Note: Beta edtions of Mural Gazer stories at MuralGazer.ca
…when he saw his mother’s purse, sitting on the kitchen counter that day of his downfall, he froze, a tightrope walker quavering, struggling to regain his balance. The moral math was simple: He craved his cola; his mother had deprived him of the sugary libations that made life oh so sweet; tit-for-tat, he would deprive her of enough grocery money to buy himself a pleasure-sustaining supply of Kik. Still, he wavered. Get a Kik out of life, his jingoistic nature crooned; get a kick in the arse with a pointy shoe, a fatherly voice from up on high threatened. He teetered on the edge for a moment, then…
Harry glanced through the window, out into the garden, where his mother was busy weeding and pruning. Opportunity had presented itself, the thirst was upon him, he could either take his chance or leave it, and not expect another any time soon.
Still, he resisted the gravity of his yearning, aghast. How could he even think something so dastardly, so cunning, as to steal from his own mother… As he excoriated, himself his body slipped into an altered state, beyond the pale of ordinary consciousness. He witnessed sadly, as if in a dream, his hand reach out, fingers scrabbling like spider’s legs, prying open her purse’s lips, rummaging its contents for her wallet. He pulled it out. His breathing quickened and eyes widened as he riffled through the week’s house money, a sheaf of bills neatly sorted into their coloured denominations…
Taken out of context, I can understand how that plea might trigger thoughts of collapsed mines, bombed out apartment buildings, avalanches or any number of natural and man… er, human made catastrophes. You could add car crashes to the list, strokes, falls off ladders, the tally goes on.
That’s not what I intended, though, lounging in one of the blue plastic Cape Cod chairs out on our back deck, watching the progress of another home run for God arcing through the infinity of blue sky over Mount Brenton.
“You weren’t thinking at all!” was how Ashley put it. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Actually, I’d been thinking about a lot of things, before Plato came along and jumped onto my lap. Good thoughts, mostly, about how lucky I am to be living my retirement era in Chemainus. As suburbs go, Cook street rates pretty good. It’s got a crime rate that flat lines somewhere near zero, there’s not a single traffic light in town, strangers wave and say hello on the street and in the aisles of the Country Grocer store, and it’s located in the mild temperate zone of Southeast Vancouver Island—accurately fabled as a bit of paradise afloat on the Salish Sea.
There’s some irredeemably grouchy types who grumble in their coffee mugs down at Nic’s Café that the best thing about Muraltown is it’s within easy driving distance of Nanaimo in one direction, Victoria in the other. I say to them: If you can afford a patch of turf in either of those two places bigger than a dish cloth, go for it. I’m happy where I am.
I was especially happy to be out on the back deck that day.
Not that I don’t like company. I do. And I really like Serena, even if she is smarter than me and can’t help delving excitedly into the details about her research into ‘mitochondrial DNA and the role it plays in aging and degenerative diseases’. She’s ‘good people’, our niece. And my wife’s good people too. But put them in the same room, and you might as well stick your head inside a beehive, the way they natter. A quiet guy like me can’t get a word—or even a thought—in edgewise.
That’s why I retreated out onto the back deck. Once they’d talked their ways through the agony of childbirth, how to get your lemon poppyseed muffins out of the tray, the best deals to be had at the hospital auxiliary thrift shop, and so on, I decided it was time to take out the recycling and stop off on the way back for a snooze in the waning light of a balmy spring afternoon, while they continued with the task of sorting through the family photo albums.
“Oh look, there’s you uncle Martin, fifty pound lighter, with hair and no wrinkles!” “Aw! There’s Panda. Remember the time he ate your socks and we had to watch like expectant parents for him to poop them out.” “Auntie Ash, you were such a hippie. I love that dress, and the army boots are ever so chic! Ha, ha, ha!” “The Half-Lemon! Oh My God, we actually drove around in a yellow VW beetle? Look at the price of gas… 48 cents a gallon! Christ, they don’t even mint pennies anymore, and gas is measured out by the litre.”
Even though I was happy for them, I have to admit to being pinpricked by envy, watching Ash and Serena babble on like partners at a quilting bee. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I was thinking, if more men could get themselves into that head space, there’d be fewer Putins in the world, and the people of Ukraine might not be suffering through a senseless armageddon, watching their cities getting pummelled into dust like 21st Century Sodoms and Gomorrahs. I’m ashamed of my male gender sometimes. Wish I could have a bit less Y in my jeans and a bit more ‘Why?’ in my brain.
