If you like history, read this mystery!

A friend who’s interested in local history (Ulster County, New York) recently pointed out to me that my 2019 novel Ponckhockie Union may be missing some readers because the cover did not sufficiently emphasize the substantial historical content in the book. I had been thinking of the novel as something else…certainly not historical fiction, more like a postmodern pastiche of philosophy and mystery, a metaphysical detective tale. 

But it’s been at least six years since I typed “The End” and began the steps toward its publication. Things have changed. This year my wife and I have been absorbed with researching the “genealogy” of our little plot of land in the Catskill Mountains: tracing its ownership (I prefer “stewardship”) all the way back to the Native Americans. I have a lot to say about that subject, but it can wait. The point is, I’ve been in a history state of mind.

And so, seeing it through my friend’s eyes, I realized that, yes, Ponckhockie Union is indeed a book about history. It is not technically “historical fiction” because its present is 2015, with flashbacks to 1995 and 1975. But woven into the strange and twisted story are explorations of the American Revolution in New York City, the burning of Kingston in 1777 (learn about the annual commemoration here), the decisive second Battle of Saratoga, the traitor Benedict Arnold, and, in subsequent centuries, the early cement industry, a famous leftist colony in the Catskills, and more. Readers who are interested in the fascinating past of the Hudson River Valley, particularly of the Revolutionary War period, get not only a generous fix for their history addiction but also a rather wild tale of domestic drama, international intrigue, psychological crisis, and crime investigation. A multiplicity of benefits!

So I decided to do a slight reworking of the book’s cover to bring the historical aspects of the story a little more into focus.

Now on the front cover: Ponckhockie Union Congregational Church, where the main character is imprisoned in a dark cell by an apparent madman (remember, it’s fiction!). The church is a landmark cement structure with a unique heritage, almost medieval-looking, that anchors one of the blocks in Ponckhockie, which is the neighborhood on the banks of the Hudson where the British landed when they burned New York’s first capital city, Kingston. 

By the way, “Ponckhockie” is a Native American word for “dust land” or “land of ashes,” suggesting a burial ground. But other sources say it means “place of canoes,” which may make more sense. My novel is more connected to the “land of ashes” vibe. Fire everywhere!

On the back cover, besides a slight reworking of the book’s description to specifically mention the burning of Kingston, I added the following new “blurbs.”

From Alison Gaylin, Edgar Award winner and author of numerous acclaimed thrillers:

“A complex, fascinating and suspenseful journey into the past—and the myriad ways it can impact and threaten the here and now. As a Hudson Valley resident, I also loved the deep exploration of our area's history. A truly unique book.”

From John Burdick, critic for the HudsonValleyOne newspaper and popular local musician:

“A mad fireworks display of global conspiracy and paranoia, haunted synchronicities, shadow-world manipulations of history, tricksters and false guides and the sudden and irreparable rupture of everything normal and stable in one man’s life.”

And a little bonus: here are a few points made by Amazon reviewers that aren’t on the new cover:

“Part historical novel. Part meditative nightmare.”

“If you love the Hudson Valley, you'll be treated to a loving tour of some of its more hidden gems.”

“The novel is at once a study of the American Revolution as it unfolded in Kingston, New York…and also a psychic mystery of mundane and frightening proportions.”

“Intricate and exquisite…”

“A refreshing twist on the mystery genre!”

History is societal, but it is also personal. Among other things, this book may be asking, “In what ways does national history entangle with personal history?”—a good subject to ponder in our current moment, pre-election 2024.

All this brings up questions about the blurry boundary between fact and fiction, truth and lies. Before Ponckhockie Union was published, I addressed that boundary in a blog post that you can read here if you’re interested in that topic. The same questions come up in my latest novel, A Book with No Author. Maybe I’m a one-trick pony. 😀

The book is available at the usual places where books are sold, including regional shops of various sorts. I hope you’ll give Ponckhockie Union a try, and let me know whatever thoughts you may have about it.

Silly Human Questions About Art

 When it comes to writing or video, spontaneity is a challenge for me. I wanted to throw off the shackles of planning, so one day I just launched my camera app, put on a hat to hide my bad hair (okay, not very spontaneous), clicked the Record button, and said a few things that came to mind about my new novel. 

But then… I couldn’t help myself, I had to do some post-production, because my talking head just doesn’t give enough feeling for the content of the book. Here is the semi-spontaneous result. I hope you’ll take 56 seconds to watch it. Then continue reading below.

For this video to function as intended (to give an impression of the book’s content), it required editing. It needed a second pass. Vocal flubs had to be removed, other images added, music mixed in, all accomplished with a certain precision that was not present in the first spontaneous effort. Obviously, it’s a lot like the process of writing: a first draft, then revisions, then a final edit.

The mama robin who built this nest put in a lot of work as well. The biological imperative is both pure spontaneity and hard-wired automatic behavior, an “instinct.” Maybe some robins are more skilled than others, but I’ll bet most of their nests are like this one: a near-solid mud bowl (clearly needed as a safe place to raise their young), crafted in an almost perfect circle (why?). Form may follow function, but here’s a case where symmetrical beauty is apparently a built-in bonus. The instinctual drive, the spontaneous impulse, results in both pragmatic functionality and aesthetic precision. No second pass required. 

How do they do that? I won’t attempt to answer that question. 

What I am interested in is the driving force. A robin is driven by eons of evolved instinct to build its nest, and to build it in just that way. It does not make a decision to do so; it just begins building when the season triggers the instinct. Free will is not involved. 

To what degree is free will involved in my so-called “decision” to write fiction?

I’ve spoken to other writers who’ve had an experience similar to mine. Feeling discouraged with the marketplace, we’ve decided to give up writing. Maybe we feel briefly relieved of a burden. But not for long. Soon, maybe within mere days, we’re back at it, either forced or enticed by… something. What? We may claim it’s the characters speaking irresistibly in our heads. But what is behind that?

