Same and Different

In my thinking about various things, I arrive again and again at a basic conundrum of human experience: the Same and the Different.

Even in ancient times this question exercised philosophers. How do we understand the ideas of Same and Different? What makes something the Same as something else, and what makes it Different? I thought of doing a drawing or a painting with the title of "Same and Different": two identical eggs side by side. They're the same--but different.

Another way of presenting this same idea is the notion of Genus and Species. In the ancient, original sense, Genus was the category to which two individuals belonged--as, say, the Genus "egg" in my example--and the Species was the individual instance within the category--as the two individual eggs. Two Different individuals within the Same category. They're the Same--just Different.

Two other terms for Same and Different are Familiar and Strange. For something to be the Same, it must be Familiar: we must have a preexisting idea of it against which to compare it and note its Sameness. The Strange is Different from our familiar ideas. We recognize its novelty.

Every created work will be an amalgam of Familiar and Strange, Same and Different, Old and New. Familiar words in a Strange sequence, for example.

My first thought was about historical fiction: that it is a particular example of Same and Different. For, like, say, science fiction, it transports us to a world removed in time from our own: to a place none of us has been in our lifetime. In that sense it must be Strange and Different. But in that Strange and Different time, it contains people, things, situations, that are Familiar--the Same as what we recognize in our own lives now.

But it's not just historical fiction and science fiction that traffic in the Familiar and the Strange in this way--it's every work. An artist is exactly someone who assembles the Familiar and the Strange in a creative and novel way to evoke a sense of aesthetic enjoyment and meaning in a viewer or reader.

And hence, again, that excellent saying about high-quality writing: it makes the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. This is the ability to see (and represent) things with fresh, unprejudiced vision, with the eye of newness.

A historical project is simply one way of doing that. Right now, it's my way. Day in and day out, I journey through the Strange to find the Familiar in history--and finding the Familiar in history, recognize the Strange in today. My task is to share those insights.

zeitgeist

I still can't view the stats page for my blog, which creates a curious feeling of being cut off. Sort of like a performer who can no longer see the audience.

I continue to research my work. If I am not an "insecure talent", in McKee's phrase, who spends all his time in research without ever actually getting down to the creative work, then I am indistinguishable from one.

But you have to go by your own sense of readiness. Only you can really tell when you're ready to write. Often not even you, for in my opinion all too many writers start writing before they're ready, and mediocrity is the result.

Now I'm enmeshed mainly in research on ancient Rome. I've always known I would have to dig into this topic, but had other fish to fry first. So it's not a surprise; I knew this was coming. And I don't want my own work to suffer from the defects I feel exist in many other works that deal with ancient Rome. Too often historical fiction suffers from an over-reliance on superficial details and texture, and does not find the deep feelings and ideas underlying past cultures. These, admittedly, are not easy to find, surfacing in one's mind, I think, only at the end of a long process of research--and not at all if you're not looking for them. But you're looking for a certain feeling of zeitgeist.

I'm now sensing that coming over my own mental horizon, which means I'm getting ready to write again...

late-night reading

The rain plops heavily outside again. A series of sirens has screamed by in the dark of morning.

I prepared for sleeplessness again last night, setting out my sweatpants and fleece top for easy access in the dark. It turned out I needed them: awake at 1:45, I rose again at about 2:30 to head downstairs to read. Might as well make the night productive. This time I opened The Lupercalia, a bound dissertation by a certain Alberta Mildred Franklin, written for her PhD at Columbia University in 1921. There was exactly one copy of this available via Abebooks. That was in Stockholm, Sweden. I bought it for just under 30 euros (including shipping).

I'm glad I did. I sat hunched over the coffee-table, highlighter in hand, flipping through the surprisingly well-made paper-bound document, and sipping a glass of cranberry juice. All quiet in the house; all quiet in the dark outside.

I read for just over an hour: wolf-cults in ancient Greece; wolf-cults in ancient Italy...

I felt fatigued but not especially sleepy. "So this is insomnia," I thought. I've never really had it before.

I crept back upstairs and back into bed. I mainly lay there, but did eventually drift in and out of a very light sleep. I know this because I had dreams. I noticed also the changes in the level of my consciousness as I lay in those hours. Thoughts and images would arise unbidden, spontaneously, and I knew that I was closer to sleep--and by then I had veered back to full wakefulness.

Now, I feel reasonably rested. I'll head on with the day, and see what it brings. One thing I can say: I'm excited by the ideas I'm researching and connecting. They may even be partly what is keeping me up nights.

researching with a machete

Bit of a late start today, since we both drifted off after the alarm rang at 5:30. A hot night, and as usual now, trouble with staying asleep through it.

Even my basement office feels warm. But a soft cool breath of air comes through the window, along with the far-off sounds of impatiently accelerating motors.

I toil on at the chapter I'm currently numbering 32. No actual prose yet, but the notes documents are ballooning to dozens of pages. I'm not even exactly sure what I'm looking for, but I'll know when I find it. I'm working my way through images, objects, symbols. I'm still looking for my core images; at this late date I still have not found them, and that means I still don't know exactly what my story is about.

When you know exactly what you're writing about, your writing loses its arbitrary quality and takes on purpose. I know the feeling of arbitrariness well; many times I've had the feeling, while writing, that I'm just pulling any old thing out of the air to stick in my scene or my description. This is inevitable when you don't have a clear sense of the meaning of your story--and probably is a universal feature of first drafts. One of the greatest pleasures of doing a second draft is the feeling of confidence in removing material that you now know does not belong. This you can do because you now know what your story is about. The feeling of not really knowing--the feeling I have now, and have had for the past several years--is one of unease and anxiety, at least for me. You can only just keep going along, doing your best.

That said, I find the actual search for key images and ideas fun. Yesterday I was digging into Mount Etna in Sicily and Mount Parnassus in Greece--both said to be the place where the ark of Deucalion (the Greek Noah) came to rest after the Flood. Mount Parnassus is the peak that looms over Delphi with its oracle; it is sacred to Apollo and the Muses, among other things. Because the Muses were said to live there, the name Parnassus has been associated with artistic creation throughout Western history; references to it pop up in the work of artists like Nicolas Poussin and writers like Louisa May Alcott.

I prowl from my computer to my bookshelves, taking out copies of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves and A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot. I read Wikipedia articles, and paste parts of them into my research files. And I type my thoughts as I go, under today's dateline. I read through my earlier notes, highlighting potentially significant or usable ideas I find there.

