Ultimate Indivisibility

To Blog Or Not To Blog

2011-12-28T19:28:00.000-05:00

To blog or not to blog? Right now, that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler as an author to suffer the slings and arrows from that nagging little demon-voice saying: days and weeks and months are going by, you and your book are invisible, you can’t expect a following if you don’t post (not that there are any comments when you do anyway, ha!), and what’s the point since you obviously have no ideas in your empty head!

Or to take arms against that sea of troubles, and by closing my blog, end them. To sleep blog-free -- ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To sleep... perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of bloglessness, what dreams may come?

Suddenly ideas would arise that cry out to be shared but have no place to live. Joy-visions or nightmares or something in between, they need an audience. Suddenly a void would yawn open where once there were words, where once there was an author and a book. Not even a grave would be left. The horror!

So there it is... the dread of something after blog-deletion, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes me rather bear those ills I have than fly to others that I know not of. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought....

Okay, enough.

Certain internet marketing gurus would say that absolutely, blogging equals being. You don’t blog, you don’t exist. To be or not to be is really the question.

But that’s bull. My blog is definitely part of my attempt to let the world know about my book, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, and maybe future books -- but it is more than that. It has a personal soul-value. It’s both a mirror and a record of my inner life. It allows me to test my own ideas, to hone sentences, to make cogent points. It’s a bulletin board where I can tack up my latest thoughts for myself to look at, if no one else. And if someone does read and comment, that’s gravy.

It feels good to offer a connection to others, and to occasionally get a very nice response. Sharing ourselves is the essence of community. My blog is a step toward you with a hand out in welcome. I enjoy your response, but I don’t depend on it.

There’s no reason for me to feel pressure about blogging. I’ll post a blog entry whenever there’s that wonderful conjunction of the arising of an idea with the time to explore it in writing. It will be “occasional.” There may be gaps, but there will not be a gap forever. And that’s okay.

It will be what it will be, and whatever it will be will be good.

Fine. I’ve decided to keep my blog. Happy New Year!

A Mafia Story in Sound

2011-10-04T21:14:00.000-04:00

I’m pleased to announce the debut of the audiobook edition of the critically acclaimed novella Saraceno by Djelloul Marbrook, narrated by the author. It’s available for download from Amazon, Audible, or iTunes. I had a good experience working with Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) for distribution. Recording was handled by Julie Last at Coldbrook Productions of Woodstock, NY, with some fine saxophone licks added by Peter Buettner.

A year ago, through my small publishing company, Bliss Plot Press, I launched the e-book version of Saraceno, which is available in all formats from Smashwords and other e-book retailers, or in Kindle format direct from Amazon. By year’s end, I’ll be announcing a trade paperback edition.

Saraceno has had a difficult history. Its original publisher folded before the book actually entered the market, but a few hardback copies continue to be traded on Amazon. It earned some laudatory reviews, excerpted here:

"Not just another run-of-the-mill Mafia novel." —Small Press Bookwatch

"Saraceno is an electric tone-poem straight from a world we only think we understand. An heir to George V. Higgins and David Mamet, Djelloul Marbrook writes dialogue that not only entertains with an intoxicating clickety-clack, but also packs a truth about low-life mob culture The Sopranos only hints at. You can practically smell the anisette and filling-station coffee."
—Dan Baum, author of Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans (Spiegel & Grau, 2009)

"…a good ear for crackling dialogue… I love Marbrook’s crude, raw music of the streets. The notes are authentic and on target…" —Sam Coale, The Providence (RI) Journal

"Strongly recommended as a remarkably crafted tale." —Midwest Book Review

"This lyrical and violent, funny and sad, hot and cool novella haunts us. Try it.” —Ann LaFarge, Taconic Weekend

And what follows is my own original review of the book, from About Town, 2005.

A New Type of Mafia Story

In "Saraceno," Djelloul Marbrook has crafted an entirely new variety of gangster tale. The story of a Mafia hit man and his friend, the grandson of the godfather, as each searches for his own true path, this compact novella is also a glass through which we see its author. "Saraceno" is an unlikely artifact: a Mafia story sculpted with the most refined of sensibilities from the clay of high art and philosophy, and then thoroughly suffused with love. This love is, first, the mysterious affection of a creator for his creations, a compassion for flawed humanity that drives the best fiction and makes its consumption a healthy activity. Second, it is the love of the characters for one another, from which redemption finally comes.

In Marbrook's narrative, "Il Saraceno" is the secret nickname given to the handsome and deadly Billy Salviati by his Mafia master, connoting both menace and respect--the historical view of the Sicilians toward their one-time rulers, the Arabs. Billy's life changes, as do the lives of his few friends, when he meets an elderly Jewish woman and is introduced to a library of the best writing and a rooftop full of roses. In an economical, erudite voice powered by an awesome vocabulary, Marbrook weaves bright strands of alchemy, art, literature, and religion into a dark Hell's Kitchen fabric.

If you're an aficionado of the recent spate of gangster yarns masquerading as psychological explorations while glorifying brutality, "Saraceno" may leave your bloodlust unfulfilled. This is no "Sopranos," no "Goodfellas," no "Godfather Part X." A nasty beating or two are in full view, but the much bloodier doings we know to be the currency of that world stay off-screen. In the same way that Paul Auster used the "detective" persona in his "New York Trilogy" to create works of art that delve into mysteries far deeper than "whodunit," and as a result got slammed by fans of the genre, so "Saraceno" takes higher aim, and may not be appreciated by those who prefer their reading tightly pigeonholed.

Djelloul Marbrook is the kind of writer I take real pleasure in discovering: a Hudson Valley neighbor and a mature artist whose rich body of work is finally coming to light. Marbrook's poetry collection, Far From Algiers, was the 2007 winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. His second poetry collection, Brushstrokes & Glances, was published by Deerbrook Editions in 2010, and his novella Artemisia’s Wolf by Prakash Books in 2011. His blog is always insightful: see djelloulmarbrook.com.

September Morning

2011-09-11T17:33:00.000-04:00

For an American writer, especially a New York writer, the events of ten years ago today reverberate in the cells, whispering for expression, but the whispers are always accompanied by the doubt that language can do justice to the actual experience. In my story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, the event is woven into the fabric of more than one of the stories. But it's most explicitly expressed in the following excerpt from the story "Phoenix Egg: Three Vignettes." I wrote this specifically for a commemorative reading event on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, and its original title was "September Morning." Then it found it's way into the web-like weave of characters' lives that makes up the collection, and became something even bigger. Hope you like it.

Morning

Helen’s mind is not on business. It’s on a pinpoint, a potential, a something so microscopic it’s more a nothing. In her center, it hums.

Every morning there is this settling in, the transition from the crush and chaos of the street, subway, elevator, to the solitude of her office. The solitude that will last a precious three minutes before it gives way to another crush: the focus of work, the pressure of duty. She punches the power buttons: monitor then computer. She toes off her sneakers, still tied, and slides them with a nyloned foot under the desk. She’s not yet ready to put on the heels, the “torture-pedics” she calls them, so she stands in stocking feet looking out the window, a Starbucks cup still in her hand. Decaf, because it’s better for the ovaries.

She had woken before the alarm, in the still black time, and climbed out of bed without waking Daniel. His schedule was out of sync with hers; a dark gulf had opened between them. Daniel was deep in the final act of the novel he’d taken a year off to write, and often stared blankly into space, his lips moving slightly. Sometimes in conversation with her, mid-sentence, his eyes would glaze, his focus wander. Only rarely could she get him to let her in, and then he’d turn suddenly manic and pace the room, arms waving, acting out scenes in dialogue, changing voices—a villainous basso profundo, a girlish falsetto—and if it was a good day they would simultaneously realize the absurdity of this picture, and dissolve into laughter. Other times a black silence would descend.

But as his novel had grown, so had an irrational need in her, from somewhere deeper than she’d known before. Even this junior broker job she’d worked so long for, that had finally netted her these actual walls and a window, could fade away, and she could smile to see it go. Sometimes this was alarming, but less and less so.

This morning, in the glow of the night light in the bathroom, she had done her monthly test. She peed on the little plastic strip, on the Urine Collection Pad, holding it gingerly by the ergonomic Thumb Grip, then watched for the lines to appear in the Results Window. Yes—today could be Ovulation Day. Normally—the last three months—she would have waited until evening to take the next step, but this morning she felt a vague hormonal insistence that sent her back into the bed, naked, next to Daniel. She caressed him, and then it was as if their bodies took over.

It was quick but good, better than it had been in a very long time. At first, just blind urgent fumbling. Then in the dim light of dawn his eyes opened, clear, and locked to hers. The prodigal ecstasy returned, the inexplicable merging, the goodness that was pain just too sharp and sweet to bear. She melted, lost in him and in all of everything. After they came together and he kissed the tears that ran down to the pillows from the corners of her eyes, she knew that these were the moments of her life that most closely resembled prayer.

Now, she hears the beep and whir of her computer booting up. She drains the cup and stretches a long yoga stretch. Hand on her chest, she feels the pendant that hangs under her blouse, against her skin; the gift from Daniel last May for their fifth anniversary; the glowing egg shape that she knew was his unspoken way of empowering her inner alchemy with a magic amulet. She’s sure, yes, quite sure she feels the tiniest buzz in her belly: excited cells, busily dividing. She takes one more long look out the window at the view she loves: this incredible city spread out below, with her its goddess gazing down with overflowing tenderness from the 93rd floor. And somewhere in that far tiny tangle of roofs that may be Chelsea, her dear Daniel is just waking up, and now sun glimmers on both the big rivers, and the graceful bridges are like toys, and the city seems impossibly silent and peaceful. This is a moment that is almost like flying. And way out there to the north there’s a plane approaching, just a bright little dot in the cloudless blue sky.

Why the World Needs Fiction

2011-08-20T16:53:00.000-04:00

Today I can say nothing better about writing than what I just read in George Ovitt's essay Fiction and Empathy in Atticus Review.

Why, in this bizarre circus of a world, do we even need fiction? My answer is that it might just be hardwired into us by evolution, to help ensure our species' survival, because, as Ovitt says, it "keeps us from committing the acts of cruelty that come so easily when we keep ourselves at an empathetic distance from others."

I hope you'll read this excellent article, and my thanks go out to George Ovitt and the good folks at Atticus Review!

A Splendid Time is Guaranteed for All

2011-07-22T10:25:00.000-04:00

I’m happy to be in good company when I read selections from my book at an event being billed as “A Midsummer Night's Fiction,” Saturday July 30, 6:00 pm. The fun will be happening at Oriole 9, a restaurant on Tinker Street in the center of Woodstock, NY.

Also reading his fiction will be my friend Robert Burke Warren, whose son once married my daughter in a mock Indian wedding at summer camp. The last time I heard him do a music set (at ‘Cue) I was wondering who gave him a list of my favorite songs. And he writes some darn good book reviews on Goodreads too. Here's his bio:

Robert Burke Warren has held down bass duties in rock bands, written songs with Rosanne Cash, performed the lead in the hit West End musical Buddy: the Buddy Holly Story, and introduced legions of families to interactive music via his award-winning, Grammy-nominated “rock of all ages” persona Uncle Rock (“Buddy Holly meets Shel Silverstein.” - LA Times).His prose has appeared in Texas Music, Brooklyn Parent, the Woodstock Times, vulture.com, Chronogram, and the Da Capo anthology The Show I’ll Never Forget.

The third member of our fiction threesome is Alethea Black. I’ve never met Alethea, but I do know that she’s done something difficult: she got a literary short story collection traditionally published in the current marketplace. Plus, I like that she called me a "splendid hipster" on her website (that calls for a "LOL," doesn't it?). More about her:

Alethea Black's debut collection of short stories, I KNEW YOU'D BE LOVELY (Broadway Books/Random House), has been called "smart ... full of heart" by Joan Silber and "downright brilliant" by Robert Olen Butler. Her work has won the Arts & Letters Prize, has been cited as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories, and has been read at venues around the country by such talents as Campbell Scott and Michael Cerveris.

I have no doubt this will be an entertaining evening!

Wine, beer, coffee, tea, lemonade available for purchase from Oriole 9. Flasks frowned upon.
Oriole 9: 17 Tinker Street, 845-679-5763

The event is co-sponsored by The Golden Notebook and is a presentation of Rock City Readings, curated by Teresa Giordano and Jana Martin.

About Rock City Readings:
Rock City Readings began in 2009 when, after spending a week in her Saugerties summer home, founder Teresa Giordano realized that although she was surrounded by opportunities to hike, kayak, and bike, what she really wanted was to hear good stories. So she started Rock City Readings. With some persistence and an introduction to Chronogram Books Editor Nina Shengold, she was able to host and present such authors as Helen Benedict, Jon Bowermaster, Cornelius Eady, James Lasdun, and more. Jana Martin became a welcome and frequent reader, a loyal audience member and in 2011 a partner and co-curator of the series. Jana's energy and vision brought the series to a new level of creativity.

Nondual Auster, Metaphysical Detective

2011-05-27T11:44:00.000-04:00

As I look further into both ancient and modern philosophies of Nonduality, I'm feeling obsessed by the challenge of embodying those ideas in the fiction I'm writing. Just creating the kinds of stories that once satisfied me (a sort of literary humanist realism) is no longer enough. Besides believability, poignance, and craft, I need something deeper, a sense of meaning that hides behind "reality" like a face behind a mask.

In my story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, I began to peek behind that mask by linking characters and their separate stories in subtle ways, implying the Net of Indra as a vision of background truth. In my novel-in-progress, I hope to go further, manifesting the mysterious workings of a Unified Field that paradoxically contains the dualities necessary for not only human drama but also the language required to tell the stories. I'm inching forward like a man newly blind.

But I'm grateful to have guideposts, in the form of old friends, favorite authors. With a buzz of recognition, I'm discovering new explanations for the elements that hooked me long ago on the early work of Paul Auster--in particular, The New York Trilogy. As I walked the streets of Manhattan at the beginning of the '90s, my head was often full of the deliciously strange mysteries in that slim volume, which is made up of three novellas that interconnect like an Escher illusion. In City of Glass, a novelist poses as a detective and gets entangled in a case that consumes him. In Ghosts, a private eye's surveillance of his subject leads him to existential crisis. In The Locked Room a man obsessively follows his missing friend into a labyrinth of blurred identity. This is work that borrows conventions from mystery fiction, then proceeds to subvert the genre--by some estimations failing to satisfy, by others succeeding through transcending predictable outcomes. The trilogy can be seen as a prototype of "metaphysical detective fiction," in which the world is one of questions, not answers; interpretations, not solutions; and the sleuth is seeking not "Whodunit" but "Who am I?"

Much academic ink has already been spilled dissecting Auster's work, much of it dense analysis of postmodern complexities that are intriguing but don't lead beyond the ivory tower. My reading has just scratched the surface, but occasionally I've spied threads of higher meaning that I'm attempting to trace here. I won't footnote the following ramblings, but you can follow the links if you want to go deeper.

One of Auster's primary themes, the primacy of language-based narrative, comes out of Lacanian psychoanalysis: (in Wikipedia's words) "We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of a lack. The lack is the sense of a being outside of language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that can not be told and be thought of, it can only be sensed."

For me, this is a pointer toward a nondual Absolute that cannot be captured in language, since language is inherently dualistic.

Here are a couple more writers who explore the language issue, and take it even further: Alison Russell, in Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction leans on Jacques Derrida when she says: "Logocentrism, the term applied to uses and theories of language grounded in the metaphysics of presence, is the "crime" that Auster investigates in The New York Trilogy. In each volume, the detective searches for "presence": an ultimate referent or foundation outside the play of language itself. This quest for correspondence between signifier and signified is inextricably related to each protagonist's quest for origin and identity, for the self only exists insofar as language grants existence to it." And Richard Swope’s article (recommended) in the journal Reconstruction adds, "the questor can never arrive at his desired destination, for in this world signifiers are not attached to signifieds, while the distinction between self and other no longer holds."

Presence... the quest for identity... no distinction between self and other... hmm... sounds familiar if you read current nonduality writings.

In an article called Mirrors of Madness, Steven E. Alford writes, "The New York Trilogy holds a mirror up to our own madness--the assumption of our hermetic individuality.... " and "The particular contribution of The New York Trilogy is that in each story, we see the realization of the "substancelessness" of the self in its psychological dimension...." And he quotes Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self: "One cannot become 'I' without an implicit reference to another person, an auditor or narratee--which may be the same subject qua listener. 'I' functions in contrast to 'you' in much the same way as 'here' refers linguistically to 'there' rather than any fixed location."

We are not sealed off from each other... the self has no substance... as here is there, so I am you... hmm... the echoes continue.

Interesting how much all of this sounds like a favorite website of mine, Science and Nonduality. Here's the description of their annual conference:

It seems agreed upon by spiritual masters of all traditions that the main reason for our suffering is the identification with the “I” and the way to dissipate this pain is to merge with what is beyond the “I”, to merge the looker with what is looked at. Science, on the other hand, can help us to understand how we construct and experience the “I”, as well as the states beyond it. ... Some of the topics we will explore are:

--Observing and experiencing how the “I” arises (Neuroscience, Psychology)
--Looking at the Macro (Cosmology) and the Micro (Biology, Quantum Theory) to reframe the “I” and give a different perspective and bring it “beyond”
--The collapse of concepts, identifications and models (Experiential)
--Glimpses of nondual awareness, no-state states beyond words and ideas (Satsang, Poetry, Art, Music and more...)

To repeat a reference from an earlier post: Alan Watts said that “I” is just the universe “eyeing.” We have met the vastness, and it is us.

Who am I? Auster asks the unanswerable question by blurring the distinctions between author, narrator, and character. In City of Glass he introduces a character named Paul Auster who is virtually identical to his “real” self, and gives a twist ending that leaves the identity of the story’s narrator entirely unknown. Maybe that narrator is the same as in the subsequent novellas, maybe not. You decide. It meshes well with a book I just finished, Biocentrism by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. They use quantum physics to support the conjecture that life creates the universe rather than the other way around. That there is no reality without a conscious observer. You are the author, which is to say, each of us is the author. The universe is omnicentric, as cosmologist Brian Swimme has stated.

In the early '90s when I first read The New York Trilogy, none of this was in my awareness. I only knew that there was a sense of metaphysical or ontogical mystery woven into the fabric of these three stories that I found incredibly compelling. To give a thorough sample, to really make you feel it, would require quoting the whole book. But here are a few clippings that give a hint of what Auster was doing that grabbed me then and sticks with me still.

