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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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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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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Direct-to-Web is more than just a digital format that allows me to distribute and share books cost-effectively and in an environmentally sensible manner, it’s also a way of opening up the boundaries of literature to new possibilities.
I’ve written 35 episodes of the The Mural Gazer, now, and have developed a format that works. But I’m only just beginning to appreciate some of the possibilities D2W offers. The most immediate pluses for readers and authors:
A D2W book can be read on a mobile, a laptop or a desktop computer. No special devices or programs necessary, other than access to the internet and the web.
Audio readings of a D2W story can be bundled with the print edition, so audiences can read or listen depending on their situations or preferences.
The cost of a getting a D2W book into readers hands is a fraction of print or eBook editions because there are hardly any distribution and printing expenses.
A D2W novel can be the modern equivalent of a serial, published episode by episode on the fly.
Graphic elements can be incorporated into the Direct-to-Web experience.
For those who want to lessen the environmental impacts of producing and distributing books, Direct-to-Web offers a much more sensible format than conventional publishing.
Those are immediate benefits of Direct-to-Web. Some of the possibilities that go beyond what is normally expected of literature, and which I haven’t even begun to explore:
Audience interaction. An author can communicate with his audience while he’s writing a book, and remain in contact after a book is published.
Side-stories. Links can be included in a book that will take readers off on side journeys. The possibilities of this feature for subplots, or excursions to actual settings, or… are enticing.
Collaborative opportunities. Musicians, visual artists, photographers, actors, all kinds of arts disciplines can be brought to bear on a plot or theme. Again, the possibilities are limitless and fascinating.
So, much as I like to see The Mural Gazer as a direction literature needs to go in, I’m pretty sure my vision is dwarfed by the reality of the medium I’m so excited about! Of course print editions of books are going to be the mainstay of most readers for some time. But I’d be surprised if mid-21st Century readers are toting paper and hardcover editions around with them; in fact, I’d be surprised if literature occupies anything other more than a shrinking niche in public consciousness if authors and publishers don’t develop the potential of Direct-to-Web books.