Perhaps there’s an elemental compulsion with which one is either in tune or hopelessly struggling against, on the order of Dylan Thomas’ “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” The life force. A law of nature, a bedrock truth.

The late Paul Auster had a lot to say on this subject. “It’s not that writing brings me a lot of pleasure,” he once said in an interview, “but not doing it is worse.” One of his non-fiction books is the 1991 essay collection The Art of Hunger. In the title piece, he delves into two of my favorite works: first, in depth, Knut Hamson’s novel Hunger, capped by Franz Kafka’s story, “The Hunger Artist.” He gives a lucid, surgical analysis that is worth reading in full, but right now my focus is on what Auster appears to be saying about the real art of the modern world:

“It is first of all an art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it…an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself. In other words, an art of hunger.”

In a review of the collection, the Chicago Tribune says, “Auster clearly shows that literature begins and ends outside literature, as something one does to live.”

Writing as an act of survival. Writing because one has no choice.

In a fundamental way, this connects to my new novel, A Book with No Author. The book is an investigation into where stories come from. What is the difference between life lived and life told? Do you own your life story? One of the characters is a writer who appears to have stolen the life stories of others – but without understanding how he did it. Among the last words we hear from him are these: “Believe me, I tried to stop it, this mad dictation. But... I couldn’t dodge the influx, the dive-bombing stream of language targeted on my cerebral cortex. The words, the voices, the images, they just wouldn’t leave me alone.”

He had no choice. Is this mental illness, or is it simply the plight of an artist? And what is an artist but one who is born with this inexplicable drive?

In the video above, the question arises: When I say “I,” what do I really mean? Do I mean all these events that have happened to me, that make up the story of my life? Do I mean the personality I’ve developed with which to interact with the world? Or do I mean something deeper than either of those, that foundational presence from which springs, without my conscious will, the drive to create?

I started this exercise by talking about spontaneity. To be fully “spontaneous”... isn’t that just to follow an irresistible impulse? A naturally-occurring drive, just like the one that tells us we must eat to live? The frequent lack of spontaneity that I perceive in myself is actually only recognizable as a surface artifact of the fundamental, ever-present hunger for self-expression, which will have its way, spontaneous or not. To resist it is doom.

Maybe the only difference between me (or you) and the robin is self-awareness. It’s comical to imagine a robin bothering with all this contorted contemplation, questioning its own instincts, asking why and how and jabbering to other robins, hoping they’ll understand. 

We humans are so silly.

HOW CAN A BOOK HAVE NO AUTHOR? (in which I interview myself)

My new novel is called A Book with No Author (see the cover in the right-hand column). Like a child just launching into the big wide world, this book is very demanding. It’s asking for support. It wants me to talk about it more, so I will heed its wishes. Maybe the best way is to do something that could almost be a scene from the novel, in which identities are multiple. I’ll interview myself. Or rather, BR1 will interview BR2.
____

BR1: A book without an author? Is this a joke?

BR2: Hold on. Let’s do this without a condescending attitude.

BR1: Okay, my apologies. Why the paradoxical title?

BR2: I like paradox, so it’s a title that would appeal to me as a reader. It may seem that I’m negating myself as an author, and maybe that’s true because sometimes it seems that stories come out of the ether rather than out of the lump of gray matter inside my skull. I often wonder, what is authorship, exactly? Is it really creation from scratch or is it something more like taking dictation from the cosmos?

BR1: Maybe those are the same thing.

BR2: Maybe. But to bring the title a little more down to earth—there is a book within the book, an abandoned manuscript whose author can’t be found. The search for the elusive author is a central plot element of the novel.

BR1: Hmm…a search for the author. Sounds like a metaphor.

BR2: Well, I want readers to interpret it in whatever way appeals to them. The book is also an exploration of identity, as well as—

BR1: So it’s a metaphysical detective story. I heard that’s a thing.

BR2: Okay, I guess it could fit that category. I don’t like categories, but apparently books require one these days. I was just going to add that this novel is also a story about people’s everyday struggles with relationships, family, work, substance abuse, religion. And place.

BR1: Where is the story set?

BR2: It takes place mostly in Manhattan and New Jersey, and there are several significant scenes out west in Utah. The final section is set in the town of Woodstock, New York, where I live. And where you live, too.

BR1: Of course. And I happen to know that there is a character in the book with my name. Which is also your name. What’s up with that?

BR2: I like playing little metafictional games, like we sometimes see in Nabokov’s work, Paul Auster’s work, and others. It makes writing more fun for me. And for readers as well—maybe they have a richer, more multi-layered experience, when they can wonder about the fuzzy borderline between truth and fiction, and think about other things besides the plot.

BR1: You still haven’t actually said much about the plot of your novel.

BR2: Well, it’s rather convoluted. In the book within the book, a freelance videographer in New York City, recovering from a difficult divorce, discovers that someone else has written and published fiction about his private life. This puts him into a spiral of dysfunction that exacerbates the pre-existing problems with his ex, his kids, his livelihood, his own self-image. On another level, the man who reads this story in a manuscript that arrived in the mail by mistake, also becomes obsessed with finding the author, and encounters his own set of problems.

BR1: Sounds a bit like 3D chess or something.

BR2: Well, one reader called it a Rubik’s Cube, which I like, but it’s much more than just a puzzle to be solved. She also said it was “tenderly invested in characters,” which is what I hope to do in all my work. To ground it in human issues, and then take flights of fancy that question reality, et cetera.

BR1: This all seems to be an exercise in poioumenon.

BR2: In what? Did you just make up that word?

BR1: No, it’s a real thing. Poioumenon. It refers to a specific type of metafiction in which the story deals with the process of creation.

BR2: Okay, if you say so. I like it!
____

Thanks for reading. To learn more, please visit the Recital Publishing website.