From City of Glass:

[Why the hero, Quinn, likes detective novels] Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.
...
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within.... By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

From Ghosts:

For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself.
...
Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

From The Locked Room:

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

This discussion doesn’t approach Auster’s other writings that build on the same themes, nor does it touch the issue of Chance, that slippery sliding scale of coincidence vs. fate, which is another key element in the Trilogy and most of Auster’s other work. But for now, it’s all I’m able to tackle.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been fascinated by how nonduality can be expressed in literary storytelling. This little essay has been part of that study. So... it seems my next task, now that I’ve ingested so much theory, is to drop it all and just write.

In other words: to get on with being the Author, and to observe the universe as I create it.

Do you like book trailers?

2011-04-28T11:13:00.000-04:00

While my two novels-in-progress lie fallow and my subconscious chews on them, I’ve found myself drawn back to more visual forms of self-expression. The lion’s share of my work life has been in the field of video production, after getting a film degree and aspiring to make movies -- the serious artsy drama kind. Also, I was a photographer before I was a writer, and before that I loved to draw -- which often took the form of narrative, as in comics and storyboards.

So I’m feeling fortunate these days to be able to connect my literary and visual interests by making short video commercials for books: “book trailers” as they’re called. I started with a very short one (meant to be the first of several) for my own book, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility (see this new review). Watch the video here: http://blissplotpress.com/indivisibility.html.

Then I made two videos each for the two poetry books by my friend Djelloul Marbrook. They can be seen here on YouTube:
Flutes of the Djinn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7xW7kC4YiE
Autobiography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yR6vnMg7U8
Canvas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BrdZKdfsjA
Adeline Compton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEXXMCWTds8

I just finished this 2-minute trailer for a new novel published by a small press in Maryland, Atticus Books:
(Go to YouTube to see it bigger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdQcgJhRHsw)

It seems that book trailers are rapidly becoming a required weapon in the book marketer’s arsenal. But do they really work? Do you watch them? Do you seek them out? Do you feel influenced to take a closer look at the book, or even buy it? Do they ever have the opposite effect? Do you resist the whole idea?

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

All Fool's Day

2011-04-01T13:13:00.000-04:00

In 1392, in the famous Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer named a date that we can interpret as the 32nd of March, or April 1. Set on that day was the "Nun’s Priest’s Tale," in which (in a story within a story within a story), the Chanticleer (a rooster) and the Fox are each fooled by the other. That was the earliest recorded association between the first of April and foolishness.

For the animals in Chaucer’s fable, vanity and pride were their undoing. For the humans in my story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, there are other ways of being foolish.

Harold, who appears in several of the stories, is perpetually bewildered about why his life feels broken and his marriages crumble. His self-image as a family man does not match apparent reality. He has buried his grief and guilt over his brother’s death.

Sid doesn’t like to face any big questions. He wants a God who is an office manager, with easy answers. He’s happy when things are simple, but having a son in a coma does not fit that picture.

Marv may be the holiest fool in the book, a plumber who dreams of popcorn farming. He’s frequently clueless but has occasional inadvertent flashes of real wisdom. Too bad it’s so difficult for him to communicate them, even to his friend Sid. Marv is introduced in this little sketch from the story "This Handful of Pebbles":

Tender

When Marv's girlfriend Polly told him he needed to get his finances in order, he went out that very afternoon and bought a money clip. Shiny brass with cherrywood inlay.

It didn't work; she left him anyway. But it wasn't because of his disorderly finances. It was because of his distinct lack of gift-wrapping talent. At every holiday that demanded paper-and-ribbon dexterity, his appalling ineptitude became more clear. “I can't bear this, TM.” she said on Christmas morning. “I have to go.” After two years of living together, she moved out on New Year's Day.

Polly is the only person who ever called Marv “TM,” and it has always rung in his ears with a faint derision, especially now, when during each of their frequent phone conversations, she hints at the presence of other men in her life. He finds himself able to shrug off those oblique references, but the repeated “TM” digs at him like a claw.

Marv is a plumber. Naturally, he does not tell the guys at the supply house that at night, sometimes he weeps.

When Marv carefully makes out an estimate for a client, in triplicate, his official signature reads “T. Marvin Felch.” His first name, Tender, he keeps strictly to himself.

As I look objectively at my own work, I find it interesting that none of my female characters qualify as fools. Or maybe that’s a facile generalization. There are at least a couple of women in the stories who are less than exemplary. Still, it would appear that in my view, the women are the wise ones. So there's something I need to look at: my streak of self-deprecatory sexism.

Also, I’ve written many other male characters who make bad decisions but cannot be called fools. They might be young and wild, old and tired, alcoholic, lonely, self-deluded in some way, but they have just enough of their wits about them to escape foolishness. With Harold, Sid, and Marv, I have an authorial relationship that is subtly different, especially when I’m telling their stories in the third person. They lead me by their own unconsciousness toward intuitive lessons. They are the blind leading the blind, where walking in darkness is precisely what is needed.

The Holy Fool is an archetype in every culture. Sometimes a savior (St. Francis), sometimes a clown (Coyote), sometimes a nasty killer (The Joker), he is usually portrayed as behaving outside the bounds of “normal” society. His rule-breaking opens gateways to deeper truths that the culture needs. He is both a bad child and a tool in the hands of a God who might be loving, or might not.

My fools are different: their behavior is not outrageous, but they are still instruments in the hands of the Author, me, to open doors. I can’t say how readers will feel, or what they might learn. But for me, Harold, Sid, and Marv are friends for whom I feel a little pity and a lot of fondness. They are boys, not men, and they need my love. They embody my own inner fool, who teaches me how to be wise.

My Little Fantasy

2011-03-18T14:39:00.001-04:00

Last week I returned from a visit to New Orleans, a trek I make annually at Mardi Gras time to assist my wife, a mask-maker, with her business. This year was different. Instead of staying in a bland corporate hotel outside the city, we were privileged to stay at a friend’s old family home in the French Quarter.

To protect our host’s privacy, I won’t post photos. But imagine this: tucked away amongst the crowded Creole cottages and narrow wooden shotgun houses is a wide frontage of brick wall, variegated browns spotted with algae, its seven feet topped with an overspilling tangle of ivy. A dead-bolted wrought-iron door opens into a lush, quiet garden, small lawns trimmed with flowering shrubs of various kinds. A cobblestone walkway leads to a little ornate fountain in the shade of huge spreading oak. Magnolia blossoms float on the still surface of the water. A two-story house with deep balconies, painted a soft pink with white trim, stands beyond the fountain and the oak. Part of the house is hidden behind another leafy wall that creates a small private courtyard, an inner sanctum. At the left of the property a pink cottage is hidden behind yet another ivy-covered wall.

It feels as if you’ve left the raucous streets of New Orleans far behind.

My host tells me that the current house was once slave quarters. The main house had stood where the garden is now, but burned down in the 1800s.

The cottage had been a doctor’s office. Its narrow double French doors open into a kitchen that is tiny but well-equipped. There is a closet-sized bathroom off the kitchen. The main room is actually rather spacious, with two twin beds, a trunk between them, a chest of drawers, and an armoire that holds a TV. That quaint little dwelling, with its own green wall and its cozy cobbled patio filled by chairs and a table with umbrella, is the site of my fantasy.

This would be the ideal place to be a writer in New Orleans. To let my inner Tennessee Williams out. I imagine myself getting up on a cool spring morning and sitting out at the table with a steaming cup of chicory coffee and a notebook, jotting ideas, maybe recording my dreams from the night before. Sometimes I would stroll a few blocks to Cafe Envie for “the best breakfast in the Quarter.” A bit of rubbing shoulders with fellow denizens of the Vieux Carre, and I’d be ready to go back to the cottage and spend a few solid hours in its sheltered nook, my laptop open under the patio umbrella. Voices, engines, the sounds of the city, would come to me as if through a filter, just distant enough to keep me in contact, but easily moved to the background -- the soundtrack to whatever drama is playing out in sentences on my screen. On the hot or cold or wet days, I’d be at the little wooden table inside, just a bit more disconnected from the city, but never entirely cut off.

At any time, I could get up, step through the glass door and round the leafy wall, say hello to my neighbors if they’re out under the oak, and walk the little path to the wrought-iron door, the portal from my inner space to the big world outside. And this is not just any city, not just another neighborhood. Everybody knows: New Orleans is a rich spicy soup, a gumbo of exotic architecture, wild characters, dark history, fabulous food, and music music music. Sights, sounds, smells -- pleasant or not, everything is a stimulant; nothing is bland. For me, the writing mind kicks into high gear; stories are everywhere.

Obviously, others feel the same way. At dinner in an unpretentious little Italian restaurant, my wife and I started a conversation with a young guy dining alone at the next table. He had a degree in literature. This meal was his breakfast because he worked an all-night bartending job to support his writing habit: a novel and a poetry book done but unpublished; in progress, a non-fiction account of his colorful life in the French Quarter. A couple days later we saw him again as we ate breakfast (his dinner) at nearby tables. I passed him some publisher contact information. I never learned his name.

All of this reminded me of one of my literary heroes, Tennessee Williams. At least a decade earlier, I had stopped into the delicious little store in Pirate’s Alley, Faulkner House Books, and picked up a very slim volume about Williams. I strolled a couple blocks to Orleans Street and sat in a coffee bar to read. The book told me that during one of Williams’ periods in New Orleans, he had lived in a second floor apartment, and it gave the address -- on Orleans Street. I stood from my table, book in hand, and walked out to the street where I could see the house numbers. I turned around and there it was, the number above the door and the stairwell leading up. Tennessee Williams had lived directly above where I was sitting, reading about him.

These subtle lines of connection and coincidence are part of the fabric of my story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. It even has a New Orleans vignette. But the New Orleans stories I’ve long thought were in me have still never come out -- I suspect because I’ve never really spent time there, living, relaxing, settling in. It’s always been a business hustle. So that’s why our lovely four-night stay in the cottage behind the wall sparked this little French Quarter writer’s fantasy.

Hmm... maybe someday.

Writing My Story / Dropping My Story

2011-02-16T21:19:00.001-05:00

This last couple of weeks, my thoughts have been back in the 70s. In the second week of February, 1974, my daughter was born (the photo was taken just two hours after her home birth) -- when I was only 21 and her mother 18 (and we’d already been married for a year -- crazy children!). Birthdays have a way of superimposing present over past like images on transparent film, layer upon layer. Plus, my niece just posted old family photos on Facebook, several of which I had shot, and the memories piled up even thicker.

Today that tiny baby in the picture is an awesome grown woman. She became an entirely different being in the intervening years, as did I. Or is each of us still “the same person” we were then? Hmmm....

A slight twist on that question is whether each life is a cohesive arching novel or a series of disconnected flash-fiction stories. An article I read a year or more ago, The End of the Episode by Lee Siegel, brings into the realm of literature a philosophical question first explored by British philosopher Galen Strawson. Narrative or Episodic: which are you?

I have a “life story” like everyone has, and I can choose to see it as one big narrative, or as a series of disconnected episodes. So what would it mean to write “my story?”

My friends Fred and Marta, dedicated memoirists who run the popular Authentic Writing workshops, are strong proponents of writing one’s story. They make this powerful statement on their website: “Authentic Writing directs writers to return to their most essential, personal material – the content of their actual lives – and to render those stories not in pious ephemeral terms, but in tough, concrete ones.” I believe in this dictum, but I don’t write memoir. I prefer to write fiction. So I interpret the directive loosely: that is, my internal life, my imaginings, my metaphorical phantasms, are a crucial part of my “actual life.” And what is good fiction if not a rich, complex mixture of the “real” and the “imagined?” The difference between those two is slippery at best -- just two different doors in my mind that may lead to the same big room.

So -- my fiction is my story. And maybe it’s a tool for transcending that other story, the one that’s made up of dates and places and people in “reality” (which is to say, in my memory, behind the door labeled “Real”). In my weekly therapy group, I experience the undeniable value of dragging stories out of that Real closet, seeking the catharsis and healing of emotional re-enactment, and I prefer to keep those actualities in that setting rather than being bound by them in my creative writing life.

Why would I want to transcend my personal history? Because it is not me. A conventional wisdom worth knocking down is that one’s personal history is closely related, if not identical, to this thing we call a “self.”

What I’m pointing at here lies, I hope, at a deeper level than the Narrative vs. Episodic debate. According to neuro-philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, the self is no more than an abstraction, similar to the “center of gravity” in physics. In The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity (1986), he says we are all virtuoso novelists: “We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one's self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you're making a category mistake.” In The Origins of Selves (1989), he compares humans to beavers and spiders: “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not building dams or spinning webs, but telling stories -- and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others -- and ourselves -- about who we are.”

Dennett would probably never agree with me, but I take his pronouncements about the unreality of individual selves to support the idea of a bigger, unified Self: an overarching Consciousness or Awareness, of which each of us is an illusory part, a flickering reflection. Alan Watts says all this best with two great quotes: “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth,” and “I is just the Universe eyeing.”

We’re all in the same predicament. Linking the moments of our waking lives together across the years is a game we humans are compelled to play by fear of emptiness. Or perhaps, more than a game, this continuity of memory is a crucial survival device created by our fragile egos to organize life-threatening chaos. On Day One of a life, the human nervous system begins weaving a nearly impenetrable curtain to shield itself from the Great Beyond (misinterpreted as annihilation). As babies facing the trauma of separation from our mothers, we begin creating False Selves, neuroses that govern the rest of our lives, unless we see them and leave them behind. (For more, see Stephen Wolinsky’s Quantum Psychology ideas, such as in Waking from the Trance.)

Am I my past, the sum of my memories? Am I my psychology, my bundle of neuroses? Am I the story I’ve manufactured to keep my ego intact? Am I my family, hometown, church? Am I this aging body?

Well, back in the 70s, all these psycho-philoso-metaphysics were not the things I was thinking about. Am I my thoughts? Whatever the answer, I am very different now. It often seems that I carry around memories of some other person’s life (perhaps implanted in my mind as I slept!). Who was that guy? And the trajectory of my daughter’s path -- from her birth in a little house in Utah where my mother was once a child, to a tropical island where she now does bodywork and healing, in between diving excursions -- seems to grow ever more divergent from mine. Our connection is biological and so much more, but where are the intersections of our lives, our pasts, our selves, today and tomorrow?

In one of the best recent sessions of my therapy group, I talked about my chronic tendency to see myself as a failure with a capital F. It’s a complex issue related to infancy, adolescent rebellion, my parents’ religion, so much more... but it is also just a bad habit. An identity choice. A costume. My therapist said, “You’ve got to be willing to take off that suit.”

To grow, I must be willing to drop my story.

The only way to find out who you are, taught Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, is to find out first who you are not. You soon see the answer is neti neti: not this, not that, not this, not that (on and on).... But that’s another investigation.

Adi Shankara, 1st century Advaita (nondualist) philosopher, said: "That which permeates all, which nothing transcends and which, like the universal space around us, fills everything completely from within and without, that Supreme non-dual Brahman -- that thou are."

So then, who am I? I am That. I am a discontinuous, non-local point of awareness, or rather Awareness, manifesting as a man in this space and time.

I must tell my story / I must drop my story. I love this perfect nondual paradox, and in its precarious balance is where I live every day.

So Many Thoughts, So Little Time

2011-01-23T16:44:00.000-05:00

The first three weeks of 2011 have been full of snow and labor, accompanied always by interweaving tendrils of thought rising like smoke and drifting away into nothingness, uncaptured. The phantom we call time flexes its invisible muscle and presses relentlessly forward, duties get done, and imaginings and insubstantial speculations fall away. But perhaps they fall like breadcrumbs, leaving a path to follow back if the birds don't eat them first.

I always hope to make pithy comments on books I'm reading, but they consistently slip into the past before I can speak, and I'm on to the next one. I can only trust that they're adding to the raw material of future creation. In 2010, I finished these (in no particular order): One: Essential Readings on Nonduality by Jerry Katz; The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum; Remembering: A Novel by Wendell Berry; It's Beginnning to Hurt: Stories by James Lasdun; The Splendor of Antiquity by Cheryl Anne Gardner; Love in the City of Grudges by Will Nixon; Finders, Seekers, Losers, Keepers by Heather Rowland; The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton; Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle by Ellen Gilchrist; The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler; The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry; This Is Not About What You Think and Living with the Truth, both by Jim Murdoch; Invisible and Sunset Park, both by Paul Auster; If I Love My Kid Enough by Sara-Jane Hardman & Jean Roe Mauro; Standing as Awareness by Greg Goode; Brushstrokes and Glances by Djelloul Marbrook. Only Jim Murdoch's poetry got any space on this blog, but some of the others are finding their way into blogs-in-progress or notes on future work.

Right now, I'm reading these: Biocentrism by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander -- all of them fueling the story creation factory in my head (or the general vicinity of my head...).

I've enjoyed pondering the implications of a 2008 study that showed that we are not consciously aware of making a decision to act until as much as seven seconds after the decision has already been made in our brain. This would seem to suggest that the much-worshipped "free will" that we take for granted as humans may be an illusion. Are actions predetermined? Discuss amongst yourselves.

I haven't yet found the connection between that and the mysterious way that reading aloud one of my long-unread stories brings sudden rushes of emotion in unexpected places, choking me up. This is why I have to rehearse before a public reading, so those moments don't take me by suprise in front of an audience. The subconscious is a... a what... a tangled net, a deep abyss, a powerful engine? All of those.

Now I'm entering a deliciously revolutionary approach to cosmology through Lanza and Berman's book Biocentrism. Solid science supports ancient mystical wisdom: perhaps there is no objective reality; there is only what we are perceiving in the here and now.

And so... all these thoughts and so many more roiling around in my mind, intertwining and spiraling, begging for expression, and when I can breathe deep and find a moment's stillness, I see that they are like the weather... they come and go, but still the sky remains. That's the real thing to explore: the space between the thoughts. Problem is, it can never be captured in words. So what's a writer to do?

Just let go.

Looking Back / Being Here Now

2010-12-29T13:05:00.000-05:00

With just a couple of days left in 2010, I’m using the mysterious and unreliable tool of memory to fill the present (this moment) with the past (the last twelve months, now gone forever). I’m looking back and thinking about this “writing and publishing journey” I’m on and how it relates to “the nature of reality.”

Writing done in 2010: not much. One novel begun but shelved for now. Another in progress. Slooooow progress. Perhaps I’m biting off more than I can chew, but I want to do something thought-provoking and unusual, and I won’t be satisfied until it captures a glimpse of potential realities beyond human psychology -- without venturing into allegory, fantasy, or science fiction. Maybe we’ll see progress reports here in 2011.

