on hiatus

Friends, I seem to be on hiatus for the time being.

Now in the mornings I find myself often wanting just to press on with my research notes rather than pausing to write a blog-post. With a project so long in the making, I'm following that impulse.

Things are going reasonably well. The mornings are dark now: it's still mostly dark outside my blinds, which I have yet to open. I was out in the chilly morning to take out the recycling and unlock the garbage-box behind our building. I really like the autumn, a time of promise in some obscure way. In the bustle of work, especially in the dark of morning, when people are returning to their tasks after lounging in the summer, I feel a sense of quiet ease and relaxation--and did even when I was part of that bustle. The world continues to be beautiful, even as people rush through it. You just have to tune your attention to it.

So that's it: I'm officially on vacation from my blog. Many thanks to all of you who have dropped by and read my thoughts. I wish you well.

darkness ahead

Where have I been, you ask?

Well, Kimmie and I have been working our way through a headcold, caught we know not where. I got it first, and probably passed it on to her. I'm very much better, but Kimmie is going through the middle of hers. Indeed, she's decided to take today off work.

I've been chipping away at my mighty work, and at the ideas surrounding and supporting it. This is a huge task, and one that I don't think I can really discuss in this blog, since I don't want to go too deeply into my own views of the meanings of my still unfinished work.

Then I'm feeling a certain blog-fatigue, as I did a couple of years ago. This blog, begun as a kind of lark or experiment back in 2005, has become a kind of commitment. I've often told myself that even if not many people read it, it can still serve as a personal record--a kind of diary of my own thoughts, if not of my life exactly, during this time of creation.

Then there's the world falling about our ears: a worldwide financial meltdown and the wintry prospects beyond. It feels almost irresponsible not to address these grave and urgent matters--but what do I know about them? I suspect that even those in the know don't really know much about what's going on. As I write these words, the U.S. House of Representatives is still grappling with the $700- (or is it $800-) billion bailout bill for Wall Street. This is almost certainly a further waste of money--a mere playing for time in order to keep things from collapsing before the federal election. The legislation, at least as it exists till now, includes these words in its Section 8:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Is it constitutional to put decisions and individuals beyond the reach of law? That I don't know, but the fact that the framers of the bill are trying it tells me that we've got something that looks much like what happened at times of crisis in ancient Rome. It was the Romans who invented the office of the dictator: a person who could be invested with supreme command over the state and the army and who could rule by decree for a fixed period of exactly six months.

In Rome the dictatorship was a perfectly constitutional office that had its own defined limits. One could be appointed in times of grave stress or threat to the Republic, and he would lapse back to ordinary citizenship again when he had done his task and restored normalcy to the polity.

The U.S. of course has no such provision in its constitution. The ever-increasing tendency to place persons in authority beyond the reach of law or oversight is a sign of creeping tyranny, and the prospect of an unconstitutional dictatorship draws ever closer. Section 8 of this bill gives certain people great power while removing any accountability from them. It's a very bad sign when a preoccupation of the regime is how to escape prosecution for its actions.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his A Study of History, describes how every society goes through the transition from being guided by leaders--people who inspire others to follow them on the basis of their vision and personal qualities--to being dominated by rulers--those who have inherited the levers of power, but who lack the charisma of actual leaders. In the U.S., we've had the transition from leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who stirred and inspired their fellow citizens, to rulers such as George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, who have been preoccupied with world domination and shaping their own country into something closer to a police state.

As I've mentioned before, Toynbee also discusses the threefold progress of a typical Greek tragedy as it applies to the catastrophic undoing of such a ruling regime. Those three stages are koros, hubris, and ate. He translates these as "surfeit", "outrageous behavior", and "disaster". I believe we've seen plenty of the first two of these; now the third is looming into view.

The U.S. has the largest military in the world. They may feel they need it if large segments of its population, thrown out of their houses and their jobs, their retirements savings wiped out, become agitated. Voila: full-on military dictatorship.

Preposterous? Maybe. But maybe that's what they thought in Burma too. And I expect that real estate is still very affordable there.

what and why

Again I find myself sitting here for long minutes staring at the screen. What do I write about? What do I say?

Over the years I've said quite a bit in this blog, weighing in on various topics, trying to stay more or less based on the slow creation of my epic, but essaying many side-trips along the way.