To hear me narrate an excerpt from the book, as well as answer some real interview questions, I hope you’ll relax for a half hour and listen to this episode of The Strange Recital podcast:

A Genre-Busting Nordic Thriller

Prominent on the lists of popular commercial fiction and television today is a category called “Scandi-Noir” or “Nordic Noir,” characterized by a police point of view, plain language, bleak landscapes, a dark and morally complex mood, and murder, of course. As I began Vic Peterson’s novel The Berserkers (Kindle edition, Recital Publishing, 2023), I was anticipating exactly that sort of genre experience. The first chapter, depicting a crime scene investigation on a frozen lake, did not begin to alter my expectations until its final two paragraphs:

“A pale tangle lay beside the hole the girl had been sunk in. It then dawned on me that the pale tangle was the girl. Her body lay sprawled on top of the ice, displaced by the minor tsunami of the sinking car, and ejected from the ice like the cork from a champagne bottle. Her clothes spread about her in wet snarls lurid under the dim sun, a cape and corset and stockings. 

The girl's pallor was blue and ruinous. My jaw slackened. I tried to utter some words, any words, whether of shock, wisdom, or warning. No sound emanated from my lips. For a pair of large wings had begun unfolding around the corpse, beautiful, wispy, shivering with each gust like the pinfeathers of a hatchling drying in the dying light.”

We quickly learn in the next chapter that No, this is not a dead angel, nothing supernatural is going on. The murder victim is a girl in a Valkyrie costume. More police arrive, character quirks and hierarchies continue to be established, certain foibles of the narrator (decidedly not a detective) are exposed, a subtly comic tone suggested in the first chapter becomes more pronounced, and, well… maybe we could still be in a Nordic Noir novel. But the third chapter removes all doubt: something else is going on here. What is it?

Genre-busting, in my view, is a key consideration in dubbing a work “literary.” I’m always intrigued when an author rejects the security of meeting reader expectations in order to follow a more personal muse. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy subverts detective story tropes. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon leaps past science fiction conventions. Cormac McCarthy’s western novels are much more than their settings and cowboy details. These authors are using genre elements as vehicles to explore themes, philosophies, or even writing styles that reach beyond what most readers of a commercial genre expect. 

Peterson is doing something like that in The Berserkers. We follow a Pynchonesque assemblage of characters through fabricated Scandinavian settings on a wild ride that is at once a Gothic comic book, a Sword & Sorcery quest in a gritty industrial landscape, an exploration of heavy metal music and soccer hooligans, a moody mystery told in lyrical prose, a comedy of errors, and an homage to ancient Norse sagas. 

The story’s narrator, Grammaticus Kolbitter, is a hapless police records clerk who moonlights in an aspiring heavy metal band named in honor of the frenzied Viking warriors called berserkers. He finds himself on a quest for justice accompanied by two other misfits, a retired (or rather, fired) cop and a legend-loving young woman who suffers from gigantism. The villains they chase are like the Kray twins on motorcycles, but with A Clockwork Orange bloodlust and collars trimmed in wolf fur. Other vividly drawn weirdos populate the cast, but I want to focus on one in particular: the Constable.

The nameless Constable is the imperious police authority whose whim or precognition assigns Kolbitter to the case for no apparent reason. He wears a black cape-like greatcoat and glasses with the left lens blacked out to cover an empty eye socket, and he has two pet ravens, Minne (Memory) and Tanke (Thought). Odin, king of the gods in Norse mythology, is also blind in one eye and keeps two ravens as familiars. The Constable is often behind the scenes, his presence felt but not seen. One of the elements that elevates the novel beyond its plot is the strangeness of the Constable’s two contradictory autobiographies, found in pages that Kolbitter steals from the Constable’s home. These texts-within-the-text are both exotic fictions, each describing a different bizarre family, youth, education, career, dramatic loss of an eye. His first autobiography opens with this:

“Shall I venture a brief yet grand portrait of the man? When I look at his face, what do I see? His face, in a mirror, a shop window, a pond? Volutes of hair, their mercury sheen. Epidermal crevasses. A black lens. Although this blemish has traveled with him, or me, many years, it is in this scar I recognize the creature most fully—him, myself—and oblivion. Attributes of a sorcerer, indeed. 

So begins my authentic biography.

Facets of a hidden clockwork. His humors play out in planetary swings. His relationships are secretive, reckless, trusting, and gravid with both admiration and disappointment. Harsh. One might suppose this man hewn with a mallet and chisel, like a woodcut. I have observed him in private moments, when he thought himself least on display, surprisingly happy, voice strong, engaged among police cadets, those earnest youths with muscular forearms and razor burn and shower-wet hair.”

This version of the Constable was “the son of a hipster couple who lived in an avant-garde circus, street buskers borne on stilts and trapezes, with lefty and lofty political intentions.” The son grows up to choose a different kind of life: he becomes a quantitative analyst in the investments business, a wealthy capitalist viewing the world from a glass tower. But then, as financial markets crash, an aged business colleague gives him a strangely potent drink and stabs out his eye. He is now “A one-eyed specter haunted the corridors, fingertips running the walls to keep his balance under his new optic discipline, his face a bombed church.” 

Several chapters later comes the Constable’s second autobiography, in which he is a spoiled young nobleman tormenting his parents with feigned madness in a brutish kingdom centuries past, where the oppressed masses threaten revolt. Drinking and gaming in a tavern, he encounters a riddling old man with a magic drink that “was icy and stung my throat. It was as if a shard of glacier had pierced me; yet, simultaneously, as if I had licked honey straight from the comb.” A few moments later:

“Thus, swifter than I could have supposed, the old corpse made a poniard appear in his claw and thrust it at my face. I threw my forearm up in what was a useless gesture. The steel slit the flesh of my left eye. I fell to the floorboards. The liquor winked silver on the hearthstones. Blood ran between my fingers.