In short: I'm still at the "machete" stage: cutting my way into the jungle of the unknown. Eventually it will be a highway and the journey will look easy.

But looks can be deceiving...

nonacademics

These days my "writing" consists of reading and typing the resulting notes. My method I suppose is not much different from what it would be if I were writing a work of nonfiction: reading, highlighting, typing. Occasionally my research sparks ideas for my story, and I type these in suitable story-related documents. I shift back and forth between reading my research works and musing on their implications for my story. I can only say that to me, this feels productive.

I follow specific lines of investigation. For a number of reasons my research right now has led me to look into the mythology surrounding Mount Lycaon in Arcadia--the place where the god Pan was allegedly born, where Zeus allegedly turned a king into the first werewolf, and where the Greek version of the Flood originated. My text right now is The White Goddess by Robert Graves, a treasure-house of deeply researched and interconnected mythological lore.

Taking a glance at the reviews on Amazon.com, I see that The White Goddess has become somewhat uncool--although it still has its passionate fans. Even those fans seem to feel the need to make excuses for what they fear is its political incorrectness and lack of concurrence with current scholarship.

Personally, I would never dare to presume to make excuses for a man of such evident and outstanding genius. True, he's an outlier: a poet, a maverick. He was not a professional academic--and was proud of that fact. He spent only a brief interval of his life teaching at a university in, I believe, Egypt; the rest of his life he spent as a professional writer.

Bravo, I say.

Graves had access to resources that academics lack. Not only was he fully conversant with ancient Greek and Latin, he had read, apparently, every surviving classical work in its original language up to the Byzantine era. He had tremendous powers of deduction and inference, as well as a profound knowledge of the natural, climatic, and folkloric aspects of Europe and especially the Mediterranean world.

But beyond these things he had a conviction in his vocation as a poet, which placed him in a fraternity not with academics, but with poets of all ages--including the poets responsible for the myths of the ancient world. Graves trusted his own poetic instincts to tell him how the poets of old connected their images and their meanings. You can't annotate that with a footnote. The plausibility or authenticity of the connection lies in its intrinsic power--in whether it awakens something in the reader or listener.

Yes, I can understand how, for academics, Graves constitutes a kind of no-go zone. But academics don't have a monopoly on knowledge, still less on history, culture, or myth. Graves was writing, first of all, for fellow poets: those entrusted with making use of the powerful images and their interconnections. And it is in that role that I approach his work.

And as I reread The White Goddess, I too am glad that I'm not an academic.

another day

I've been taking it easy, blogwise. Kimmie took an extra-long weekend over Canada Day (and had dental surgery on Wednesday), and I fell in with vacation mode alongside.

But even in vacation mode I keep on reading, researching. It can never be "enough", except in the sense that there comes a point when I feel willing to dare writing more of my story based on what I've learned so far. The creative urge pushes me on, even if only slowly, like viscous lava rolling slowly down the side of a volcano.

The great majority of research material that I uncover I will never use. Rather, it helps me to feel at home in my world, helps me make choices that feel real to me.

I hear the clunk of Kimmie's footsteps in the kitchen upstairs as she prepares a blender-drink breakfast for herself. Outside the weather is cooler and still: even the frail leaves of the Japanese maple hang motionless in the morning air. I hear the wavering drone of an airplane, but other than that, only the breathy whir of my computer's fan.

Another day, another day.

the brain and I

Earlier this month something prompted me to an ad in Scientific American (one of the magazines I read fairly regularly) and order a lecture series on DVD called Understanding the Brain. Published by an organization called The Teaching Company, it's a set of 36 half-hour lectures delivered by Dr. Jeanette Norden, a scientist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, accompanied by some simple computer animation instead of the usual lecture-hall overhead-projector transparencies (at least, that's what they used to use back in the days of my, uh, formal education). So now I've added a half hour of brain lecture to my daily diet of study.

What's with me? I felt a bit conflicted about ordering this series, since it cost money: even as a special promotion, the total package, with bound transcripts of the lectures included, came to something like $165. And when the package arrived at my door, I was also stung with GST and PST, plus a $10 service charge from Fedex for paying those taxes on my behalf at the border. (Not quite as offensive as the fee charged by our own federal government for levying GST on packages coming from the U.S.--that's right, they charge a fee for collecting tax.) It costs money to get smart--and in my current incarnation as an artist, money is in relatively short supply.

Still, once I make my decision I feel happy about it. I seldom suffer from buyer's remorse for buying books or other educational materials (except for fiction--there I find that buyer's remorse is my usual response, such that I rarely buy fiction nowadays).

I remember years ago--it would have been 1977--standing in Duthie Books on Robson Street, down in the subterranean section of the store called the Paperback Cellar, accessed by a spiral staircase of wrought iron. Having been hugely impressed by reading Joyce's A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was keen to read more Joyce. I stood there, staring at the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses--an oversize trade paperback priced at $5.95, then a much higher price than the average paperback. I felt conflicted about spending so much on a book. But then I thought: What the hell, I'm employed, and this is one of the world's greatest works of literature. It's cheap!

I bought it. No regrets. (In fact, I eventually bought another copy, for complicated reasons, and now have two copies of this same edition in my shelf--one weathered and beaten, the other pristine.)

So yes: the brain. I've long been interested in it. Back when I was a student I was interested in computer science and especially in artificial intelligence--the effort to get computers to simulate (or actually achieve) conscious life. (In the end I realized I was more excited about writing fiction about such things, and abandoned my school career to work on a novel--later aborted--centered on an artificial-intelligence project gone awry.) At one level it makes sense: if our experience of consciousness depends on a physical thing, the brain, and its mechanical processes, then why should such mechanical processes not be reproducible in another form?

Back then I was quite afraid of the idea that my mind, my actions, were perhaps determined by fixed laws, physical mechanisms. Reading about the brain could make me anxious. But the interest was there; it remained strong, and is still strong.

So this course on the brain is one of my forays into "general knowledge"--it is not directly related to research on my project The Mission. It will no doubt have a bearing on future projects of mine, though. And meanwhile the organ that I think with seems to want to know more about itself. Why not indulge it a bit?

switching tracks as a way of life

I've just looked up the word divagate in my Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Here's the definition:

to wander or stray from a course or subject : DIVERGE, DIGRESS

I was trying to come up with a word to express my way of studying, thinking, talking--my way of life, I suppose. It's what sprang to mind and I reckon it's close enough.