This year, much of the time once dedicated to writing was diverted toward supporting my book, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, in the marketplace. Like a child just ushered out into the big world, it needs what little help I can give it. The balancing act between business and creativity is a fact of life, a tightrope walk I negotiate one day at a time.

A fun part of the writing/publishing activity this year was teaching my third semester of a course called The Writer’s Alchemy, offered by the Lifetime Learning Institute at Bard College. Using issues of the regional literary journal I published earlier in the decade as our texts, these classes explored the creative writing process through face-to-face discussion with authors selected from the journal. This year we dug into Prima Materia Volume 3: Stories We Tell Ourselves. Poetry, memoir, and fiction writers from this amazingly talented region of the Hudson Valley treated us to their insights about work, inspiration, and the publishing world. A few of our guests: Will Nixon, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Alison Gaylin.

Another highlight was the opportunity to earn and learn at the same time, as I edited Jason Stern’s book Learning to Be Human. My own learning took place through the close study of the spiritual growth of someone “not me,” another human manifestation, Jason -- as documented in his monthly Chronogram columns, which I selected and assembled into thematic groups for the book (handsomely published by David Applebaum at Codhill Press).

I enjoyed producing three video clips for my friend Djelloul Marbrook's poetry books, featuring poems that fortunately were right in the groove of my interests as well as being exquisitely crafted. Djelloul tells me the videos are doing their job in the marketplace quite nicely.

Both my editorial and video work has been partly in the service of a new venture with my designer friend Joe Tantillo, a services company for independent authors called Indie Book Studio, conceived in 2010, birthing in 2011.

And finally, I’m looking back with a measuring eye at my second year in bloggerdom: 24 little posts, such a trickle compared to the deluge so many bloggers pour forth. On balance with all the other activities that husband-and-fatherhood entail, it is what it is. It is sufficient. But... hmm... please let me know if you want it to continue.

In my first blog post of 2010, I wrote this:

Another intention for 2010 is to re-read some favorite fiction through a new lens. I'm interested in how literary fiction can incorporate principles of nonduality without losing its identity and without becoming didactic or cliched. I want to explore the expression of Unity, from ancient Advaita to the mysteries of quantum physics, in modern realistic storytelling. This is done in several ways: by looking with new interpretive eyes at work I already love, by reading new stuff, and by writing my own.

I did make some progress on this non-resolution and I suspect I’ll have something to say about it in this space in 2011... that’s part of what all this has to do with “the nature of reality.” But more important is to realize that all of this stuff -- ideas about literature and nonduality, memories of past accomplishments, plans for future action -- is merely the flicker of shadows on the cave wall. Not the real thing at all.

There is only one reality, and that is this very moment, now, in which I sit by a crackling fire and type, or you look at a screen and read these words. There is nothing else but this instant, endlessly renewed. Enjoy it.

Writings from Beyond the Half-Century Mark

2010-12-05T14:06:00.002-05:00

I'm happy to be included in a very fine book of writings just published by Holy Cow! Press. When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50 is a labor of love by the editors and includes an eclectic mix of fiction, poetry, and essays by authors whose fifty-plus years mean the words are leavened with a bit of wisdom. Or a wry perspective, at least.

My short story, "Signs," appears here as well as in my collection The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. The tale of a retired judge who's facing unsolvable mysteries, it is set partly in Woodstock, NY, with an important scene taking place at the Center for Photography of Woodstock.

From the book's Amazon page:
"These essays, stories, and poems were chosen from more than two thousand submissions of previously unpublished work. Some of the contributors — a poet laureate, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a former foreign correspondent — have long literary histories; others — a social worker, a civil service employee, a clergywoman — began to write later in life. All of them were inspired by a call that asked for fresh and honest writing from the fullness of their lives."

It's at a low pre-order price now. Check it out!

Learning To Be....

2010-11-17T21:03:00.006-05:00

A new book has just come out from Codhill Press, on which I had the good fortune to be the editor. Learning To Be Human is by Jason Stern, publisher of Chronogram magazine. It is comprised of selections from thirteen years of Jason's monthly Esteemed Reader column, in which he addressed the matters on his mind from the perspective of Awakening.

What a pleasure it was for me to edit this book! The project came at just the right time in my beginning studies of nonduality. I'm grateful for the growth experience, as well as the work.

I’ve been a regular reader of Chronogram since 1995 and always enjoyed Jason’s column, so it’s not farfetched to imagine that I had read all of these essays, one at a time, each in its original context. Depending on my own state of mind every month, some were memorable, perhaps even profound; others less so. They came like baseballs from a pitching machine, each replacing the one before it. Other readers probably felt the same way.

However, there is an entirely different, more powerful, experience awaiting the reader of this collection. I began to sense that fact as I sifted through years of raw material, rejected, selected, rearranged, and tweaked these pieces, laboring to bring them coherently together into one volume. But it was not until I took a final full pass through the compilation, from beginning to end, that I realized the new power in these pages, the impact of each essay amplified by its juxtaposition to all the others. By being gathered from multiplicity into oneness, the disparate segments are transformed. It was Aristotle in the Metaphysics who gave us this gem: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This rebirth works on several levels. First, subverting the linear march of monthly installments twists time back on itself. A book carries a simultaneity that a periodical cannot, so one experiences its content in a sort of suspended present. It’s more Now-ish.

More important, immersion in the concentrate of the author’s thought makes it tangible. Vision clears. It becomes plain that there is a deeply-felt unity of philosophy running through these explorations. They are all “of a piece.” In some, the spine is developing, in others it’s fully formed. The work is both introspective and world-engaged, both reasoned and passionate. The ideas here are mined from the deepest veins in every wisdom tradition of the world. This is not scattershot column-scribbling that makes topical glances on the way to meeting publication deadlines.

And finally, one of the real pleasures of reading these thoughts gathered from across the years is the almost journal-like sense of the author's voice, spirit, and personal trajectory. His past, his interests, his family. It is a peek into another’s life, to which we’ve been invited with heart. This is something to be approached with reverence. You will experience, as I did, the privilege of getting to know another human being a little better.

Thanks, Jason, for being my teacher.

Editing - Design - Video

2010-11-05T13:33:00.004-04:00

A new partnership is about to launch. I’m building on the independent publishing knowledge I’ve gained over the last decade, plus the intense writing focus that started a decade earlier, plus the professional video experience that began over a decade before that (we’re talking all the way back to the late ‘70s now). Add to those the top-notch graphic design and typography skills of my friend, Joe Tantillo, another seasoned veteran with independent publishing history, and the result is our new venture, Indie Book Studio. We’ll be offering editing, design, file prep, and video services to self-publishing authors and small presses. The web site is not ready to be unveiled just yet, but watch for my announcement soon. Meanwhile, here are two video trailers I produced for my friend Djelloul Marbrook’s award-winning poetry book, Far From Algiers. I like how the atmospheric first poem, “Flutes of the Djinn,” carries a powerful nonduality message in its final lines, and the second, “Autobiography,” embodies the wisdom of compassion for our child selves.

Review: Jim Murdoch’s This Is Not About What You Think

2010-10-22T14:14:00.004-04:00

I’ve mentioned in previous posts my fascination with the intersection of literary creation with nonduality philosophy. In my reading, I’ve been exploring how principles of unity are depicted in storytelling in various genres. I set an intention to write some book reviews along those lines, but haven’t yet brought my chaotic notes into order. At the same time, I’ve found myself focusing on poetry more than usual, so right now I’m surprising myself by launching my upcoming series of review/essays with today’s post: a look through the nonduality lens at a book of poems called This Is Not About What You Think (Fandango Virtual, 2010), by Scottish author Jim Murdoch.

First, let me set some boundaries and goals. Neither this book nor any others I’ll be featuring fall into the “spiritual” category. These will not be books full of transcendent verse, guidance toward enlightenment, or new age reworkings of ancient scripture. Such publications are certainly valuable, but they are not the subject of my investigation, which is focused on prose and poetry created for reasons of art and entertainment, not self-help. Also, this thing I’m calling “nonduality” may take many forms, not always explicitly about cosmic unity. My loose interpretations may brush up against quantum paradox, the slipperiness of “I”, mysticism from all traditions, the ambiguity of language, and more.

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for over thirty years. He’s working on his fifth novel, and has published two. He’s an active blogger. I became aware of him through the POD People blog, where both his novels were praised, then I became even more interested in his work when I read his mixed review of Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, where he made this simple statement: "I like books that make me think." I found it significant that he did not say, "I like books that keep me up all night turning pages." The latter seems to be the prevailing quality standard today, but not for me.

In This Is Not About What You Think, Murdoch uses the title to jump right into the philosophical realms that turn me on. His title is both paradox and wordplay. “This” may refer to... everything. The world. He’s making the point that nothing is as it seems; that your reality and mine are separate because each of us is a center of a different perceived universe. Reality is perception, which is another way of saying that the objective existence we assume for the dazzling multiplicity of things labeled “reality” simply doesn’t exist.

At the same time, the title’s “This” refers to the book itself, its content, so the phrase can mean both “These poems are not about what you the reader decide they’re about,” and “These poems are not about your thoughts” (which is to say, they are about Jim’s thoughts, not the reader’s). Each of which suggest its opposite: that indeed, the poems, once in the hands of a reader, must be primarily about whatever the reader brings to them, since the writer’s part of the dialogue is finished. He can say no more.

This shimmering mirage of multiple meanings, along with the cover image of a Rorschach-style mirrored inkblot (suggesting to me a female body, so what does that mean?), speak to me of the big conundrum: This thing that some of us try to capture with the word “nonduality”--a realization of the ultimate indivisibility of All--can never be captured with a word because the job of words is to separate one thing from another. So, contrary to conventional wisdom, when we make statements that seem elusive and duplicitous--that seem to carry their own negations--we approach as close to truth as language will ever allow. Questions, not answers, are true.

My approach to the content of the book follows the same tack: the poems that resonate with an ambiguity that suggests multi-dimensionality, that undermines assumed reality, are the ones that shine for me. The title poem opens with this stanza:
Every name and place has been changed,
what we did and why -- all changed,
the dates and times, how we really felt,
the reasons we wouldn’t stay away,
everything slightly altered, twisted,...

The accuracy of memory and story is called into question, and after asking whether it all should make sense, the poem ends,
...It’s a pretty good question.
I just don’t have any pretty good answers left
so this will have to do for now.

This rather perfectly captures the marvelous actuality of life in a universe so vast and mysterious that the wisest approach is surrender: it doesn’t make sense, I can’t explain it, this will have to do for now. It’s another way of saying: what is, is. Whatever happens, happens inevitably. This is a profound undercutting of our cherished belief in free will, the human need to feel that the decisions we make actually change the world. But we can’t really know, because what is, is. No deity need be implied; just a simple universal law. With that acceptance, a great burden is lifted. Murdoch confirms the philosophy with this couplet that closes the poem “Shadowplay”:
No, I don’t believe in destiny
but I do in inevitability.

The poem “Background Silence” works on two levels. Its context in the book tells us that it’s a poem about death, set in a hospital. With that reading, it delivers a bleak chill.

Background Silence

The silence was always there
behind the
sounds of monitors and pumps

just as

emptiness was always there
behind the
well wishes and smiles and lies

just as

the blankness was always there
behind the
words on every card you read

because

there is always something to
block our view
of the nothingness that is

coming.

But I prefer to see past, or through, the death poem here to another poem that lies underneath. Silence... emptiness... blankness... nothingness... these are words that for many readers may be frightening or dispiriting, devoid of life, and perhaps that was Murdoch’s intent. But another segment of readers, myself included, find those words liberating, spacious, more life- than death-oriented. After all, without a ground there is no figure. Without a dark sky, we see no stars. For me this poem, while observing death, simultaneously expresses the truth that, in this realm of duality, of so many “things,” our view of the vastness beyond is too often blocked. Perhaps it is by looking at a loved one’s death that most of us catch a glimpse of the unified field in which all life and death play out.

How poetry should be interpreted is an ongoing debate, and I confess that my particular view risks a protest from the poet. For the reader’s sake, I don’t want to mis-characterize this book. The collection as a whole is without a doubt more an exploration of psychology than of philosophy. Murdoch shows a skill for economically capturing family and relationship truths that are much bigger than a few words on a page, like a charcoal sketch captures a gesture. Here’s a portrait of one person that deftly reverberates into other lives:

Making Do

My mother made do almost every day of her life.

There wasn’t much to the dish. To tell you the truth,
Mum could make do
with almost nothing at all.

She’d put on the pot and just let it simmer for hours.

And all of my life so far I’ve tried to do the same
but I find mine
always leaves a bitter taste.

I wish I knew what her secret ingredient was.

Often he ends with a sculpted line that opens like a trap door into old heartache or poignant self-examination that most readers will identify with, made even richer when it’s delivered in a tone that can be interpreted either as tongue-in-cheek or not. I appreciated the generosity in these poems, the willingness to disclose emotional vulnerability, to reveal the tender heart of a child--coupled with the wry perspective of middle age.

One final note: Murdoch closes his poem “Is a Red Wheelbarrow Ever Empty?” with:
I did hear the sounds
of silence
and I think one hand clapping

and a tree fall in
the forest
but I don’t have the words to

explain them.

I’d say in response: Jim, nobody has those words. The sweat and heart evident in your crafted lines, plus the white space around them: that combo does the job. Words are clumsy at best. With this book, you’ve done as well as anyone can with such tools to both dig deep and fly high.

-------------

Get the book here: http://www.fvbooks.com/jmurdoch/jmurdoch4.htm

Science and Nonduality

2010-10-07T12:39:00.003-04:00

Later this month, the Science and Nonduality conference will take place in California. Wish I could be there! This is the stuff I want to weave in subtle ways into my fiction, and use as a lens through which to view others' literary works. Here is a sampler of last year's conference speakers:
video platform video management video solutions video player

A Criminal Manifesto

2010-09-21T20:44:00.004-04:00

Today I can't do better than to simply copy and paste my friend Djelloul Marbrook's blog post. Replace poetry with fiction, and it says what I want to say:

Divine criminals

Writing a poem is for a transformation of my being. Alchemical work. It may not be the best poem that best carries forward this project. The individual poem is not as important as the act of creating it, and the act of creating is more important than the oeuvre.

I think carpentry or mathematics could be viewed in the same light. The making of something lights a light, and it is not extinguished when the poem is read, the cabinet breaks down, the poet dies and is forgotten. It is somehow remembered, because we belong to a collective consciousness, one great being.

And I suspect that one great being consists of an infinite number of lesser beings, a pantheon.

When I consider this, when I weigh it against my religious and intellectual experiences, I see how readily paganism came to humankind, how much easier it was to grasp than monotheism. I feel no need to reconcile the two. It would be, for me, a fool’s errand. In fact, I see no real conflict, only the ideological conflicts men have chosen to pursue.

Because the better part of my poetic output has occurred late in life I have often contemplated its nature. Do I write for recognition? I don’t despise it. I wish I did. But more and more I see that I write to transform myself, to understand my materials, my experiences, and to make something of them as a kind of gift to the gods. There are writers who dazzle us and there are writers who enlighten us and there are writers who enable us to live another day, and they’re not always the same. And whenever we think we know something we’re actually in grave danger, which is how I’ve come to think of American society—in grave danger because of what we think we know. I have been considering this from my habitually odd angle of seeing things. I thought I was familiar with most if not all the major anglophone poets of the 20th Century. But in 2008 the distinguished Carcanet Press in England published Sylvia Townsend Warner, New Collected Poems, and I was speechless. I had utterly missed this breathtakingly versatile poet whose life for a time paralleled that of William Butler Yeats and whose poetry sometimes reminds one of his work. I’m going to die only a little less ignorant than when I came, barring any knowledge I might have lost in my arrival. And I suspect that if more of us could bring ourselves to espouse this forlorn conviction—rather than our other noisier and more vehement convictions—we might just resume building the society our forefathers had meant to build.

I have a feeling that every day someone who lives in a cardboard box and is familiar with frostbite and hunger has already done something more memorable than Adolph Hitler or Yeats. But whose memory, which memory? I suspect it is a memory of which we are all part, an immortal consciousness that evolves, expands outward, as the universe is said to expand.

I may have smiled at a child in a cafe and thereby done more to change the world than the sum total of my poetry, and I am more than content with this. Had it not been for a handful of such smiles I would not have survived to say this.

I believe each poem is an act of co-creation with a divine consciousness that requires me as a cooperator, a co-creator, a co-imagist. A conspirator, if you will. I believe that each poem, in this sense, is a dangerous, even a criminal act, an act of divine criminality. And I believe that politics and ideologies exist to suppress this divine criminality and are therefore quintessentially anti-cultural and regressive.

I do not think the act of creating art is carried out against society. I think, rather, that society’s impulse is always to brush off the divine fire that ignites it, like a man rushing out of a burning house and trying douse the fire that has engulfed him. Some of us, a very few, choose to walk around on fire, aware of the very high cost of our decision. Some of us, even fewer, learn to glow but not incinerate. The Sufis refer to this as standing in the fire, in the kiln from which a thing of beauty emerges. But beauty often frightens, and it is this frightening aspect of art that politics seeks to extinguish. One has only to think of Caravaggio in art and Rimbaud in poetry to fathom how establishments of any kind are unnerved by great art and literature. Isn’t that why our media are so trivial? They are at the beck and call of establishments for which trivialization is a weapon as potent as ideology, and a lot cheaper.

And when our dust is finally settled, the one great being we have served, or ill-served, remembers us not for what we should have liked to be remembered but rather for what we were impelled to do by our instincts, our grandest compulsions. And that is why I think of those cardboard shelters and the world’s most despised. —Djelloul Marbrook

Ebook Edition...Thoughts and a Coupon

2010-09-10T12:12:00.005-04:00

Call me old school... I've had mixed feelings about my book being trans-substantiated into mere digital bits, as ephemeral as a status update on Facebook. When I created it, it was with a beautiful object in mind, a thing that would offer a visual and tactile experience as well as the mental and emotional experience embedded in the stories and their interconnections. I got pleasure from going through several printed proofs, perfecting the cover and interior design, enjoying the feel of the book in my hand. And I scattered amongst the stories a number of cool drawings by my wife, Wendy Drolma.