My idea of myself as a writer is changing. When I started this blog in 2005 I still thought of myself as a more or less "normal" writer (if such an expression can be allowed): that is, as a member of a more or less well-defined category called writers. I figured that my thoughts, my methods, my difficulties might be more or less like those of others practicing my craft.

Now my feeling is more one of difference: how I am unlike others practicing a superficially similar craft. I keep thinking back to an observation made by Roger Penrose near the beginning of his excellent (and challenging) book The Emperor's New Mind, that he expected, when he was in university, that as he got ever deeper into his discipline of mathematics he would find he had more and more in common with his colleagues in that field. Instead, the opposite happened: as he got deeper in, he found he had less in common with his supposed colleagues, that his way of thinking was so different from others in his field that it was surprising that they could communicate at all.

And yet to outsiders, it would seem obvious that mathematicians would form a tight clique of those who, uniquely among humanity, could understand what they heck their members were talking about. The rest of us sure can't.

So it is, perhaps, with us all. The relentless differentiation of life means that we keep becoming more unique, more distinct, regardless of the groups or associations we belong to. Nothing can stop that. Perhaps it is a lifelong preparation for the solitude of death (counterpart to the solitude of birth).

The writer's task, perhaps, is to turn away from belonging and to use his medium--words--to communicate his uniqueness. A conundrum, for I've toyed often with this joke: "I'm unique--just like everyone else." We're all unique, and in that respect we're all the same.

Ah well. There is passion in me to do what I'm doing--so I'm doing it. What's difficult is to explain what I'm doing--or why. Maybe this blog will never do either of those things.

vision returned

Thank heavens! I dug into the Kaspersky User Forum and discovered how to unlock access to the site stats for my blog. I can see them again.

I discovered how much I rely on being able to get a sense of how many people are stopping by (I can see only a subset of visitors, due to various security settings on people's computers, and so on). Writing posts without any sense of audience, I find, is hard: it's hard to get motivated. It's like performing in front of a one-way window, where people can look in but I can't see out.

Will this get me writing more posts again? Stay stuned...

what do I provide?

It was a hot night. This morning it is gray and cooler; a mild rain started to fall as I took out the recycling just now. Kimmie's garden around the patio out my window is as lush and green as it's ever been.

Something's been bothering me about my blog. Well, maybe more than one thing. But what I'm thinking of is its title, which refers to a "historical novel". For some time now I realize that what I am in fact writing is an epic. Like most epics, it is also historical--but the genre is distinct. So, strictly speaking, this blog does not document the genesis of a historical novel (a phrase that I grabbed quickly from the air anyway when I set up the blog as an experiment in 2005). For that, I actually feel a little bit bad now, a little bit fraudulent (but only a little bit!).

Are blogs passe?

Probably not. They are, after all, a new force in journalism in the most basic sense.

But when I read the book Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish, a text on web copywriting, I realized that she was right: people on the Web are seeking information. The task of a website, including a blog, is to provide this information as quickly, clearly, and easily as possible.

The information this blog is intended to provide is about the experience of writing a particular novel--and many issues ancillary to that. But many people land here in search of other things, such as the word-counts of certain novels or the significance of hermaphrodites in dreams. While I hope they regard whatever they find here as helpful, I'm not an authority on those topics (although my novel word-counts are probably as good as anyone's back-of-envelope calculations), and it bothers me a little bit that I might not be providing high-quality information on anything except, well, my opinions and my inner state generally.

It doesn't bother me too much (I'm offering up these words for free, after all--take 'em or leave 'em). But a fairly large part of me is keen on accuracy and integrity.

In a way, I'm surprised still to be writing this blog three years on. Mind you, I seldom write in my offline journal nowadays; so this is it. Such as it is, this is the document of my life. That is the information I'm providing, whether it's sought or not.

billions

It seems I'm finally coming up against what I feared when I first started this blog back in 2005: that I might run out of things to write about.

I used to keep a file of possible blog-post topics, but found that I never referred to it, preferring to shoot from the hip when I opened up the posting window. Why not just grab whatever's going through my mind, and start typing?

Sounds good. And maybe if I had more guts I could really follow through with that. But I feel constrained by the fact that, on the one hand, I don't want to talk too much about the content of my work in progress, the ostensible theme of this blog, and on the other that many of the other thoughts and feelings that dominate my life right now are things that are very private and inward.

So: here I sit.

Another week begins, and I must pray to the Muse to grant me a few more lines of my work--or at least the gumption to open up its files and face it, something I found that I couldn't do last Friday.