When I study, think, or talk--or when I write, for that matter--I keep switching tracks, elaborating on some sub-point before I get to the end of my initial point, and then going down a further digression on a sub-sub-point, until, quite often, I've forgotten my initial point--how I got here. My interlocutor has to help me out and remind me of what I was talking about.

It's not mere wandering attention or an inability to focus. On the contrary, it almost comes from a particular intensity of focus. I want to say exactly what I mean, but often I'm not sure exactly what I mean, and I'm thinking things through as I go. As a result, often, when I'm talking, I start the same sentence or point two or three different ways, searching for the right way in. I'm a strange mix: for the purposes of light conversation and repartee I'm quick and fluent, but when it comes to expressing more serious, important thoughts, I'm hesitant and laborious.

I'm very dissatisfied with lazy, ill-considered thoughts. It seems to me that most of the actions in the world are ill-considered, including--or especially--those taken by the world's most powerful people. Mostly we get by with very flabby, self-serving "reasons" for our views.

One example, which I get from Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes", was the thinking about the issue of genocide in European history. From the British point of view, the mass deaths brought to colonized people like the Canary Islanders and the Indians of the Americas by the Spanish were easy to explain: the Spaniards were notoriously cruel and bloodthirsty. There: problem solved. But when natives were dying in large numbers under British colonial rule, and not entirely by disease, but also through mistreatment and massacre, new reasons had to be found. The "science" of colonial domination was developed through the 19th century, greatly aided by Darwin's theory of evolution, which held that "survival of the fittest" was an impersonal law that cannot be altered. The ideology was already well developed when Adolf Hitler was still in short pants.

When I try to say something true, something that I believe, I find myself wondering why I think it's true--and whether I really do indeed think it's true. This trait has me hemming, hawing, and hesitating. In writing it has me taking laborious care to establish a foundation under what I say. (Well, except for this blog! It's more off the cuff. Although even here I find myself going slowly, thinking, typing.)

I hop from subject to subject, all connected, since some sub-point within one leads to the next. But it often takes me a long time to get back to an earlier branch in this garden of forking paths--if I ever get back there.

Somehow, this is how I operate.

beachcombing

I seem to be back to full intestinal health--praise be.

This morning I continue to type notes from different books--The New Larousse Encyclopedia of the Earth (not so new now; I received it as a present in about 1973), Anatomy of Criticism, The White Goddess. Searching, typing--what am I doing?

I'm not really sure. I'm looking for something, but what? Can I even say?

The first word that jumps to mind is unity. I'm looking for unity. A work of art is, after all, one thing--a unit. Everything in it must belong. How do you decide what belongs? It's partly intuitive, partly rational, or so I find. I think about John Constable, fussily reworking his paintings. I believe that in his masterpiece, The Hay Wain, he painted the dog (walking along the near shore of the pond) in and out of the picture more than once. Not just the dog, but other elements too. Constable had a hard time deciding what belonged in a picture.

A work of art, such as a novel, is like a landscape: it is a visible thing whose features are supported by a host of invisible factors that stretch out into the whole universe. Its richness and uniqueness and beauty derive from the specific conjunction of those factors.

I'm looking for things I can use. I'm searching the most likely places, trying to let intuition guide me as much as possible. For the artist does not create ex nihilo, but assembles things that he or she finds. Creation is a matter of combination. To have a range of things to combine, you need to go hunting.

So I'm hunting. It's almost like beachcombing, or like the old guy I saw in the Hinnom Valley outside the walls of old Jerusalem in 1981, walking slowly down the slope with a metal detector, looking for coins or other bits of treasure not yet found.

Yes, after all these years, still assembling my construction materials.

(not very) sick days as opportunities for freedom

A quick post, just to keep my hand in.

I have some kind of mild gastrointestinal infection that had me fasting for five days (I stopped fasting yesterday). It's also had me living a less structured life, as I typically do when having "sick days". In fact I'm not sick in any meaningful sense--I feel good--but the break in routine of eating and so on makes the day different.

So I continue to follow my research instincts. I'm making discoveries, which creates a feeling of excitement and confirmation. I try to stay open to my intuition, letting instinct guide me from one book to another, one idea to another.

Is this any way to write a work of fiction? I don't know. I don't know if it's properly known what fiction even means. (I think of my old classmate Don's mnemonic device for remembering how to distinguish fiction from nonfiction: "bull" vs. "non-bull".) Northrop Frye also had trouble with this strangely vague but persistent way of categorizing literature.

So I'll press forward, and let it be what it is.

Onward.

the knowledge hunter

These days I'm still thinking and reading about as much as ever, but I find that my train of thought is dispersed. I feel less of a sense of goal or direction in my thinking. I have a sense of being becalmed, and am unsure of which way to go.

I'm kept in motion by habit. "Just keep doing what you're doing," I tell myself. "Just keep doing what you're doing."

I feel intellectually tantalized. In some sense I think I always have.

The word tantalize comes from Tantalus, a figure of Greek mythology whose name meant (according to Robert Graves) either "lurching" or "most wretched". He was alleged to have committed two crimes against the gods: one was stealing ambrosia, the divine food, from one of their banquets; the other was the butchering of his own son Pelops and making him part of a stew served to Zeus and the other gods. He was caught at both, and Zeus killed him and arranged a special punishment in the underworld. Tantalus was hung from a fruit-tree so that he dangled in a lake. Tormented by thirst and hunger, he would bend down to sip the water, only to find that the level of the lake dropped away as he did so, returning when he raised his head again. He would then try to grab fruit from the tree, but a wind pushed the fruit just out of his grasp every time he did so. In this hungry, thirsty, and unfulfilled state he would remain for eternity.

To be tantalized, then, means to have the object of one's desire always just beyond one's grasp, and more especially it must mean that it recedes from you just as you approach it or reach out for it.

It's hyperbole of course. But in learning I do have a feeling of forever reaching out, and never quite grasping what I think I'm reaching for. It might be that I don't know what I'm reaching for.

So I play it by instinct. What I read, and what I write in my notes, is a matter of following my urge or impulse of the moment. A hunting metaphor springs to mind: the deer runs through the forest, across country, trying to elude you. It's not trying to make it easy for you; it's trying to make it hard. Very hard--impossible. If you've made that deer your prey, then you're stuck with whatever terrain it leads you through: dense brush, gooey swamp, steep hillside. Now that you've fixated on it, it sets the terms of the chase.

