Truth of the Python
Hot and dark in the old bedroom at night. Time to appreciate it while lying there from 3:10 till the alarm went off at 5:30. It's easy to drop off after the alarm sounds, I think because then there's no pressure to sleep. You can relax. You just don't have time to sleep now.
The current work, The Mission, is not my first attempt at a historical novel. By late 1984, in my spiritual readings, I had come across material on the ancient philosopher Pythagoras, in particular in Jacob Needleman's book The Heart of Philosophy. In Needleman's view, Pythagoras was a pivotal figure in the development of our modern outlook, as opposed to worldviews that were truly ancient. Supposedly the creator of the terms philosopher and cosmos, Pythagoras sought to know truth apart from dogma, and thus could be termed the first scientist. At the same time, he understood truth as something higher than mere concepts; profound truth was intrinsically spiritual. In a sense, then, Pythagoras was a kind of primordial scientist of the spirit--and it was this about him that excited and fascinated me.
So I began to work on a biographical story about Pythagoras's life, which, shrouded in legend, is thought to have been in the 6th century BC. I was hoping to capture a kind of junction-point in Western history, when the possibility of a truly new and holistic way of understanding life was born in the spiritual colony (possibly the world's first monastery--earlier than the one founded by the Buddha in India) founded by Pythagoras in southern Italy at Croton. According to legend, the townspeople eventually razed the colony for alleged immorality (Pythagoras admitted women as full members--something that was not to happen in Buddhism for many centuries, and not in mixed monastic communities until it came to North America in the 20th century). Pythagoras was killed, and with him, I speculated, perhaps a chance for the growth of a more sane, balanced approach to the search for truth than what eventually came to pass here in the West.
But somehow the idea of just writing a biographical novel was not working for me. How do you write a life story, as fiction, in a way that has story power? I didn't know. I fussed and fiddled; mainly I researched, buying and reading books on ancient Greece. I read the Pelican edition of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves in summer 1985, and was spellbound. I would stand at the bus-stop downtown after work, reading in the hot sun, unable to pull myself away from Graves's fascinating and erudite explication of the myths. People have to know about this, I thought. But the story would not jell.
Then my mother lent (or maybe gave) me another book: Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss, about a psychiatrist who, using hypnosis, accidentally regresses a young woman to previous lives. Not only that, the voice of a discarnate spirit-guide speaks through the woman, about the evolution of her soul--and of Weiss's evolution--in the series of lives in which they have known each other. Weiss, a mainstream psychiatrist, was transformed by the experience and changed his career.
I was electrified. And I had my story idea: a contemporary hypnotherapist, right here in Vancouver, helping a young male client cure his bedwetting, would accidentally regress the client to a previous life--one in which he, the client, was the philosopher Pythagoras, and in which the therapist himself also had a part, as another shadowy quasi-historical character, the shaman Abaris. Unfinished issues from that remote time would be played out here and now, in contemporary Vancouver. The link between ancient and modern, which I had been seeking, would be made directly. Yes! I was so excited that I couldn't help myself: I had to start writing it immediately, to vent the creative energy. I remember sitting at ICBC, where I worked, in December 1985, furtively writing the first few paragraphs longhand on a ruled office notepad. I knew I had to back off and write an outline, but I just couldn't stop myself. When I learned one theory of the meaning of Pythagoras's name, I had my working title: Truth of the Python.
Like everything that excites me, it was ambitious. I had already arranged to quit my job so that Warren and I could make a stab at writing scripts full-time. I left ICBC in February 1986 and Warren and I used a spare room at my mother's townhouse in False Creek to write each day. Before he arrived I would work on Truth of the Python, mainly reading and notes. It would be years before I finished that project. But maybe more about that in a future post.
The current work, The Mission, is not my first attempt at a historical novel. By late 1984, in my spiritual readings, I had come across material on the ancient philosopher Pythagoras, in particular in Jacob Needleman's book The Heart of Philosophy. In Needleman's view, Pythagoras was a pivotal figure in the development of our modern outlook, as opposed to worldviews that were truly ancient. Supposedly the creator of the terms philosopher and cosmos, Pythagoras sought to know truth apart from dogma, and thus could be termed the first scientist. At the same time, he understood truth as something higher than mere concepts; profound truth was intrinsically spiritual. In a sense, then, Pythagoras was a kind of primordial scientist of the spirit--and it was this about him that excited and fascinated me.
So I began to work on a biographical story about Pythagoras's life, which, shrouded in legend, is thought to have been in the 6th century BC. I was hoping to capture a kind of junction-point in Western history, when the possibility of a truly new and holistic way of understanding life was born in the spiritual colony (possibly the world's first monastery--earlier than the one founded by the Buddha in India) founded by Pythagoras in southern Italy at Croton. According to legend, the townspeople eventually razed the colony for alleged immorality (Pythagoras admitted women as full members--something that was not to happen in Buddhism for many centuries, and not in mixed monastic communities until it came to North America in the 20th century). Pythagoras was killed, and with him, I speculated, perhaps a chance for the growth of a more sane, balanced approach to the search for truth than what eventually came to pass here in the West.
But somehow the idea of just writing a biographical novel was not working for me. How do you write a life story, as fiction, in a way that has story power? I didn't know. I fussed and fiddled; mainly I researched, buying and reading books on ancient Greece. I read the Pelican edition of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves in summer 1985, and was spellbound. I would stand at the bus-stop downtown after work, reading in the hot sun, unable to pull myself away from Graves's fascinating and erudite explication of the myths. People have to know about this, I thought. But the story would not jell.
Then my mother lent (or maybe gave) me another book: Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss, about a psychiatrist who, using hypnosis, accidentally regresses a young woman to previous lives. Not only that, the voice of a discarnate spirit-guide speaks through the woman, about the evolution of her soul--and of Weiss's evolution--in the series of lives in which they have known each other. Weiss, a mainstream psychiatrist, was transformed by the experience and changed his career.
I was electrified. And I had my story idea: a contemporary hypnotherapist, right here in Vancouver, helping a young male client cure his bedwetting, would accidentally regress the client to a previous life--one in which he, the client, was the philosopher Pythagoras, and in which the therapist himself also had a part, as another shadowy quasi-historical character, the shaman Abaris. Unfinished issues from that remote time would be played out here and now, in contemporary Vancouver. The link between ancient and modern, which I had been seeking, would be made directly. Yes! I was so excited that I couldn't help myself: I had to start writing it immediately, to vent the creative energy. I remember sitting at ICBC, where I worked, in December 1985, furtively writing the first few paragraphs longhand on a ruled office notepad. I knew I had to back off and write an outline, but I just couldn't stop myself. When I learned one theory of the meaning of Pythagoras's name, I had my working title: Truth of the Python.
Like everything that excites me, it was ambitious. I had already arranged to quit my job so that Warren and I could make a stab at writing scripts full-time. I left ICBC in February 1986 and Warren and I used a spare room at my mother's townhouse in False Creek to write each day. Before he arrived I would work on Truth of the Python, mainly reading and notes. It would be years before I finished that project. But maybe more about that in a future post.
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