It helps to keep some perspective. Last night on CBC Newsworld I watched Brian Stewart interview the economist Paul Collier about his book The Bottom Billion, about the world's poorest people. These are the people--or whole families--who try to survive on less than $1 a day. Many of those people are in Africa. There were video clips of violence in Africa: unarmed people running for their lives while "soldiers" shot at them, and so on. What a mess.

I liked Paul Collier--a Brit who used to work for the World Bank. As he observed, political stability has only ever arrived anywhere at a great price in violence and upheaval, a fact we should bear in mind as we shake our heads over Africa. And, I think, even once it's achieved it's fragile, ready to be smashed when the strong give in to the temptation to gain their ends by force, and reap the whirlwind of violence.

As one of the "top billion", I have nothing to complain about. So I should get to work, then.

keeping the posts short

I seem to be running behind. I know: I have no job, no fixed schedule; what can "behind" mean to me?

Well, I live a routine life, just as much as if I had a regular job. This is the most productive way to live, I find--and productivity is important to me, appearances notwithstanding. The meagerness of my output is not due to any desire to keep my work in short supply. But without my routine, that output would be more meager still.

So I'm very aware of time. At any given moment of the day, I can usually guess the time to within about 5 minutes. To have a productive day, I know where I should be at each time of that day.

I fit the writing of blog-posts in after my morning research-notes-with-coffee, and before I head up for breakfast. In order for the blog to stay alive, it' s important that it not take too much time. Sometimes I get caught up in my argument or point, though, and find that a post can take me an hour to write. I don't feel good when that happens--it's too much time.

Today, running late, my intention was to jot down only a quick, back-of-envelope blog-post. It's already become longer and fleshier than what I intended, so that's a bonus.

But it's time to get on with my, uh, "real" day, such as that is.

On with the week, on with my work.

the long-distance blogger

The third anniversary of this blog came and went last month without my noticing it. Three years on, do I feel that it is fulfilling its mission? Do I even know what that mission is?

It began as an experiment. Indeed, I think I might have set it up originally in order just to have an identity on blogger.com, in order to leave a comment on someone else's blog. I quickly filled in the forms and set it up, not thinking I would actually use it and maintain it.

Now look at me. I think my original thought was that a blog might help save me from laboring in utter obscurity. I would have a way of expressing the experience of working on a large, complex creative project, and maybe some people would take an interest in that.

I didn't realize how popular blogging was or would become. I've heard figures like 40 million as the number of blogs online. A few of them have real, undeniable value (I think about the pseudonymous blog called Baghdad Burning, written by a young woman in war-torn Baghdad, offering an inside view of Iraq unavailable even through the best professional journalists). The great, oceanic majority are like the parody of blogs and bloggers I saw in a segment on the Rick Mercer Report on CBC: nerds in dark rooms who have no life, typing about the pizza they're eating and uploading digital pictures of the pizza for others to look at, while also requesting that they create links to his blog in their own blogs.

Is this me? I felt a little bit uncomfortable as I watched the segment.

I do have one edge over the majority of bloggers: I can write. So I've got that going for me.

But as for whether this blog adequately documents the creative process, or whether that process (my process anyway) is worth documenting, I can't say. There is a self-absorbed quality to a personal blog such as this that is perhaps not entirely wholesome.

In the end though I suppose it's not for me to judge. I do have family and friends who check in on the blog, and that for me is reason enough to keep up with it. There are also others who have taken an interest over the past three years, traveling along with it for a time. I've enjoyed that attention. Then there are those who, for better or for worse, have landed on the blog after making online searches for specific kinds of information. Common searches that lead here are for information on "Shantaram characters", or the word-counts of specific books such as War and Peace or Gravity's Rainbow, or the symbolism of hermaphrodites in dreams--among various other things. The idea that people come here looking for factual information gives me a feeling of responsibility; I worry a bit about shooting off my mouth.

Mainly I feel that the blog is a document of how long this project is taking. I recall a book that used to be on the shelf when I was growing up: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. I never read it, but I found the title haunting. The blog, I suppose, is an effort to mitigate the solitude of the creative work, and in that respect it may have some slight effect.

But it is only slight. It is a long distance, and it is, in some sense, lonely.

Again I sit here, wondering what to write about.