But... perhaps there are those whose preference is the visual and tactile experience of a slim electronic gadget in their hand, a sleek little object that can hold the digital equivalent of hundreds of books. My choices of typeface, illustrations, and page layout are not important to them; they want to go directly to the messages buried in the text. So who am I to deny their pleasure?

What I wonder, however, is how our tools shape our minds. There's no question that they do; it's just that it's impossible to measure the dialogue between human inventions and human brains: mind makes tool, tool makes mind. We've consumed stories through oral traditions, from pictographs, from written language hand-inscribed on clay tablets, skins, papyrus, and eventually machine-printed paper pages... while at the same time we've evolved into the humans we are today, for better or worse.

I can't help but wonder if I'm behind the curve... if those who prefer reading on a screen also prefer a different type of story. Maybe something faster, louder, not my rather quiet little narratives with their subtle interweavings and everyman characters facing family crises and inner struggles. I hope that's not the case. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

So... while print books (the dead-tree variety, soon to be called "pbooks") seem to me to be a perfect technology, I am definitely not a Luddite, and so I have decided to offer The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility in ebook formats suitable for all the e-reader devices currently on the market. The ebook version unfortunately does not include Wendy's drawings. It's available for $4.99 here on Smashwords, and soon at many other ebook retailers.

But from now through October 31, get it for only $2.99 by entering this coupon code at checkout: HJ58M. Many thanks!

The Big Stone

2010-08-26T21:08:00.003-04:00

Here’s a sample from my book, lifted from the middle of a story called “This Handful of Pebbles,” which links to another story, “The Green Beetle.” This is a scene between Marv, a plumber who loves popcorn, and his friend Sid, whose son is in a coma after a car crash. Just a couple of regular guys doing their best to figure it all out.

Marv feels honored. Sid has asked him to come along as he visits the crumpled remains of Matthew’s VW bug in the gravel-covered yard behind Manny’s Garage and Tow. The sky is gray, the air chilly. Sid is leaning awkwardly into the cramped, glass-strewn interior, picking up papers, pens, books, CDs, and putting them into the blue knapsack from which they seem to have exploded as the car rolled, those three long nights ago. Marv watches, his hands feeling wooden, unsure what to do to help his friend. He looks around at the drab assembly of crunched vehicles and wonders if there is a sad story to go with every one.

When Sid stands, straightening his back with a groan, his eyes are wet. He looks through the tears directly at Marv and says, “Do you believe in God?”

Marv is not accustomed to this—to tears, to God-talk, to the twisted carcasses of death-trap cars. His mind goes blank except for one memory: the look and feel of the popcorn kernels he held in his palm last night—their tiny roundness, perfect symmetry, golden sheen.

“I... I don’t know,” he says. “But I believe in... something. You know, that everybody is really more than just a... a body walking around.”

Sid stares at the ground. “I never understood people’s need for religion until now,” he says.

Marv picks up a handful of pea-sized stones from the ground and holds them in his cupped palm under Sid’s gaze. “See these pebbles? See?” Sid nods.

“Now imagine they are popcorn kernels. See, every kernel is not just a little round hard thing... you apply the right amount of heat, and... pop! It turns into a beautiful flower.”

Sid sighs, “Marv, please, enough with the popcorn.”

“No, but don’t you see—they’re just like people, wrapped in their shells, but with all this beauty inside, totally unique, like a divine spirit.”

Sid’s hand suddenly covers his eyes as he lets out a guttural cry, “Aaaahhh!”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Shit, Marv! I’m all messed up, I don’t know anything, nobody ever taught me! My son might die! I mean, I need answers, not, not, you know, a handful of frickin’ gravel!” Sid turns away and strides toward the gate, his shoulders hunched.

“Wait Sid, I know, I’m sorry about the popcorn thing.” Marv hurries to catch up, the stones still in his outstretched hand. An image has leapt into his mind, and he has to speak it.

“But look—look at this handful of pebbles. Every one seems like a separate little stone, you know, an individual, right? But see, that’s not really true. Because they all came from the same big stone, see? They’re all the same stuff, all one substance.”

Sid doesn’t look as he keeps walking. “I’m gonna take Matthew’s bag to the hospital, talk to Emily, see what’s up. You wanna come?”

“Maybe that’s what God is, Sid.”

“What? What the hell is what God is, Marv?”

“The big stone. The substance we’re all made of. You, me, Emily, Polly, Matthew, everybody.”

At his car, Sid stops and turns to Marv. He takes a deep breath. “Okay. You can come with me if you stop with this. Throw the gravel away. I’m just asking you to please shut up now.”

Marv nods and doesn’t say another word. He drops the stones on the ground, wipes his hand on his jeans, and gets into the car. He senses waves of sadness emanating from Sid, silent in the driver’s seat next to him, and he feels his own separate sorrow, wishing he could have been helpful. But as they cruise the bleak streets of the city, his mind cannot stop toying with the feel of pebbles in his palm.

Craft + Heart + Truth + Philosophy

2010-08-12T12:26:00.006-04:00

An exchange of comments on Jim Murdoch’s blog set me thinking about what I want to read and what I want to write -- about my own standards for “good fiction.” This is not a new subject of contemplation for me. When I was editing the literary journal Prima Materia, I established three elements that were required in the work I published: Craft, Heart, and Truth. In the years since, I’ve decided to add another one: Philosophy.

My definitions of those terms are, of course, my own. They are entirely subjective and are always evolving. You may have different definitions, or entirely different criteria. Whatever works for you is valid.

Craft: Skillful technique. Confident, effective use of the writer’s tools -- vocabulary, grammar, syntax, rhythm, pace, structure, even punctuation. This is essential, bottom line.

Heart: Compassion for the human condition, empathy with one’s imaginary characters. An acknowledgment of the emotional component of experience, in balance with the physical and intellectual.

Truth: A sense of honesty or authentic communication, in which the author is not showboating or sacrificing believability for manipulative ends. This is not related to “facts” or “non-fiction.”

Philosophy: An underlying idea or worldview, especially when it feels like an enriching, exciting discovery. Best when under conscious control by the author, although frequently is a side-effect.

Somewhere at the intersection of these four streets is where I want to stand as a reader and as a writer, and where I tried to land with my collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. Perhaps my reader-self can let go of Philosophy occasionally. My writer-self can too, but then I find myself wondering, why bother? Storytelling is fun, but I feel compelled to serve something greater. And I get creative juice from “deep” ideas, the more esoteric the better. I’m on a path that includes group therapy and a little light study of nondualism and quantum physics, and I’m often excited to capture in my fiction all the awesome stuff I’m learning.

The main problem with this Philosophy thing is that it can too easily slide into over-concern with Theme, or even into Pedantry (oh, the horror!). So I keep in mind the truths expressed by Thomas McCormack in this essay,‘Theme’ and Its Dire Effects (thanks to Mark Barrett of Ditchwalk).

Any ideas on the subject you want to share? I’d love to hear ‘em.

Request for Feedback

2010-07-27T12:36:00.007-04:00

It has now been a year since my book, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, came out. I’m grateful for everyone so far who shelled out their hard-earned bucks to get it, and I’m aware of the risk one takes in buying a book when you don’t know if you’ll like its contents.

I’m also grateful for everyone who has given me their reactions to the book, from reader reviews on Amazon to Facebook messages to personal comments, cocktail in hand, at a party. I’ve felt touched and humbled by the praise, and of course, I’d always like to hear more.

But now, I want to hear from any of my readers who may have felt unwilling to offer any feedback. Maybe you never got around to reading it, maybe you started but lost interest, maybe the book was unsatisfactory somehow, maybe you just plain hated it. Or maybe you loved it but are embarrassed to say so. Now is your chance to tell me anonymously how the book made you feel, what it made you think about. Be general or specific, brief or long-winded, but please just let me know your honest thoughts.

The reason I’m asking for this is mix of feelings that I imagine every artist faces: we work in isolation, we don't really know what we've done, we feel the work is incomplete until the creator-audience circuit is closed, we need evidence of our own existence. So I hope you'll help me out.

Below the Comments text field at the bottom of this post is a drop-down list where you can choose to post as Anonymous. Every comment is good; please hold up the mirror and let me know we're in this together. Thanks!

Chopra and Hameroff on Quantum Consciousness

2010-07-15T12:41:00.005-04:00

I got this from the always-enriching Nonduality Blog. Deepak Chopra interviews Stuart Hameroff M.D., Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, at the University of Arizona. Here's a short excerpt:

"I don't necessarily ascribe to any particular religion, but I think through quantum physics, three essential components of spirituality can have a plausible scientific explanation. Namely, these are first, interconnectedness among living beings via quantum entanglement. Second is guidance by Platonic wisdom. Penrose also embedded Platonic values in spacetime geometry which can guide our actions, and be viewed as following the way of the Tao, or divine guidance, or whatever you want to call it. And finally, even conceivably the possibility of afterlife or consciousness outside of the body. Because if consciousness is happening in the spacetime geometry, normally in the brain, then when the blood, oxygen and metabolic energy stop driving the classical auto-pilot activity, the quantum information extending to spacetime isn't destroyed, but can perhaps leak out or dissipate in a more holographic distribution, but remained entangled. So it's possible that a soul could exist afterwards in Planck scale geometry. There could be reincarnation. I don't have any proof, and I'm not saying this necessarily happens, but if it does, here is a plausible scientific explanation."

The interview is long and covers a lot of territory, but is not hard reading. Find it here on SFGate.

Conflicted

2010-06-23T21:47:00.004-04:00

I don't like trumpeting this, but I'm doing it anyway:
One week left! Get 10% off the price of my book PLUS get a free copy of The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask. Just order the print version of The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility from Lulu.com and enter the coupon code SUMMERREAD305 at checkout, then forward the receipt from Lulu to me at order[at]blissplotpress[dot]com.

I'm uncomfortable with being a salesman. Hawking art like merchandise feels sleazy. At the same time, I want people to read my book and I want it to bring me dollars so I can recoup the (small) expense of publishing it. Sales = good. Selling = bad. I have Inner Conflict.

This is a good thing.

To be "of two minds" (or more) is much better for a fiction writer than to be comfortably reductionist. In storytelling, conflict is key. And self-observation may be the best tool (neck-and-neck with observation of others) an author can employ in creating convincing characters. Each of us is a world in microcosm, a jumble of contradictory selves like cats in a bag. We label the bag "I" just to get along in society.

Truth is, we live in a complicated universe. Complexity theory tells us that everything is a system of interrelating parts, and attempts to reduce the complexity run the risk of falsification: simplistic rather than simple. To embrace the big tangle is to think holistically. Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."

I am an entire ecology. So are you. That's the truth of being human. It feels good to accept what is.

So I occasionally play a salesman role, and will continue as long as it feels right to do so. When it doesn't, I'll stop.

I Am Not a Brand

2010-06-12T12:47:00.004-04:00

The writing/publishing journey includes a stretch of highway running through a desolate landscape of blood and horror, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It's usually just called Self-Promotion.

I've been happy to visit that territory less and less frequently in the months since my book came out, as I've learned more about walking a path with heart.

Part of the torture is the non-stop screaming of harpies with Advice: marketing, branding, networking, facebooktweettweetblahblahblah! So I was glad to come across a blog by author Maureen Johnson that expresses very well my thoughts about selling one's work on the Internet (it's funny too). Read her Manifesto here:
http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/2010/06/08/manifesto/

Thanks, Maureen!

Memento Mori

2010-05-30T16:35:00.007-04:00

On Memorial Days when I was a child, my mother would take me and my siblings to visit the grave of her older brother Adrian, who died in France in World War II. She had been a young teen at the time, the baby of a mostly fatherless family, and Adrian, in his 20s, had been the brother who had taken on the role of "man of the family." He had risen admirably to the task... until that dark day, the day of the unfathomable news.

After his death he became family legend, the golden boy, the perfect man. By telling me that I reminded her of him, my mother could keep me on the straight and narrow, a guilt cage. But that's another story.

When I visited that cemetery as a child, perhaps with my baby brother in tow, I never imagined that as a young adult I would be there again, visiting my little brother's grave. My brother Cal died at 21, as a result of his own drunk driving. My book The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility is dedicated to him because so much of it was written as my own way of processing his death.

Memorial Day is about honoring those who died in wars defending our nation's liberty. Cal was a casualty of another kind of war: the war for personal freedom in an oppressive society. A wild-child rock-n-roller, he was doing his best to break out of the deadly prison of a fundamentalist Mormon upbringing, to let his creative spirit fly, to be his true self. But he had no tools to work with, his armor was defective, and, like every young soldier who dies in battle, he didn't see the bullet coming.

In my worldview, wars are manifestations of inner human states. In that light, the struggle for individual spiritual emancipation is even more important and heroic than the gory battles over invisible borders and political non-issues.

I'll never know why the role of the dead brother was Cal's to fill, not mine. I've had to fight the battle for personal liberty myself, and he has been an immense help. Cal is the advance scout, venturing into the ultimate unknown territory ahead of all of us. If the cemetery was not 2,000 miles away from my current home, I'd honor him by visiting his grave today.

I've recently been inspired reading past installments of Jason Stern's "Esteemed Reader" columns from Chronogram Magazine, several of which explore a truth that is crucial to healthy living, something that wisdom traditions from Sufi to Samurai urge: "Die before you die." Consider your own death, prepare for it, know that you are temporary, and then live to the fullest in the here and now.

Memories of my brother, this blog entry, the book it refers to, even Memorial Day itself -- each serves me best as a memento mori. Memento mori is Latin for "Remember you must die," or in another interpretation, "Be mindful of dying."

Let's let this Memorial Day and every other day remind us: Life is short; live it.

Writing and the Mask (Again)

2010-05-13T12:30:00.002-04:00

This is a re-post from last year, resurrected to coincide with the opening of my wife's new mask studio/gallery in Phoenicia, NY. It's an essay that I revised a bit from my introduction to an anthology about masks (get a free copy). It gives a taste of my thoughts about the art of writing fiction....

Writing and the Mask

I am wearing a mask. Right now, as I write this. It is not a physical thing covering my face; rather, it is in the "I" that begins this paragraph. Again, now: I write "I" followed by a verb, and you the reader perceive me, a writer, telling you his own "truth." But no matter what I write, "I" is a lie. And no matter what I write, "I" is also the truth.

This conundrum is explored in an anthology, The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask, that I co-edited along with professional maskmaker Wendy Drolma (Klein). The book explores the meaning of the mask through poetry, art, "fiction" and "non-fiction" (I put those words in quotes because, in the end, their definitions are entirely elusive). What you are reading here is a revised version of the book's introduction.

If I were writing here in a mode called "fiction," you would gladly accept the mask and maybe even think, "how creative." In the anthology, when Robert Louis Stevenson wears the face of his invention Dr. Jekyll and says, "I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune...," we enter into a kind of theater and suspend our disbelief. Our pleasure is in believing the obvious lie. When Barry Yourgrau starts the final story, "I come into the kitchen...," we're not so sure that this is an invented persona speaking, but we go along happily as his darkish whimsy unfolds. Mark Sherman's "I" may make us squirm a bit because, while his story has the trappings of fiction, the narrator, we think, just might be Mr. Sherman himself, pretending otherwise. The mask grows thinner.

But there are "non-fiction" works in the volume as well. For instance, this introduction. Since it is not fiction, it must be true, right? The mask of "I" is not acknowledged; it is a sly disguise that looks similar enough to my real face (is there such a thing?) that you don't suspect I wear a mask at all. In the anthology, Michael Perkins, Sparrow, and Gabriel Q all write an "I" that also makes no suggestion of a mask. Does that mean their works are "true"?

Samuel Avital, Sophie Rogers-Gessert, Vincent Lloyd, and George Ulrich don't need an "I" at all; in their essays, they wear the masks of authority, of objectivity, of educated reason. But simply to set pen to paper, one must adopt the persona of "writer." Carl Jung said, "The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual."

I write fiction. I believe in the power of imagination, and I have often "hired" someone not myself -- a persona -- to narrate my stories. When Oscar Wilde said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth," he was right: behind that mask, my conscious agendas, my censors, my carefully constructed "self," all disappear, and without "me" in control, I tell the truth. The real truth. It slips in through the unguarded back door. It can't be otherwise, because I am I.

Except, of course, for the Buddhist truth that "I" is just an illusion anyway. As Alan Watts said, "I" is just the Universe "eyeing." Each of us is both the center and not the center: double in nature. Dr. Jekyll can't face himself as he writes about Hyde: "He, I say -- I cannot say, I." He denies his own double nature even as he admits it. In a similar self-deconstruction, H.G. Wells' Invisible Man turns his unhappy being into apparent nothingness and then, hiding in a costumier's shop, must put on a mask and false whiskers to make himself again perceptible in the world. The masked man always dons another mask, and so it goes.

Pablo Picasso said: "Art is a lie that tells the truth." The anthology The Other Face, our little work of art, is full of masks, but it is also full of truth. I hope readers approach it with an open heart, and receive wisdom. And as for whether these warm wishes come from "me" or from some persona in my employ, I feel as Jorge Luis Borges does, when he closes the story "Borges and I"...
"I do not know which of us has written this page."

----

The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask, published by Bliss Plot Press, is available from Wendy Drolma Masks.

Get a Free Book!

2010-04-30T21:18:00.006-04:00

During the months of May and June 2010, buy a copy of my story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility (print version only: $14.95) from Lulu.com and Bliss Plot Press will send you a free copy of The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask, a fascinating anthology of writings about the mystery of masks (an $8.00 value).

Get more information about both books at BlissPlotPress.com.

When your purchase at Lulu is complete, you'll get an e-mail receipt. Just forward that receipt to Bliss Plot Press, along with your shipping address, and they'll put The Other Face in media mail at no cost to you. Send the receipt to: order [at] blissplotpress [dot] com .

Two good books for the price of one!

The Human Social Ecosystem

2010-04-20T21:13:00.004-04:00

Here are a few thoughts inspired by Earth Day...

I was pleased to discover that the term "ecology" was first defined by zoologist/artist Ernst Haeckel in 1866--pleased because Haeckel has been for years an important presence in my home, since his beautiful illustrations of radiolarians (single-celled organisms) are a primary source of inspiration for my wife Wendy Drolma's work as a maskmaker and sculptor (explore her site; the studio tour video shows Haeckel's presence).