If I get scratched, trip, break my leg, or indeed plunge off a cliff and die, that's not the deer's fault. It's the risk I assume by taking on the role of hunter.

Right now I feel I've kind of lost the trail. The deer is nowhere in sight, and I'm shifting back and forth, looking for its tracks. This is part of the hunt too, but it's an anxious and unrewarding part. Yes, even a tantalizing part.

one book leads to another

In my life, one book leads to another. Occasionally I might stroll through a bookstore and pick up a book that happens to catch my fancy, or find a book through some other more or less serendipitous means (I recently got the Maus comics after seeing their author-artist, Art Spiegelman, interviewed on TV), but that is increasingly unusual.

More often I acquire books as part of following a line of thought or investigation. Take Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs, a book that I recently took down from my shelf to read again. I first bought and read it in March 1997 (I inscribe the purchase date inside each book). The book, written (unusually for Jacobs) in the form of a Socratic dialogue between modern characters in New York, is, as its subtitle says, A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

I was led back to it as part of my investigation into good and evil. What's good and what's bad--and why? What exactly is evil?

In the ancient world there were natural evils--that is, natural events that were regarded as evil, such as famines or floods. To me these are more what I would call misfortunes or disasters. Painful and unwanted, yes--but not evil in the same sense as the deliberate and unjust infliction of harm by one person on another. The cruel treatment of the helpless and innocent seems especially evil. Where does it come from? Why does it happen?

Following the thread of this line of thinking back, I recall reading in John Keegan's A History of Warfare that the phenomenon of the mounted warrior arose in the steppes of Central Eurasia sometime around 3000 BC. These people were nomadic pastoralists who gained most of their living from herding and hunting animals. To round up and slaughter defenseless animals requires a certain hardening of the heart, and Keegan observes that the techniques of wrangling herds were exactly the same techniques used by these nomadic warriors in combat: driving and encircling foot soldiers, and then slaughtering them. The feeling of superiority that the mounted warrior felt over his livestock was transferred to his similarly unmounted enemies. They were weak, passive creatures to be controlled and killed for his benefit.

Then I recalled reading in Mary Boyce's book Zoroastrians that it's possible that Zarathustra, the great Indo-Iranian prophet of (possibly) 1500 BC, received his revelation of the cosmic warfare of good and evil in response to his experience of these same mounted (or in his period, chariot-driving) warriors, who mercilessly pillaged peaceful farmers on the steppes.

Another input: in Vintage: The Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson, I read that the ancient practice of dining while reclining on couches--the eating style of the nobility throughout the Mediterranean world--was acquired from the nomadic tribes of the steppes and deserts. It struck me that the mounted warrior, that creature of the steppes of Central Eurasia, who eventually morphed into the medieval knight, was the basis of what we call the aristocracy or the ruling class. By virtue of their mental toughness and superior prowess, they have the ability and the right to rule over those who are not of their class. Farmers produce wealth, warriors take it.

These thoughts led me to reading up on the steppe cultures of Central Eurasia, but then I also remembered Jane Jacobs's book on morality. She discovered that there are two different and mutually exclusive moral "syndromes" in the public world: one which she called the Commercial Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of people in industry and trade; and one called the Guardian Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of those in government, politics, and the military.

These two syndromes are mutually dependent in a functioning, thriving society, but what is "good" in one part of the system is "bad" in the other part. Jacobs lists 15 "precepts" that make up each of the syndromes, and the first precept of the Commercial Syndrome is "Shun force". The first precept of the Guardian Syndrome is "Shun trading". Merchants trade, and it's wrong for them to engage in the coercion of force; guardians (that is, police, soldiers, etc.) use force to achieve their aims, and it's wrong for them to engage in trade. When a merchant uses force, or a cop sells things, you have wrongs such as extortion and corruption.

This is the merest outline. My point is that one book leads to another for me, a flow, like one neuron lighting up the next in a train of thought in the brain.

inquiring minds

It snowed again overnight, so I went out first thing again to shovel. There was less snow than yesterday, but I found the job harder, mainly I think because of the unaccustomed work for certain muscles--surprisingly, my thigh muscles. Then it was inside again to make the coffee and start keying research notes.

It feels as though my study has, if anything, intensified over the past few weeks. No doubt study, like everything else in life, follows a basic pattern of alternating movement and rest. You feel yourself in motion, trying to learn something, trying to understand something, and conscious of the fact that you're not there yet. At some point you understand. Something clicks and you get it. A light goes on, and you achieve a state of rest or tranquility. If you were rock-climbing, this would be a ledge--a place to stand or rest between stretches of scaling vertical rock.

This image is not bad, because it emphasizes the partial or provisional nature of the insights gained along the way. The rock-climber can't hang around forever on the ledge; he has to get going again to the next station on his journey up. Only at the summit is the task finished.

Sometimes, to me, it feels as though the ledges are few and the vertical stretches of rock are long. Long, long. Whenever I "arrive" anywhere in my studies, I'm conscious of how most of what I want to know remains obscure, unaddressed.

Maybe that's because the question that interests me most is the last and hardest one of the five that journalists are supposed to be concerned with: who, what, where, when, and why. Any of those questions can be a mystery, but the last one, why, tends to be the biggest mystery. Answering that question depends mainly on the questioner's notion of what constitutes an answer. When do you regard something as explained?

It's the philosopher's question. Even a simple version of it opens up avenues. Why do I live in North Vancouver? Well, I grew up here. All right, but is that a reason to live here now? Well, I actually left North Vancouver when my family moved from it in 1977, and I returned here to live with my girlfriend, who happened to have an apartment here. We kept living here because, in part, we were working here. From another point of view you could say that I live here because I bought a house here in 1987, and once you've bought a place, you need a good reason to sell out and leave. Or at least, I need a good reason--put that down to my character. Looking back further, you could say that I live here because my parents, both unlikely immigrants to Vancouver in the 1950s, happened to get together and at some point chose to move to North Vancouver, imprinting this place as my home.

More than the other questions, the question why requires a sense of purpose or direction on the part of the questioner: you need to know what kind of an answer you're looking for. In short, it points back to the question of why the questioner is asking this question! It's a two-edged question.

I suppose that the main reason my research seems endless is that the question I'm always most interested in is this why. It's the question that keeps on breeding offspring. And the answers you accept reveal your belief system: they show up your mythology.