Various things tumble through my head. I have feelings of trepidation and hesitation that seem to come from many sources. I think back to what made me launch this blog back in March 2005: I wanted to find out what this new phenomenon was called blogging, and, as an experiment, went through the steps of setting up a blog on Blogger.com, not realizing that by the end of it I would be "live" and would have a blog. Having built it, I started typing content into it.

I'm still here. I wanted to create a journal of the progress of my work, one that others could check in on, if they so chose. The commitment of publishing would keep me coming back and writing posts, so at least I would have a record for my own use of the process of writing this book.

Along the way I have used it to develop my thoughts on writing and reading, on art, literature, mythology, symbolism, and other things. These are ideas, and it's hard to know how much influence or effect they might have. They're like seeds: insignificant objects that mainly never do anything, but when they find a home and sprout, then tremendous results can occur. I'm throwing them out there, for whatever it's worth.

I don't regard myself as a normal member of the blogosphere, engaging in comment on other blog-posts or weighing in with heated opinions about the topics of the day. Looking at the reader comments attached to online news articles, I find that the tone of exchange is generally dismal and juvenile. I have no wish to be part of that.

So this document is what it is. It's more like correspondence than journalism--like writing letters to someone I know well. I suspect that the advent of e-mail, so excellent in so many ways, has damaged the level of correspondence. There's nothing exactly like the kinds of letters I used to write and receive before the days of e-mail (never mind text messaging!): thoughtful, carefully composed communication intended only for one or two people. It's too bad.

I reckon I'll keep sending these letters into the ether--to finish documenting the construction of this invisible cathedral. One day it will become visible, and this record might make more sense.

(This post has no title, because no matter what I do, Blogger will not let me enter the Title field. Last day of Mercury retrograde...)

due to technical difficulties beyond our control...

No blog-post yesterday, because I was unable to go online. After trying the usual tricks of unplugging my modem and plugging it in again, and restarting the PC a couple of times, I phoned the customer-support line of my Internet-access provider, Shaw Cable. Like all quasi-monopolies, they have an overly long telephone menu to step through before you can actually get to a person. But I made it.

In the course of the next hour I was helped by two men, who took me through all the tricks in the book that they knew of. Still no dice for me. At the end of it, Kevin, the technician I was talking to, said that under the circumstances I would probably have to reinstall my operating system (Windows 98 Second Edition), "although we can't recommend that." When I asked him what other options I might have, he confessed that there probably weren't any--just reinstalling Windows, "although we can't recommend that."

I had only one option--and that one they couldn't recommend.

"You mean I'm on my own?" I said.

"Unfortunately we've done all that we can do from here," said Kevin. "Is there anything else we can do for you?" I chuckled at this, and Kevin moved on quickly to: "Thanks for calling--and thank you for choosing Shaw."

With that he was gone. But I did find it funny, because he clearly wasn't comfortable with cutting me loose, problem unsolved.

Nothing for it: I put in an old backup disk of Windows 98 SE that a neighbor had made for us five years ago, and proceeded to reinstall my operating system. It took about half an hour. And when the moment of truth arrived (well, one of the moments of truth), and my Web browser and e-mail client launched, seeking connection, I was a bit surprised that they actually did get onto the Internet--I was online again!
My desktop settings were all preserved, all my shortcuts were still there--all my data files seem to have survived. I was delighted. I figured that I had finally reached the point where I'd have to get myself a new computer, after all.

A suspicion floated up in my mind. Checking my planetary ephemeris, I discovered that Mercury is retrograde, and has been since 15 June: communication mix-ups, commuting delays, office-equipment malfunction. Prepare for more of the same till 10 July.

For the few hours that I was offline, I realized how much I have come to rely on being online, how much more powerful and useful a computer is when it is part of a worldwide network. I felt a bit isolated and lonely, no doubt as people used to feel when staying at a cabin without a telephone.

So yesterday's interruption of service really was due to technical problems. Will there be more of them? Stay tuned.

garbage in, garbage out

It's cool and wet outside. Our building's garbage-box on the back lane has again been violated, this time through the rusted mesh of its roof, I'm sure by raccoons. Last night Kimmie woke me to say that someone or something was on our back deck. I padded in the dark to look out, fiddling to get my glasses on. Peering down through the blinds, I saw an animal thumping indiscreetly down to the little landing near the top of the stairs up from the patio. Looking out through the partly opened window, I saw it was a raccoon. It paused in its self-licking to look brazenly up at me. Ah well, better than finding a person down on the deck, as I have a couple of times in the past (once a burglar, trying to open the window that faces the deck). I locked the window shut at a narrow setting--raccoons can zip up the side of a building in seconds--and we returned to bed.

