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.
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I’m not a poet, but in this instance, a novelist composing a sonnet, taken from the mind of the protagonist in my current work-in-progress, The Mural Gazer. Buddy Hope has decided to take the final, life defining step of ending his life. But he’s not approaching this ‘task’ from the usual anguished trajectory. Instead, he sees it as a logical conclusion, a job that needs doing, almost as if it were a household chore.
I’ve been trying to figure out how he came to this conclusion. Many of us have contemplated the act of suicide, not as something we would actually do, but as a way of getting underneath, or behind, or into the meaning of life. That’s not where Buddy’s head is at. He’s simply tired, and doesn’t look forward to another thirty or so years dragging himself through a world that has no purpose, no sustainable joy.
To paraphrase someone very close to me, who chose Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), Buddy isn’t living anymore, he’s just existing. He’s depressed at the prospect of carrying on, when every moment takes him farther from that time in life when he believed in his purpose as a father, a reporter, an armchair philosopher.
The question hanging in the air at this point in the novel is: Will Buddy’s recollections and contemplation heading toward his final act change his mind. He’s composed his parting letter, and left it on the dining nook table of the camper he’s been living in as his home-away-from-estranged-home. He’s saying his veiled goodbyes to family and friends, and is about to drive out of cell range to his chosen spot. Nothing he’s considered so far has dissuaded him from deploying EEK, his Emergency Exit Kit.
What Sense Reveals isn’t written to a particular person; it’s written to all the people he has known and loved.
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I have been reading two books lately that are giving rise to cognitive dissonance: Disloyal, a tell-all memoir by former Donald Trump acolyte Michael Cohen; and A New History of Western Philosophy, by Anthony Kenny.
There’s nothing anyone could write about Trump that would surprise me anymore, although Cohen’s account of the utter sleaziness of America’s president has confirmed in lurid detail the disgust I harbour toward this reptilian specimen. The word Cohen has not yet uttered, however, is almost more telling than what he has said.
Trump is portrayed as crass, vicious, misogynous, greedy, undisciplined… insane, pretty well sums up his character. I could have reeled off those epithets and more before reading what Cohen had to say. But the former ‘personal attorney to President Donald J. Trump’ has yet to attach the ideological label that explains the true threat Trump represents: The man is a fascist.
And what shocks me in Cohen’s account is how mesmerized Trump’s followers are by the bare-fisted power of ‘the Boss’, how overwhelmed they are by his all-consuming ego, which has become the ego of his political brand, the MAGA nation.
In true fascist form, Trump has latched onto the disgruntled facet of the American soul, and given it voice. He has justified for his followers all manner of bitterness and rebellion, and amplified their distrust of a political system that has certainly made itself worthy of condemnation. But the glaring irony of his presidency is that he, of all people, is the most ruthless user and abuser of average Americans. There’s only one American that truly counts in Trumpian logic: Donald J. Trump.
Trump has taken the US to the brink, and anyone who thinks the threat to democracy he represents was beaten in the recent American election is living a delusion. ‘The Divided States of America’ is an apt moniker for the US psyche right now.
Cohen’s book underscores the deviancy of a president who supposedly stood up for the common man in Middle America, while reaching out to other fascists of his ilk like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kenny’s history of Western philosophy attempts a distillation of the thinking that has led from Ancient Greece to ‘Philosophy in the modern world’. It’s fascinating in its scope; daunting in the depths it alludes to. Right now I’m reading about Kantian logic, and how it plays out in the formulation of morality and ethics.
A central theme of this tome is the quest for moral knowledge and thereby certainty with regard to ethical behaviour. Over and over again, philosophers have attempted to apply reason in response to the question: What is morally right and wrong? And why should I obey the edicts of morality, rather than simply look out for my own interests?
Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ comes down to a statement that moral behaviour is ultimately self interest taken to its logical extreme. I won’t go into a detailed discussion about a philosophical conclusion I haven’t yet fully understood, but the categorical imperative basically says that to act morally, I should always ask before doing something: What if everyone behaved that way?
For example, why shouldn’t I steal whenever I want something and it’s obvious I can take it without being punished, either because I’m cunning, or powerful, or both. The answer is: If everyone behaved that way, there would be no such thing as private property, and the social structure I rely on to lead a better life would collapse. So I’m acting in my own, and everyone else’s interests when I adhere to the edict: Don’t steal.
Kant’s is just one perspective in the history of morality in Western philosophy. The point is, there have been great thinkers throughout the ages trying to answer the fundamental questions about right and wrong, and find some basis for ethical behaviour.
If you have persevered this far, you probably have identified the cognitive dissonance I am experiencing reading Michael Cohen’s Disloyal at the same time as Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. It comes down to this: What’s the point in enunciating philosophical statements about morality and ethics when, at the end of the day, it’s always the immoral and unethical pit bulls like Trump that come into power?
I’ll suggest a couple of answers, but with the disclaimer that I can’t resolve the conundrum for anyone else. You’ll have to come up with your own answers for behaving in what you believe is a moral and ethical manner.