That line of influence stretching across centuries is, in my view, an example of how the complex ecosystem of human interaction operates. The field of Human Ecology shares much with the social sciences and is built on concepts from ecology like interconnectivity, community behavior, and spatial organization--all subjects that interest me. But while Human Ecology's interdisciplinary studies focus on the tangible, I'm more fascinated by the ephemeral: invisible but impactful threads of consequence radiating in all directions among us, in the form of objects, ideas, events, subtle contact shared by absolute strangers. While the Haeckel>Drolma connection is easy to see, the less visible vectors of influence are just as real, with the power to shift our thoughts, nudge our behaviors, send our lives along new trajectories.

We're all part of a vast, complex network of interdependencies, give-and-take, message-and-feedback, an invisible social ecosystem. Of course, the Internet itself, and more specifically, the behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and all their smaller siblings, come to mind immediately. More and more digital ink flows every day exploring just what the social networking phenomenon means to human life and development. But just like Korzybski's "the map is not the territory," those sites are powerful tools, but are still merely cyberspace metaphors for the real thing: our true interconnectedness.

In The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, I've attempted to illustrate, or embody, some of the ways the human ecosystem works, and to provide another type of metaphor for Nondualism. The stories are linked in a variety of obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Several of the stories are made up of smaller stories, apparently disconnected, but sharing a strand of commonality that has a definite, if difficult to see, effect on the characters. In the story "Echoes: Five Men Speak," the strand is a music CD that passes from one man to another, all strangers to each other. That contact is not meaningless; in each case it has some small consequence... but as the Butterfly Effect tells us, even the smallest of actions can have big results.

"Echoes" was originally published in the online journal Jerry Jazz Musician, here. I hope you'll read it.

And I continue to hope that little by little, our species is inching toward a shared vision of our Oneness.

Happy Earth Day!

A Writer Wrestling with Unity

2010-03-29T14:00:00.009-04:00

Back in December a shortened version of my story "Baptism" was published in a literary journal called RELIEF: A Quarterly Christian Expression. The Christian Right has rubbed me so far the wrong way (I mean, really far) that I had felt real misgivings about submitting the story to this journal. On the other hand, they seemed relatively open-minded ("Christian writing unbound" is their slogan), and I felt my story about a Mormon boy and his adopted Navajo brother had some truth to speak to such an audience, so I sent it anyway.

It felt good to see the story in print (besides in my book), and the editor subsequently invited me to write a guest post for their blog. Again I felt reticent at first (my ego: I don't want people thinking I'm Christian!), but I enjoyed recapping how my journey toward publication of my book coincided with my entry into nonduality philosophy. And now I see how the blog's title, A Writer Wrestling with Unity, has another meaning as well: I'm confronting my own resistance to inclusivity, to embracing the "other," even as I learn the truth of our oneness.

The guest blog appeared in February. I hope you'll read it:
http://www.reliefjournal.com/2010/02/27/a-writer-wrestling-with-unity/

Sharing the Stage (Take Two)

2010-03-23T12:32:00.004-04:00

A month ago, a Big Scary Snowstorm forced the rescheduling (to now: Spring!) of a reading event that I'm very pleased to be part of, with Gail Godwin, John Bowers, and Heather Rolland (details below). I'll be reading from my story collection The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility (see links to reviews on the right). Since one of the themes of my book is the interconnections among people and the subtle influences exerted by those invisible circuits, I've been thinking about the other three readers with whom I'll be sharing the stage....

I'm especially humbled to be on the same program with Gail Godwin. She's a literary celebrity, with three National Book Award nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and five novels on the New York Times best seller list. Although we both live in Woodstock, I met Gail only once, briefly. It was May, 2002, and she was attending the launch party of my publishing project, Prima Materia, a literary annual for Hudson Valley writers. She was the guest of one of the contributors to that first issue, Djelloul Marbrook (insightful blogger, fine fiction writer, prize-winning poet), and his wife Marilyn, who have since become dear friends of mine. Gail was raised in Asheville, North Carolina, a place where I was once very pleased to discover a delightfully countercultural health food store, a bright spot on a long, dreary journey along the corporate treadmill of the interstate.

I've never met John Bowers, but chances are good we've seen each other. He lives in Phoenicia, NY, a quaint/funky village that is the home of many of my friends, my daughter's school, and frequent breakfasts, lunches, and gallery strolls by my wife and I. John is also a literary star, with seven published books, many articles and essays, and twenty years as a writing professor at Columbia University. I found myself in his home town, Johnson City, Tennessee, just last month. It was a welcome stopping point on a dark wintry night after twelve hours of driving, heading home from New Orleans. Wendy and I were even able to have a good Indian meal and a glass of wine, not our usual highway fare.

Heather Rolland and I share a number of friends on Facebook (that feeble simulacrum of the Net of Indra) and she's a member of the networking website I started, Hudson Valley Writers. I was aware of her first novel, and knew that she and I could probably talk shop about the experience of independent publishing. We had only that strange, disembodied cyber-connection, like electronic eavesdropping, that is today's version of "friendship," until she attended my reading/booksigning event last Fall. I enjoyed meeting her and her husband and daughter, but was too busy signing books to chat at length, so even though we've met in person and live in neighboring towns, the connection is still mostly in cyberspace. I look forward to hearing her read.

This event is an example of what I love about the Hudson Valley, and in particular, our northern Ulster County corner of it: the creative talent that bubbles up out of these woods and small towns is amazing. There must be something in the water.

Please join us. Here are the details:
Sunday 3/28, 4 pm
Inquiring Mind Coffeehouse and Bookstore
65 Partition St., Saugerties, NY
845-246-5775

Gail Godwin will read from her new novel Unfinished Desires: http://gailgodwin.com/
John Bowers will read from his new novel Love in Tennessee: http://www.johnbowersauthor.com/
Heather Rolland will read from her novel Finders, Seekers, Losers, Keepers, and forthcoming sequel Honey Melon Fudge: http://www.heatherrolland.com/

Arrive early, order coffee, browse books, chat with the authors. Hope to see you there!

For Free

2010-03-04T20:47:00.008-05:00

Driving to work, I heard the old Joni Mitchell song, "For Free," in which she compares herself to a street musician:

I slept last night in a good hotel / I went shopping today for jewels / The wind rushed around in the dirty town / And the children let out from the schools / I was standing on a noisy corner / Waiting for the walking green / Across the street he stood / And he played real good / On his clarinet, for free

Now me I play for fortunes / And those velvet curtain calls / I've got a black limousine / And two gentlemen / Escorting me to the halls / And I play if you have the money / Or if you're a friend to me / But the one man band / By the quick lunch stand / He was playing real good, for free

Nobody stopped to hear him / Though he played so sweet and high / They knew he had never / Been on their TV / So they passed his music by / I meant to go over and ask for a song / Maybe put on a harmony... / I heard his refrain / As the signal changed / He was playing real good, for free

It reminded me of the street musicians I always encounter on my annual Mardi Gras trip to New Orleans -- some very talented, some not so much, all nobodies struggling for a buck.

Or not. Because it also reminded me of the experiment conducted by the Washington Post in January 2007, in which world-acclaimed virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell, incognito, played masterpieces on a Stradivarius for 45 minutes in a Washington metro station during the morning commute. Of 1,097 passersby, only 7 stopped to listen at length. Most ignored him entirely. Donations totalled $32, although on the previous night Bell had played a concert where seats sold for $100.

I'm not commenting on the rat race or cultural ignorance or mercenary urges, nor am I pondering the meaning of context, "art without a frame," etc. Instead, I'm thinking about the role each of us plays in the drama of life... how we were chosen for the part, how well we perform despite the payback or lack thereof, how graciously we accept the role we've been given.

In my view, fame and fortune are not earned. Neither intensity of labor nor quality of work has a cause-effect relationship to worldly rewards. Some folks have been selected to be stars; others have not. The universe has birthed everything we see to be exactly as it is. Nothing can be otherwise. If a droplet in the ocean were sentient, it might easily convince itself that it is a powerful free agent whose own decisions make it go this way and that, up and down, here and there, without ever being aware of the ocean's vast currents at work underneath its every move. While human free will itself may not be an illusion, its consequences are. When someone lifts himself by his own bootstraps, it's because he's playing the "Bootstrap Guy" in the script. He deserves praise for his sweat, but that does not mean it actually caused his success.

"He was playing real good, for free..." Joni saw that she and the street clarinetist were equals, just performing on different stages, and being rewarded differently. The unfortunate fact is that too many people didn't listen because "They knew he had never / Been on their TV." If Joshua Bell had been a more familiar face from pop culture, more people would have paid attention. To them, fame equals value... consensus is more important than personal perception... nothing not already known is worth knowing.

In the literary arena, there are blockbuster author-celebrities, hardworking genre craftspeople, fringe-dwelling creatives, and an ever-growing mob of scrambling self-published storytellers and poets with skills from the ridiculous to the sublime. I'm among that latter group. Apparently my role is not to be a big-selling author but to be an independent artist, and my responsibility is stay true to myself, do the best work I can, and let go of the results.

It's not always easy to duck the missiles of "fame equals value." Invisibility hurts; not so much when it's "me" who's invisible, but rather when it's my work -- work that I know is good -- that's ignored. Ignored because I have no "platform" -- that is, fame. One of the ever-more-prominent protocols in self-publishing is to give away one's work in e-book format as a way to jump-start a following. In other words, to be that street-corner clarinetist, playing real good, for free. I've had very mixed feelings about that.

This discussion intersects with the always lucid thoughts of Mark Barrett on Ditchwalk.com. His March 1 post called "Doctorow, Anderson and Godin, Oh My" shines an Emperor's New Clothes light on the "free content" movement. I'm with Barrett: I don't want to be part of the trend toward celebrity as a measure of value. I say let celebrities play their celebrity roles; I'll play my writer role, thank you very much. However it works out, that's how it works out. And I lean toward Barrett's (old-fashioned) ideas that professionalism can be indicated by price (see his March 2 post as well as others about "platform").

Trouble is, I had already put my book in digital form on Smashwords.com with the tag, "You set the price!" Then, after looking at it there in the various e-book formats, I felt so disgusted by the utter lack of design or formatting consistency that I did nothing to let the world know. This is not what I ever wanted my book to look like. Sure, the stories are really my work, not the page design. But no, for me it's more than that -- if it's not a beautiful object, I'd rather not have my name on it. Current conventional wisdom would suggest that I'm cutting my own throat with this attitude. Maybe I'll change; time will tell.

Eckhart Tolle tells me to ask myself, "Can I be the space for this?" Part of what that means to me is, to follow Byron Katie's presciption, "loving what is." Opening my arms to welcome the actual... breathing... knowing that in this moment, all is well... not resisting my emotions, my intuitions, the whispers of truth from the world. These positions all of us hold in the heirarchy of this dreamscape, these roles we are playing in the drama, they are exactly the right roles. For free or not, let's play them the best we can.

Sharing the Stage: READING EVENT RESCHEDULED FOR MARCH

2010-02-19T11:21:00.003-05:00

I'm very pleased to announce that I'll be part of a reading/booksigning program that includes Gail Godwin, John Bowers, and Heather Rolland, Sunday 2/28 in Saugerties, NY. I'll be reading from my story collection The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility.

Details:
Sunday 2/28, 4 pm
Inquiring Mind Coffeehouse and Bookstore
65 Partition St., Saugerties, NY
845-246-5775

Gail Godwin will read from her new novel Unfinished Desires: http://gailgodwin.com/
John Bowers will read from his new novel Love in Tennessee: http://www.johnbowersauthor.com/
Heather Rolland will read from her novel Finders, Seekers, Losers, Keepers, and forthcoming sequel Honey Melon Fudge: http://www.heatherrolland.com/

Arrive early, order coffee, browse books, chat with the authors. Hope to see you there!

Indivisibility Book Trailer #1

2010-01-27T20:36:00.005-05:00

Does a video really sell books? I don't know, but conventional wisdom says you gotta have one. Or more. Truth is, I had fun putting this little one together (only 35 seconds), and I look forward to doing more, and longer ones, in the future. Enjoy!

To see it bigger, go to YouTube.

Intention, Not Resolution

2010-01-07T20:29:00.003-05:00

I don't do New Year's Resolutions. "Resolve" seems a stony thing, grim and inflexible. In a mountain river, I'd rather be water than boulder.

Rather than make a resolution, I prefer to set an intention.

An intention seems to better fit the truth I've felt attracted to lately: that free will is merely an illusion. As Jay Michaelson says in a Huffington Post essay that brings nonduality into pop culture: "Free will" exists as a psychological reality, but not as an ontological one. Like the individual self, it's a mirage: "You" exist, sure, but you exist just like a wave on the ocean: here one minute, gone the next, and never apart from the ocean itself. In that light, taking a firm-jawed, self-important stand on a "resolution" just seems silly.

So I have intentions. One intention for the year is to return to regular journaling, using ink on paper. My most creative and prolific writing years were when I was freely journaling, filling up book after book with both mundane record-keeping and giddy flights of inspiration. Then, I would develop the eureka moments on a keyboard, transforming them into fiction. As I've moved further into the cyber-world, my use of dead trees has declined, but so has my creative juice. For me, there's magic in the hand-pen-paper circuit.

Not only that, but blogging is unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, it's too public, which for me means it's not spontaneous enough. I craft my blog too carefully for it to fill the uninhibited role of a journal. Second, it feels transient, not actually real. When I'm gone from this sphere, I want my children to have a physical record of my life, rendered in my own handwriting, caressable by their fingers, easy to pull off a shelf... not merely a list of hyperlinks or a shiny thingy full of binary code inaccessible without an electric machine. Maybe I'm not confident there'll be an infrastructure left by then.

Another intention for 2010 is to re-read some favorite fiction through a new lens. I'm interested in how literary fiction can incorporate principles of nonduality without losing its identity and without becoming didactic or cliched. I want to explore the expression of Unity, from ancient Advaita to the mysteries of quantum physics, in modern realistic storytelling. This is done in several ways: by looking with new interpretive eyes at work I already love, by reading new stuff, and by writing my own.

This intention does not bite off too much: I'll begin by looking again at some of Paul Auster's early work, which has been of vital importance to my creative development, and see if it offers up new insights through my nonduality glasses. Then, if I feel so inclined, I'll move on to Nabokov, Brautigan, Marquez, others. And I'll keep an eye out for writing I haven't already read that seems likely to feed this hunger.

Maybe I'll even write about what I discover. Maybe it will appear here on this blog. Or not. Maybe it will only appear as scribbled notes in my journal. Or not. It will be what it will be. After all, it's not a resolution, only an intention.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T17:05:00.004-05:00

All of 2009 for me was focused on bringing my collection of stories, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, into the world. I deeply appreciate all of you who bought it, read it, reviewed it... and I hope it touched you in some small way that lasts.

I just returned home a few days ago from a little adventure to the opposite coast, where encounters with family, new and not-so-new friends, and many strangers, served to further cement my awe at this vast web of interconnectedness that gives us unenlightened humans an occasional glimpse of the Unity behind the illusion of our everyday lives.

Now I'm getting ready to turn this computer off for the final time this year, and head toward a celebration with close friends, children, pets, music, good food and drink, and much love.

Thank you for reading, and may your 2010 be full of peace, insight, and many happy moments!

An Austerrific Moment (my first blog post 3 years ago)

2009-12-16T13:11:00.002-05:00

On MySpace three years ago today, I posted my first blog entry ever. It still expresses something that feels true to me, so here it is again:

I always dig it when these things happen: Last weekend, I had just eagerly retrieved my copy of Paul Auster's 2003 novel Oracle Night, months overdue on loan to my sister, and begun reading it for the second time. I had only progressed maybe a dozen pages, enough to revive my memories of the book's delicious, convoluted mysteriousness -- its novel within a novel within a novel, in which men encounter chance events that lead them to the limits of themselves -- when I put the jacket flap between the pages to mark my spot and laid the book aside, to be continued later. That night, I went to a party at a lovely little cabin in the woods of the Catskills and met several strangers, among whom was an interesting man -- I'll call him "A." -- who spoke about his "former life" in New York City, where he had published a prestigious photography magazine whose name was familiar to me because of my own history with art photography. The following day I indulged my curiosity and looked up the magazine on the Internet; I only knew A.'s first name, and could not find it on the magazine's website. But with some help from Google, I deduced that his story was true. On the website, under the heading "Artists A-Z", I read a couple of Forewords by the editor (A.'s former wife). I noticed that they had published a number of fiction pieces, and the first link on the list was Paul Auster. When I clicked on the link, it opened an excerpt from Oracle Night, familiar because I had just read those very same sentences. The excerpt ended at the precise spot where I had left off reading the day before.

This may seem like merely an odd little coincidence, but I felt deeper currents flowing. My sister was with me at the party, and she had, just weeks before, left her husband and moved from their nice suburban home into a small apartment. She didn't reveal that to A., but a good part of our conversation with him was about making big life changes: the death of one's old life; the birth of one's new life. As I (and many of us at the party) had done, A. had left his city existence for an entirely different kind of life in the mountains, where an unexpected set of country joys and struggles replaced the old urban set. But the synchronicity at work was not about city vs. country living, but about the deeper mechanisms operating when a person makes a bold commitment and leaps from one life to another. In the realm of soul, it is as literal a death and rebirth as is the process going on at a cellular level every day, by which our bodies entirely recycle themselves every seven years. Its closest analog is suicide: a conscious rejection of the status quo in favor of the mystery. And quantum reality suggests that if we could see beyond "death," it would be revealed as just another life transition perhaps not much bigger than moving from the Lower East Side to the Catskills. So there we all were, A. and I and all the rest, a houseful of suicides chatting, while on my endtable at home, Auster's book was sitting with jacket-flap marking the synchronous page. That page was where the narrator, a writer, was beginning a new novel based on an obscure episode in Dashiell Hammet's "The Maltese Falcon," in which a man narrowly escapes an accidental death, suddenly sees his mundane life in a new light, and, on a radical impulse, leaves it behind -- job, family, and all. Auster's novel-within-a-novel then begins its own imaginary investigation, carefully following a parallel thread in the same philosophic fabric.

Concurrently, another parallel was at work. For the past few months, I had been reading and thinking a lot about the nature of the universe, through the lenses of both quantum physics and ancient wisdoms, contemplating the way that the macrocosm and the microcosm are mirrors of each other. We live in a fractal world; whatever scale we choose to observe, the same patterns are visible. The atom is analagous to the solar system; each cell running its errands in the ecology of a human body is analogous to the full individual filling a role in society. Each of us watches from the center of our own world in this omnicentric universe, surrounded by texts inside of texts inside of texts, which spiral both directions into infinity as they busily scroll out their storylines in full Everywhereness and total Simultaneity in the fabric of space/time. So when Auster tells his tale of a novelist telling a tale that includes another novelist who has told a tale about a man who sees the future, he is capturing a truth about the unity of reality and giving us clues for predicting our own futures in the spiral of time, whether for good or ill. It seemed like perfect coincidence to me that the topics on my mind were suddenly before me on the page.