Last week, when I learned that animals were again getting in to our garbage-box, I discovered that the roof-mesh had been torn away from the sides in a couple of spots. At one of those spots, I found a large (two-fist-sized) granite rock lying on the mesh. I feel sure that this rock had been used as a tool to break into the box. While we know that skunks used to raid the box before we had it sealed, I think it's raccoons this time--and they have the brass and brains to be actual burglars, using tools to break in.

In my capacity as (outgoing) president of our strata corporation, I have arranged for a carpenter to come and patch the box again, but of course it takes days to arrange, even with a good nearby guy who actually shows up to do the work (most trades don't, in our experience, especially plumbers). Today is garbage pickup day, so I'll see what the collectors take away, and which animal-ravaged bags they leave behind for someone--likely the strata president--to clean up.

Writing these blog-posts has become more difficult and irritating for a technical reason seemingly originating with Blogger.com. For the past week or so, the characters do not appear as soon as I type them, but after a delay of a couple of seconds. They slowly appear, one by flashing one, in a stream after each burst of typing. It's strangely annoying, not being able to see what I'm typing as I type it, but having to wait until Blogger feeds me the characters. Each typo takes extra time to fix, since I have to wait for the characters to appear, then backspace to the error. In all, it has become an irritating process. Too bad. I suppose I could compose the posts in Word and then paste them in--but it's annoying that the process has become less good, rather than improving. Maybe it's an artifact of my old Windows 98 operating system, which no one really supports anymore. A new computer would mean getting Windows Vista, reportedly a crappy, bloated, bug-ridden mess.

Will faulty technology finally drive me off the Web?

keeping the jury out

For the past months, or even years, I have written this blog by simply sitting down at the keyboard and starting to type. When I first launched the blog I used to worry about what I was going to write about. I kept a separate Word document with ideas for blog-posts. I've long since given up that idea; usually I never went back to it to look. The blog is too informal and too unpaid for me to worry much about its content. I have a few regular readers, a larger circle of occasional readers, and a still larger circle of people who visit the site after making a search for some item of information, such as "writer's lifestyle" or "Mumbai mafia".

I hope that at least some of these people find what they want--or at least something that interests them. I feel a certain sense of responsibility (and guilt) that people might be looking to this blog as a source of accurate factual information. I can say that at least some of the information offered here as factual is also accurate--but that's about all I can say.

I began this post with the vague sense that I'm hitting a dry patch, or at least maybe running out of fresh ideas for blog-posts. Yesterday I was talking with my brother-in-law Mike, who had come down to Vancouver from the Okanagan as part of a Mothers Day get-together with my mother. He has enrolled in a truck-driving course for the summer, and as part of his research into the world of trucking has read a number of truckers' blogs, of which I understand there are quite a few. The process of reading each of these blogs came to the same end: he saw what the attitude of the writer/trucker was, and the posts then simply continued in the same vein.

When I pressed Mike to explain what he meant, he said that each trucker tended to have either a positive or a negative outlook on his or her experience, and then, whatever happened, each event would be seen and interpreted in light of that outlook. A "positive" trucker would see an event in a positive light, as confirming his or her viewpoint on life; a "negative" one would see it in a negative light, also confirming his or her view.

"When I got to that point I would just stop reading," said Mike.

Of course my first thought was: Uh-oh, what about my blog? What category am I in? Am in a category?

My next thought was: What would have to be different about those blogs to have encouraged Mike to keep reading?

Clearly what would keep him reading would be some kind of freshness, unpredictability. He was implying that for each of these blogs there was no need to keep reading. He had already got the "message" of the blog, the message of the writer, and all the rest of the material was simply further examples of that message. I'm guessing that had Mike found a blog whose writer had not already made up his or her mind that life was positive or negative, but who was still investigating the issue, weighing new evidence each day, as it were, he would have stuck with the blog a lot longer. As readers we don't want to leave the courtroom, so to speak, while the jury is still out.

