story peaks

Yesterday I reached a (minor) milestone in the progress of the book by finally hammering out the sequence of story-events that I've been working on. These story-events constitute a mini-climax within the work as a whole--what is known as an "act turning-point" in storytelling jargon.

By writing in "acts" you show that you understand storytelling; by reading or watching a story composed in acts the audience feels confident in the powers of the writer, and also that the work is one thing--a unified whole.

For, interestingly and perhaps counterintuitively, it is exactly the decomposition of a thing into relatively autonomous parts that makes it a whole--a distinct thing. The human body, for example, is not just a mass of cells, and still less a stew of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is made up entirely of subunits which are relatively whole in their own right: organs. The heart, for example, is integral with the rest of the body but is also a distinct organ with its own clear functions and inner rules of operation. In the term coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine, it is a holon: a part that is also a whole.

In a complex hierarchical system, in order for a higher-level whole to operate smoothly, all (or anyway most) of its component subwholes have to be running smoothly: doing their jobs without taxing the higher-level holons above them. When this is not happening, for whatever reason, there is a failure of efficiency and of health (a word that comes from the same source as whole), and the organism is diseased. If your pancreas is not running smoothly, you have some form of diabetes. If your thyroid is not running properly, you have some kind of metabolic disorder.

In a story, the acts are the highest-level "organs" making up the story as a whole: the equivalent of its brain, heart, and liver. And like these vital organs, acts too are complex things made up of subwholes of their own. In a movie script the next-lower subwhole is called a sequence, and a similar level exists for prose writing--often roughly at the level of the chapter in a novel. The next-lower subwhole below the sequence is the scene. Each scene too is composed of distinct subunits, which Robert McKee calls beats. These, according to him, are the elementary units of a story: the individual intentional actions that cause a story to move forward.

So, having now plotted out my act-climax in some detail (and having resolved many story and character issues to do so), I feel like someone who has scaled a mountain-peak. But it's just one peak in a range--and not the highest one. That still lies ahead of me. And the difficulty I've had in scaling this one gives me pause about tackling the big one.

But I'm committed now.

acts of creation

Well bless me, there is sun out there and blue sky. Kimmie sent me an e-mail, two floors below her (she can do that now), commenting on the beauty of the sunlight touching the orange leaves of the maples on the boulevard. The deluge is over.

Yesterday I had the fun of receiving a book in the mail. If you order enough books online, you don't know what has arrived until you open it, which gives the experience more of a Christmas feeling--it's fun! It was a used book, not a purchase from Amazon. I saw a Chicago postmark, but didn't remember what book I had bought from there--and didn't want to remember. I tore open the envelope, and unwrapped the hardcover book, which someone had carefully shrouded in pages of the Chicago Sun-Times' sports and metro sections. Then it was revealed: a compact, quite pristine 1969 copy of Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation--a book I'd forgotten altogether that I'd bought.

I subjected it to my usual process for receiving a used book: I carefully wiped down its (surprisingly intact) dustjacket with a damp cloth to remove the grubbiness and organic flecks that accrete on book covers. This made the book feel clean and new. Then I inscribed my name and the month and year on the inside.

I forget now exactly what prompted me to buy the book. It may have been part of my research into the phenomenon of identity. In this book Koestler examines the psychological phenomenon of creativity, more specifically the event of creation: the individual creative act. Where do new ideas come from? How are they formed or discovered?

These questions fascinate me for several reasons. For one thing, I'm a creative type. I'm interested to know more about this aspect of myself. For another, I want to look into the mysterious borderline between the mechanical and the free. For as living beings, we are combinations of the two: the great majority of the processes of our lives happen automatically, by reflex. But floating on that automatic flow is a free agent, an entity who chooses--and who creates. Where is the border between the automatic and the free? How does it work? How does it change? I expect Koestler to examine those questions.

Then there is the fact that creation, in the words of religious scholar Mircea Eliade, is "the divine act par excellence." Creation is finally the prerogative of the gods. When we humans create, we partake of the divine.