An example: I'm reading Sven Lindqvist's excellent little book "Exterminate All the Brutes", an investigation into the phenomenon of genocide. He mentions the mass deaths of natives that resulted from the incursion of Europeans in the Americas. Lindqvist says that when the 16th-century British asked why so many Indians had died in South and Central America, the answer was not far to seek: the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Spanish. Then, when Indians died in vast numbers in North America as a result of contact with the British, a different explanation had to be found: divine intervention. God was clearing the land for the European settlers.

The explanation--the answer to why--depends sensitively on one's already existing beliefs, and also on one's level of objectivity and maturity. Once you become aware of these factors, it becomes hard to answer the question why satisfactorily. Am I just reaching for an easy prejudice? Am I accepting a cover story? Am I simply justifying my own selfishness? These are all likely possibilities.

In psychology, why is known as a hostile question. Usually, when someone asks us why we've done or said something, there is an element of challenge: we're being asked to account for ourselves. The implication is that our behavior needs accounting for, and that our challenger--our accuser--has a right to this account. It's a "scientific" attack: instead of saying that I don't like what you did, I call on you to justify it, leaving my own motive unstated. There's a sense of ambush.

I suppose the question why is a kind of attack, even when made not on a person but on the world. It's a challenge to the world to provide an answer--and the world pushes back: "who wants to know?"

Well, I want to know.

And who are you?

Hmm. Good one...

study as path

More reading, more keying-in of notes from my source books. Where is it all going? I don't know.

On the one hand, my Buddhist training tells me that book-learning is not and can never be a path to true knowledge--to ultimate truth. The truth--especially truth in the sense of a solution to the "puzzle" of life--can be realized only directly and nonconceptually. It is an experience, not something that can be put into a sentence.

I remember clearly when this teaching broke through into my mind. Perhaps paradoxically, it was via reading a book: The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. It was February 1978 and I was traveling through Europe with my friend Tim. Running low on funds, we had decided in Rome to turn around and head home. As we drove north out of the city, Tim was at the wheel of our 1970 Westfalia and I was sitting at the table, reading. And as I read, in the dim twilight of that overcast day, about how Buddhists discover reality by direct experience--through meditation--rather than learning about reality through words, I felt a deep sense of recognition and excitement. I wanted to have that experience!

For a time, maybe an hour or two, I felt a tremendous sense of elation and connection with my immediate experience. I really saw the interior of the van, the smudges on its windows; I smelled the cocktail of scents of its damp, food-containing interior. My senses were open, rich, alive: I was experiencing the world as directly as I had ever done, and it was a delicious thing.

But it quickly passed, and I was distressed to find my mind sinking into its ordinary worries, distractions, and even peevishness. I felt sickened by the plunge from such an exalted state of mind to such a grouchy, unpleasant one. If only I could stay in that more uplifted state! Why couldn't I?

That experience, fleeting though it was, was a key one in leading me to take up of Buddhist meditation myself in late 1986. I learned that the enlightenment of the Buddha would take sustained effort for an unknown time, probably many lifetimes. I also learned that enlightenment will never be realized in the future--it can only ever be realized in the present, the only moment we can actually experience. So, like all Buddhists, I trained in paying attention to the present moment. Even if you don't have the enlightenment of the Buddha, this is a wonderful way to live life--indeed the only way to truly live life, to actually be present for your life while it's happening.

I also learned that for all the talk about how enlightenment is nonconceptual, the Buddhists have a vast literature and students are urged to study it all the time. Indeed, it is held that to attain enlightenment through meditation alone--that is, without any accompanying study--is vastly more difficult and time-consuming than to follow a path of both practice and study, sometimes known as "walking with both feet."

Study is closely connected with the deeper meditation experience known as vipashyana, or clear seeing. The basic idea is that it's easier to see things when you know what you're looking for. Through study you learn theory, such as, say, the nature of the mind. Then, through practice, you put that theory to the test. You look to see whether the mind is as you've learned. Or, maybe more accurately, you glimpse directly the way your mind is, and recognize it as being what you've studied.

For a time I felt neurotic and anxious about how "conceptual" I was, and felt bad about my thirst for study. Eventually though that went away. Concepts--thoughts--in Buddhism are often likened to clouds in the clear blue sky of the mind. For the beginning meditator, the mind seems completely overcast, and the notion of clear blue beyond is mere hearsay. One nervously and anxiously looks for signs of clear blue.

It seems that the only real antidote to that nervousness and anxiety, which are themselves "overcasting" the sky, is to become thoroughly bored with the meditation practice. When you're bored enough, you start getting a "who cares?" attitude, and somewhere in there you notice the distinction between thoughts and the space they're floating in: the blue sky. You can start to relax about thoughts, since, as clouds, they're insubstantial, transitory, and basically nonthreatening. It's not particularly important whether they're there or not. Indeed, as the painter John Constable found, clouds are what make the sky so interesting and exciting.

So I continue to study. I know I won't become enlightened through study, but I will find new ideas, and new ways of connecting them, and therefore will find new things to look for in my own experience.

Interesting. I entered the path of Buddhism in the hope of finding nonconceptual reality, and have emerged from my training with a heightened ability and appreciation for study--for concepts.

writing with guns to head

My approach to writing is inseparable from my quest for beliefs.

Yesterday, while keying notes from Story by Robert McKee, I came across his view on what the function of art--written art--is in society (slightly compressed):

I believe we have no responsibility to cure social ills or renew faith in humanity, to uplift the spirits of society or even express our inner being. We have only one responsibility: to tell the truth. Therefore, study your Story Climax and extract from it your Controlling Idea. But before you take another step, ask yourself: Is this the truth? Do I believe in the meaning of my story? If the answer is no, toss it and start again. If yes, do everything possible to get your work into the world. In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

To tell the truth. OK, good. What is the truth?

In the first place, from the artist's point of view, it's honesty: telling it like it is. Reporting the actuality of one's experience rather than an idealization of it, or what the community agrees it is or should be. What's it really like to get married? to get fired? There are conventional ideas around the experience of these things, but the writer should have no truck with those. What do you really think and feel? That is what the writer should be writing.

You might call that subjective truth: honesty about one's own subjective experience. But there's also objective truth: the world of facts outside oneself. The storyteller must also be honest and proficient here. That means taking the trouble to find out how things are.