First, it’s a mistake to conclude that Donald Trump is behaving immorally or amorally. He may not have formulated his moral code in comprehensible English, but clearly he believes that you take whatever you can get, by whatever means are available to you, without the least concern for the harm you do to others. Lying, bullying and cheating are techniques for achieving an end, and with few exceptions, other people are a means to your ends, not entities you need concern yourself with.
There are millions of people in the world who share Trump’s morals, and always will be.
So, for ‘morality’ in a less selfish, less brutal and dishonest form to survive, it must be articulated, and espoused, and championed by millions of others. Always, and every day.
Morality isn’t a ‘pillar’, in any physical sense of the word. It’s not something that exists outside human consciousness, that you can put in place, then walk away from, secure in the knowledge it will hold up your sky. Morality and ethics are ideas that have to be stood up for every day, and exemplified by people who believe as strongly in their moral codes as Trump and his associates believe in their’s.
That comes down to the responsibilities that are the obverse side to our charters of rights and freedoms. Morality isn’t comprised in vociferous complaining about the excesses of Donald J. Trump and his ultra-rich coterie. It’s about how we live our own lives, and try to persuade others about what’s right and wrong, fair and unfair in the world around us.
Cognitive dissonance is an essential state of mind, when you think about it.
Here are the details about some herbal ingredient in these foea.org generic viagra australia medications, avoid taking them in order stay healthy. online viagra order Men who feel more stressed may lose an erection during the time of physical intimacy. And when it comes to sexual pleasure, everyone wants to have sexual pleasure in their life. viagra ordination It also affects viagra professional canada your stamina and sex drive. From The Mural Gazer, Episode 56, News Style. Buddy Hope contemplates ending it all.
Thanks for checking out my first video post of Today’s Writes. This excerpt is taken from Episode 56 of my novel in progress, The Mural Gazer. At one level, it’s a philosophical but very personal take on suicide – not as a desperate act, but as the rational decision by a man who’s grown tired of living. So I don’t see it as a discussion of suicide per se, so much as an existential, inner conversation on the value of life without meaning.
Protagonist Buddy Hope is more sad than desperate. Sad, because purpose and meaning have drained out of is life, and the thought of continuing seems cowardly. He has arrived at this ‘to be or not to be’ moment, not in Shakespearean torment, but almost dutifully. The twisted irony of his circumstance is: his purpose in life has become to end it.
And what about those he’ll leave behind?
That becomes the real question. And Buddy doesn’t have an answer. He’s written his note. Said oblique goodbyes to his estranged wife, children, lover, and friends Bernice and Harry. But he knows his leaving will be a painful shock to them, and they will be left to struggle with the question: why? To wonder what they could have done to save him.
So another conundrum confronts him: Buddy realizes he has to commit a cowardly act, if he wants to discontinue his cowardly existence. His only consolation, if you can call it that? The belief that people will have to patch the fabric of their own consciousness with shared memories of him, and that mourning might, in a convoluted way, bring them together.
Is that a vain hope?
Today’s Writes are excerpts and reflections on some of my works in progress. They are an opportunity to share, and an invitation for people to participate in my story telling. Thank you for being here.
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Poetry, of course, stands on its own. In fact, one of the joys of all literature is the creative response it evokes in the minds of readers. Sharing our responsive impressions is now possible, and this is mine to Rosemary Ratcliff’s poem Our Changing World.
This video was produced for the Chemainus Valley Cultural Arts Society, where I volunteer as a communications guy. Collaborations like this help bring the arts in general, and literature in particular, to a larger audience.
If you want to simply hear her poem, and let its language activate your own interpretations and visions, hit the play arrow, and close your eyes! Then share what it evokes for you in a comment!
Sometimes, usually late at night, after having devoted an inordinate amount of time to figuring out some arcane and indecipherable philosophical theorem, I ask, “Why torture myself? Why not simply accept uncertainty and live out my days happily, secure in the knowledge that what is, is, and what shall be, shall be?”
Why bother with philosophy?
Recently, an answer to that question emerged. As mentioned previously here, for some weeks I have been muddling through Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. Having just finished the lengthy section on Medieval Scholasticism, I considered myself not much the wiser for it. On the contrary, I felt disheartened and depressed.
That night, however, a list of conditions that I consider foundational to my own philosophy took shape, one after the other, in my mind. Even as I tapped them into my mobile – which I keep handy on the night table for recording thoughts – I realized these fundamentals were in response to my reading of the Medieval scholars… that they are part of my attempt to make sense of what my intellectual forebears had to say.
Here are the foundational statements to my own metaphysics:
Substance is neither created nor destroyed.
Change is incessant and never ending
All change is transformation of one substance into another
There are three fundamental substances: energy, matter & spirit.
Nothing exists that is not composed of the three fundamental substances.
The three fundamental substances never exist in isolation from one another.
The purpose of Being is Being.
The purpose of existence is existence.
The purpose of change is change
The nature of spirit is Being.
The nature of matter is existence.
The nature of energy is change.
Entropy is countered by Being
Being is threatened by entropy.
Nothing cannot exist.
This moment has been possible for all eternity.
All future moments are possible in this instant.
I can imagine that which does not exist; I cannot imagine that which is impossible.
What I imagine does exist.