The kicker for me was the fact that I had so enjoyed Koestler's later book The Ghost in the Machine, actually the third book in a trilogy of which The Act of Creation is the second book (the first is The Sleepwalkers--a copy of which I've owned since 1986 but have not yet read!). I've talked about The Ghost in the Machine before. I found his ideas powerful and persuasive. I admired his boldness and originality as a thinker, as well as the clarity, vividness, and passion of his prose--that interesting and humbling phenomenon of the foreign-born (Hungarian in this case) writer taking up English and beating most native writers in its use. As an explicator of scientific ideas, he belongs in the pantheon along with (in my opinion) Isaac Asimov. (Interesting side-note: all the writers I've mentioned here--Koestler, Eliade, and Asimov--were polymaths and creators whose works spanned both fiction and nonfiction in various fields; plus they were all of East European birth, with Eliade born in Romania and Asimov in Russia.)

In The Ghost in the Machine Koestler developed the powerful new idea of the holon--a unit of spontaneous organization in an "open hierarchical system", which means any "system", including especially living organisms, that behaves in organized, purposive ways. In this theory, any such system is made up of relatively autonomous parts, which in turn are made up of other complex and relatively autonomous parts, and so on down the line. For example, we, as living beings, are made up of organs. The brain is a relatively coherent unit, although it forms only a part of the whole person; likewise the heart and the stomach. But the brain is made up of substructures, each of which has its own comparative autonomy within the system. There are structures specifically devoted to processing visual information, and for coordinating balance, and regulating speech, and so on. Thus, each "part" is also, from another perspective, a "whole" in its own right. In Koestler's terms, each is a holon: a neologism signifying something that is a "whole-part".

I've taken up Koestler's holons as part of my own developing theory of identity. Another thing I enjoyed about The Ghost in the Machine was how Koestler did not merely suggest a few new ideas, he boldly explored their implications as far as he could. He developed a whole system. In short, he took the ball and ran with it all the way to the end-zone: no timid half-steps for him. The book does not stretch a couple of thoughts into book length; it is a banquet of well-worked-out ideas, a feast--and I love that.

Given the author and the subject-matter, I have every reason to expect much enjoyment from my "new" used book. I started it yesterday at tea-time. So far, so good.

ego consciousness

Last night I lay awake from 2:50 till the alarm went off at 5:30. I don't feel bad now, but the thoughts that keep me awake at night are not pleasant. It's always possible to see things in a negative light, and this seems to be what's happening during these dark periods when my mind is under the dominion of the moon.

In the morning, over coffee, I'm still on the trail of identity. Will I ever arrive? Will I find something that, to me, feels like an answer? I may not, but I would still like to have a theory, or maybe even a decent hypothesis, to work from.

I continue to trawl through The Origins and History of Consciousness. I'm now in Part II: The Psychological Stages in the Development of Personality. It's excellent, fascinating. The section I read last night, "Centroversion, Ego, and Consciousness", was so rich that I highlighted most of the text. Centroversion, a word coined by Neumann, refers to the tendency of an organism to stay intact and maintain itself; it is the same as the integrative function described by Arthur Koestler in his description of "holons" in The Ghost in the Machine. A holon (a term coined by Koestler himself) is any relatively integrated thing that functions both as a whole, when viewed from within from the perspective of its constituent parts, and as a part, when viewed from above from the larger thing of which it is a member. Organisms, including people, are holons, for we are made up of constituent parts, and are also parts of larger wholes above ourselves.

So centroversion is the integrative tendency we have as organisms, the unifying effect of all our subsystems working together to keep us alive. In Neumann's view, consciousness is "the control system of centroversion", and the ego is the central complex of the field of consciousness. He believes that consciousness arises when stimuli, outer and inner, become represented as images. The ego, which as far as I can tell is basically the consciousness of the organism as an independent individual self, arises only very gradually and painfully. Neumann makes the point that pain is key:

Pain and discomfort are among the earliest factors that build consciousness. They are "alarm-signals" sent out by centroversion to indicate that the unconscious equilibrium is disturbed. The function of ego consciousness, however, is not merely to perceive, but to assimilate these alarm signals, for which purpose the ego, even when it suffers, has to hold aloof from them if it is to react appropriately. The ego, keeping its detachment as the center of the registering consciousness, is a differentiated organ exercising its controlling function in the interests of the whole, but is not identical with it.