We have strange thoughts in that fantastical zone between awake and asleep. There I was, reclining in the Cape Cod chair out on the back deck, the brilliant sunshine lighting up the inside of my eyelids like lava lamps when, plop, Plato landed on my lap.
Cat’s paws are the closest thing I can imagine to an angel alighting… until they begin kneading that is, their claws tugging at your clothing and pricking your skin. Plato circled round for a couple of laps, like he was tamping down the grass under a tree on his vast savanna, then settled in and started purring. I sat perfectly still, trying to make my bony thighs soft as down filled cushions. The rumble of his contentment echoed through me. You have to feel a cat’s purr to really appreciate it, let it permeate consciousness.
Please understand, Plato is not a lap cat. He’s aloof, a strutter through our lives, more likely to show you the pink petunia when you make a move to pat him than to rub up against your leg. Usually he stumps off like you’re beneath his dignity. Ash and I are lap-cat-people, though, yearning for that mystical connection between cat’s fur and human skin, and that reassuring deep vibrato of feline contentment. He was deigning to settle onto my lap for a snooze that afternoon. But lap time with Plato? It’s like cuddling a land mine. Don’t touch, don’t move, don’t even breathe, or he’ll be off.
Ash and I share the joys of those moments as if we’d experienced a second coming. I often wonder what it is we’re missing in our lives, that we hanker so desperately after our cat’s erratic affection? We have each other, isn’t that enough? Our death-defying circle of friends? Our kids, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, our dog Sophie, neighbours who wave hello wherever we go in Muraltown? Isn’t that enough?
Not unless Plato loves us back, I guess.
How could I be so selfish as to not share that glorious interlude with Ash? So, risking all, I slipped my fingers like a bomb disposal expert into the hip pocket of my ever tightening jeans, pinched the top of my mobile and slid it ever so gingerly out from under Plato. He was still purring when the phone came to life and I pointed it at him in camera mode. His enlarged rump filled the bottom of my frame; my hiking boots—propped on the deck table—the top.
‘Click’ went the camera. Plato purred on. I dared not breathe a sigh of relief.
Kids can thumb in a text quicker than ‘u or i’ can let go a fart. I punched my mobile’s runes the same way you’d poke at an elevator button, my pudgy index finger hitting the wrong key half the time, so that I’d have to go back and try again, and again, hissing like a kettle too long on the hob. But eventually I got the message into the allotted space beneath the distorted image of Plato on my lap, then zip, off it went.
‘Help! I can’t move my legs!’ it said.
Panic is instantaneous contagion. It zaps the collective consciousness of a room like the sudden glare of a flood light. It’s another sort of bomb, its shockwaves radiating out into the neural network, forcing adrenaline to squirt like juice from a squeeze bottle into the guts of its infected tribe. On the one hand, panic gets us moving before the bus runs us over; on the other, it doesn’t give us time to think. The autonomic nervous system kicks in and we get jerked around like puppets. If we’re lucky enough to survive, we analyze ‘the event’ after the fact, picking apart the threads of mayhem.
My theory is we’re predisposed to panic. The Doomsday Clock is always ticking closer and closer to midnight, shaving off half the remaining time, then half again, until the calculus of destruction tells us there’s nothing, no measurable allotment of milliseconds left between us and…
Duck, cover and hold! We don’t want to hear that bomb go off!
Ash, for example, is predisposed by images of me snacking on potato chips and sneaking chocolate bars, munching toward the imminent possibility of a heart attack; she has witnessed my shuffle-footed stumbling often enough to anticipate my tumbling down any convenient flight of stairs; tick, tick, tick, the clock keeps blinking, until…
‘Bing!’ The text message slid into the corner of her screen, minus the cute, explanatory photo of Plato snuggled in my lap. It shouted: “Help! I can’t move my legs!”
So there I sat, swaddled in the joy of Plato’s fidgety affection, while Ash and Serena dashed about the house looking for the corner I had collapsed into, or the staircase I’d toppled down, expecting to find me dead, my finger still touching the screen after I’d shot off my desperate expiring plea for assistance…
“You scared the crap out of me!” Ash shouted without preamble once they’d zeroed in on the back deck. She slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise, maybe even trigger some kind of cardiac event. “Serena was about to dial 911!”