‘You wanted release?’ the mad stranger hissed. ‘This is your release. The vast cycle of ages will advance without disruption. The price? Sight for sight; vision for vision. You will remember everything, and see everything, and you shall wander haunted among mortals, seeking meaning.’”

When he returns to his great ancestral hall, it is in ruins. He seeks out his parents:

“I immediately recognized their forms, impossibly hardened into statues of glass. Clear, shimmering glass, glowing with a misted light from within. Deliquescing. Father in his opera hat, worn too low, the corners of his thin mouth sloped down toward the folds of his cheeks. Mother, liripipe framing her face, clutching a sprig, staring off into an unpeopled country.”

Clearly, none of this is standard Nordic Noir fare. And these florid passages are not typical of the prose style in the rest of the book. What do these weird tangents have to do with the plot, the police investigation, the quest to bring to justice the murderers of the winged girl in the ice? Nothing. These flights of fancy are not there for the purpose of advancing the plot. Nor are they simply character development. They are atmosphere, enrichment, art for art’s sake: color, brushstroke, chiaroscuro, counterpoint, dissonance, coloratura—confidently applied. Their effect is to lend the entire work a moody strangeness, an edge of unpredictable lunacy, a dark ballast of aesthetic complexity underpinning the humorous, TV-friendly surface. This is not the artistic choice of a calculating follower of genre formula.

So… the odd crew of justice seekers lead us from the frozen lake through bleak northern cities, antique library volumes, a mead factory, a tawdry brothel, a clash of hardcore soccer fans, a bar fight, a tangle with a trio of rune-casting witches, a risky chase and deadly combat inside old mine-shafts in an island mountain, a heavy-metal battle of the bands, and more—all rendered with Peterson’s unusual mix of JRR Tolkein and David Lynch and Henning Mankell. 

But the Constable’s autobiographies are what I found most fascinating. When Kolbitter asks him about his conflicting life stories, the Constable is suitably cryptic. “‘Sometimes,’ he says slowly, ‘a fable tells the greater truth. Not easy to get your head around, but poetry takes a little bloodletting. Look at the changes wrought in you since that day on the frozen lake.’” But how many autobiographies can one person have? According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, perhaps an infinite number. Maybe that’s what all of us who write fiction are doing: just writing an authentic memoir from another dimension in the multiverse.

###

NOTE: This review appeared originally in The Dactyl Review 12/29/22.

Imaginary Auster & Double Layers of Story

Ben Orlando’s debut novel, Lost Journals of Sundown, is two things at once: a fascinating exercise in metafictional homage, and an unusual standalone mystery story.

For readers who are not familiar with the work of Paul Auster, Orlando has created an entertaining, oddly slanted pseudo-detective story. In a slightly off-balance version of New York City, a suicidal writer adopts a false identity as a private investigator and desperately embarks on a vague quest to protect a couple of misfit strangers from their villainous father. He imagines this adventure will keep him away from the noose in his closet. During his rather inept surveillance, he uncovers the father’s darker, more twisted campaign to ruin lives and potentially destroy civilization, one psyche at a time. He faces the dual challenge of both stopping the madman and finding his own salvation.

But there’s more. Readers who know Paul Auster’s “City of Glass,” part of The New York Trilogy, are treated to an extra layer of meaning and enjoyment. If you’re in the know, you can smile at Orlando’s sly wink from the very outset of the book, with the wrong number phone call, the detective pretense, the name Stillman, and more. Orlando has crafted his story to parallel the plot of “City of Glass”—with key correspondences, structural touch-points—but also to ultimately be entirely different in both broad strokes and finer details.

 

Auster’s The New York Trilogy is known for subverting detective story tropes to go beyond the genre mystery into some new form of hybrid literature. 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?". For more on this subject, see an earlier blog post of mine.

Orlando’s authorial style and concerns are entirely different from Auster’s. Where Auster is spare, Orlando is colorful. Where Auster is philosophical, Orlando is psychological. Where Auster raises questions, Orlando seeks answers. His book sits more squarely in the mystery genre, while tipping its hat to the outsider, Auster. Orlando’s most impressive feat is the balance he finds, in which he pays metafictional tribute through both imitation and conscious reference, yet at the same time maintains his own vivid style and tells an entirely unique story—all the while addressing two audiences.

Late in the book when Auster himself shows up as a character, and the actual “City of Glass” is unmasked as the template for a con job, the two different types of readers have different experiences. Those not familiar with Auster accept the story twist and either learn about an author they didn’t know before, or perhaps simply assume he and his novella are fictions—either way, the story outcome is the same. The Auster fans, however, see their secret insider’s knowledge suddenly made public, an experience of both satisfactory vindication and, perhaps, a twinge of disappointment. At the same time, it’s fun to see a fictional version of a real person brought into holographic second life on the printed page. And perhaps they nod—yes, all this nicely reflects the way The New York Trilogy and other Auster books investigate blurred identities and “doubling.”

As an Auster aficionado, my experience with Lost Journals of Sundown was pleasurable on a couple of levels. Since I’ve read much of the substantial Auster academia (he seems to inspire scholarly analysis), I enjoy seeing new additions to the catalog. Also, I see Orlando’s book as perhaps a companion work to my novel, Ponckhockie Union, influenced in both style and content by Auster, and in which Auster himself appears as a secondary character, but fictionalized to be an unpublished novelist working in small-town journalism. I wonder what other writers may be putting their Auster inspiration right out on the page. I’d like to read those books too.

On another coincidental side note, I even enjoyed the references to a tiny hamlet in the Catskill Mountains called Sundown, which in real life is just 18 miles from my house. Orlando has created a history for that town that, as far as I know, is a wild fabrication—but that’s his privilege. He’s a fiction writer.

