. Doubtless I am better suited to the company of my cave-dwelling Golem than the early nineteenth century Parisian aristocracy.

 According to Paolo Giovio, Michelangelo was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico, who "withdrew himself from the company of men." One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his impassioned style, his ability to create awe-inspiring grandeur, terribilità: an intensity of expression in stone, the curl and clench of musculature, the throb and pulse of tendon all frozen in the white purity of Carrara marble. But so vividly vital beneath the mantle of ice that it seems one hot breath will restore them to blood and bone. As Michelangelo liberated his magnificent figures from their white prisons of stone, so writers conjure landscapes and  personalities from the fabric of historical accounts. Like alchemists they will take the mundane base metal of life and transmute it into a gleaming precious nugget of literary gold. The room is cluttered, the person disheveled, the laundry awaits, the dinner hour grows near...but the writer cannot quite return to the bustle of things, for a thread yet connects him to his otherworld, the lingering tendril of a thought that has not quite reached its natural conclusion, the promise of something yet unfulfilled, the lure of the literary landscapes beckons yet with all its possibilities...

In Gratitude for the Books

What a thing it is when a child learns to read! When they first associate letter and sound, when they tentatively string the phonemes together and a stumbling word emerges - a word they have utilized in speech for years past, a word that is already imbued with meaning in their heretofore circumscribed world.
And it is at this moment, as understanding dawns, in that magical instant when stapled rectangles of ink-darkened paper become something more; the hitherto strange and alien cipher relinquishes its meaning and innumerable universes open up like petals of a night flower to the immensity of the stars.

The child's world, which has been long embellished with obscure and mysterious symbols, adorning road signs and cereal boxes, becomes something transcendent; and instead of one life, one path (the fate that awaits non-readers) the child becomes an early traveler. Venturing through time and space, learning, absorbing, and wondering; the realization that an immensity of meaningful worlds are encapsulated between the tattered covers of  novels. Books are imbued with magic; they contain the transformative power to incite revolution, to sway and influence: a conveyance of alternative perspective, a vehicle of many truths, the physical manifestation of intense thought.

It is my opinion that the truly great writers are indubitably voracious readers; it is in that subtle dynamic interplay between written narrative and sensory reception. A writer's words are exhaled from the page in a delicate mist, a gossamer tendril of another world that envelops the reader in an imaginative cocoon. The voice of the writer is a whisper in our head, transcending time and space, with literary skill that lingers in our imagination like the fading echo of an exquisitely haunting musical phrase. The words hum and resonate with a vibrancy of something alive, shifting and morphing into something greater than the sum of their parts. The simple sequence of letters is cognitively transformed into the imaginative painting which arcs across the inside of our minds.

One forms bonds with paper-born characters, in a fabricated world interwoven with words and threaded together by thoughts. They emerge from the hazy mists of our mental landscape like a hallucinogenic phantasm, more vibrantly alive than one would have thought possible, and with whom we feel and fear, their heartbeat our own. It is a feat born of magic indeed! Taking the geometric linearity of letters, the sharp punctuation of line, the unequivocal rigidity of consensual alphabetic form and evoking an ethereal landscape within the confines of mind; from stark unvarying form to poetic ether. This is the dazzling beauty of language into which the child is ushered.

It is a powerful thing to be a reader. We are presented with numerous gifts of perspective: visualizing the familiar in strange new ways, and broadening our understanding of that which we have little experience.  While our bodies are confined and constrained, destined to occupy a limited physical space, our consciousness soars upwards in the vast expanse where all things are possible;  the murmured narrative of each new book sighs secrets, discloses thoughts and ideas in the hushed darkness of our minds that we too have entertained. There is a vague recognition of things dimly perceived that only now with this writer, with this book, have been brought into bright relief. One is seized by a thought, captured by an image painted in words, and the connective wisp is established between writer and reader like conversations passed between us in the dark. For we are not merely passive receptacles of the phrase, but we engage with the books that we read, our very selves are altered, our perspective enhanced in a multitude of subtle ways. Victor Hugo declared that "to learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark." To light that flame for a child, to engender and nourish the sparks that will enable their own limitless explorations... what could be a greater gift?