a writer and his vocabulary

By the time I was 10 years old, I was known among my friends and classmates for having a large vocabulary and knowing "big words".

I was proud of that, or maybe I just took it for granted. But by the time I finished high school, while I knew that my English vocabulary was larger than most people's, I was conscious that the language has far more words in it than (probably) anyone can learn. Also, since I wanted to be a writer, I needed a vocabulary, and it should be bigger than that of the average person, in the same way and for the same reason that an artist's pencil collection is bigger and more diverse than that of the average person, who uses pencils only to jot phone messages.

And, in my reading, whenever I came across a word I did not know, I recognized that the writer, in knowing and using that word, had an expressive option or tool that I lacked. I came to think, "I could not have written this--I don't even have the vocabulary to have written this." Never mind talent and training, do you have the tools? It's like looking at a painting and realizing, "I could not have painted that, simply, in the first place, because I don't have those pigments!"

Want to write like Lawrence Durrell? You've got some studying to do, pal. Want to write like Thomas Pynchon? Get thee to a dictionary.

By the time I got into my mid-20s I stopped letting words go by me. I started making my own bookmarks by cutting sheets of white 8.5"x11" typing-paper into 8.5" strips. One sheet of paper would make about six bookmarks. Then, while reading, when I encountered a word I didn't know, I would stop, open the dictionary, and write out the word and its definition on my bookmark. Each bookmark became a two-sided column of words and definitions. When both sides of a bookmark became full, I would then review the words, sometimes testing myself but more often simply reading over the list and the definitions, and then discard the bookmark.

As time went on I became more rigorous. Instead of looking up only words that I hadn't seen before, I started looking up words that were not in my "active vocabulary"--words that I could not use confidently and correctly at will. What does the word fletch mean? It's kinda familiar--something to do with arrows. Yes it is: it means to feather an arrow. When you put feathers on your arrow, you're fletching it.

I've been using that system ever since. I store a sheaf of cut bookmarks at one end of a bookshelf in the living-room. The first 20 or so are all partly used. When I stop reading a book (I was going to say finish a book--but often I don't!), I slip its bookmark at the front of the sheaf. When I start (or resume) another book, it will be the first bookmark I pull out. So it's a LIFO system ("last in, first out").

The stack of books I've got on the go at any one time keeps my bookmark sheaf fairly well mixed. Each bookmark has words on it from several different books, often read at widely different times and from different fields. Usually, when I look at the words on a bookmark, I remember what book I learned them from. I get a feel for the vocabulary of the writer.

For example, a couple of days ago I finished a bookmark. I've got it right here. The first word on it is band shell. (Know it? I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but I was just assuming--and for me, that's not good enough, so to the dictionary I went: "bandstand having at the rear a sounding board shaped like a huge concave seashell".) I remember looking that up while reading Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs.

But the next word on the bookmark, carrefour, I remember from William James, specifically his Principles of Psychology. (Know it? "1: crossroads; 2: square, plaza".) The next seven words on the bookmark are all also from Principles of Psychology (inspissate, intussusception, holystone, sapid, sthenic, pyknic, whilom). But the next word is backwater, and with this I know that I've arrived at a new source--Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Scott chewed up the rest of that side of the bookmark, and the whole back side: 29 words in all before I had to fish out a new bookmark (and I'm still not finished Ivanhoe).

It's the archaic language, of course. What are the chances that I myself will ever want to use words like malapert ("impudently bold: saucy"), hilding ("base contemptible person"), or pouncet-box ("box for carrying pomander")? I don't know. I like having the choice.

Last night Scott finished off a second bookmark--although this one had room on it for only two more words when I pulled it from the sheaf (and what were they? quean, "a disreputable woman, specifically, a prostitute"; and bar, in the sense of "railing in a courtroom that encloses the place about the judge where prisoners are stationed or where the business of the court is transacted in a civil trial"). This bookmark began with the word by-blow ("an illegitimate child"). Most of the words on the first side are from the same book, but now, darn it, I can't quite remember what that was. Whatever it was, it was quite a long time ago, and featured medieval or archaic vocabulary (ewer, shotten, collop, etc.). Darn. What the heck was it?

Anyway. Two bookmarks are ready for the recycling bag. I'll review them, and let them go.

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.

an afternoon's reading

For me, "writing" is mostly research. I spend most of my time learning about what I want to say. How does this process work?

There's a kind of cause-and-effect process; I pursue threads of research. Yesterday, for example, I read from three different books. At teatime I tucked first of all into Home Networking Bible by Sue Plumley--a book I bought last September, having spied it among the stacks of books on the bargain table at Save-On Foods. Its printed Canadian price was $42.99, but Save-On had it marked down to $14.99. As one of the "Bible" series of computer books published by Wiley, it's supposed to be comprehensive about its topic. I had always been rather mystified and intimidated by the concept of computer networking, so I saw an opportunity. I had bought the Windows 98 Bible and been quite happy with that, so I picked this one up as well. I'm reading it now because it's time to get a new computer, and I want to provide Kimmie with a computer as well (probably this one), and to share our broadband Internet account--so home networking it is. I'm gobbling it up quickly, because I want to move on this.