In both our books, the imaginary Paul Auster is a good guy. He attempts to bring some sanity to the scattered, impulsive mind of Orlando’s protagonist, Daniel Reed, and is a fatherly helper behind the scenes as the story nears its end. In my book, he assists the narrator, Ben Rose, in his escape and hideout from a shadowy assassin, and the writings in Auster’s journal act as a Greek chorus of sorts, commenting on and interpreting some of Rose’s story. Orlando drops in the names of characters from Auster’s oeuvre (another wink), and I include mention of Auster’s real-world wife and daughter, even as I construct their lives to be alternate-timeline fictions.

In both cases, readers experience two levels of story: one on the pages and the other in “reality.” Like memory, like deja vu, like dreams, they operate simultaneously, overlaid upon one another like double-exposed film. Orlando has Auster tell Reed that life is like a lucid dream: with awareness and a little attention, it can be controlled. As humans, we are story-making creatures, and stories are dreams made physical. We walk through multiple dimensions every day.

So… how many ways can two different stories exist in the same book? It all depends on the mind-frame of the reader. When you read Lost Journals of Sundown you’re bound to have an entirely different experience from mine. That’s as it should be. Writers and readers are co-creators. As the Talmud says, "We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are."

Coincidence, Precognition, Rock Stars

I’m writing this in a cafe where I am the sole customer. A forkful of herbed chicken salad with greens, a bite of crusty peasant bread, a series of keystrokes, a sip of iced tea, repeat. Words and phrases emerge from the blank white screen. Out the window is a forest shrouded in mist under a low gray sky. The old Lovin’ Spoonful tune, “Didn’t Want to Have to Do It” plays softly in the background, taking me back to high school days in Colorado, when I had all their albums, when John Sebastian was a hero of mine. Is it a coincidence that much later and thousands of miles away, I am growing old in the town where he lives? That I had a nice chat with him at a mutual friend’s home?

This is not about John Sebastian. Maybe it’s about coincidence… I’ll find out as I follow the lead of my fingertips.

Recently I’ve been thinking about coincidence (a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection), wondering about how it overlaps with precognition (knowledge of something in advance of its occurrence) and intuition (the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning). I’ve wanted to boost my ability to recognize coincidences in my life. I’ve been thinking about writing on the subject, but no door was opening.

Until right now. Maybe this is a form of serendipity (a happy accident): I was wanting a way into the coincidence topic, and then while I’m having lunch this old song plays….

I’ve recently connected with Dr. Bernard Beitman. He is a psychiatrist and the author of Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen. He has initiated The Coincidence Project to gather people’s stories of meaningful coincidences in their lives, to encourage awareness and discussion, and to bring the study of coincidences and their meaning into the field of science. Synchronicity, serendipity, seriality, simulpathity, the psychosphere, the collective human organism (CHO)… Learn more at Coincider.com and on YouTube.

Now the cafe soundtrack is “Small Town Talk,” written by Bobby Charles and Rick Danko, first recorded here in the town of Woodstock, NY – but what I’m hearing now is the great Paul Butterfield’s Better Days version, also recorded in Woodstock. This is the version I loved since I first heard it when I was 21, living in Utah – when I hadn’t the faintest clue that the album cover image was taken in the Catskill Mountains just a few miles from where I would spend my senior years. I live on the same road where Butterfield once lived. It All Comes Back, indeed. *

What does it mean that the literary podcast I now co-host is recorded in a home studio not a hundred yards from where Bob Dylan lived at the time of the mysterious motorcycle accident (1966) that allowed him to retreat from the cacophony of fame after his electric revolution, and do the woodshedding with The Band that would result in yet more world-changing music that I listened to avidly as a young man… what does it all mean? Is this some sort of cosmic synchronicity?

Well, let’s think clearly about this. These were famous people loved by millions all over the world. I’m just one of those millions. And Woodstock is a very small town. If you live here for a few years, odds are extremely high that you’ll come into direct contact with the artifacts of its world-famous musical history. The few incidents I’ve related barely scratch the surface of my experience.

Also, Woodstock is a destination town, a lovely, artsy little place just two hours from what John Lennon called the capital of the world, New York City. Many people visit; some stay. Its association with the widely known 1969 concert that bears its name is, of course, one reason. My wife-to-be had moved here from “the city” in the early 90s and I soon followed her. So… if synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) is defined by numerical odds, then the fact that I ended up here surrounded by reminders of my heroes of the distant past is probably not synchronicity, not even coincidence at all.

Nevertheless, it feels meaningful. To me, just a nobody from an anonymous suburb out west, it feels highly unlikely. After all, to live in Woodstock was never a goal of mine, and none of my high school or college friends ended up here. If synchronicity can be defined by the feeling of meaningfulness, then maybe it qualifies.

Does precognition create coincidence? Can tastes be shaped by precognition? How does precognition figure into my youthful attraction to Sebastian, Butterfield, Dylan, others who are specifically associated with the town of Woodstock? Did the fact that I would feel the pleasure of living in their neighborhood as an older man guide me to their music as a younger man? Why was it these particular artists whose music I loved? I was the only person among my high school friends who was a serious Lovin’ Spoonful fan. And my choices as a limited-budget record buyer did not go in directions that many people my age followed – toward, for instance, Led Zeppelin, who have no connection to Woodstock. I was certainly a Jimi Hendrix fan… but Hendrix lived for a time in a house just two miles as the crow flies from where I live now. He practiced for the Woodstock concert at Tinker Street Cinema, the little movie house near the center of town.

Did I precognize my future? Is it a case of “retrocausation”? I’m sure Eric Wargo would have some ideas about that. Wargo has been a recent guest on Dr. Beitman’s podcast but I have followed his blog, The Nightshirt, for years, and my fiction writing has been influenced by his ideas. His latest book, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self, is a tool I’m currently using to explore my dreams and how they interact with my waking reality.

Quantum physics has shown that, at the most fundamental levels of reality, no distinction can be made between cause and effect. The relation between two events can be either causal or retrocausal. I imagine time not as a line but as a surface – let’s say the surface of a pool. An event in my consciousness, perhaps given power by emotion, is like a pebble dropped into the pool. 