I get the feeling that there is something very important here, not just for writing but for all of life. The writer--or the person--who has made up his or her mind about life, about experience, has ceased to become interesting, in a sense; he or she is now selling a product. Just as I don't need to watch another commercial to learn that Colgate regards oral hygiene as important, and that the best way to promote it is to use their product, I don't need to hear anything more from someone whose view of life has already been reduced to a few set ideas or slogans. All future experience will simply be further evidence of that. And interestingly, in the case of the "positive" and "negative" truckers, the same experience will serve as evidence of opposite conclusions, depending on who has it.

The interesting writer then, or the writer who continues to be interesting, is the open-minded one, the one for whom the jury is still out.

In terms of a single work, the interesting one is the one whose outcome you can't foresee. You don't know which value is going to triumph in the end. It looks like it could go either way, so you stay tuned to find out.

Have I "branded" myself? Have people figured me out? How many visitors to this blog have moved on, thinking, Oh yeah, I see where this guy's coming from?

Right, Paul: open-minded it is.

swallowing starfish

Another morning post. I'm at the tail-end of my second mug of coffee; it is only lukewarm. I have been keying notes from Hebrew Religion by Oesterley and Robinson and from Zoroastrians by Mary Boyce. I think I'm going at about the same speed I always have, but progress feels slow, like running in sand.

This blog is ostensibly aimed at recording the creation of a novel, The Mission, but there are difficulties and conflicts here. I don't want to reveal too much, either about the content and plot of the book or about its thematic issues. This makes it hard to talk about, in many ways. I'm reminded of a satirical e-mail I thought of years ago while working at the Insurance Corporation, the sort we might expect from senior management:

It has come to our attention that certain individuals have taken certain actions that have had certain consequences for certain other individuals.

The statement, as far as it goes, might be perfectly true. It is also the antithesis of anything that could be called communication.

I'm not quite in that boat, of course. This blog remains a document of one writer's effort to get a large and atypical project done. Artistically solitary, opinionated, and even cantankerous, I labor slowly and unsteadily (it feels like) at my oversize task. My various worries, problems, and distractions are of the essence of my journey, and most of those I can talk about freely--and have.

Here's one: fear of mediocrity. Having inveighed repeatedly against the sloppy efforts of other writers, I'm conscious of having to live up to a certain standard, if only for the sake of integrity. Usually I feel that I'm not likely to live up to it.

I'm technically not mediocre, of course, at least by my own definition. I feel that a truly mediocre writer is one whose very best efforts yield only average material. These people can be very successful commercially--and indeed might be among the most commercially successful of writers. (For the record: I think that the very most commercially successful, such as J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, are not mediocre.) My best efforts are above average. But there can be a disconnect between the level of quality one knows is attainable, and what one actually puts out. Even though it's counterproductive to think about this while writing a first draft, thoughts cannot be excluded deliberately from one's mind (only unconscious mechanisms of repression can do that).

Mediocrity in this sense can mean underachievement: that the product is not worthy of the effort and time lavished on it. This would probably by a symptom of overambition: biting off more than one can chew. This does send a chill through me. I feel like one of those gulls that Kimmie likes to point out when we're walking at Ambleside Beach: birds bored or unsuccessful in their search for regular food who eat starfish lying among the rocks. The starfish, alive, do not want to be swallowed and make strong efforts to avoid it. We've seen gulls with a starfish half ingested, trying to cope with the two or three muscular arms the creature still has wrapped around the gull's face. Usually the gull can eventually swallow its armor-plated prey, but one young gull we saw a week ago looked like it was choking, and, lacking hands to pull the thing out with, didn't know what to do.

That's what you get when you eat starfish. I do worry that I've got a very, very large, live starfish in my gullet.

bonus post: Vitols translates Goethe

Procrastinating my writing chores, I was adding some labels to old blog-posts just now, and came across the post from 2 April 2006, in which I mentioned a verse of Goethe that appears, in translation, as the epigraph to Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness. Here is that translated verse:

He whose vision cannot cover
History's three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the day's frontiers.

Gabriele Campbell, in a comment to that post, gave the original verse in German:

Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren,
Sich Rechenschaft kann geben,
Bleibt im Dunkel, unerfahren,
Muß von Tag zu Tage leben.

I don't know who translated the verse for Neumann's epigraph, but I sensed that it was quite feeble compared to Goethe's original, so I just now had a go myself. I don't speak German beyond a crude traveler's level, having studied the language only in a weekly class in grade 4, then using a Teach Yourself book when I was 25, since I had a German girlfriend and wanted to learn her language. I also took a night-school class through the Vancouver School Board that same year. Thus equipped, I tackled Goethe, and came up with something that I think is quite good:

Who won't go back three thousand years
To hear what history has to say,
Remains in darkness, without ears,
And lives from day to day.