If you want to write about firemen, you need to know their world. What are their job functions? How do they spend their day? How are they similar to each other? How do they differ from each other? You'll need to know these and many other things before you can write something worth reading about firemen. If all you know about firemen is that they're tall, strong, brave, and like rescuing people, then you're simply regurgitating a cliche--a conventional idea of what a fireman is. And as McKee says, what's wrong with creative writing can generally be summed up in one word: cliches.

The only way to prevent cliches is to acquire knowledge: actual, objective knowledge of what you're writing about. Each sentence should be telling the reader something he or she didn't know before--something he or she has not already heard elsewhere. Each sentence should contain some element of surprise. With each sentence you learn something new. That's what keeps a reader interested.

Yes, often that "something new" is a matter not of direct knowledge but of imaginative innovation: the various quirks of Harry Potter's world, for instance. But even there the imaginings are based in fact, and in a direct experience of the sensual world and the people in it.

And for those of us not writing fantasy, we have to dig deeper into our world for surprises.

In my case, I'm not satisfied merely to dig into the world of facts; I also dig into the world of theories: people's beliefs and the dimly-felt realities to which they refer. My "story research" is also a kind of scientific or scholarly or philosophical research. I'm not sure this is the "right" way to write, whether it will add anything or make for a better end product, but it seems to be the only way that I can do it and feel that I'm giving it my all. If I did not do this, I would not feel that I've tried everything in my quest to tell the best, the truest, story that I can.

It's a fascinating journey, an interesting way to work--but it's time-consuming. That in itself is not really a problem except for two things, in approximate order of importance: 1) death; 2) revenue. I could croak before I'm finished, and I could go broke and be derailed from my work by having to scare up the wherewithal to live.

Both of those things have worried me from time to time. But I can't let them scare me off my project, or intimidate me into changing my approach. This is a great experiment in my approach--the approach I would use if not coerced by any outside influence. With Death and Revenue holding guns to my head, I have to coolly keep my nerve--and keep working.

musings on a dark, rainy fall morning

Back to the task. Kimmie returns to work today. The mornings are dark a long time now after 5:30, when our alarm goes off. I hear the distant jingling of our front-door chimes buffeted in the predawn autumn wind.

My project, my story, is morphing out from under me. As I learn more, throw open more doors to the vaults of the deep past, my world enlarges and changes the journey of my heroes. Not fundamentally--I'm in far too deep to make a radical story-change now. But it's more like discovering things that were already here: connections, meanings, possibilities. I feel I have the opportunity to replace certain arbitrary elements, which I'm never very happy about, with elements that reflect the growing meaning of my story. In this way a controlling idea very gradually emerges, like a shipwreck being floated gingerly from the bottom of the ocean.

My reading about the cults of the Roman Empire--the exotic religions brought into it by its foreign traders and captives--is throwing tremendous new light on the way I see that world. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about the fact that I'm coming across this information so late in my journey, but in general I trust the timing of the arrival of information. This trust seems to be borne out time and again by the coincidental arrival of complementary information from different sources. I read about the Egyptian religion of Isis, which became widespread in the Roman world, in a book devoted to her cult, only to open a chapter of Toynbee's A Study of History to find him discussing Isis and Osiris (he conjectures that this brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-son duo represents a transformation of the more ancient cult of Ishtar and Tammuz in Sumer). These simultaneous linkages between widely different sources happen a lot for me, and tend to confirm the path I'm on, and the way I'm traveling it. It's like just-in-time delivery of manufacturing parts, except the parts here are ideas or pieces of knowledge.

If my "building blocks" are arriving just in time, that must mean I'm assembling things at the right pace--painfully slow though that seems to me. (I find it embarrassing to be asked about the progress of my work, since its progress is almost imperceptible, even to me. Pluto seems to orbit the Sun faster.)

Even in Chalmers Johnson's latest book, Nemesis, about the disintegration of the American republic, I have a very good short summary of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which also dovetails with my other research, even though I'm reading it to learn more about current events and not for my project. The parallels between Rome and the U.S. are striking, and give me a feeling of relevance in what I'm doing.

Supposedly Harry Truman said that the only news is the history you don't know. I'm sure that's true. History is made generally by the ignorant and purblind, those who believe they're acting in an original way but who are in fact merely duplicating the actions of others taken long before, most often with disastrous results. It's a truism to say that history repeats itself, and it never actually does, quite. But the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see a pattern where the less intelligent see only chaos.

Mind you, that's also the hallmark of paranoia.

One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I think it was Live and Let Die, had as an epigraph this little saying:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

According to Toynbee, since the beginning of civilization societies have evolved according to one overarching pattern: growth; stagnation into a "time of troubles"; the rise of a pacifying "universal state"; and a final rupture and disintegration due to the combined agitation of a disenfranchised "internal proletariat" and a hostile and opportunistic "external proletariat" of barbarians beyond the civilization's frontier. Although I have not yet finished reading his Study of History, Toynbee so far reckons that our own civilization (which he calls Western Christendom) entered its "time of troubles" in the 16th century with the bitter and fratricidal European Wars of Religion. Since the 20th century was even more disastrous and bloodthirsty, it seems safe to say we're not out of the time of troubles yet. Indeed, they have to get so bad, in Toynbee's view, that people are generally relieved to acquiesce in living under the aegis of a universal state, like Rome under the Empire.

We don't seem to be there yet, which means that things are set to get continually worse. The U.S. administrations since World War 2 have set their sights on becoming the next universal state. But their chances of success are, in my opinion, poor. I expect this century to be worse than the 20th century in terms of human suffering, and that much of it will be linked to catastrophic environmental change. If Toynbee's historical cycle is still functioning after we go through that wringer, it's anyone's guess who might be strong and coherent enough to provide a peaceful universal state for the survivors to recuperate in.

Whew, this morning's even darker than I thought.

patience

What does a writer who's writing about his writing write about when he's not writing?

Last week I saw, in a book my mother had bought about writing, a snippet from Lawrence Durrell, which I paraphrase as, "All blocks are at bottom a form of egotism".

For I do feel rather blocked. But at the same time I recall Robert McKee's sterling advice, that the cure for writer's block is research. According to him, writer's block is simply lack of knowledge of your subject.

I suppose that writer's block is actually a symptom, and not a disorder in its own right. It could therefore have different causes, as a fever can have different causes. Durrell's egotistical block sounds like a symptom of the writer who has donned the hat of the editor or critic, and sits perched at the desk, waiting for the creator to come up with something so he can edit/criticize it. The creator, like a gopher in a hole surrounded by vigilant dogs, knows better than to poke his nose out in that environment.