“It was an accident!” I protested. “There was supposed to be a picture…”
“You’re the accident,” she shook her head. Case closed; sentencing to be announced over dinner and executed over some indeterminate length of future time.
Thoroughly harangued, I was left standing on the deck by my two saviours, who marched back into the house through the sliding door, shaking their heads, words like ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘stupid’ reverberating in their wake. I turned round, and looked wistfully at Plato, inscrutable as ever, purring away on the Cape Cod chair.
“You little shit,” I said. “I really do love you.”
Screen views of The Mural Gazer, a Direct-to-Web novel
What is D2W? The easiest way to answer that question is via a link to my Direct-to-Web novel The Mural Gazer. But before you click let me point out a couple of advantages D2W has already made available to you as reader and me as author:
First, I can share my novel with you in an instant, just about anywhere on the planet you can pull in an internet signal;
Second, you don’t need any dedicated technology to get into the story. Your laptop, mobile or desktop computer are your eReaders.
So back to definitions: A Direct-to-Web book is published as a website.
More specifically, it’s a website formatted as a book that reads like a print edition. If you’ve visited The Mural Gazer, you have seen its landing page, which introduces the story as would the front and back covers of a conventional book.
From there you can follow links to either Pullout, the opening scene, or the Episodes menu item, which takes you to the Mural Gazer’s table of contents. It’s the same type of decision you might make browsing a volume pulled from a bookstore shelf.
If you dive right into the story via the Pullout page, you will see an audio link at the top, which lets you listen to a reading. That’s handy if you happen to be riding on a subway or driving to work.
You can always jump to another page, or get back to where you were when reopening the novel on another device via the Episodes table of contents link.
Beneath the audio bar and at the foot of each page are links to the next episode. Every page links to its following episode, so you can read or listen to the entire novel as if you were turning the pages of a print edition.
That pretty well sums up the Direct-to-Web concept in terms of what you might expect from the design and layout of any book: accessible, convenient, portable and navigable.
There are a few extras, though.
You don’t need a light source to read a D2W thriller! You can be right out there in the dark and stormy night, scrolling through its pages in situ, while glancing over your shoulder for any ghouls that might be in pursuit!
The Mural Gazer can be readily shared via email and social media, so you can invite friends into your reading adventure. At the top of each page are social media and email icons that allow you to instantly send a link from the page you are reading to anyone on your contacts list. Books are meant to stimulate conversations.
Up in the menu bar there’s also a Contact tab, so D2W readers can connect with or follow authors if they want to share some ideas, ask a question or keep up with new releases. This feature is especially important if, like me, you are an author who sometimes chooses to write ‘dynamically’, inviting critique as the story unfolds in real time.
Not showing on this excerpt form the Mural Gazer are internal links. But say in the seventh paragraph of Pullout I wanted to give readers a snapshot view from the Malahat Summit on Vancouver Island, up Finlayson Arm? I could put a link into the text and take them there. Or I could link to a side story from the narrative, or provide supporting description for a word or phrase some readers might not be familiar with.
Of course, because the reader happens to have their internet device in front of them, they can do a quick Google snoop any time they choose to check out a scene or expand on a bit of information.
Finally, if you look at the widget area on both the Pullout and the Episodes table of contents pages, you will see a description of the book and a button that allows readers to ‘Buy-In’ to the story. Readers can get a sense of the story before – at any point – they choose to buy, and authors can choose just how far they want to allow readers to go before buying.
Eventually that space will also allow readers to purchase print and ePub editions of The Mural Gazer. D2W books complement their print editions, giving readers who like to read on screen the option – they don’t replace hard copy editions, which will long remain the preference of most book lovers.
The capabilities we’ve shared will be the subject of future posts in the Books Unbound series. The objective of Direct-to-Web publishing is to make it easier for readers to buy books and authors to share and sell them.
Sustainable Literature is the goal.
We’ll delve more deeply into the features of a D2W publication and how the reach and scope of literature can be broadened through the use of digital and online technologies in future posts. In the meantime, thank you for visiting what is, in fact, a Direct-to-Web book in the making: Books Unbound.
The Mural Gazer is being published Direct-to-Web at MuralGazer.ca
Since December, 2019, I have been writing and publishing The Mural Gazer, a Direct-To-Web novel set in Chemainus B.C. I’ve posted 63 episodes to-date, and have 17 more to go. My best guess is I’ll be finished the ‘first draft’ of my online edition by the spring of 2022.
