Grateful

Among the many other gifts of the season, I’m grateful I have been able to finish the first draft of my novel So Are You to My Thoughts. It’s the final book in the series I have been writing for the past ten years. There is a lot of work to do before the novel is published, as it has been written sporadically and needs pulling together. But, there is no getting around it. It’s done.

In this culminating novel, Line’s kids are all thriving. She and Stephen continue to reside in Santa Cruz with Poppa, as the kids move into their own lives. It is easier for Line to communicate with them, however, as technology has improved. In her 60’s, Line begins to feel something is wrong. Eventually she is diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis which at first horrifies her. She gradually becomes used to her new condition, with Stephen stepping in to help.

For Paul, the book begins with the loss of Marie. He finds a place for himself, however, when Ellie and Bruce decide they can rebuild the family’s lake cabin. It will become a year-round home, with Paul in residence as manager. The building process is exciting and Paul is thrilled to find himself deep in northern Minnesota where he always wanted to be. Marie’s daughter and her children remain his family.

Marty’s single life is completely disrupted when she moves in with Doug at the Boulder Creek ranch on the mountain above Santa Cruz. She becomes the household anchor for the family, since Doug works hard and the kids are all in school. As a father, Doug is full of ideas about what he wants for his kids. Marty helps implement them. During some of the kids’ high school years, the family moves in to Santa Cruz to be closer to activities. By the end of the book, the kids have their eyes on college. Marty and Doug are amazed at how quickly they grew up.

Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, says “For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.” I have come to that place, indeed, when we see whether the books are viable enough to survive in the modern world.

This is not to say that I am sure the books qualify as “art.” Art, with a capital A, is a romantic idea, often supported by a lot of hype, to which I don’t subscribe. All of us bring art to our lives, and occasionally try to embody in words or music or the other arts the spirit we cannot contain, that we feel we must share.

I hoped the books would show, in one group of siblings, born into a particular place and time, how one grows into a self and then sets out to share that self with a larger family. It is always an adventure, an odyssey through uncharted waters. But, as with most adventurers, home, and the making of a home, is the goal. I have been blessed every day with ideas and scenes I call up from memory or create from research, often a combination of the two.

The project could not have been brought to this point without the specific help of three people: My sister Naomi has read each chapter as it was written with an eye to its emotional continuity and the awkward word or phrase. My brother David has especially commented on the Paul chapters. And Don Starnes has brought his visual and technical gifts to the production of the covers and the website. For all of this help, and for the web of life reflected in the books, I am deeply grateful.

Tipping My Hand

Readers of this blog will have noticed common themes running through its posts. As I near the end of the first draft of my final book, So Are You to My Thoughts, I think often of the value system embodied in the characters. I haven’t tried to make it explicit, as it is indeed meant to be reflected in their actions and thoughts. Their human natures compel their actions, while their feelings and thoughts make meaning of them.

In our study of tai chi, the Taoist way and its principles, we were taught an exercise between two people in which we first “listened” with our bodies, “surrendered” to the other person, “transformed” their energy as it came toward us, and finally “pushed.” It is a practice of balance within oneself, and harmony between people, which also results in positive accomplishment.

In my work, I’ve tried to show that there are ways of taking the material you grow up with and find in yourself and transforming it. Thus the freedom everyone in my generation fought for (“like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir”) does not have to be freedom from anything. It can be freedom to make homes, families and lives of which we are proud and which honor those we love.

Likewise, the self definition which many of us were so desperate about can be understood in terms not of self expression, but of service. Beyond the idea that only a few are called to become artists, documenting every last impulse, we can recognize that all of us are able to display the cardinal virtues of discernment, courage, temperance and fairness. Cultivation of these virtues enables us to live beside each other in harmony and peace.

A third major preoccupation of my generation was lifestyle, making new ways to live beyond the traditional furniture-ridden, unquestioned round of those who had gone before. Transforming this impulse to trash the past, we can educate ourselves to live with grace and taste, seeing these as elements of everything we do.

Goodness, truth, and beauty have long been the ideals of humanity. Keats saw in the Grecian urn that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” None of this triad exists without the other. I associate freedom with truth, as all paths must be open in order to find it. Beauty has within it the necessity for authenticity, as in nature, where nothing is anything but itself. Goodness too is hollow without the backbone of character. Victimhood has been the subject of art, and of people’s prurient interest, way too long. And people hardly believe they have a right to beauty, that they know what it is. We can turn our gaze back to these ideals.

In his book, The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit [1995], Frederick Turner says: “The greatest arts are, I believe, not those which cause a stir on museum walls or extend some ‘shocking’ modern or post-modern critical theory into yet another posture or attitude, but those arts which intensify ordinary human existence and fill it with meaning, that make a home into a place that recalls all our beautiful and tragic past, and points to futures that are as human as they are strange and adventurous.”

John Bayley pointed out, regarding Czeslaw Milosz, that he was beyond ideology, having lived through so much change and violence during the 20^th century. Milosz was “not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.” The U.S. too is growing up, forging a new culture not seen before from its indigenous peoples, its immigrants and its unique place on the globe. Humans evolve slowly, but culture is quick. We can do better than we have in recent years. Postmodernism, with its identity and power politics, is a dead end. We are over it. Time to look back and pick up the pieces.