All very interesting, as is this:

We shall always find that fear of the unconscious, and fear in general, is a symptom of centroversion, seeking to protect the ego.

I keyed that whole section, then pulled down another book, this one from my dharma shelf: Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, a slim little volume I bought in April 1989 while on a month's meditation retreat at (what was then called) Rocky Mountain Dharma Center in Colorado. I found this little book exciting, gripping, disturbing when I first read it, which was while I was down on that retreat.

But more of that perhaps another time. I'm eating into my teatime here--treading on sacred ground!

reopening the project

The belly of the whale; or maybe I'm just somewhere in his esophagus still...

I lay awake for a long time again last night, falling asleep relatively close to alarm-time (5:30), and having dreams. I wrote down one of these during coffee-time, wanting to find whatever wisdom I can from the realm where dreams originate.

But today was an advance for me, as I was able to actually open up my novel and look at it, and even work on it a bit. I avoided and resisted for awhile, but eventually gave in and opened chapter 21 and its associated notes document. I reviewed what was in the chapter (11 pages drafted), and looked over the notes to see what I had in mind, then, with a "what the hell" feeling, I typed on, pushing the story ahead. I found that my indifference actually made it easier to type; I wasn't worried about how I expressed myself, I just typed. It's an odd state of mind to be in.

Lately I wrote another book review on Amazon.com, for Future: Tense by Gwynne Dyer. I was gratified today to see that someone gave me a "helpful" vote. Nice.

Last night I finished reading The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler. I was going to quit about 20 pages from the end, but thought that Koestler deserved a finishing kick after all. I found out recently that Koestler died in 1983 by committing suicide in a pact with his wife. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease and leukemia.

Kimmie has been up at the dentist having a root canal. Wind has blown in fierce gusts, sending people's yellow and blue recycling bags far from their houses, up lanes and streets, across other people's lawns.

Now I'll head up for tea.

rebuying books

Rain fell heavily in the dark of morning. It was still dark at 8:00 when I went upstairs to munch my granola; I left the blinds down.

After the usual fear and procrastination, I launched on drafting chapter 20. Having reviewed my notes over the past few days, I figured I was mostly ready. Indeed, I'd found that I was inspired by the notes; I didn't realize my story was that good! How nice.

Having fully and finally recovered from the long cough that followed my cold, I decided after lunch to make my first run of 2006 (it had stopped raining). Before heading off I found, to my delight as ever, that the mailman had stuffed not one but two packages that were clearly books that I'd ordered online (abebooks.com). Had to open those before I set off: Communitarianism and Individualism edited by Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit, part of the Oxford Readings in Politics and Government series; and The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler. This latter I ordered with a wry attitude, since I'd already bought the book back in 1980 or '81, but gave it away a couple of years ago, figuring I'd never read it again. Now I've shucked out another 15 or 20 bucks to get it back (my first copy was also a used book--very unusual for me at the time).

I remember reading The Ghost in the Machine on my breaks as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital, and being occasionally heckled by fellow janitor Mark, a mocking university grad. "Ah," he'd say, "Koestler!" His tone was laughing and mocking as always, but I got the feeling that he respected a fellow janitor reading philosophy on his breaks. In any case, I found that my mind did not click with Koestler's at the time; he struck me, a judgmental 21-year-old, as a bit lightweight.

It is my inquiry into identity and its basis that prompted me to read the book again (I buy books, of course, rather than merely borrow them from the library, so I can highlight as I read--a crucial part of my process now). I remembered Koestler's introduction of the concept of the "Janus-faced holon", a term intended to represent "dividuals": things that are made up of parts, but are nonetheless also wholes in their own right--such as ourselves. His reference to Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and boundaries and doorways, spurred me as well, since Janus is proving to be an important image for my work.

Well, Art, I'll give you another shot. Maybe I'll get to you forthwith, over afternoon tea. Off I go.