Ripples flow outward in every direction in time. As a 15-year-old, I felt a connection to John Sebastion because fifty years later I would meet him. But wait… doesn’t the power in that moment come only from my pleasure in encountering my boyhood hero? What if as an old man I hadn’t met him – would my young self have paid no attention to his music? What is cause and what is effect? It’s an endless loop, an Escher image of the mind, like the cover of Eric Wargo’s first book, Time Loops.

The time loop trope is common in fiction, but I don’t use it. My novel Ponckhockie Union and my story collection The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, as well as another novel and another story collection in progress, use coincidence, synchronicity, and other riddles as the atmosphere in which recognizable characters like you, me, and our neighbors face life’s multiplicity of challenges. My premise is that the world is not as it seems – it’s much more wonderfully mysterious. The unanswerable questions are my inspiration.

 

But… skepticism is also very high on my list of values. I do my best to live by the motto: Believe nothing; question everything. I am always self-monitoring for cognitive bias, confirmation bias, or any unfounded assumptions. I am a self-diagnosed “epistemological obsessive,” always demanding of myself and others, “How do you know?” So with all this talk of invisible interdependence, I have to ask: How much am I a victim of apophenia? Apophenia – a common condition that in its extreme form is a precursor to schizophrenia – is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The conundrum here is: who decides what is “unrelated” and exactly how do they decide? While I don’t want to be apophenic, I also do not automatically accept someone’s authority about whether I am or not.

Speaking of untrustworthy authority, which is increasingly evident as the world falls to pieces around us – is there a valid reason for rambling about coincidence and fiction? One writer friend of mine can’t write because of his anxiety about the problems in the news. Another only wants to write about the problems, in protest. My own preference (or is it intuition about what is healthiest for me?) is to follow my perennial interests no matter the current events, but I harbor an old secret fear of being a dysfunctional daydreamer – most likely, a vestige of parental voices in my head. Right now I am consciously putting that fear aside – my own small gesture of sovereignty.

I appreciate Wargo, Beitman, and others such as Dean Radin (see his book The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena) in their efforts to give solid scientific study to “psi” or parapsychology. After all, who knows what truths about the universe we may be missing when ultimate authority is given to reductionist, materialist Scientism?

So I continue with my quest to enhance my awareness of coincidences in my life, and to interrogate their meaning. Old songs, rock stars in Woodstock, my meandering path to this place and time… I’m glad intuition led me to follow that unexpected trail of thought as I ate lunch. What does it mean? After some pondering, I can say this: coincidence, synchronicity, precognition, intangible vectors of influence – the vast, intricate web of interconnectedness that sparkles just outside our normal sight – this is what inspires me to create. And creation is what keeps me sane and somewhere on the edge of happy and content in this Insanity Stew of a culture. Without a doubt, my fiction will continue to explore those mysteries.

“Artmaking is making the invisible visible.” ---Marcel Duchamp

* For more information about the musical history of Woodstock, see the book Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns.

Missing Ted Denyer

This month marks 15 years since my dear friend Ted Denyer left this planet. I miss him a lot, but I'm also glad he did not have to see the dismal condition of the world today. He would have been bewildered and sad.

Ted was a painter dedicated to making visible the invisible. I'm extremely pleased to see his life's work catalogued on this fine website: http://teddenyerart.com/, a creation of his son-in-law Efrem Marder and grandson Ben Marder. I hope you'll check out the evolution of his paintings, and take 16 minutes to watch a video documentary that my wife Wendy and I produced about him in 1996.

As I began to write here, I realized the futility of attempting to capture the profound impact one human being can have on another. Every two weeks for ten years, Ted and I had dinner together in a cozy little loft room that overlooked his painting studio in his home in Mount Tremper, NY. I grew from my forties into my fifties, he from his seventies into his late eighties. Our conversations ranged widely, but the words and topics were not the important part of those evenings. There was often a feeling of timeless suspension. Perhaps it's not going too far to say we entered a parallel dimension of communion. We were in tune, sympatico, kindred spirits, but also... I had never been close to an older man before. My own father had frequently felt like a stranger. Ted's warmth, interest in others, fascination with truths below the surface, cultural hunger, self-reliant individualism, curiosity, laughter, young-heartedness, even his sometimes too-crusty opinions about art, gave me a role model. This was the kind of man I wanted to be as I too moved past middle age toward the final days.

By way of tribute via imagination, I gave Ted a very brief appearance in my novel Ponckhockie Union, which is primarily set in my local environs in the Hudson Valley. The character called "Ted" is one of the elements in the protagonist's recovery from a devastating life crisis. His one "on camera" scene is in a chapter that focuses on some of the history of the town of Phoenicia. You can hear me read that chapter and answer some interview questions on the podcast I co-produce, The Strange Recital. I was glad to be able to say a little about the real man that inspired the character. The episode is 24 minutes long.

(See this previous post for more audio glimpses of the novel.)

Another tribute to Ted that I wrote not long after his passing, is this odd little venture in prose (less than 2 pages), called "The Abstract Painter."

The future on this planet seems potentially very strange and difficult, not what I'd hoped for in my later years. My memories of Ted, the example he set for how to live a creative life and face death with courage, are among the things for which I am most grateful.

(Photo of Ted Denyer by Susan Quasha)

Sample My Novel: 1-2-3

It seems necessary to acknowledge this truth: a blogger I am not. My last post here was nearly two years ago. I had reached "The End" of my novel Ponckhockie Union, not knowing it would grow a bit and get better in the next few months. Occupying too much of my time and attention to allow thoughts of blogging, the book finally completed its gestation and was born into the world in July of 2019. Since then I've been on the road of promotion, while also launching two other books through our startup Recital Publishing, plus maintaining a twice-monthly schedule on The Strange Recital podcast.