It’s been an amazing experience, and I’m emerging from it more convinced than ever that Direct-to-Web books have a place in our writing and publishing mix. But I know I’ll go about it differently when I launch my next title, and that a conversation about D2W with follow writers and publishers would prove invaluable.
So in the coming months I am going to review what’s been done, why and how, inviting people to join me in a critique of The Mural Gazer, not only as a literary work, but as a mode of writing, publishing and distributing ‘books’. Questions I’d like to address include:
Why is literature more important that ever in the 21st Century?
Why should it be necessary to expand the definition of a ‘book’ in the digital era to include D2W?
What are the features and benefits of Direct-to-Web writing and publishing?
What are the obstacles to books as websites?
What steps can be taken to overcome those obstacles?
How will writers and publishers incorporate D2W into their creative and business processes?
How do writers and publishers derive income through Direct-to-Web releases?
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I’m not used to thinking in these terms; I’m more of a hands-on type. But if Direct-to-Web is to be viewed as something more than a gimmick (and I think it has to be), questions like these must be answered. I hope you’ll join in the conversation. Please subscribe to my email list if you want to receive updates and notifications.
It’s no coincidence that the natives of the countries that it grows in for centuries to assist men and women battle insomnia as well soft viagra tabs as helping the man achieve an erection faster, Virectin also helps maintain it for longer, which can improve sexual pleasure for both partners. You have to take care of the fraud companies that do not supply the medicine you want will Clicking Here levitra 40 mg reach to you in short. Anapolon, Sustanon, Primobolan Depot are god examples of turkish steroids that can be purchased from Pharmabol. cialis wholesale india Another option to make sex possible on magic mushrooms would be this storefront on sale now cialis order levitra to use classic aphrodisiacs in combination. Click up above for a Video Reading Excerpted from the children’s novella, Flibber T. Gibbet, this story-within-a-story sees a quick-thinking squirrel trying to avoid being eaten by a predatory, but not unsympathetic owl.
Ptero was going about his business one evening, searching for nuts, berries and tasty insects to eat, when – whoosh – Bubo, the owl swept down and snatched him up in her talons.
He struggled and squirmed, but she held him fast in her powerful grip, and he knew he could not survive long. He had to think quickly if he was ever to see his nest again.
‘Bubo!’ he gasped. ‘Bubo, why would you bother eating a scrawny little squirrel like me. Winter has just ended, and I’m not much more than a skeleton right now. Let me go, and I promise to return to the very branch you snatched me from in three month’s time. Then I will be plump and delicious, and make a mouthful… er, a beakful.’
Because squirrels always keep their word, Bubo agreed to Ptero’s request, and returned on the appointed evening to find his prey, plump and well-fed, on the same branch where they’d first met. Bubo swooped down and carried him off again.
‘Bubo,’ Ptero pleaded this time. ‘Why would you tear me to pieces and eat me up now, when it is the season I am preparing to make many meals for you?’
‘Explain yourself, and be quick about it, for I am hungry,’ Bubo demanded.
‘It’s springtime, and I must mate. Soon there will be many of me scampering amongst the branches for you to catch and eat. Three more months, and I promise to return so you can me carry off a third time. But by then there will be many more like me for you to feast on.’
To Bubo this made good sense, so he returned Ptero to their favourite branch. ‘I shall see you in three months my little friend, then – sadly – I will have to gobble you up, for that is my nature,’ she said as she flew off.
So Ptero met a mate, and they had a family, and after the three months past he returned for Bubo to catch again.
‘What am I to say now,’ Ptero fretted, shivering with fright. He thought, and thought, but no new ideas came to him before Bubo glided silently overhead and snatched him up a third time.
‘So Ptero,’ the owl said as they flew away, ‘what reason are you going to give me tonight to keep me from my dinner?’
Ptero had nothing to offer, so he went limp in Bubo’s talons, closed his eyes, and prepared for his grisly fate.
‘Before I devour you, let me ask a question,’ Bubo said.
Eager to postpone what was surely coming, even for a heartbeat – and I can tell you, a squirrel’s heart beats very quickly when he is afraid – Ptero replied, ‘Please ask, and I will do my best to answer.’
‘What time of year is it, my scrumptious little friend?’
Now, to Ptero this seemed a silly question. But he pretended to be puzzled, and took as many wing beats as he possibly could to answer. ‘It is the season of long days and warm weather,’ he said at last.