I've written almost no poetry in my life--I'm too inhibited and afraid. But, urged by my sense of the power of Goethe's words in his own language, I felt motivated to try to express his thought in my own language. I believe my translation captures something of the force of Goethe's thought and diction.

There: Vitols, the translating poet, is born!

tinkering with blog, plodding with story

I finally switched over to the "new" version of Blogger, as urged over the past couple of months by Google. since I already had a Gmail account it wasn't too painful. We'll see how it works out.

Returnees will note that I've added a couple of features in the sidebar:

• last book I finished reading


• last book I started reading


• other books I'm currently reading

Why, it's almost as good as being able to look right at my coffee-table stack (except I'm only including those books I'm actually, actively reading in the blog-list, whereas the coffee-table sags under the weight of books formerly being read and not yet reshelved).

Another feature are the "labels" I can attach to each post. I started off yesterday by labeling a number of recent posts--assigning categories to their content. Since as of yesterday there were a total of 361 posts, it will take me awhile to get through them all this way, and I'm not altogether sure of the value. On the other hand, the dry administrator in me (who owns a good-sized portion of my psychic real estate) is naturally attracted to this feature, so I do intend to complete it. Both die-hard fans and new visitors will be able to list posts according to their content labels. That should keep you up nights.

Meanwhile, I'm back at it, working now on chapter 26. I realize now that my method, if it deserves such a name, is what it is, and is not likely to change for the remainder of my draft. I keep researching, forging connections, and thinking through the backstory of each chapter. All of these contribute to the quality I have called "richness"--the "nonfiction" feeling that one is relating (and therefore reading about) real events. I believe that the more imaginary the world, the more removed it is from today's reality, or the reality of the reader, the more concrete and real-feeling it needs to be. In this respect historical fiction has a burden much like that of fantasy or science fiction. If you want to take the reader far away from where he or she is, you need to plant him or her definitely in another place.

Such anyway are my thoughts on it. Now to think of some labels to stick on this post...

non-advice about historical novels

I have a meter that counts visitors to my blog. I'm quite happy with it, and it's free. (I chose to use Statcounter.) Among the things it tells me (not the identities of individual visitors--never fear!) is search terms people use to get the list of results that include my blog (and on which they clicked). A fair proportion of those are people who search with queries such as "what is a historical novel" or "how to structure a historical novel". It makes me a bit sad to think that those people will not really find what they're looking for in this blog.

If I were to try answering such questions, what would I say? For a definition of historical novel, I might look in places such as the Historical Novel Society website, and in particular to their definition page. Not to keep you in suspense, their short, one-line definition runs thus:

To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).

(Their definition page has links to other, more in-depth discussions of the genre.) I'm sure their definition is as good as any; for these are people who clearly read lots of historical fiction and care about it.

Which, in some sense, is more than I can say. For I would not describe myself as a fan of historical fiction as a genre. That is, I don't go out of my way to read historical novels. I am not particularly attracted to any genre as such. I feel the same way about movies: it doesn't really matter to me whether I watch a romantic comedy or an action-adventure show. I care about only one thing: the quality of the story. If the story is good, I don't care where or when it's set, or whether it's drama, comedy, or something else. It's like the old joke: What kind of comedy do you like? The funny kind. What kind of story do I like? The good kind.

So why am I writing a historical novel? Because that's where the action that interests me happened: in history. The story is very important to me; anyway, I deduce that it must be, because it is putting me through an incredible amount of effort and mental discomfort. The story is important; it magnetized my attention; so I'm telling it.

Don't get me wrong: I do like a good historical novel. One reason, I think, is that the genre is quite wide-open thematically. The story can be about anything; it just has to be set in the past. This is unlike, say, murder mysteries, which I tend to find too formulaic. In this case, writers exert themselves to find exotic places and people to write about, but handcuff themselves (in my opinion) by writing to such a restrictive theme. But here again, an exceptionally well-done murder mystery gets my respect and my eager attention. Snow Falling on Cedars almost--almost--made it to this category for me.