I can only know what exists in imagination.
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Not everyone will agree with that starting point. Perhaps no-one other than I will. And I may have to revise its terms as I go. But for this existentialist, at this moment, every one of those statements is true, none of them are conditional or contingent.
A butterfly on our back verandah. There’s more than seven wonders in this world!
When I was a kid, my parents insisted I go to church. My older sister and brothers didn’t have to put on a scratchy suit and sit in the bum-polished pews of Norwood United for an hour or so of tepid religion – either because they were already saved or irredeemable, I didn’t know which. But I had no choice.
Then, at some point, Mum and Dad stopped attending, but insisted I continue to make my weekly pilgrimage to the House of God. I resented this arrangement, felt like a sacrificial lamb, being sent as a proxy to atone for my family’s guilt. The only redeeming factor in the whole situation was Rev. Kennedy’s daughter, who sat in the front pew, revering her father, while I sat toward the back, revering her.
Eventually, having recognized my own apostasy and the unattainable nature of the reverend’s daughter, I stopped going to church, too, saving the offertory money for other entertainments that might or might not have required forgiveness, but certainly had nothing to do with salvation.
Thus I spiralled like a misguided spark down the black hole of disbelief. I didn’t permit myself to know it at the time, but I’d stumbled upon my own sort of absolution at the drained font of atheism. It took decades for me to realize I was an atheist, decades more to believe it. I suppose it was mostly the unsettling notion of personal mortality that kept me in suspended animation all those years.
Having lived long enough to know that I don’t want to live forever, though, I’ve freed myself from that more or less selfish entanglement for imposing God on the universe. And what other reason could there be?
Well, it turns out that belief sort of sneaks up on you. If there is no God, I found myself asking, how do I explain all this? ‘All this’ referring to a seemingly infinite and eternal universe which harbours that most astonishing of all miracles: living Beings? Entities that are conscious, that procreate, and that have evolved into something as complex and incomprehensible as my self?
If you are not awed by the panoply of life buzzing, rooting, galloping, creeping, wriggling and a thousand other …ingings all around you, and inside you, and before you, and after… if you aren’t amazed, utterly and profoundly amazed by every bug on every leaf on every tree in the forest, then you can’t be fully human, can you?
That’s where religion sneaks back in. Aren’t awe, wonder and other such terms clearly in the religious realm? Don’t you have to be certifiably religious to use that kind of language in public? Doesn’t it bespeak things we mere mortals can’t understand, or even appreciate wholly. And if we can’t comprehend this universe of ours, who can? I mean someone has to? Otherwise, just like a bunch of passengers on a jumbo airliner, whose pilot has just died of a heart attack, we’re doomed.
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The catch to that sentence, “I don’t understand!” is it presumes there is someone who does. And of course, there have been plenty of prophets throughout the ages, who have proclaimed God’s word in fulfilment of that presumption. And most people throughout history have taken a proclamation of some sort as their truth.
Who knows, they might be right. That I don’t believe in a divine being who exists outside the realms of the physical universe and animal consciousness doesn’t mean all those prophets have been wrong, or charlatans. I don’t have to disprove the existence of God to disbelieve; nor do believers – despite the strenuous logic of thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus et al – have to prove His existence as a prelude to common faith.
As an existentialist I refuse to waste everybody’s time and energy with elaborately futile refutations of God’s existence. Is God possible? Yes. Therefore he cannot be denied with certainty. That’s an end to it. In fact, existentialism is not incompatible with faith.
On the other hand, I don’t have to listen politely to the strenuous attempts of believers to ‘save’ me. Or accede to claims about God-given rights in the realms of morality, justice and politics. I don’t mean to quibble, but there’s a stark contradiction to the lyric “God keep our land glorious and free” in the Canadian National Anthem. Who’s God are we talking about? And how is this presumed God going to be fair and impartial to citizens who don’t believe in Him?
Rev. Kennedy was a nice man. I liked him. Most believers are tolerant people. But there’s an underlying pity, or smugness in perverse cases, to the religious outlook. Not only are non-believers damned, according to the Bible, they are also incapable of true wonder, true awe. The heathens are not experiencing the eternal light of salvation; their vision is dimmed by blinding cataracts of sin. The presumption here is that, without God’s divine light we cannot be truly spiritual.
The damage done in the name of that kind of faith has been incalculable.
The other day I was sitting with a group of people in our workshop, the only indoor space on our property where we can practice the edicts of social distancing in accordance with COVID-19 protocols. We heard a cricket chirping in the room, and I spotted him next to the baseboard on the opposite wall. I excused myself from the conversation, walked over and coaxed the creature onto my hand. What a delight! To accompany a living Being out-of-doors and let him go about his singing in a place where it might attract a mate.
Awe is scaleable. Some people need dramatic music and dazzling vistas to achieve that sense of wonder; some need prospects of omnipotence, eternity and infinity; others find it in the minutest of details, in the awareness of spirit infusing every space, every nook and cranny of consciousness.
As an existentialist and atheist I’m reminded every day of my spiritual connection to this world, and I want to celebrate its wonders every moment. In that sense, I’m a believer, too.