‘Indeed,’ Bubo agreed. ‘It is also the season of abundance, is it not, when an owl can catch more food on a single night’s hunt than she could eat in a week.’
‘True,’ Ptero agreed.
‘And what season will arrive in three month’s time?’
‘Why that would be the season of falling leaves and withering fruit.’
‘So what might a wise owl do – and there is no such thing as an owl who-hoo-hoo isn’t wise – what might a wise owl do with a bit of prey, if her stomach and larder were already full, but winter was on its way?’
Ptero hesitated, fearful of making a guess. But he finally screwed up enough courage to say, ‘He might return a little squirrel to its branch and come back again in three month’s time, when his larder and belly will both be empty?’
‘Ah!’ Bubo hooted happily. ‘Excellent idea. Why, if you weren’t shaped like a plump little rodent, I might mistake you for one of my kind.’
And so for many seasons Ptero and Bubo have been getting together for their pleasant flights, and neither has figured out in all that time why one should eat the other. You could even say they’ve become good friends.
Well into retirement age, it’s time for me to ask what I want to achieve in this final phase of my literary career? What it means to be a 21st Century writer? It’s never been an easy vocation; and that truism has never been more applicable than it is on the cusp of this New Year.
I began my working career as a reporter, hammering out stories on an Underwood typewriter; I’m writing this introspective on my laptop, standing up in my dining room, occasionally interrupted by the ‘Ding!’ of another email landing in my in-box; I could just as easily be thumb-writing in ‘Notes’ on my iPhone, in the middle of a busy intersection or at a socially distanced café.
Conclusion: The world has changed. If we writers don’t adapt to the blizzard of social and technological innovation that’s whipping round us, we will lose our vital role as voices in the storm. In a future post I want to go into more detail about just how vital the role of literature is, and how sorry a loss it will be, if we fail to rise to the challenges of the times, but for now I’m going to map out how I want to go about adapting to our new reality, not the why of it.
I’ll begin with my oft-repeated, favourite saying: Writing isn’t about writing. It’s about delving into meaningful experiences and sharing those adventures with appreciative audiences. And it’s not about ‘books’ in any clearly defined sense of the word, it’s about insinuating our ways into the minds of audiences.
Please note the use of the world ‘audience’ instead of ‘readers’ in that last paragraph. Ultimately literature comes down to books in some form or another, of course. But my minimalist definition of a book is: A code of squiggles and dots on a series of pages or screens; or a vocalization of those squiggles and dots into words and sentences, which any creature other than a human would interpret as the grunting and growling of an animal suffering terminal indigestion.
The allure of literature, its special place in the arts pantheon, is its symbolic delivery. Every reader or listener has to make up the presented story in his or her own imagination. Until then, books are inert lumps of masticated wood and ink on library and bookstore shelves, or confusing assemblages of wires and circuits in peoples briefcases and pockets. Reading and its derivatives are creative acts as much as the art of writing.
Alas, getting people to choose reading over the plethora of other media available to them has become an increasingly hard sell, especially if you define literature as a subset of entertainment. Think about it! A hundred and fifty years ago there were no radios, no televisions, computers, video games, the Internet, virtual realities, movie theatres – and so on. Candle light story-telling, live theatre, and parlour music or pub songs were the free-time activities people turned to, and books the only transportable repositories of thought and entertainment.
That unique portability has long-since been overwhelmed by powerful broadcast media, and I believe authors and publishers are increasingly going to have to seek out niche audiences, and find affordable, widely dispersed channels for sharing literature in this crazed new world. Books are going to have to connect seamlessly to digital media and keep up with the fast paced bursts of attention modern audiences give new ideas.
Learning how to effectively use new media has become part of my creative process, and I hope to share my successes and pratfalls as I go. I don’t see digital technology as a replacement for ‘books’, but as an essential adjunct. My upcoming edition of The Boy From Under is my third run at what I have dubbed Direct-to-Web publishing, the first edition (now offline) was my inaugural run. My second effort is a novel in progress, The Mural Gazer.
I’ll celebrate if, late in life, I can become a crotchety advocate of new media as the neural network for modern fiction and creative writing… Heck! I’ll celebrate even if my only achievement is to get literary types to stop using Underwood typewriters and quill pens as their trademark symbols in this frenetic here-and-now!
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Words are such fascinating things! So versatile. So nuanced. So ultimately… meaningless? That thought comes to mind as I attempt a review of my 50-plus years as a writer. I occasionally analyze what has become for me a habit, and as I begin a rewrite of my novel The Boy From Under, I feel it’s time for a look through the microscope and see where this impulse lives in my DNA.