As for how to structure a historical novel, I would say it is not different from any other kind of story. Most fiction-writers, in my opinion, are undereducated in storytelling, and should try to catch up with screenwriters in this regard. The best source available is Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. You should learn these rules--and learn them well--before you think about breaking them.

So, you historical-novel hopefuls, I'm probably not your role model. I'm not a genre writer. I'm working on a vast, difficult, and very eccentric project.

In a word: don't try this at home.

heartened

Well. I just wrote most of a post, only to have Mozilla Firefox lock up on me ("invalid page fault"), crash, and lose everything. What a way to return to the blog--strong negative reinforcement. I'll see what I can remember, but I feel frustrated and disappointed.

Even though I have not posted for about 12 days or so, I see from my stat-counter that people have nonetheless been stopping by--both my loyal readers, and the many one-time visitors, who often arrive after searching Google for things like "Pluto conjunct Saturn" or "Save-On Foods" or "outline for a historical novel". Many thanks!

It has been a time of low energy and flattened affect for me, so I have not pursued my commitment to the blog, which for the first year I felt I must write every day, whether I felt like it or not. But I have resumed writing again, not in a joyous way or a depressive way, but in a workmanlike way--maybe sort of like an inmate in a psych ward, heavily medicated and working on a craft. Unshaven, in terry robe (cotton sweats in my case), and full of lithium or chlorpromazine, he works with flattened affect at sculpting some plasticine. Maybe, if he has talent, it's even pretty good.

My reading has continued strongly; I pursue my inquiry into the mystery of identity. Lately, reminded by an illustration in Amit Goswami's The Self-Aware Universe, I pulled down my copy of a book I bought in September 1979, when I was starting university: The Origins and History of Consciousness by the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann. When I opened the old, well-made Princeton Bollingen paperback, I was struck to find this verse by Goethe as an epigraph:

He whose vision cannot cover
History's three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the day's frontiers.

I felt energized and encouraged--maybe like someone stumbling through a dark mine, lost and alone, who finds a directional mark. Yes: I'm trying to get my vision to cover history's three thousand years--and more.

I felt heartened.

adventure from cradle to grave

Goodness gracious. This blog's birthday came and went yesterday, and I didn't think of it until just now. Happy birthday to it.

Is it possible to generate any kind of excitement or interest around a life of the mind? Worldly adventures have their own undeniable appeal. My niece Clare is adventuring in Central America right now (and is running her own blog of the adventures). Snorkeling in lagoons, canoeing down Belizean rivers, bouncing in Guatemalan buses--these are adventurous.

What about the mind--the place where I now do my "adventuring"? Can I convey any sense of that adventure? Indeed, can I feel that adventure?

Yes, I can. Conveying a sense of it is perhaps another matter. In a small way, I've tried in this blog. I haven't engaged in physical adventure for some time now. I don't travel; I scarcely manage to get out of the house. If I did, though, I would have a nagging feeling that I'm missing the action. The action, for me, right now, is in books.

Yesterday I read further into Daniel Goleman's Vital Lies, Simple Truths. He has moved from discussing the unconscious restrictions of attention that we all unknowingly engage in as individuals, to discussing how this phenomenon--the selective permitting of only certain data into awareness--operates at the group level. Here is a Goleman's description of some of the effects of groupthink:

The first victim of groupthink is critical thought. Typically, talk is limited to a few courses of action, while the full range of alternatives is ignored. No attention is paid to the values implicit in this range of alternatives, nor does anyone stop to consider the drawbacks of these initial choices. The ignored alternatives are never brought up, no matter what advantages they might have. Facts that challenge the initial choice are brushed aside. The group expects success, and makes no contingency plans to deal with failure.

As an example of groupthink and its effects, Goleman presents the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. The Kennedy administration appeared to sleepwalk its way into this botched adventure in Cuba, much to its own embarrassment. I couldn't help but draw a connection to the current war in Iraq. It shows many of the above-named signs of groupthink. Has the U.S. sleepwalked its way into another blundered adventure--this one vastly larger than the 1,500 Cuban exiles who landed in the Bay of Pigs?

Having read (and reviewed) Gwynne Dyer's Future: Tense, about the implications of the Iraq war, I also had this thought: Is Mesopotamia, often called "the cradle of civilization", also to be its grave?

This is a sampler of some of the recent thoughts in my life of the mind. It is its own kind of adventure--no less so, and indeed I think more so, than jumping into the water with the barracudas when I was in Belize as a young man in 1979.