Auster has said that although occurrences like this are constants in his life, they are essentially meaningless. I disagree. In my opinion, they are evidence that, while our everyday lives may be wrapped up in the myth of Three Dimensions plus Time, and in the illusion of our own separateness from everything else, there is a deeper truth. All events and objects and sentient beings in this omnicentric universe are One, and are occurring in the same infinite Now. What we call "physical reality" is totally unverifiable; all is perception, and each of us perceives from his own center. Like the widely separated particles in the nuclear physics lab, dancing in tandem with an invisible connection, tiny flickers of energy in the quantum field occasionally reach the surface of our awareness in a manner that we, with our limited view, can only interpret as "coincidence." And mind-body medicine has shown us that thoughts and feelings are events in the field just as truly as are molecules undergoing chemical reactions. Synchronicities are the rhymes in the poem of One Reality. If you're tuned in, they're everywhere.

Melody Lines

2009-12-01T13:52:00.003-05:00

Among my story collection's various threads of interconnection are a recurring character (Wes, the sax player), a musical "score" (jazz), and a thematic element (alcoholism), all introduced in the story "Blues for Jane." Later, Wes gets the full historical treatment in "The Saxophone," invisibly influences various strangers in "Echoes," and makes a brief appearance in someone else's story, "A Confession of Love and Emptiness." In these opening paragraphs, we meet him in the midst of a self-pity crisis...

Blues for Jane (excerpt)

I tried to be Sonny Rollins tonight, but instead I sounded like Sonny Ferguson, the fat kid who played second saxophone in my high school marching band, honking like a donkey next to me, twenty years ago. All my cells, angry, buzz: just another tenor man, just another one, one more tiny loser cringing in a dark corner of big cruel America. This tour was a waste, and I can’t drink.

Maybe it’s finally time to give up.

I stand in the shower, in the slimy motel steam, until my fingers are crushed velvet, and when I come out, Jane is in bed, lights out, eyes closed. The rainforest drum and sizzle seem to follow me and I realize the desert sky is pouring outside. Today was a hot, still day, dry and dusty, with that waiting tension in the air, the familiar electrons-humming-in-wires tension like before the first note of every gig, the dull tension that is now being washed away by this western rain, no same old New York drizzle, but pounding big drops of rain, much much bigger than tears.

As I stand naked in darkness, holding the drape aside, staring out at the wet street, Jane comes up behind me. She wraps her arms around my stomach, presses her breasts against my back, and whispers, “Come to bed with me?”

“I’m not tired.” I don’t turn.

“I know. Let me feel some of that energy.” She strokes my chest.

“I feel like taking a walk.”

“But it’s raining.”

“Right.”

I feel her smile; her cheek rests on my shoulder blade. She sighs and murmurs, “Boy, are you a piece a work.”

My breath goes out with a sound like opening a beer can. It’s sarcastic and dismissive, like I hoped. Her face lifts from my back and her voice goes sharp. “Wes, give yourself a break, for God’s sake.”

So maybe I’m finally getting to her. She’s been slow; with other women it was always fast work, boom bam, woman gone, me alone again, bitter drunk. But that was before.

For a blink she’s ice, but then she melts, touches me, her voice a whisper, low and smooth. “You know, I get so hot watching you play, the way you hold your...”

“Yeah, yeah, man and his tools. Everything gets you hot.” I forcefully remove her long arms from around me. “I’m going out.”

I get dressed; Jane doesn’t move. I feel something, maybe good, tough anyway, leaving her flat. This is not the first time. She stands there naked, not sure what to do with her hands so she hugs herself, a tall girl with big sad eyes, looking at the wall, at vacation romance fading, a film’s end, black. I button my shirt, slow fingers moving up like I’m playing a ballad on worn brass keys.

I remember there was a little of her look, the lonely part of her look, in those wide eyes the night I first saw her in the little club on Second Street in Jersey City, watching me solo. Those eyes were lighthouse beacons piercing the smoke, headlights in the fog bearing down on me, a truck, a train of trucks, roaring like wind through misty midnight straight at me, me and my rambling solo, and suddenly I was caught, pinned in the glare, so self-conscious, every fingering suddenly suspect, my stance pretentious, my breathing so obviously faulty, and I closed my eyes and prayed, closed my eyes and fell away from that wide pure stare into the rhythm, and breathed, and finished okay. As Joey began his piano riff, I opened my eyes to meet hers, wide again but with a little smile, a shy smile, no more trucks in the fog, just a girl, and she clapped her hands, and I made a small bow, and then I watched her move through pools of light and smoke, moving like a young racehorse, all legs, long legs rolling from the hip joint, the young awkwardness of big feet, big hands, big shy head, eyes down as she moved through the dimness in long steps, all odd grace, all awkward pieces joined into smooth flow, big eyes glancing at me once more from the bar, and I knew I’d see her after that set, and after that night.

Now, here, my hand is on the door. She’s looking away.

It's All a Fiction

2009-11-20T16:28:00.007-05:00

A week ago as I introduced the story I read at my booksigning at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, there were several things I meant to say but didn't. Things that simply left my head the instant I stepped to the microphone. Hmm... by now I should have learned to make notes.

One of those things was that I love the blurry boundary between fact and fiction. I chose to read at CPW because in my story "Signs" I set an important scene there and had conjured up two fictional bodies of photographic work to fill the gallery walls. It was a real place, but filled with imaginary art and imaginary people, like a parallel universe -- almost ours but just a bit different. As I read, it was as if apparitions from the story floated half-visible in the room with us.

In another story in my collection, "A Confession of Love and Emptiness," the narrator (a total fiction) faces the legacy of being related to (the real person) Peter Roget, of Thesaurus fame. And he watches as his father's demolition company (entirely imaginary) tears down a neighborhood to make way for Lincoln Center in New York City (truth) -- the very block that was the (actual) childhood home of Thelonious Monk. He goes on to say:

Ten years later, Alice and I sat in the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center, watching LaBoheme, Rodolfo singing to Mimi that her beauty is like the sunrise, and Mimi, dying, crying back, no, like a sunset, and Alice was in tears, but I was seeing all around us the faint outlines of buildings, brownstones with light in the windows, and through the shimmering walls I could see the rows of finely dressed New Yorkers in a grand golden hall. It was like those Kirlian photographs I’ve seen since, where the image of a leaf is whole, unharmed, although its tip had been torn off before the photo was made, and I thought: build and destroy, build and destroy, that is the way of the universe, the way of God. All things built, once destroyed, leave their imprint forever, ghost shapes that linger in the gaps, made of quarks and neutrinos and photons, everywhere, like the memory of water that hides in ice, like the possibility of ice that hides in water.

The ghostly side-by-side existence of multiple realities -- fiction/fact, past/present -- is more than just a writerly game that's fun to play. For me, it's a metaphoric description of actuality.

It works on more than one level. Quantum physics and string theory provide the foundation for simultaneous time, distanceless space, and an infinite number of parallel universes. Ancient wisdom traditions like Advaita (literally, "not two") tell us that what we see as reality is all an illusion: "Maya." A fiction. Our lives, our individual selves, the multitude of separate things we see around us -- all just ego-manufactured stories masking the Unity, the "ultimate indivisibility," that is the world's true nature.

Borges was writing something true when he described the infinite maze of possibilities in his story "The Garden of Forking Paths." Literary fiction holds a mirror up to the larger fiction of the world, and gives us a way to see past the details of our lives toward a larger context. That experience can be even richer when we consciously layer the "imaginary" over the "real," and that slippery juxtaposition presents us with the suddenly beautiful face of Mystery.

This Self-Promotion Thing

2009-11-03T12:35:00.006-05:00

My book hit the marketplace in late July and here it is November already! After what feels like much too long a delay, I have scheduled a public reading/booksigning event, graciously hosted by the Center for Photography at Woodstock (yes, that Woodstock, in New York state), Friday November 13, 6:00 pm.

CPW is a world-class, 32-year-old, nonprofit institution dedicated to supporting artists working in photography and related media. But wait a minute -- my book has nothing to do with photography. Why would they host a literary reading? Well, besides the fact that CPW is run by very nice people, it is also a prominent setting in my story "Signs," in which the elderly protagonist's small but important journey of self-discovery is furthered by his encounter with the images on the gallery walls -- entirely fictional photo exhibits, I might add. CPW Executive Director Ariel Shanberg even told me, "Hmm, I'll be interested to see what your ideas were for the photo shows in our galleries..." My new skill: imaginary curating! It was fun to write; now let's hope he likes it.

The point is, for you authors facing the promotion challenge, this is a way of stepping outside the predictable bookstore or coffee-bar venue for a reading/signing event. A real location mentioned in your book is a logical choice, a fun blurring of the fact/fiction boundaries, and its owners may welcome the added bit of exposure and cachet that an attachment to the literary world may give them.

Which is not to suggest that a writer should craftily fill their book with real-world settings they can then exploit for readings. Blecch.

Truth be told, I'm a little slow and reticent about this self-promotion thing. It could be said that for a self-published author, that's the kiss of death. So be it then... my raison d'etre is not the selling, but the writing. I want to get back to writing my next project as soon as possible, but ever since my book came out, all my (miniscule) free time has gone toward establishing a presence, getting reviews, posting on various networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, yikes!), blogging, etc.

I'm looking forward to this reading, because the contact with my potential readers that I like best is the flesh-and-blood kind. Shaking a real hand is much better than touching screen and keyboard to commune with a virtual mask.

So I feel myself gradually stepping away from constant online promotion, even as I'm just now doing my first booksigning. I'm grateful to Ariel and CPW, and (in advance) to the other venues where I'll appear from time to time in coming months. As my baby, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, totters out into the world with just a little support from me, I hope you'll give it a closer look. The book is about connections. Let's connect.

Let It Be

2009-10-26T14:38:00.004-04:00

This is a re-post of something from a year ago on the Hudson Valley Writers site, but it still applies...

-----

Saturday I finished transforming a jumbled mountain of firewood into rough rows and columns in my woodshed. This monotonous activity, besides kicking several muscle groups into sudden loud protest, made me think about writing. Of course, many things make me think about writing. Like, most of all, not writing.

As I stacked wood, I labored through motions both repetitive and unique, sometimes carefully choosing size, shape, and placement for structural integrity, other times just tossing whatever was available into the row. I had a sketchy vision of the end product: rows relatively balanced and uniform, columns standing tall without collapse or even wobble. I had to keep up a certain pace or never finish; no time for nit-picking. Every log was a word, a phrase, an idea – each with its own ragged edges, annoyingly imperfect, often stubbornly refusing to fit, but still the only thing at hand.

Eventually it was done and I could step back and see the whole thing…. Ouch. All that work, for this? This rough, ungraceful edifice, barely utilitarian, not beautiful at all? But it’s finished. The shed is full. No rewrites allowed on this one (cheering from the sore muscles), so… here’s the difficult part: I have to surrender my perfectionism.

I’m grateful that, in contrast to wood-stacking, my writing affords nearly endless revision. But still, every time, I face the same inner dialogue: this piece of work is not really what I wanted it to be, it didn’t quite capture some exquisite subtlety of mood, some ephemeral shadow of memory, some brief twinge of insight. But I’ve done all I can do. I have to just let it be what it is.

With that motion (figurative) of opening my hands (heart) to let go, as if freeing a dove to the sky, I make room for something new. Like on Saturday, when I stood and stared a long minute at my woodshed, breathed deep and exhaled slow, and allowed in the sweet taste of accomplishment and the warm fuzz of winter security – just like that, every day, I have to release my writing from silly fastidiousness so that it can simply go forth and live. For me, this is a challenge. Thank you, I accept.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” – Voltaire

“Let it be.” -- McCartney

Gratitude for Reviews

2009-10-03T21:28:00.005-04:00

It's been a whole month since I wrote here last, an indication of overload at the day job and on the home front. Maintaining a blog is a challenge for the non-loquacious (like me). And I've discovered that now that The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility is out in the world and beginning to toddle on its own two feet, my thoughts are moving on, getting all wrapped up in the next work-in-progress. That's a good thing, but I don't intend to abandon my firstborn... I'll continue a little promotional effort here and there to keep some momentum going. Meanwhile, the next book calls!

Speaking of momentum, these last few weeks have been gratifying as I've seen the results of my early submissions of review copies. Once my first small POD print run was in the works, after several proofs and final tweaking, I e-mailed review queries to two local print publications and three online review sites. One of the websites declined--I suspect literary short stories are not their cuppa tea--but the others accepted and I sent books as soon as they arrived. Then I began counting days and alternately fearing and desiring those imminently-arriving comments from objective strangers (yikes!) who were actually reading my book (wow!).

Now, it's the morning after opening nght, and I'm a happy author as I read the reviews! Here they are so far, in reverse chronological order (click to read each one in full):

In the October Chronogram Magazine, Anne Pyburn manages to capture the essence of my book in three paragraphs that are so eloquent I'm hard-pressed to choose the best blurb... how about "a feast of food for thought, a richly imagined reality that looks much like our own world if we could really see it."

Online at POD People, Cheryl Anne Gardner gives a really thoughtful, in-depth examination of the themes (and their alternates) that she sees at work in the stories and the book as a whole. I'm immensely grateful for this kind of close reading and generous analysis, made even better by the fact that hers is all volunteer labor. Again, so difficult to choose a few words from so many insightful comments; here's one: "...the collection really begged the question: Hope? Is it really genuine or is it something we invent as a way to justify our acceptance..."

At the website Self-Publishing Review, whose mission is to help bring self-published literature to a more respected position in the minds of readers and the industry, editor Henry Baum closes his review with this: "Overall, it’s a collection of very strong writing - thoughtful, full of vivid imagery, sorrowful at times, but never self-pitying. The Lost Symbol it is not, but it’s subtle and moving in a way that Dan Brown dreams of being." (Sorry, Dan!)

The Fearless Reviews website takes just two paragraphs to give a strong impression of the content and themes in my stories, and sums it up with this: "This is a beautifully written, thoughtful collection well worth reading."

In my local paper, the Woodstock Times (scroll down to Storytellers), I was flattered to be reviewed along with one of my writing heroes, James Lasdun. Reviewer Paul Smart says "...the use of a fractured story structure, where characters, actions and similar reactions come together over time, lend the overall work the tragic air of great epics, with people doing all they can to escape fate's plans for them; and yet also the bittersweet quality we recognize in the best comedies, where folks keep pressing on, no matter what pushes them back."

As more and more copies get into the hands of readers, I'm finding that I deeply appreciate knowing that anyone is investing their precious hours to explore the worlds I worked for years to get onto those pages. It's humbling and pleasurable at the same time. Thanks for reading!

Intangible Vectors of Influence (a story excerpt)

2009-09-04T20:49:00.006-04:00

Here's the first section from one of my stories, "Emergency: Three Romances." Like several of the others, it's a story made up of smaller stories, disparate fragments of strangers' lives connected, and changed in small ways, by a thin thread of circumstance. Or because we're all part of one big thing....

Intangible Vectors of Influence

The young cop says, “Sorry ma’am, you’ll have to wait.” In the strobing red-blue glare he looks like a teenager. Melissa wonders if Tony had looked so young when he started, all those years ago. Ever since Steph blurted her confession an hour earlier, Melissa has been thinking of Tony, obsessively thinking of Tony, her ex-cop waiting at home for her return.

The night is blustery and cold; snow will be coming soon. Melissa just wants to get in her little Honda and go home. But there’s some sort of emergency in the brownstone facing her parking space (a lucky find, she had thought at the time), and her car is surrounded—in fact the entire one-way street is blocked—by an ambulance, two police cruisers, and an unmarked SUV topped with a detachable flashing light. The sirens still seem to be echoing from a minute earlier and the spit-crackle of radios cuts through the low roar of idling engines. The air smells toxic. Two stone-faced troopers watch the cars and the door. A few gawkers stand around the perimeter waiting for action, swiveling their heads up toward the lighted third-floor windows and back again, but nothing seems to be happening.

Melissa doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to wait, to see someone’s misfortune, to learn any tragic truths, and she doesn’t want to go back to her sister Steph’s apartment. She feels lost and bubbling over with rage. Downtown Jersey City is like a foreign country to her—a dim resemblance to Manhattan, but darker, stranger. She wants to stamp her foot and insist that these uniforms get out of her way, let me go home goddammit, but she knows that would be a mistake. Shivering, she heads for the coffee shop that she spotted earlier near the PATH station. She imagines that Stephanie must have taken this same route and was already out of the train on the other side of the Hudson, strolling the happy bustling streets of the Village.

Melissa feels out of sorts partly because she is out of her world, here in the city instead of home in the mountains. At home she doesn’t have to worry about her baby sister’s drunken escapades, at least not in such an immediate way, and she has Tony to laugh with. But even solid Tony seems to waver like a mirage just now, because he is home doing who knows what, and with whom? She knows this fear is all based on Steph’s admission—or baldfaced lie—an hour ago that, on her last visit upstate, while Melissa was finishing the afternoon at the shop, she had tried to seduce Tony.

Her voice had been pitched with that air of pretense that had annoyed Melissa so often. “And I rubbed up against him and breathed in his ear like this.…” Steph was on her feet, moving and posing in front of Melissa as if on stage. Her eyes fluttered shut, her hands and hips seemed to contact an invisible body in the air, her voice fell to a sultry whisper. “Mmm, you smell so good….”

Melissa pasted a smile on her face to go along with what surely must be a joke. “Mm-hm, and what happened next?”

Steph said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” and she made a bye-bye motion with her fingers, laughing with her head thrown back as she closed the bathroom door.

Melissa had been struck dumb, groping to make sense of the whole scene. Now, as she walks, she wonders: why hadn’t Tony mentioned it—because it wasn’t true, or because it was true and he wanted to pursue it?

She imagines asking Tony that question. She sees his eyes glance down and away as he says, “You know your sister’s a total wack job. She’s lying, as usual. So whaddya want for dinner?”

Then immediately she sees the scene repeat, but this time he looks directly into her eyes and smiles. “You know your sister’s a total wack job. I couldn’t believe the, y’know, seductress act she put on. Like high school drama club. Made me laugh.” Then he comes to Melissa and puts his arms around her. “Look, baby, she doesn’t do it for me, not a bit. She’s a skinny neurotic drunk without an ounce of sexiness in her whole stringy little body.” He presses his smooth, good-smelling cheek against hers. “Besides, you’re the only one for me; I’m not looking anywhere else.”