I do suffer from that type of block, but it has not been debilitating. It has not prevented me from creating--although I do think it has limited the quality of what I have written, and I have taken various steps in my life to try to improve the situation. I have tried to both throw the hounds off the scent, and also toughen up that little gopher so it can sock it to the hounds if it does find them on-site when it emerges. I've used things like writing drills, in which inhibition is smashed by forcing oneself to write nonstop for a short period, like 15 minutes. But I think this obstacle is also overcome somewhat by taking on projects that are so challenging in other respects, such as in size and complexity, that one's attention is forced to those aspects, leaving one's actual manner of expression, one's use of words, to fend for itself.

But in general I think McKee's assessment is more to the point, and more debilitating if left untreated. For the slavering hounds called Editor and Critic can be thrown off the scent by one trick or another, but if you don't know what you're talking about or what you're trying to say in the first place, you really are stuck. Then it's true that only research can save you. You have to refuel the empty tank of your head.

This is what I've been trying to do. Yes, I've been researching my world and my topic almost nonstop for five years. Yes, I read from at least one and usually two or even three relevant books on it each day, and type notes into Word files. But I need to get my hands on the right books, the right topic areas. And it takes me time to get through them. I'm steady rather than fast.

Then there's the task of synthesis. If I read more than one authority on a subject, and they disagree, which version do I go with? What do I think happened? This is decision-making in the face of uncertainty, which is inherently stressful and hard. Each decision defines the world of my story a little more, gives it its character and its meaning. For each decision is made by particular criteria, whether conscious or unconscious. If I have a choice, then I should choose that which furthers the aims of my story, which is largely still an intuitive choice.

The other danger with research, also cautioned against by McKee, is that of spending all one's time in research and never getting down to writing. This is the sign of the nervous student or amateur. In McKee's view writing should proceed as a series of steps of writing and research. You write as much as you can, until you get blocked from lack of knowledge, then you turn to research. As soon as you know enough to proceed, you do so. You learn what you need to know in the course of writing, so that by the time you finish your final draft, you know the world of your story completely--and not before that time, if you've been writing efficiently.

I've been embroiled in the world of the cults of the Roman Empire, and seeing ways to incorporate this material in my work. It's very relevant, since my work is a spiritual story at bottom. I'm still stuck at the same chapter, but I find myself making notes in other chapters for how to rewrite them in draft 2. I am learning enough to find that my current draft, draft 1, is already becoming obsolete.

And yet I must finish it. Because going back to start a new draft before you've finished the current one is suicide, I think. Don't rewrite something that isn't written yet.

Patience. That's what I really need. I think that's what I'm really trying to learn.

let excitment be your guide

"Write what you know" is a well-known and basic tip for writers. And it's a good one. After all, what else are you going to write?

For the fiction-writer, it's not a completely straightforward question. Because fiction is "made-up stuff", you can put as much of it in your work as you want. You "know" the stuff you make up, and then you write it down. There--you've written what you know!

That's a specious self-deception that I myself have bought into plenty during my life, and no doubt still do. To me, "writing what you know" always suggested writing about one's own family life and so on--subjects that never really excited me as a writer. But, driven by the commandment to write what you know, I would ever and again return to my own life and look for ways to fictionalize it. After all, was that not what James Joyce did with his magnificent Portrait of the Artist, and what Malcolm Lowry did with his brilliant Under the Volcano?

Starting at about age 18, I have spent, cumulatively, a great deal of time trying to find a way to mine my own life story for fictional material. All such efforts have so far gone bust. In about 2000, when my mother put me on to a very good book by Tristine Rainer called Your Life as Story, I became excited again by the idea of "lifewriting"--simply turning one's own life episodes into story. Once again, as in the past, I beavered away at finding the "story structure" of my own life. Now I felt I might be better able to accomplish it, since, like Tristine Rainer, I was now a scriptwriter and had studied story structure.

As with so many projects, I generated a lot of pages, but was not happy with where I got to. It gradually dawned on me that I would need a definite theme in order to provide a criterion for selection. What exact story would I be telling? But to know that, you need to have an idea of what your life is about. What is the purpose of my life?

In fact, Ms. Rainer provides strong counsel in how to search for exactly this, and I went through the exercise carefully, and was delighted with the result--for awhile. I came to feel that my life is many stories, has many themes. I thought, "Fine, pick one." I picked one--but it became obvious that it interlocks with all the others. How to disentangle them? How to simplify my life into a coherent story?

Ach--I just went and checked the folder called Lifewriting, and saw that yes, it does indeed contain many documents, some of considerable length. I never was able to solve my structural problems, and eventually gave up in despair.

Now what? You have to do what excites you. Excitement is the psychic energy that drives you forward--is perhaps the "intoxication" that Nietzsche said must precede the creation of any work of art. You need to be excited. I remember visiting the Pacific National Exhibition here in Vancouver with my friend Brad back when we were in school. At age 12, we loved James Bond-type action-adventure, and would talk enthusiastically about turning the various aspects of the busy exhibition-ground into sets for action-movie scenes. For us, a ride on the chairlift-style people-mover that traversed the site was like a movie-location survey. That creative excitement got us involved in story-writing, filmmaking, and animation. I remember staying up all night at his house making animated films with his 8mm movie camera. We were powered by excitement: how will this turn out? What will it look like?

I do seem to be naturally inclined toward the adventure genre (I note that The Odyssey, which I created and wrote with Warren Easton, was an adventure-fantasy show). The adventure genre, with its exploratory, revelatory, and questing elements, speaks to me--gets me excited. It's the genre of questing in uncharted territory, and that somehow connects with my heart.

But you need to know enough. In writing about your alien world, you need to know it, and that means research. You need to know enough about the world of your story to make your characters seem at home in it, and therefore to let your audience feel at home there as well.

Kimmie and I are currently watching the HBO series Rome. I watch with special interest because it is set in my period and place, and so I have researched that world myself--although not in as much depth, for one thing because I'm only a single person, and each department of the series--writing, art, wardrobe, props, hair, makeup--will have done its own research. But the show is striving for authenticity, and so it has authority, and the ability to involve me. (Some things I'm less happy with--such as the Forrest Gump-like appearance of its two commoner heroes at all the critical junctures of the period's history.) I'm very interested and excited by the prospect of creating authentic exotic worlds. The Odyssey was an example.

