Novels to Live In

Having completed my series So Are You to My Thoughts, and just now having re-read the series from beginning to end, I have some thoughts on the kind of work it is. First and foremost, I believe they are novels to live in. It might not even matter if you begin in the middle of the series, and later go back to the beginning. You are going to find the characters consistent, like people you might meet and then wonder about. “How did Line and Stephen meet?” you ask. “Why does Paul move to Alaska?” or “Why does Marty make poor choices?” In this case, you would be rewarded. Their stories are there for all to see.

In addition, the novels exemplify what I think of as my manifesto “against brilliance.” I have nothing against erudition, except when it is a masquerade, when there are no clothes under the king’s ermine robe. One does not need to go to an ivy league or big eight university to get an excellent education. Education is more in one’s own hands. Art doesn’t need to be larded with obfuscation and prizes. It needs to be meaningful. One doesn’t need to learn code, finance or go to law school to find good work. Work in the service of humans is everywhere. Glitz, glamour and fame are not how we should measure our success. But in simpler ways, by the trust others have in us and our fidelity to the lives and natures we have been given. By our ability to be happy. And our country does not need to be the biggest cheese in the world, saving other countries from themselves. Rather, we need to get back to our own basics, spending money on education, health care and justice rather than on armaments at every level.

None of us are perfect. Certainly my characters are not. But their stories leave space for the reader to live among them. They show the characters finding practices that fill them with delight and wonder: Paul finding a way to live with loss in the heart of the country he loves most; Marty finally learning to appreciate the beauty within herself and making a home for a family which expresses it; Line having to tame her fierce maternal energy into a watchful tolerance.

And they are stars, each with an epic story of their own movement from a fixed childhood firmament into an expanding universe. Their own dinner table conversations are thrilling, their houses and gardens are beautiful and they are proud of the lives they lead.

The great anthropologist and poet Frederick Turner, in Beauty, The Value of Values, published in 1991 imagines that the mid- 21^st century will be surprising to us, should we arrive there all of a sudden: We would be “most surprised not by the expected innovations but by the way that all of human cultural and biological history will have become part of the landscape; by how magically corny, how shamefully old-fashioned, how primate-like and tribal we will be among the almost invisible and intangible miracles of our technology; by how slow and quiet everything will be, how improvised, how richly ornamented; how closely we will live with the animals and plants, how much in the open air; how gorgeously and formally and anachronistically clothed we will be, how morally earnest and at the same time how lighthearted, how accepting of shame and tragedy; how much also as we lived in the great pedestrian cities of the civilized past.”

I loved this vision of the future, so quiet and peaceful. But we have far to go in that direction! Like Turner, I have written books which state my own values, as over against those around me. Technology assists me to assert them, whether anyone agrees or not. But one thing I can assure you. The writer is dressed plainly, in cotton t-shirt, ragged jeans and tevas on a warm day near the center of Los Angeles.

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.

A Return to the Classic Mode

It is just past the solstice, when, from the point of view of earth, the sun’s daily path reverses direction and begins to go the other way. This powerful change is welcome to those of us in the northern hemisphere, who are ready for more light!

I just put the next to the last chapter of my current book, A Moon Every Night up for my early readers. I might finish the last chapter before the end of the year, or I might not. It is the sixth in my series of novels about Line, Marty and Paul, and there is only one more to come. I’ve been giving this work as much attention as I can, partly to finish before someone, or some thing, stops me! I will need three or four edit cycles to finish the book, of course. It will probably be published some time in February. At any rate, I am feeling accomplished.

Northerners, photographed by Peter Taylor

The solstice reminds us that in human cycles too, change is inevitable. One, probably old-fashioned and literary, way of thinking of how we are as people is in terms of the romantic versus the classical modes. A quick definition might be that the classical mode sees the underlying forms, shapes and order of things, proceeding by reason and natural law; whereas the romantic proceeds by intuition, creativity and inspiration, seeing things as they immediately appear. Alain de Botton, a Swiss-born writer, defines these modes here, and notes that the classical mode of life is “ripe for rediscovery,” after almost 250 years of the domination in the Western imagination by romantic attitudes.

Frederick Turner, a Shakespeare scholar and poet, has written a book entitled The Culture of Hope, a New Birth of the Classical Spirit. This wide-ranging critique of the prevailing culture comes from his background in both the sciences and the humanities. He feels our culture is in crisis at many points, particularly in academic circles. He describes here how the humanities have been subverted by an interest in power, while at the same time the sciences have become less determined, more interested in evolutionary development and emergence.

I’ve been watching for cultural change for a long time, perhaps because I’ve often felt myself swimming upstream in my relationship to culture. I’ve been interested in “real matter,” those things we can perceive with our senses but which have a spirit indivisible from that matter. I’ve been interested in the family and how it cradles each of us in a net both sticky and sustaining. And I’ve been trying to sort out values of wholeness and balance, rather than needing to express every last personal idiosyncrasy. I’m not sure that what I am working on gets into my books, but that is the intent.

Readers of this blog will have noted my fascination with the theories of wholeness propounded by the architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander. I’ve been very much inspired by the scientist E.O. Wilson’s recent books and his plea for consilience between the humanities and sciences. I look for change in our artists too, seeing it in the widespread success of such things as the musical Hamilton, in authors such as Ruth Ozeki and Arundhati Roy, and in the ongoing interest in the lyrics and life of Leonard Cohen. What is the structure, the underlying meaning of life? Who can tell us?

In addition to working on my series So Are You to My Thoughts, I’ve kept up my blog about women characters, both fictional and real. By this time, I’ve written about more than forty women whose stories have something valuable to tell us, which you can read here. These pieces point to the longer stories of each. Women continue to present an enigma which baffles everyone, including themselves!

In the blog I portray wonderful mothers and domestic partners such as Aline Renoir, Sally Hemings, and Kristen Lavransdatter; artists and seekers such as Nedra Berland and Tina Modotti; adventurers and poets such as Dalva Northridge and Elizabeth Bishop. Some are real people and others are characters in fiction. What are the patterns of growth for women? What does a grownup woman look like? What are the values women share? Why are women so interesting?!

Every one of us is making culture, from the earliest talk between mothers and their babies to the dignity with which we present ourselves to younger people as we grow older. Some of it gets captured in media. Some doesn’t. But how we tell our stories is a matter of choice. As Frederick Turner says, “It is story that opens up the world, that truly represents the world as branchy, free and full of surprises.”

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.”