With that image, Melissa’s dark mood lifts a bit, but she still doesn’t know what to believe.

Now she figures she may as well tank up on caffeine so she can stay awake on the drive home. She shifts her overnight bag from right shoulder to left as she walks. Her plan had been to go out dancing with Steph, proving that clean and sober fun is actually possible, and then have a sisterly sleepover full of heartfelt confessions. But the plan has “gone down the crapper,” as Tony would say. Stephanie, after her announcement of betrayal—while Melissa was in the shower for a moment of stunned solitude before soldiering on—had simply disappeared.

For Melissa, the studious older sister who had always valued predictability and had too often felt forced to stand in for emotionally absent parents, Stephanie had always been a handful, really just too much. Tearful trauma over every grade-school slight… a junior-high shoplifting binge… cocaine in college… the list was endless. Melissa knows, and grieves for, Steph’s secret scars, both visible and not: the gash on her thigh from an impulsive quarry dive; the gash on her heart from losing again, after so much soulful rehearsal and a “brilliant” audition, the role of Blanche in the latest summer revival of Streetcar. And all those men, a parade come and gone, until that September morning she stood on the boardwalk at Exchange Place with a paper cup of coffee in her hand and watched the towers come down, with her new beau in there somewhere, never to return. Since that day, Stephanie’s fun-loving side had risen like a despot, a clown tyrant who ruled with deadly desperation, grinning and dancing all the while.

Steph’s dysfunctions are so appallingly transparent. Still, Melissa cannot let go of an image of herself, a mud-bound stone, looking up at Stephanie, a pirouetting feather.

Toweling her hair after her shower, Melissa had called out, had looked through the entire tiny apartment, and then had sat numbly waiting until it became clear that Steph had, without a word, just left her behind. Ditched her. That’s when the rage began.

“I love you, Mel,” Steph says every time they speak. But the time had come to cut Stephanie off. Say goodbye. Disown her. As she closed the door of Steph’s building behind her, Melissa was ranting so loudly inside that she was surprised nobody on the street could hear. She was done with the little bitch forever. And good riddance.

Then she encountered the young cop, the ambulance, the emergency. She was unable to slam her car door and screech away. Now, as she strides down the shadowy street hugging herself, her anger does what her anger always does: transforms itself. Melts into guilt. Surely she could have felt more charity toward her sister. Surely she could forgive, forgive a hurting overgrown child. Be kind to a charming, passionate girl. Surely all this was Melissa’s own fault, she was such a loser. Such a loser that Tony would probably rather have Stephanie.

Melissa is on a campaign against her jealousy. Or whatever this feeling is, this burden, this curse. It’s her biggest focus right now, the point of all her efforts at self-improvement. In the past, with any tremor in the ground under the latest romantic edifice she had constructed, her first instinct was toward despair, toward the sure knowledge that everyone else is more attractive, more lovable than she is, and that she’ll end up without something, something indefinable but crucial. She’ll end up without... whatever it is that she needs. A deep, wild fear would rise up in her throat, and she would be obsessed with thoughts of the interloper, whoever she, or it, might be. Over the last five years, Melissa’s therapy group and meditation practice have helped immensely, but now her sister’s latest antics have sent her spiraling down into that familiar tangled darkness.

And to make it worse, her daydreams have recently turned toward marriage: an embarrassingly conventional vision of settling in with Tony, getting old with him. He hasn’t proposed. Is she crazy, blind to the truth?

As she pushes through the door into the bright noisy warmth of the Grove Diner, it seems unfortunately fitting that she hears her own name on the classic-rock radio piped into the place. “But back home he’ll always run... to sweet Melissa....” The old Allman Brothers’ song was a favorite of her ex, Robert. He would sing it to her often, too often, usually because he was trying to make up for hurting her somehow.

Robert, a sculptor, had persuaded her with much cajoling to quit her jewelry-store job and accompany him, to leave Manhattan and move to a remote house in the Catskills. For more “creative space,” he said. At first resentful of the new landscape, Melissa had experienced her resistance sweetly melting as she discovered that she loved the woolly green views, the quiet winding roads, and the unpretentious people that filled her new life in the small mountain town near their home. Then, before a year was out, Robert flip-flopped without warning and fled back to the city. The timing was perfect; the opportunity had just arisen for Melissa to take over the antique shop where she had been working, so she said goodbye to Robert and city life, and stayed on, for good or ill.

A year later, Tony arrived, shaggy and unemployed but sharing her desire for an upward trajectory, and they had trekked together so well, for so long. And now he was established in his handyman business, serving the second-home owners from the city. They were living together, and the future had seemed so simple and good. Why must things always grow more and more complex?

Depositing her bag on the seat opposite, she slides into a booth next to a long window, her back to the door. She remembers yesterday at home, how she had whined that she didn’t really want to take this trip down to the city to fruitlessly “intervene” once again in Stephanie’s drunkenness, and Tony had told her, “You should go, do what you can. After all, who knows what intangible vectors of influence are at work?” He spoke like that more and more often these days.

Melissa’s eyes tear up. She can’t help it; she’s in love with him. This won’t do. She wipes the tears away and straightens her shoulders. She orders coffee.

Waiting, she considers the pleasures of being self-sufficient and alone, strong without a man. The feeling is good. She imagines getting in her car, tonight, as soon as they will let her, jumping on the New Jersey Turnpike, and driving south. All the way south, to the end, where she could stare out at empty ocean. Starting a new life there, where she could read daily the marker at the corner of South and Whitehead in Key West: Southernmost Point, Continental US. She could join the freaks of the Conch Republic, rent a musty little bungalow with windows shaded by palm fronds, make funky jewelry, sell it to tourists every night at the Mallory Square Sunset celebration at the edge of the glittering Gulf.

Her tropical reverie is interrupted by the clink of a saucer and full steaming cup appearing on the table in front of her. Reaching for the little metal pitcher of milk, she glances out the window to the sidewalk, and there, walking with eyes downcast, is Stephanie. As if the glance were audible, Steph looks up just then, lifts her face into the light, and it seems to Melissa that a mask has dropped away, revealing a misery too wild and deep for words. Their eyes connect, and Steph moves directly to the window, her face folding into the teary red clench that Melissa has known for so, so long. Her mouth shapes, “I love you, Mel.”

Without warning, Melissa is filled by a sensation in her chest of great heavy doors swinging open, and she knows that her plans for tonight are going to change once again. Midnight is gone, another day has begun, lives change inexplicably every instant.

Then, for one more long moment that seems to lean invisibly toward morning, the sisters stare at each other, gazing without thought, without past or future, from opposite sides of the cold, clear glass.

What? No murders?!

2009-08-11T20:40:00.001-04:00

In the thirteen stories that make up The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility there are no murders. Nor are there any pimps, hookers, gangsters, junkies, pedophiles, or terrorists. There are no movie stars, rock stars, or fashion models. There are no aliens or monsters, no witches or wizards. There is not a single evil conspiracy.

Yet I would like people to buy the book. And read it. Am I crazy?

Some folks would say so. They might say, "So what could possibly be in it then?" They might say, "People need entertainment; ya gotta give 'em a thrill." They might say, "The current marketplace demands blah blah blah..."

I personally don't know any murderers, pimps, hookers, gangsters, movie stars, rock stars (ok, maybe a couple...), terrorists, models, aliens, monsters, witches, or wizards. I've known a few junkies in times gone by, and about pedophiles... well, I don't know. All those characters occupy their very solid niches in our culture, and their stories can make good entertainment, even high art. In fact, a survey of the market may give the impression that one (or several) of them is absolutely mandatory for a compelling story. But that would be a false impression. The real requirements are heart, truth, and writing craft. Quiet stuff. In fact, call me perverse, but when I see the deluge of loud cover art in most bookstores, proclaiming the value of violence and glitz, my urge is to run the other direction. And take my writing there too.

Oops, lost dollars. Oh well. As Popeye said, "I yam what I yam!"

Wick Poetry Prize winner Djelloul Marbrook gives me some good support with this back cover blurb:
"Subtlety ought to be on an endangered literary species list, but Brent Robison brilliantly makes the case for its essentiality in this exquisite collection of webbed stories. These stories argue that everything is a facet of the same jewel and we touch each other’s lives in unfathomable ways. To read them is to heighten one’s bond with strangers."

So... what is here in these stories is ordinary people -- people like you and me, fully engaged in lives packed with struggles of various kinds, but almost never with evil, explosions, glamor, or gore.

Thankfully, murder touches very few of our lives; in this book, there is one attempted but unsuccessful, and the mass murders of 9-11 and Iraq loom just offstage.

And of other deaths, there is no shortage. There is love and its attendant strife. There is addiction. There are families broken and whole. There are urban streets, country roads, jazz, sex, storms, car crashes, office doldrums, desert skies, artists, Mormons, hospital rooms, petty crime, storms, Navajos, popcorn, and emptiness. There are also ideas.

Maybe my next book will have ideas too, plus a murder. We'll have to wait and see.

How is Unity expressed in story?

2009-07-23T12:44:00.003-04:00

I love the unanswerable questions. And I love to learn as much as my subgenius mind can handle about everything we humans have so far come to know in our pursuit of answers to the unanswerable. Parallel passions--science and metaphysics--gradually led me to glimpse a perfect interweaving of current knowledge and ancient wisdom. Quantum physics intertwined with Advaita Vedanta. Spacetime as a metaphor for Oneness. Superstrings pointing to Nonduality.

Meanwhile, I labored away at writing stories. Imaginary characters with lives and hearts and pains all their own kept jumping up and asking to be acknowledged. Inspired by literary realism, postmodern and classic, lush or minimalist, I worked at exploring psycho-spiritual states and getting something both meaningful and beautiful onto the page. Then out of all that jumble rose the challenge that got my blood pumping at a whole new rate....

If everything is One, how is that expressed in story?

Well, it's been done, with various degrees of success, in all kinds of ways:
--exegesis of various cultural mythologies
--allegory or parable with a "moral"
--stories from the lives of famous gurus or holy men
--the conundrums of time travel (see my friend's book The High Priest of Prickly Bog)
--fanciful alternate realities like those of Italo Calvino
--narrative thought experiments ala Jorge Luis Borges
--straight science fiction: on other planets, things behave differently
--variations on the sword and sorcery genre
--human encounters with angels or extraterrestrials
--magical realism
--etc.

Trouble is, none of these appealed to me. Or rather, they were not what I was doing as a writer. I wanted to write literary short stories, about us, ordinary people, our everyday tragedies and existential crises, the mundane epiphanies that move us all incrementally forward. Real life.

It was my invented characters themselves who offered me the key. Of their own accord they had began lurking on the edges of each other's stories. But I wasn't sure what that meant. Then one day as I surveyed the whole array of stories and fragments, a complex web of faint shimmering lines seemed to materialize before my inner eye. These people, like all of us, were connected by invisible threads, coincidences, ephemeral glancing touches, by which subtle influence was being exerted, life paths changed in seemingly tiny, but possibly powerful, ways. We were like cells in one giant body, all going about our business transporting enzymes from one place to another and effecting change on other cells, but with rarely a glimmer of awareness of our own impact.

To suggest this newfound truth seemed to me the best way I could express Unity. Still, just as in this thing we call "reality," the needs, hopes, dreams, heartaches, addictions, and loves of daily life are the foreground. To see the background is another level of perception altogether.

I'm entirely a beginner on the road toward Unitive Consciousness. But that vision of all human beings interconnected by a vast intangible network of influence, invisible energy lines weaving us together, became the engine driving the finishing, assembling, and publishing of my story collection.

So, does it work? Does it matter? Does The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility say anything useful? Can this odd combination of literary realism and esoteric philosophy create its own public? Or is it all a big illusion (delusion) in my mind? I really don't know. I hope you'll read it and tell me what you think.

Publishing = Creating a Public

2009-07-05T21:44:00.002-04:00

My journey toward publication of The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility has been fraught with doubt. I've kept soldiering on anyway. But this past week I felt incredibly empowered by a new way to look at publishing. Here I quote writer/editor Matthew Stadler:
"In English, publication includes the word ‘public’…publication is the creation of a public. Publication is a political strategy. It is not an attempt to make beautiful objects. It is not an attempt to make an accurate record that can be stored and archived… There is no pre-existing public. The public that we hear about, which we think about often to our own discouragement, is itself a fiction created by political actors to lend moral authority to their choices. I am interested in publication because I want to create a public. I live in a culture, in a country, that uses the fiction of a mainstream public in many ways that I find discouraging, negative, and disempowering but I don’t believe the notion of and the experience of a public needs to be that way… It is imperative that we publish not only as a means to counter the influence of a hegemonic public, but also to reclaim the space in which we imagine ourselves and our collectivity. We feel lonely and powerless when we accept the myth of ‘the mainstream public.’ When we accept that fiction we relinquish our ability to form our own collectivities and draw hope from them.”

In the loud, clamoring marketplace, I usually feel lost and out of place. I don't write potboilers with zinger tag lines, so it's easy to feel invisible. But I've clung to an intuition that there is an audience for my work: a few people will love it, and then a few more, and a few more. Stadler's viewpoint gives some muscle to that hunch. I love the idea that I'm taking political action by writing what feels true for me ("market" be damned), then joining the self-publishing revolution to bring it to the world. How freeing to let go of that vast, oppressive cloud of "the mainstream public"! Each of us who creates is building not only a piece of work, but a network of invisible connections among those who admire that work: a new public, a new family, a new community. Large or small is of less importance than the nature of the connections. It is through such bonds that energetic shifts take place and worlds change, both inner and outer.

For bringing Stadler's ideas (and the quote above) to my awareness, I give a big Thank You to Shannon Yarborough and his essay "Why Do We Publish?" in The LL Book Review.

Brand New Skin

2009-06-22T15:06:00.004-04:00

Feelin' great--my book gets ever closer to entering the world! Here's the cover, the skin of the baby... featuring string/pencil/wax drawings by Wendy Drolma, with my design. The interior includes another dozen of Wendy's drawings scattered among the thirteen stories.

Writing and the Mask

2009-06-14T21:19:00.003-04:00

Here is an essay that I revised a bit from my introduction to an anthology a few years ago. It gives a taste of my thoughts about the art of writing fiction....

Writing and the Mask

I am wearing a mask. Right now, as I write this. It is not a physical thing covering my face; rather, it is in the "I" that begins this paragraph. Again, now: I write "I" followed by a verb, and you the reader perceive me, a writer, telling you his own "truth." But no matter what I write, "I" is a lie. And no matter what I write, "I" is also the truth.

This conundrum is explored in an anthology, The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask, that I co-edited along with professional maskmaker Wendy Drolma (Klein). The book explores the meaning of the mask through poetry, art, "fiction" and "non-fiction" (I put those words in quotes because, in the end, their definitions are entirely elusive). What you are reading here is a revised version of the book's introduction.

If I were writing here in a mode called "fiction," you would gladly accept the mask and maybe even think, "how creative." In the anthology, when Robert Louis Stevenson wears the face of his invention Dr. Jekyll and says, "I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune...," we enter into a kind of theater and suspend our disbelief. Our pleasure is in believing the obvious lie. When Barry Yourgrau starts the final story, "I come into the kitchen...," we're not so sure that this is an invented persona speaking, but we go along happily as his darkish whimsy unfolds. Mark Sherman's "I" may make us squirm a bit because, while his story has the trappings of fiction, the narrator, we think, just might be Mr. Sherman himself, pretending otherwise. The mask grows thinner.

But there are "non-fiction" works in the volume as well. For instance, this introduction. Since it is not fiction, it must be true, right? The mask of "I" is not acknowledged; it is a sly disguise that looks similar enough to my real face (is there such a thing?) that you don't suspect I wear a mask at all. In the anthology, Michael Perkins, Sparrow, and Gabriel Q all write an "I" that also makes no suggestion of a mask. Does that mean their works are "true"?

Samuel Avital, Sophie Rogers-Gessert, Vincent Lloyd, and George Ulrich don't need an "I" at all; in their essays, they wear the masks of authority, of objectivity, of educated reason. But simply to set pen to paper, one must adopt the persona of "writer." Carl Jung said, "The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual."

I write fiction. I believe in the power of imagination, and I have often "hired" someone not myself -- a persona -- to narrate my stories. When Oscar Wilde said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth," he was right: behind that mask, my conscious agendas, my censors, my carefully constructed "self," all disappear, and without "me" in control, I tell the truth. The real truth. It slips in through the unguarded back door. It can't be otherwise, because I am I.

Except, of course, for the Buddhist truth that "I" is just an illusion anyway. As Alan Watts said, "I" is just the Universe "eyeing." Each of us is both the center and not the center: double in nature. Dr. Jekyll can't face himself as he writes about Hyde: "He, I say -- I cannot say, I." He denies his own double nature even as he admits it. In a similar self-deconstruction, H.G. Wells' Invisible Man turns his unhappy being into apparent nothingness and then, hiding in a costumier's shop, must put on a mask and false whiskers to make himself again perceptible in the world. The masked man always dons another mask, and so it goes.

Pablo Picasso said: "Art is a lie that tells the truth." The anthology The Other Face, our little work of art, is full of masks, but it is also full of truth. I hope readers approach it with an open heart, and receive wisdom. And as for whether these warm wishes come from "me" or from some persona in my employ, I feel as Jorge Luis Borges does, when he closes the story "Borges and I"...
"I do not know which of us has written this page."

----

The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask, published by Bliss Plot Press, is available from Wendy Drolma Masks.

A Story Excerpt

2009-06-03T07:11:00.000-04:00

Here are the first three pages of a 25-page story from The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. It originally appeared in the literary journal Silent Voices, whose editors nominated it for a Pushcart Prize.

A Confession of Love and Emptiness

Living half a century is no great accomplishment; I’ve done it and more. Living through tomorrow may be something much bigger. Tomorrow a group of people, every one of them younger than I, will take a great saw and rip through my sternum, and insert steel claws, and crank my rib cage open, and spread me like a lobster.

I don’t believe in priests, so I’ll make my confession directly to God, who hides in the pure white expanse of this blank page.

If I live, I will live a new way. I am ready to say this not merely because of the grim surprise with which I realize daily that I am precisely what I thought I’d never be, a middle-aged man, a man growing old whose body is failing, who may die soon. And not merely because deathbed repentance is attractive and convenient, even to someone like me who has always rejected such pathetic whimpers of fear, but because today I received a message of redemption. In the face of a little girl, I saw forgiveness.