Time to catch up! But why the weird title? What does it mean? Come back to this blog for a future post about that. For now, here's the description from the back cover:

Benedict Arnold Rose is a documentary filmmaker in a troubled marriage. His history-focused life is suddenly derailed by shadowy assassins with multiple identities, indoctrination in a dark cell, seduction, betrayal, the finality of fire, and the unexpected kindness of a stranger. He must journey within, but what is real? And who is asking? Coincidence and paradox abound as Rose negotiates his passage into a new life…but the questions without answers still remain.

Encounters with a fictional version of the well-known author Paul Auster, and with a mercenary soldier who is also a devotee of the Indian spiritual guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, entwine the metafictional with the metaphysical in a speculative swirl of mystery, history, and self-inquiry. Check out John Burdick's insightful viewpoint in Hudson Valley One.

If you’d like a direct glimpse into Ponckhockie Union, here’s a good start: three episodes of The Strange Recital that feature audio excerpts from the book, but also have a little fun with supplementary material (as in “author interviews” that go a little astray). And music!

Start with this one, the opening of the novel, with a particularly local focus (thank you, Woodstock, NY):

This one features an important character (not Ben Rose, the protagonist) and a different voice:

And here’s a bit of the backstory, some context for the marriage crisis that is a key element in the plot:

I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts or questions about what you just heard. Find me on Facebook at https://facebook.com/robisonbrent or Instagram at https://instagram.com/robisonbrent52.

Memoir in Fiction, Truth in Lies

Note: if you prefer audio-visual media to reading, here's an opportunity -- skip to the bottom and listen to the podcast while looking at a pretty picture! But I do hope you'll read first, then listen.

Even I, despite my intentional avoidance of mainstream news media, know that a lot has been said recently about the nature of truth -- a lot of words but not much substance. "Alternative facts," "fake news," etc. -- phrases whose very existence necessitates an opposing argument, but the entire exchange devolves into Us against Them. "Truth" deserves different definitions depending on the category of reality we're talking about. But the sound-bite world can't tolerate discussion with any depth.

Simplistic thinking is a cultural trend that may never abate, but I intend to continue quietly defending the boundaries of a tiny territory where everything co-exists in equilibrium with its opposite. Where there is no two, only one. Call it Nonduality Nation.

In the literary realm, this might be expressed in the old dichotomy between Memoir and Fiction. Granted, this is useful categorization for the marketing and selling of books -- but that's a mundane level that doesn't interest me much. Also, in my own internal experience as a writer, the distinction is very clear in intention and process: memoir is reportorial, fiction is imaginary. The act of writing in each of those modes simply feels different from the other. So yes, there are categories in which the dichotomy is accurate.

But for some people, Memoir = True, Fiction = False. In Nonduality Nation, this proposition is not valid.

Memory (on which memoir is based) has been proven highly unreliable. See the work of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, then go even further with the bizarre speculations of The Mandela Effect. So there is certainly no direct correspondence between an author's memory of an event and the objective "truth" of that event, if such a thing even exists. When we write memoir, we just do our best to remember and report. It's a faulty venture at best, but it can be a very rewarding one.

Fiction is a different exercise. My own fiction is subtly and inextricably laced with events and characters "borrowed" from my actual history. I suspect every fiction writer does this to one degree or another. We make conscious decisions to pull a scene, an image, a bit of dialogue, from our database of memories when it feels right for the otherwise entirely imaginary story we're telling. Or maybe those memories inspired the story to begin with. They are the foundation, and they get heavily embellished with imaginary (yet equally important for the story) scenes, images, characters, events -- which, by contrast with memory's "truth," must be "lies."

In that way, truth begins to mix with falsehood to make an undifferentiated soup. To anyone who's thought much about the subject, all this is obvious. But it's only the beginning. My conscious decisions to create that mixture are not as powerful as the inevitably unique expression of my subconscious mind. Every idea, emotion, image, sequence of events -- even word choice, sentence structure, punctuation -- is an expression of me. If I attempt to strictly control those things, as if to bypass my subconscious, the control itself becomes the expression. I can't escape it.

Fiction or non-, every book is a portrait of its author. (I have more to say on this subject... in a future post.) It's entirely possible that a work of fiction might contain more psychological and emotional truth than does a fact-filled memoir by the same author. "The Starry Night" might say more about Vincent Van Gogh than any of his self-portraits. Of course, nothing is certain.

So, in that light, my newly completed novel, Ponckhockie Union (yet to be published) is both true and not true. Also, here in Nonduality Nation, events in imagination are just as concrete as those in conventional actuality. The story takes place in a reality that is almost, but not quite, the same reality you (the reader of these words) and I (their author) are in right now, in this present moment. But the continuum of "real" to "not real" is just as subject to over-simplification, or just as blurrily overlapping, as "true" and "false."

That's one reason why I prefer questions over answers. Here are a few of many questions raised by my novel: Was my protagonist, Ben Rose, actually threatened by a shadowy international assassin, or is it all in his mind, a metaphor? Who would the well-known author Paul Auster be if he had never had publishing success? What if Yasser Arafat of the PLO was actually an impostor controlled by a hidden elite? Did a mercenary killer ever sit at the feet of the guru Nisargadatta Maharaj? In what ways does national history entangle with personal history? And how much of the book is actually autobiographical (in other words, haha, "true")?

I get a secret pleasure from the idea that my readers are asking the autobiography question as they read -- always wondering what is my "true story," or memoir, and what is "made up," or fiction. I hope they come away with an ineffable understanding that it doesn't matter. Those things are one and the same.

With all this in mind, I wrote a very brief, confessional, tell-all memoir. No more secrets and lies! I call it "Vagabond for Beauty." Tom Newton and I recorded it as a podcast for The Strange Recital. My reading is followed by a lovely bit of guitar music by David Temple, then an author interview that explores some of the foregoing ideas, and offers others. The whole thing lasts 23 minutes. I hope you'll listen.

(The photo of Delicate Arch is by me, taken over 30 years ago.)