There are two views through this microscope of mine: the pro and the con.
As a pro, I have achieved states of being I would never have experienced otherwise. I have surprised myself with inspired moments, and done my best to share emotional and intellectual highs and lows with readers. I’ve felt the verbal pyromaniac’s joy at igniting imaginations. I have made words work for me, pulling long trains of philosophical reasoning up steep hills and down dangerous grades. I have had meaningful fun.
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As a con, I have dragged my reluctant carcass to its work station, as if I had a ball and chain attached to my ankle. The urgent clatter of my keyboard has drowned out any real sense of celebration, as I hurried to file another story, making sure the facts fit whoever’s case I was trying to make. I have become lost in wildernesses of uninspired words drivelling toward ‘The End’ or, in forgotten journalistic jargon, -30-.
What I’m getting at, here, is writing for me as a way of life. Whether I’m up or down, I have no choice, I have to write, and in my more introspective moments, I do what I’m doing now: write about writing. I hope you won’t hurt yourself laughing, but the following image is a partial visualization of what I’m writing this moment. I sometimes sketch my thoughts before setting them to words, a reminder of why I chose literature rather than the visual arts as my goto discipline…
The point I’m trying to make, sharing that ‘idea map’, is: There should be way more spinning round in my head as I’m writing than I can possibly include in a story or article. My choices should be excruciatingly and wonderfully difficult. There should be plenty left over for future instalments!
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Some people walk right by Gwen’s place, and don’t even notice. They might be thinking about mortgages, or family problems, or jobs… or the latest national fixation, COVID-19. But Kirsten and friends weren’t distracted by any of that. The cold bright air made them happy, and the flutter of dark-eyed juncos at a feeder across the street… Until they were startled by the great, big, green Grinch nailed to the post under Gwen’s balcony. “Won’t steal my Christmas,” Kirsten pouted angrily, and everyone on the line agreed, even though Mrs. P, their daycare teacher, had to laugh. Snowmen, elves, and Santa himself crowded Gwen’s yard, too, fastened to sticks in the surrounding brick planter and tacked to the clapboard siding of her house. So Kirsten felt pretty sure that – as always – the Grinch would come to be a believer, too. It was Mrs. P who pointed to the painted rocks nestled in the grass along the planter wall. Kirsten figured they must be nice rocks, judging by their colours and shapes. “Life is short, eat dessert first,” Mrs. P read one. Kirsten agreed! “Less todos; more todays!” advised another. Kirsten’s favourite, though, was the one with the angel on it that said, “Believing is seeing!” Even though Mrs. P said “whoever wrote it got it wrong way round.”
About this Moment
Our neighbour, Gwen, loves Christmas, and goes all-out with decorations every year. This Moment was inspired when a gaggle of daycare kids all hanging onto a cord, with their daycare teacher in the lead, stopped to wonder at Gwen’s display. All I had to hand was my iPhone, so I took some pictures with that, and got one or two that were good enough to use. This is a fictional rendition. None of the names are real, and actual events have been interpreted to fit. Hope you enjoy.
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He’d never dived off Prospect Rock before, only jumped, legs and arms flailing, yelling like a banshee, anticipating the cold slap of the lake’s surface, and that alarming transition between this world and that… the world of summer sky, filled with clouds and birds and planes, and vastnesses; into that startling nether world of cold water pressing in, stifling your voice, forcing your limbs to straighten out, and your body into the shape of a dagger, plunged into an unknown. He’d never taken that shape, mid-air, hands clasped above – or, rather below – his head, feet pointed up into the sky, mind focused on the precise moment when he’d enter the water, not with a splash, but with a surgical penetration of the translucence between now and then, past and future tenses. Diving is a conscious act; jumping a wild, screeching, childish enthusiasm. You prepare to dive, imagine yourself arcing through space like a cormorant, parting the waters as if your steepled fingers could find the interstices between molecules, then point your flexing body into its precise curve through the fluidity of its new medium gracefully, missing the jagged formations imagined beyond the phenomenon revealed by light.
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Surely there’s enough room in the universe for everyone who has died.
That’s a relief, I suppose. It means there might… just might… be a heaven out there, even a god, who only need occupy a tiny corner of the 13 billion light year breadth of measured space and time… and who knows what lies beyond the known, how far we’d have to travel in our transcendental spaceships to reach the ever expanding membrane of infinity.