The story is easy to remember, but not to tell. It’s about love and emptiness.

The year I turned forty, I begged… or, rather, demanded, rudely, that a Voice speak to me, that He stop hiding in spiteful silence behind that grand impenetrable drapery of blackness above my head.

I was standing at the side of a hospital bed where my wife lay dying of ovarian cancer. The steel rail was cold in my fists. The machinery hummed, whooshed, beeped. Now and then her brow folded up like a fist, but her eyes stayed closed. She was shriveled, unrecognizable. All I could think of was the hypnotic glitter of the Milky Way and how desperately, bitterly, I wanted to understand Eternal Space. I behaved like a thoughtless imbecile. I shouted up at Him, at God, at the ceiling.

An angry nurse blew in like a gale gusting through white curtains, hissing, threatening to have me removed, forcibly if necessary. Later, in one final rush of pain, my wife died. I never received my revelation.

For over fifteen years since, I’ve slept on my side of the bed, with an empty space beside me. I believe that’s what was meant to be. My reward. God is just.

The trouble is, people disappear all the time. They just vanish—poof, gone. This is not startling news; everybody knows it. And if you want the return of the disappeared, then that’s in the Miracle department. I used to believe it was utterly impossible, back in the years before I met Rico, that sweet, crazy old crooner. But these days, I’m thinking that maybe the gone can come back. In their own way, unobtrusively, they return. If you’re watching.

In my life, there were Billy Brock, and my mother, and of course Alice, who left those gaping vacancies. But it started with my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who lived with us, who rode me on his back like a horse so that my clearest memory of him is the thick shiny tangle of the back of his head, wet ropes the color of coffee beans, and the sweet scent, like a fruity wine, of Wildroot hair tonic.

Then, before I was eight, he was gone. He came home alone one day, home too early from his job with my father, wearing a fat white bandage around his right hand. His face is dim in my memory, but I know his skin was pale, a white forehead spiked by a dark lock hanging down. He was thin, young, couldn’t have been more than twenty‑five, I realize now. That day, he came in tense, pacing, silent. He scared me. I escaped to the back yard and while I sat under our willow, reading, their voices, his and hers, my mother’s, shouted in distant echoes from inside the solid bricks of our house, and I tried not to listen, and I remember not a word. As I tried to focus on the page, a page full of diagrams of rockets, I heard the front door slam. That was my Uncle Davy leaving. I never saw him again.

Somehow I knew even then that that was the beginning of the end of our family.

My name is Jonson Burgess. Not the old standard John, but Jonson, after Ben. My mother, in love with her own sense of irony, wanted to make a statement about negative capability, perhaps her own, perhaps my father’s, perhaps mine, and so I was named for Britain’s most admired playwright of the seventeenth century, who towered and gloated over, who praised and patronized, his failing friend Shakespeare, but who today is lost in the Master’s shadow, all but forgotten, merely a minor player. And in his dim beginnings, before all his avid self‑promotion, Ben Jonson was a bricklayer, like my father. Maybe she knew my father would rise above sweaty labor to his own higher plane of banality, too. She would chuckle low in her throat; she thought such contrivances were funny, like a jazzman tossing a riff from “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into his solo, a sort of inside joke, her personal comic subversion in a humorless, dark universe.

When I was six, my uncle’s secret name for me was “Muscles,” since he said, with a name like Jonson, some might think that my father’s name was Jon, but no, it was Sam, and Samson would hardly do now, would it? But I could be like Samson someday, he said, with a wild wicked girlfriend, and biceps, and hair, and a fatal flaw. I didn’t know what he meant by all that, but I did know about Samson, since my father read me Bible stories every other night at bedtime. My father and mother had an arrangement, a sort of alternating current that powered all my perceptions then. Then and, I suppose, now. On my mother’s nights, she read to me stories of her choice, and I suffered through them, often yawning or dreaming but sometimes enthralled, adrift, sunken in a syrup of words, in her soft deep voice, Dostoevsky and Kafka, and now and then Dickens, for a bright note.

Odd how just now I felt a sudden longing, a deep twinge like the flex of a muscle, somewhere near my heart, a longing for her to be here at the side of my bed, reading to me, reading anything, I don’t care, caressing soft syllables with that voice like whiskey on velvet, filling with its deep folds this sterile hard room where, now, without her, every sound, even a rustle, a whisper, clangs and echoes like a bloody bullet dropped in a surgeon’s pan.

And the rustles, the whispers I hear, are my heart wheezing to force my blood through an ever narrowing space, a gate where some freak twist of DNA raised a lump that year by year has gathered coats of calcium, layered like geologic sediments recording the history of my heart, my life. A congenital aortic stenosis, thank you Mother, thank you Father, thank you God.

Now I know, so I can say, my sin is this: I have lived a life obsessed by emptiness. On a quest for absolute vacancy.

Artist, Diagnose Thyself

2009-05-25T13:21:00.000-04:00

The following is a re-post of my blog entry from January on the Hudson Valley Writers networking site:
---------

I just re-read an article that I had decided on my first reading was very important for my writing, then promptly forgot about. "Ready-made rebellion: The empty tropes of transgressive fiction," by Jonathan Dee, appeared in Harper's in April 2005 and can be found here: http://harpers.org/archive/2005/04/0080507.

Be forewarned: if you're a fan of Neil Labute, A.M. Homes, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, or Dennis Cooper, they don't go unscathed here (especially LaBute). But fanhood should always be open to challenge anyway, don't you think?

Dee opens with these statements: "Good fiction has never been about moral instruction; it would be much easier to write if it were. Its more imposing task is to do justice to the inexhaustible complexity of human motivation." He goes on to say that we look to writers to tell us why people act the way they act. The challenge in that statement, of course, is that the writer must have some self-understanding in order to illuminate his characters. So the journey toward self-awareness, perhaps the most important journey any of us makes, is crucial not only for life, but for fiction. This became most clear to me when I was in a therapy group led by the late Mark Abramson, whose firm, even cantankerous insistence upon clarity and honesty of thought and expression was not only an invaluable and loving aid in emotional growth, but became a rigorous training ground for my writing as well.

But I'm often easily confused by what goes on in the marketplace; new work getting praised as hip and edgy might make me question what I'm doing. Or, worse yet, its influences might creep into my work past my internal literary gatekeeper, who sometimes sleeps.

I'm grateful to Dee for helping make clear my muddy instincts when he writes, "Books that depend for their sense of opposition on the straw man of a presupposed bourgeois mentality outside the fiction itself--on shock value, in other words--are working in conditions of profound safety disguised as risk. The characters suffer no repercussions (nor do the writers, for that matter, regardless of outlaw posturing), but the atmosphere is one of self-conscious edginess and aesthetic daring."

I don't want to be that type of writer. I'm not entirely confident that I haven't slipped into some of the methods he decries, even in stories now "finished" and on the market. But I am hereby re-dedicating myself to being vigilant against shallow posing, to exploring my characters from the inside rather than judging them from outside while pretending objectivity. And to continuing my own inner exploration, because, whether I'm writing or not, that's what I need. I believe in Dee's final declaration: "Artist, diagnose thyself."

Indra's Net = Internet ?

2009-05-14T12:42:00.000-04:00

This is the epigraph I've placed on page one of The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.

---The Avatamsaka Sutra
Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra

Francis H. Cook

(drawing by Wendy Drolma)

When the authors of the Vedic texts first described Indra's Net over 2,500 years ago, it almost seems they were describing the mind-numbingly myriad nodes and threads of today's Internet. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, the whole social networking complex is a clumsy, rough-edged facsimile of the infinite sparkling elegance of the net of Indra. Were the ancients spookily prescient? Well, anything's possible. I imagine they were sadhus, exploring the vast inner deep, and giving us a metaphor for what they encountered there: the indescribable unity and inter-penetration of all things.

In other words, they were describing the same truths about humans and the universe that govern us today, and that we are currently manifesting through technology. Some days as I surf Facebook, I've been surprised by a nudge of excitement to be part of the physical manifestation of a long-hidden esoteric principle, our blind striving for unity. We have no choice but to manifest this at this time in history because we are who we are. On one level, we are programmed by evolution to seek connection with other humans: a cellular impulse tells us we’re safer in groups than alone. On another level, quantum physics has shown that we and everything else we see are all momentary flickers in one vast energy field. We are intimately connected because we are all One.

But still, everyday life happens. We must behave as if the illusion is real. Enmeshed in the dazzling net of Indra, we still must do the laundry. And as we do it, invisible lines of energy radiating like the reflections of jewels from total strangers, exert subtle influence on our every decision, turning our paths in new directions. Then we in turn unknowingly alter the lives of others, and the reflections multiply, ripples spreading ever outward in all directions.

I hope my book of stories gives a fleeting glimpse of not only the lives of others like me and you, but also of the sparkling web that weaves us all together.

To self-publish or not to self-publish?

2009-05-05T21:12:00.000-04:00

Do, don't, do, don't. For a year I've been afflicted with severe indecision: chase down a small press who'll publish my (clearly non-commercial) collection of stories, or join the Do-It-Yourself revolution and get my book out to the public all on my own. I respect artists like my wife who take their work to the marketplace as independent creator/entrepeneurs. But at the same time, I admit my ego-based (sometimes revoltingly desperate) desire to be validated by an editorial gatekeeper of even the smallest stature.

Besides being a writer, I'm also a tiny DIY publisher of, among other things, a regional literary journal (http://blissplotpress.com/). So I know that fine literary quality is certainly to be found outside the gates of the publishing establishment, even when that establishment is defined liberally. And I know how to build a book, get it printed, even get it into the marketplace.

But still, I've been resistant to joining the ranks of self-publishers. I had hoped it would be very clear that someone other than myself thinks my work is good. We all need a little respect, right?

But "good" does not mean "commercial" and publishers have bills to pay, a bigger problem now than ever. Besides, I'm just too impatient to persevere, plodding along at the snail's-pace submission/rejection game.

And so it goes: I decide to self-publish, then I flip-flop, and flip-flop again.

The submission history of my story collection goes like this:
1. Four contests... no awards
2. A publishing contract offer from a small press who, when I suggested minimal adjustments to their terrible contract, withdrew their offer, no discussion.
3. Interest from a respectable small press, but I decided not to pursue it further because they've gone to Print-On-Demand only, which I felt I could do just as well by myself.
4. Query to an agent referred by a friend... politely declined.
5. Months wasted when one small but reputable press cashed my reading fee check, then lost my submission. No answers to several inquiries... but eventually they refunded the money.
6. Queries to five small publishers... three declined, one no answer despite follow-ups, one response still pending... but since eight months have now passed without an answer to my query, I just sent them a note withdrawing it.

So... fnally... the decision is made. I have begun the process to self-publish my collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. I've decided that a baker's dozen submissions is enough; if 13 wasn't my lucky number, then I'm taking luck into my own hands. The final nudge came from this simple but very helpful website: http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/, whose About page says, "The aim of this site is to legitimize self-publishing – not just as a fallback plan, but as an avenue that’s increasingly necessary and useful in a competitive publishing industry. If the site has a manifesto it is to improve the culture around self-publishing."

So along with bearing the burden and reaping the rewards of total independence, I'm helping lay a foundation for a radically different future in the world of publishing. Viva la revolution!

Earth connection

2009-04-22T18:06:00.000-04:00

In honor of Earth Day, here's a short selection that says something about our cellular memories of a closer connection to the body of our Mother. This is an excerpt from my story "A Partial Catalog of Harold's Major and Minor Epiphanies," originally published in Chronogram magazine. Its protagonist is a recurring character in the linked stories of my collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility.

Help

Harold sits in his cubicle, typing. He is documenting the functionality of Release 2.3.1 of the Transaction Log Utility. A month ago, when he was still Manager of Training and Documentation, his afternoon would have felt infinitely more vital.

The soft gray walls muffle the keystrokes of the programmers and analysts in their cubicles on all sides of him. There is a low susurrus under everything, the processed air circulating endlessly. The windows on the far wall cannot be opened.

Harold’s eyes are locked on the screen as black letters string out against white, under blue and gray bars. Earlier, they grouped sensibly into words and sentences, but now the digital characters have regressed into absurd hieroglyphics as his fingers continue to click in random repetitions of featureless sound on the beige keys. The string of senseless symbols just keeps on rolling out, rolling out. His eyes glaze. His fingers slow. His head nods.

His eyes pop open, his fingers pick up again, another string of gibberish, then a fading, a letting go.…

Stars trail in slow motion across a vast night sky. Giant gargoyle silhouettes of gnarled stone wheel across the diamond field of stars. An owl hoots nearby, invisible. Coyotes yip on a distant ridge, the cries of aliens heralding the crescent moon just creeping over the ragged horizon. Sand grits against his skin, the flesh of his cheek. He lies on the ground, sweating, heart pounding like a fist. He knows that he has just been dancing, bare feet in the dirt, whirling madly to a savage drum, naked and shouting under the glittering stars, until, exhausted, he has fallen to the earth.

Harold snaps open his eyes. His fingers twitch. On the screen in front of him, centered in the monochrome field of lines and squiggles, is a gray rectangle containing words that slowly, dimly enter his conscious understanding.

Error. No help is available here.

How do you know it's finished?

2009-04-11T21:21:00.000-04:00

Too bad you can't just stick a fork in and know... know that your book, story, essay, poem, is done. I once read that when Jackson Pollock was asked, "How do you know when you're finished with a painting?" he replied, "How do you know when you're finished making love?"

Well... I wish it was that easy, Jackson.

Hmm, but maybe he is on to something....

I just finished my story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, for the third time. First time around, it was a rather skimpy ten stories long, but I decided it contained everything I could give it. No sooner had I sent it out to several contests than I begin to hear whispers.... A couple of characters in the book wanted me to know that their tales weren't fully told yet, plus a couple of fragments crawled up out of my notes and made strong claims for a position in the book. Meanwhile, I had started on a novel that had been brewing in my brain for years. But the characters from Indivisibility wouldn't leave me alone. So while I waited (and waited and waited) for replies from publishers, I put the novel away and worked on two new stories.

No letter of acceptance arrived, so I added the new pieces to the manuscript, sure this time that a twelve-story collection was just right. Sending it out again, to publishers as well as to two author friends from whom I begged cover blurbs, I felt for several months that the collection was... well, it was as complete as I could make it. My priorities shifted again and I began work on another project, a novel-in-stories, that would be built on a couple of older pieces that didn't fit Indivisibility.

But then it began again, the haunting, the whispering. Characters from Indivisibility and others from my notes were telling me that they needed attention, their stories needed voice. And they were showing me the intangible lines of energy connecting them with each other, and suddenly I felt certain: I knew one more story really had to go in the book. Months passed with the glacial pace that is normal in the literary world, and no publishing contract was signed, so I finished the new story and added it to the manuscript. Thirteen, a baker's dozen, perfect.

So that's where I am now. Done. But how can I be confident that it won't happen again, those little voices pleading to be included? Addition, subtraction, revision, tinkering of every sort, can go on forever. This is not an easy question to answer. Do I have an unconscious desire to run away from success, to undermine my dreams, so I'll simply never finish? Well, if it's unconscious, my answer must be no, right? But I say it with surety: No. So am I finished this time? Yes. Evidence says I can't be sure, yet I feel sure. And therein lies the only answer to the question of how we know we're finished. Our feelings tell us. Call it intuition, call it vibration... it's something outside the realm of reason, so it's difficult for some of us to perceive, much less acknowledge.

"Feelings" had told me that I was finished before, but this time there is a distinct difference, a palpable sense of well-roundedness, like a thrown and fired pot in my hands. With practice, I've learned to pay closer attention to my inner cues; I've reached a deeper level of awareness of the universe inside. This feeling is different, and I trust it.

Oh, and there's one more bit of proof: my creative interest has moved on. My desire for that particular book, which once was focused on the intimate act of writing it, is now all about getting it dressed and out into the world.

So that's what Pollock meant. You know when you're finished making love because... you're finished making love.

Why the title?

2009-04-06T21:08:00.000-04:00

In "Family Man," the opening story of my collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, the bewildered main character doesn't understand why he sometimes feels relief as he leaves his suburban home on weekday mornings; he tries to deny all threats to his self-concept as a man with a forever indivisible family, even as the edifice crumbles. Initially, I thought that those words in his mind, "...the principle of ultimate indivisibility," referred to families. But as fragments coalesced into stories, and stories connected to other stories, a deeper view revealed itself.

I used that phrase for the title because the subtle thread that holds the whole collection together is the knowledge that we humans, following our unique storylines that feel so separate, are nevertheless all cells in one vast body, interconnected in all directions by visible and invisible lines of energy. Without that vision driving me, I doubt I ever would have finished the stories and assembled them into a book.

Seen against the drama of "reality" -- the illusory world that we must treat as true -- the intangible vectors of influence that link us to each other may seem flimsy, unimportant, easy to forget. But they are the most crucial thing for us to remember. I was pleased to read my thoughts perfectly expressed by Jason Stern in his column "Esteemed Reader" in the January '09 issue of Chronogram: "The fact is that there is a present emergency that might drive humanity to recognize our inherent oneness, if we can feel it. It is not terrorists or the scary economy, global warming or global war, or even our personal plights. These are only symptoms and results of the real emergency, which is our alienation from that which matters. What matters is the consciousness of inherent unity, and the strength of being to make that consciousness real in our world." (Thanks, Jason!)

My hope is that even as insubstantial as literary fiction may seem in today's loud world, it still has some power to help wake up from hibernation the ancient wisdom that we are One.

A Beginning

2009-04-03T22:04:00.000-04:00

I write fiction, with a collection of short stories completed, other stories in various states of evolution, and two novels in progress. The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility is my book of thirteen linked stories... an assemblage that developed over the course of twenty long years. This blog will be tangentially related to that collection... its themes, settings, characters, events... as well as the story of its construction, publication, destiny.

The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility weaves together the disparate lives of ordinary people as they stumble through tiny everyday epiphanies on their way from confusion and loss toward redemption. With structures both traditional and experimental, these stories explore the bonds of family; the impacts of religion; our intertwined struggles with grief, love, and addiction; the intangible circuits of influence that link us to strangers; and the blind but determined striving for consciousness that is common to human experience.

Stories in the collection have been published in a variety of journals and have won a Short Fiction Award and an Honorable Mention from Chronogram Magazine, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.