So, as much as possible, I try now to let spontaneous excitement be my guide--and follow that up with the discipline of research.

integrity and adequacy

I find myself engaged in a major rethinking of my project--the reason that I have had it up on blocks, so to speak, for a couple of months now.

When I say "rethink", I don't mean I intend to junk major portions or completely alter what I'm doing. Maybe the word think would be better than rethink. It's a process of learning more, of going deeper, asking why, and forging connections.

In order for a work of art to have integrity, to have unity, everything in it must relate with everything else. Everything in it needs to belong, and needs to be felt to belong. I suppose that the larger and more complex the work, the more difficult it is to meet this requirement.

It's hard to be more specific about this without going into details about the work itself, which I don't really want to do (the spoiler factor). But there is sometimes the feeling that an idea for one part of the story can be applied to others parts, thus knitting them together thematically. My current investigation into ancient credit and finance, for example: I am working with it as a means of creating tension and interest in my current chapter, but I'm also asking how this might be applied to other sections of the story. If it's meaningful and relevant here, it should be meaningful and relevant elsewhere.

Credit could thus become a thematic strand: a kind of thread running through the work, tugging the pieces into closer union with each other. It becomes part of the meaning of the work.

An exciting but scary aspect of this process is that such meanings cannot really be forced onto the work; they are discovered. There is something organic about it. I think of the image of neurons forging connections among each other in the brain: they branch out, their fibers fastening on to each other and fusing, the junctions growing stronger with each impulse that passes through them. The brain, composed of countless complex parts and subunits, becomes a functioning whole.

I continue to worry about my work in progress. When I wake at night and lie thinking, it is still one of my main concerns. Or while watching TV in the evening: something I see will trigger a thought about my work, and I will actually gasp as though an electric shock had been applied, startling my wife. It's fear that I've missed something important, or that my work is deficient in some deep but specific--and irreparable--way.

Life. A story must capture the flavor of life. There are endless ways of doing so, but it's not easy. A story represents both your understanding of life and your ability to express it. When you're offering up a story, you're saying, "I think life is like this." Even supposed escapist and fantasy works say this. As Joseph Campbell observes, stories of magic and monsters are really about the psychological world--our inner life. The story is a test and an expression of the writer's personal adequacy to the world.

In this view, the greatest works are by writers who are highly adequate. They see into life and are able to paint what they see--to express it. As with any endeavor, excellence is only for the few.

Could it be that a truly unified work can come only from a unified personality? Someone who has attained personal integrity in the deepest and widest sense?

I don't know. The question marks here express the truth of my own situation.

credit history

In my inventory yesterday of the research books I read the previous day, I left out one: A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer.

I think I forgot it because I have been reading (and typing) it down here at the PC, instead of in the living-room as part of my daily reading period. I got my hardback copy of Homer's classic last February through Abebooks; it is marked (discreetly) with the stamps of a former owner, the Ambassador College Library in Pasadena, California.

I first learned about this book in 1994, when it was referenced by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their hefty jeremiad The Great Reckoning, a bold set of forecasts based on their theory of history. This theory was centered around the concept they called megapolitics: that the ultimate driver of historical change is and always has been the technology of weapons. In the last analysis, those who make things happen have always been those who held the greatest ability to project violence. In the view of these authors, the history of civilization has been essentially the story of how governments have controlled the freelance violence of individuals and small groups by being able to overpower them. But a continuing trend, from the beginning of history, has been the "democratization" of violence: the development of ever more powerful weapons that placed ever more violent power in the hands of individuals. We have gone from spears to muskets to handguns to machine guns to high-yield explosives to "tactical" nuclear weapons. In the long run, in their view, the question is whether governments, including legitimate, accountable ones, can hold the balance of power against violent individuals and splinter-groups.

The authors acknowledge that these thoughts are not cheerful. However, when you boil away all the ideology and talk, you arrive, basically, at Hobbes's "state of nature": what we now call the law of the jungle, or, in more sanitized Darwinian terms, survival of the fittest. Hobbes saw the rule of law as what separates us from that miserable condition in which men's lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". But Davidson and Rees-Mogg are saying that the rule of law itself is only as good as the weapons that back it up. If the police are less well armed than the miscreants they are trying to control, then the state is lost just as surely as if its army is outmanned and outgunned by an invading force. The final backstop of the rule of law is violence.

I found their book fascinating, and in fact have read it twice. It even formed a key inspiration for another TV project that Warren and I created in the 1990s, a drama about a degenerated society in the near future (a project which has not got off the pad). For the record, I'm a nonviolent person myself, and believe firmly in the principle of negotiation rather than violence in achieving results. No matter how long it takes, agreement is a much more powerful force, as well as more humane, than simply imposing your will through violence. At the same time, we all know what happens when we operate by an "honor system" that has no one policing it. Even in a monastery, frictions and grievances arise.

The authors of The Great Reckoning were investors and investment advisers, and the book was addressed mainly to fellow capitalists. How do you make a buck in Hobbes's state of nature? One of their favorite authorities was Sidney Homer, and his monograph on the history of interest rates. When I first saw the title, A History of Interest Rates, I laughed. It sounds like a satire of dullness--a text that might be carried around by an ultra-nerdy sitcom character. Because I have long been interested in finance and capitalism, I actually felt some nerdish attraction for the book--although not enough to actually seek it out and buy it.

However, now that my own story of the ancient world is developing more of a financial component, I felt I had to get it. I've still read only the first 60 pages or so, but I find that it is even more interesting than I'd hoped. As Homer, a bond trader and partner of Salomon Brothers in New York, observes, interest rates are like a fever chart of society: peace, calm, and stability are reflected in low interest rates; and disorder, uncertainty, and fear are reflected in high interest rates.

Homer also observes that every major legal code, at least of the ancient world, from that of Hammurabi on, was brought in largely to regulate credit. From ancient times, Jews (and other compact societies) were forbidden to lend to each other at interest; loans were expected to be interest-free. Only loans to strangers or outsiders could bear interest. Eventually such rules created large financial and social problems, which were addressed in various ways.

The very word credit is related to words like credo and credible, relating to belief. To extend credit is to have faith. Faith in someone, faith in the future. Faith is the basis of religion.

My intuition tells me that this is an important theme, both for my story and for all of us.