So Are You to My Thoughts As Food to Life

Shakespeare's Sonnet 75

In the late 1990’s, I took a calligraphy class in which the teacher suggested we use Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75 as a final project. In my favorite, quite poor Uncial, I lettered the sonnet onto a thick piece of white paper, posting it on the wall when I was done. And there it was, the title for the series of books I was beginning to think about. I had already met the person who was to my own thoughts as food to life. I wrote that I wanted to “plan some big work, amorphous, capacious, which is full of my particular conundrum. To be finished only in twenty or so years, when I shall no longer worry what the world thinks.”

It is now twenty years later, and I’ve begun to outline the last book in the series, entitled So Are You to My Thoughts. It makes me extremely happy to have gotten this far. The penultimate book, A Moon Every Night, is written, waiting for its last edits, and I’ve gone ahead with planning the last.

The books are full of characters, but they tell the stories of three protagonists, Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson. I’m interested in how the arcs of these three stories play out as over against each other. It isn’t exactly planned. It is just how things happen. One person may be in a dynamic situation which energizes and grows them, while another is in a quieter part of their life.

Line’s story is intense at the beginning, when she and her husband are impacted by the violent student protests of the late 1960’s while quickly having four kids. She is able to do much good as she gains experience working across many spectrums of health care. Later in life things settle for Line, and keeping track of her kids, who make the most of their excellent educations and resources, occupies her.

The reverse is true for Marty, who doesn’t blossom until later. Though she has good jobs and a lively intellectual life in San Francisco, she has married an emotionally deprived man, who never really recovers. Only in the last books do we see the full flowering of her abilities and her taste for beauty, when she finds a partner who loves being a father to his four kids and needs her to complete his family.

Paul’s journey is steady. He successfully settles in wilderness places he wants to study. His achievements turn to ashes in his hands, however. His beloved wife does not live long and he finds himself back where he perhaps wanted to be in the first place: resident at Lake Michigami, the lakeside home built by Mother and Dad, with the long-term help of family and their hard work. He is left with his own task of getting to the bottom of things, his own search for truth.

In all of them, the Mikkelson values for balance and a sort of human ecology can be seen. Excellence often comes at a cost, skewing everything around it and often requiring many people and resources to shore it up while one person gets the glory. Though each of the Mikkelsons is unique and takes their own path (just off the mainstream!), their aims are often modest. In their family culture, Dad’s insistence on right relationship, to God and to all of his creatures as well as each other, is of the highest importance.

I try to look at these stories, which are of course those of me and my family, though fictional, from the outside. They are a saga, an evolving tale of what was possible in particular cultures in the second half of the 20^th century in the United States. It is a time when technology, particularly communications, accelerated. The Mikkelsons grew up in North Dakota, with 19^th century technology and only each other to entertain themselves, however. They have grown rich and fertile inner lives with which to combat Baudrillard’s “desert of the real,” which makes up life in the 21^st century.

I hope that the books are anthropology, as well as story. E.O. Wilson’s great salvo on socio-biology, On Human Nature posits that “soft core” altruism, as opposed to “hard core,” is the key to human society. “The genius of human society is the ease with which alliances are formed, broken and reconstituted. There is in us a flawed capacity for a social contract, combined with a perpetually renewing, optimistic cynicism with which rational people can accomplish a great deal. Human behavior is the technique by which human genetic material is kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.” The Mikkelsons, keeping themselves simple and their minds open, are the proverbial “salt of the earth.”

The idea that I would have to give up worrying what the world might think about the project was prophetic. I publish the books myself under the imprint Lightly Held Books. But I have had some wonderful comments. On Amazon.com, a “Concerned Citi-zen” writes: “With her photographer's eye, poet's mind and compassionate disposition, Kronlokken steps into and guides us, book after book, through the intimate intricacies of her character's lives and times. Weaving a tale often more akin to a symphony than a story, her novels are rich with a zen-like sensitivity that leaves one quietly fulfilled, yet wanting more. Highly recommended.”

First Draft Finished

This week I completed a draft of the fifth book in my series, Nature’s Stricter Lessons. It has taken longer than the first draft of other books, but this was a busy year. After a couple of edits, I plan for it to be published some time in February. Deo volente, of course!

Because of my reading of E.O. Wilson and Frederick Turner this year, I’ve begun to look at the series So Are You To My Thoughts differently. I found the form for it seven or eight years ago, but I didn’t know what I was doing. The books don’t feel like novels, but they are fiction, a kind of family saga. Looking at them through an anthropological and evolutionary lens, however, helps me make sense of them.

E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature [published 1978] sets out the views of a scientist who believes that “the evolutionary epic is the best one we will ever have.” Looking at the objective facts about the social animals we have become, he describes how aggression, sex, altruism and religion have all served the necessities of diversifying the human gene pool and adapting ourselves to our environment. We share a single human nature and develop socially along the dual tracks of culture and biology. Family is one of the universals of our social organization.

Wilson is a prolific writer who is still making major contributions. In this brief interview, he discusses how little we still know about the world and how the extinctions which are going on in the natural world may affect us. He writes that science and the humanities must come together, that neither is complete without the other. He shows how empiricism destroys “the giddying theory that we are special beings placed by a deity in the center of the universe in order to serve as the summit of Creation” [Consilience, published 1998].

I was thrilled to find that Wilson doesn’t think the post-modern turn literature has taken of much value. When he quoted the poet and professor Frederick Turner, I immediately went out and found the only book by Turner I could get my hands on, Epic: Form, Content, History [published 2012].

Turner was raised in Africa, the son of anthropologists. He believes the current culture is trying to break out of social and political fallacies that proclaimed authority over human life. In literature, art, music and architecture, the mediums of production became fetishized, turning a spiritual gift into “a work of art, a collector’s item, a connoisseur’s pleasure, a critic’s meat, a statement of the most recent and ‘novel’ frame of reference and model for fashionable behavior.” He sees epic, the story of human evolution, as the solution. “It is story that opens up the world, that truly represents the world as branchy, free and full of surprises.” You can get a glimpse of Turner’s wilder side here.

All of this has helped me see the work of my series So Are You To My Thoughts with new eyes. I had no idea, for instance, that my books are about “exogamy,” the attempt of Line, Marty and Paul to find mates far from their kin-group. They are stories of growth, in which the siblings negotiate the need to find employment and build families of their own in precise social environments not known before their time. Though some of them do not have children, their altruism helps their relatives to pass on their genes.

I don’t expect that thinking about these things will change my work very much. When I started, I imagined how plants in a garden, given good soil, plenty of rain and sunshine, still bloom in very different ways, depending on their inherited color, leaf structure, height and type of bloom. No one of my three intertwined characters is privileged over the other. Line hopes to do good in the world, Marty wants most to make beauty and Paul is dedicated to truth. Do they succeed? Do they become more integrated and productive as they grow older? And what of their parents and children? And the places they call home?

People are not as complex as we make ourselves out to be. As Wilson says, early humans invented the arts to express and control aspects of the environment “that mattered most to survival and reproduction. … The arts still perform this primal function, and in much the same ancient way. Their quality is measured by their humanness, by the precision of their adherence to human nature.”