Language can say things it’s impossible to comprehend. Thirteen billion light years, for example. Uncle Franklin tried to describe the speed of light for me once. “If I flicked on a light switch, here in Chemainus, say at the tip of Bare Point, you’d see the beam – it’s a wave, actually, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you’d see that beam in just over a second, if you were standing on the moon, say in the Sea of Tranquility… one-point-two-five-five seconds to be exact, that’s how long it would take.”
Uncky Frank couldn’t have understood that most nine year olds wouldn’t have a clue what the heck he was talking about, of course. Or what the speed of light had to do with my father’s coffin, making its slow progress down the centre aisle of our church, borne on the shoulders of six strong friends and relatives. He was just trying to describe, after the fact, the theoretical speed a soul could fly according to his own theory of special relativity.
Mum and Dad used to laugh at Uncky Frank and his ‘weirdo theories’. “He should leave the science to Einstein, and stick to building houses,” Dad said. “He’s good at that.”
“His inquiring mind takes him to strange places,” Mum agreed, as if Uncky Frank’s brain was a poorly trained Pitt bull yanking him around on its leash.
They loved him, though. He was everybody’s favourite uncle.
“Your dad isn’t very far away, once you know ‘C’,” he said, sitting beside me at the wake. “That’s the constant that stands for the speed of light in a vacuum,” he added, when I gave him a puzzled, pleading look. “Three hundred thousand kilometres per second.” He smiled benignly.
“How far is it from your head to your heart?” he persisted. “Show me.” I put my left hand over my heart; my right on top of my head. “That’s how far away your dad is from you, always,” Uncle Franklin said. “He’ll never leave, and – at the speed of light – he’ll be with you in an instant, whenever you need him.”
Uncky Frank had a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, on a special shelf next to his favourite armchair. He’d read it every evening, as if it was the world’s longest novel, from A to Z with occasional side-steps to look up an incomprehensible word in another article, then another word in the explanatory article, and another, and another, and so on.
“Unless someone’s reading it, these are just lumps of masticated wood, glue and fake leather, gathering dust,” he told me once. “Knowledge doesn’t reside in books. Squiggles on a page don’t mean anything until someone reads them.”
To his dying day Uncky Frank claimed to be an atheist. I visited him near the end. Gaunt, pallid, and weak as he was, he still smiled and gazed at me with his pale blue eyes. He could tell what I was thinking, and put his left hand over his heart; his right on top of his head. “That’s how far away from you I’ll be, if you ever need me,” he said.
I tried not to show it, but he laughed. “Just cause I’m what you call an atheist, doesn’t mean I don’t believe something. A few more days, and I’ll be gone, but I’ll live on in your memory,” he smiled benignly.
“And when I die?”
“You’ll live on in the memories of your friends, your colleagues, your family. And I’ll be a smidgen of that, which is enough for me.”
Uncky Frank bequeathed me his set Encyclopedia Britannica. I browse them from time to time, but there’s no reference to any history of mine in there, just antecedents. The speed of light hasn’t changed, though, and the time it takes a beam to get from Bare Point to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.
End Note:
Writing is rarely a linear process. For example, this video has a typical pedigree. Yesterday I was working on Episode 43 of The Mural Gazer. In this scene Buddy paddles out onto Cowichan Lake, teetering on the brink of suicide. There, he encounters the spirit of Hong Hing, the Chinese merchant, bootlegger and gambling den operator, depicted in Chemainus Mural #4, who is tying to dissuade him. Although he’s alive and talking, Hong Hing is decked out as a deceased, oriental patriarch, and he’s floating to the forever-after on the mirror-calm surface of the moonlit lake.
I’m on aqua incognito for this description, so I started researching Chinese funerary traditions online, a fascinating glimpse into the rites of an ancient culture.
At the same time, I have been trying to get my head around Immanuel Kant’s metaphysical theory of Transcendental Ideals. Although that’s not the kind of subject matter you can throw undiluted into a novel, as a thematic undercurrent, I believe speculative philosophy enriches stories. And the rites I was learning about the Chinese belief in an afterlife, particularly the burning of Joss Paper and representations of things the deceased need to be happy in their new world, evoked by association Kantian proofs of god, heaven and immortality.
There’s no logic to the sequence that lead to The Speed of Light, but its origins do trace back to The Mural Gazer.