Alternate Lives: Books by Paul Auster and Jim Murdoch

A picture of two books.... Okay, so in their physical presence these two novels are completely different. So what?

4321 by Paul Auster is a 6.5 x 9.5-inch hardcover with dust jacket, 866 pages (a brick!). Published by Henry Holt and Company, a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, one of the Big Five.

The More Things Change by Jim Murdoch is a 5 x 7.75-inch paperback, 329 pages. Published by Fandango Virtual, a homegrown effort.

The point of this little essay is not to compare them, but rather to explore them and to honor them, with an eye toward their shared meanings. And part of the context here is an invisible (so far) third book: my own novel, currently undergoing final edits. My book (working title: Ponckhockie Union) is perhaps more different from these than they are from each other. But I mention it here because of the topic of alternate lives. A key character in my novel is "Paul Auster," an unpublished novelist working as a local journalist in the Hudson Valley, married to a successful writer named Siri. He is almost, but not quite, the world-famous Brooklynite, husband of Siri Hustvedt and author of The New York Trilogy and so much more—just as the world in which my book takes place is almost, but not quite, the one we live in and think we know.

4321 is Auster's latest, and longest, novel. It has already been much praised and—like all Auster's work—much criticized. It tells four stories in one: four of the perhaps infinite number of possible lives of one young man, Archie Ferguson. Starting from the same point (birth in New Jersey, 1947), each Archie takes a different path as a result of apparently random occurrences in his life and the lives of his parents, family, and friends. Part of Auster's impressive achievement is the depth of well-observed and well-imagined detail with which he describes the hopes, fears, interests, challenges, and loves of each Archie—all seem equally authentic. Which one is Archie's "real life?" They all are. For me, this gets into the territory of the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which suggests that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual world or universe. On a less scientific plane, it evokes the Mandela Effect, in which memories don't seem to match reality—possibly explained by the suggestion that some of us occasionally slip between parallel, very similar, realities, or "timestreams."

Jim Murdoch is a Scottish author living near Glasgow. I've reviewed past books of his on this blog: a story collection, a poetry book, and an earlier novel. The More Things Change is his latest, and longest, novel. It tells the story of Jim Valentine, a teacher-turned-author, an ordinary guy whose journey is anything but. He is living a life without distinction, job and marriage in a state of torpor, dreaming of being a writer but never actually writing. As Murdoch says, "Jim was forty and had been since he was thirty." Then one day in the park he meets an old codger who claims to be God. They have a long philosophical conversation over the following days, and the next thing Jim knows, he is standing in front of an apartment door, key in hand, with no memory whatsoever.

A fresh start, a re-birth. Thus begins Act 2 of his life, in which he writes a major bestseller and a less successful follow-up. This part of the story is told from 20 and then 40 years later, after he's fallen again into isolated obscurity, been divorced by his wife, and come to the end of his ability to write. Or has he? Could there be a third book in progress, one that circles us back to the beginning? Once again he meets the old man in the park and their dialogue (or is it repartee?) brings into focus the alternate life Jim has just lived, and the next (or is it simultaneous?) life he may be embarking on. He is, after all, a character in a book, subject to the metafictional whims of the Author. As, perhaps, are you and me—see this article about the "simulation hypothesis."

Murdoch is a master of a particular kind of narrative voice: a very subjective, internal flight of fancy, a torrent of ideas large and small, busily skewering cliches and deconstructing conventional thought, a careening monologue in which the events of a storyline seem almost incidental—all delivered with wry wit and good humor. His narration is funny, but never at the expense of his characters, for whom he always has affection.

Auster's book is also full of affection for his characters, perhaps more heartfelt than any of his past novels. I was surprised to find myself moved almost to tears more than once. But he is a storyteller first. Even when his story is twisted and strange, he moves straight ahead to address the question "What happened next?" I see Murdoch, on the other hand, as a philosopher first, entwining his plot in a complex tapestry of playful ideas and big, unanswerable questions. And he's funnier than Auster could ever be.

Both of these books are dense, presenting pages of text rarely broken by paragraphs and more rarely by dialogue. These authors ignore the tired writing-school trope of "Show, don't tell." To their credit, this indicates the courage to be true to one's own unique expression, rather than courting the biggest possible audience. Also, both use unusual structures. I've already mentioned Murdoch's jumping through time, but he also spices the book with short enigmatic snatches of dialogue in playwriting format, a way of embodying another layer of reality. Auster's four parallel lives are tracked in interleaved segments numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, then 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and so on. It's very organized but the reading experience can blur the framework. I soon surrendered to the experience of never being sure, when I began a section, which story I was following. I found this a sort of delicious disorientation that served to blend the four lives into one, a perfect way of making a concrete reality out of a mental concept: how thin the boundaries are between one life path and another.

A final note about Auster's book: I only wish he hadn't dealt me a final twinge of disappointment with a too-easy, reality-bound ending, which I won't spoil by revealing. Perhaps there are many readers, those who like mysteries to always be solved, who will be glad for that ending. I appreciate the fact that Murdoch chose, with a smile and a wink, to keep the questions alive beyond his last page.

Bottom line: I enjoyed both of these books very much. Both are smart, brimming with verbal and cultural intelligence. Both are impressive achievements in the craft of writing fiction. So the question arises: what makes some people famous and others not? Could it be that each of us plays a scripted role, as I explored in my story "Wild Roses"? (Hear the story in audio form here.) Maybe, in some alternate life in a parallel universe (or simulation), Auster is the obscure one (as in my novel), and Murdoch, like his character Valentine, enjoys (or endures), a brief, brilliant moment in the well-deserved limelight.

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Relating Writings: Follow this link for more of my thoughts about underlying meanings in Auster's work, and go even further with this link to a long-ago post. Follow this link and this link for other book reviews that explore thoughts about the connection of memory to "self," as well as my opinions about the "mystery" genre.