Next: The Golden Ass by Apuleius. I bought the book just this month through Abebooks from a bookseller somewhere in the Southeastern U.S. It's the Wordsworth Classics paperback edition, translated from the original Latin by William Adlington and "revised" by an S. Gaselee. I bought this book as a result of reading Hellenistic Religions, an excellent little book by Luther H. Martin. Martin opens his text with a discussion of The Golden Ass, which was written in the 2nd century AD, because he regards it as a perfect picture of Hellenistic thinking and feeling about the world and about religion.

In it, the first-person narrator, a certain Lucius, is traveling on business to a city in Thessaly, Greece--a place reputed to be the birthplace of magic--and discovers that his hostess, Pamphile, is herself a witch. In his eagerness to learn about the hidden arts of magic, Lucius seduces his host's maid Fotis, and persuades her to take him to where he can watch Pamphile change herself into an owl--a trick she does so she can fly away secretly to her young lover. Lucius, craving such an experience for himself, induces Fotis to get him the magic ointment, but when he puts it on, he is transformed into not an owl, but an ass--Fotis in her nervousness has grabbed the wrong ointment.

As luck would have it, thieves break into the house at this moment, and in the chaos Lucius, now in asinine form, is dragooned into becoming their pack-animal, and finds himself willy-nilly on an adventure as a mute ass. The supposed cure for his condition is simple: he just has to eat some roses--if he can find them. But so far, the thieves have him under tight control (and they're none too kind to their stolen animals).

When I received my copy of the book, I was at first disappointed to discover that the translation was done in 1566; indeed, it seems no one even knows who William Adlington was, since, except for his moniker on the title-page of this book, there is no record of him. The prose style, therefore, is essentially pre-Shakespeare, although it has been modernized (and punctuated) by S. Gaselee, a "fellow and librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge," in 1922. I regretted not picking up the version translated by Robert Graves, one of my favorite writers. But now that I'm actually in the book, I'm finding it very readable--much more so than I expected. Indeed, to my surprise, the book is something of a page-turner. I read it as I do my nonfiction books, highlighter in hand, picking out cultural tidbits as I go.

Next: The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson. I bought this book, along with his earlier work, Blowback, from Amazon.com last month. The paperbacks, published by Owl Books, are part of The American Empire Project, an organization devoted to exposing and documenting the rise of the American empire. I was put on to the books by reading posts on TomDispatch, a blog of dissent by Tom Engelhardt against injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government. Chalmers Johnson, a longtime American academic specializing in Asian economics and politics, is a contributor to Engelhardt's blog.

(Tom Engelhardt I discovered, in turn, via Google News, my homepage. I clicked on an op-ed piece by him that appeared in the South China Morning Post. It was a very well-written, cogent essay, critical of some aspect of U.S. foreign policy, written from a point of view I had not yet seen anywhere in the U.S. press. It led me to check out Engelhardt's blog.)

I had just finished reading Blowback, first published in 2000, and plunged immediately into The Sorrows of Empire, enjoying Johnson's knowledgeable, authoritative prose. (Blowback, by the way, is a jargon term of the CIA, referring to violence perpetrated against Americans by foreigners in retaliation for clandestine operations undertaken by the CIA. An example was the 1988 bombing of Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people--payback for a 1986 Reagan-administration aerial raid on Libya that killed Khadaffi's stepdaughter. Another example is the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and Washington, which occurred just a year after Johnson's book was published.) The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, already has a much different, starker tone than the earlier book, for Johnson says that while Blowback was still a warning about the possibility of America's morphing into a full-on empire, he was now writing about what he regarded as an accomplished fact. Or, as Johnson himself puts it:

In the wake of September 11, 2001, it no longer seems necessary to issue warnings; instead a diagnosis, even an autopsy, may be more appropriate. In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the U.S. is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is probably irreversible.

The United States, with its obsequious Congress and its docile press, is at this moment undergoing transition from a republic to an empire (or, in the usual euphemism, a "lone superpower")--a point crossed by ancient Rome just at the time of my own story. In that sense, it is very germane to my own work. But mainly I'm reading it to become a better-informed citizen of the world--a responsibility I take seriously.

So there you have it: an afternoon's reading by the writer.

on showing off

To think that when I started this blog I was worried that I would not have enough ideas for posts! I used to keep a Word file of possible post ideas, in case I dried up. Now I positively enjoy coming to my post with a blank mind, even if I do have to sit here staring at the screen for a few minutes before finally starting to type.

My approach is just to open up my Word document (I no longer compose my posts in Blogger, since there is a problem with the way typed text shows up slowly there), clear out the previous day's post, and let my mind wander to my book. Even if I haven't really been working on it, what are my thoughts?

In truth, though, I am working on it, even if it is just in the form of research. In this area I feel I do follow Goethe's personal motto, "without haste, and without rest". There's no getting around the fact that if you're writing about a remote time and place, you've got a lot of learning to do first. Otherwise your work will be amateurish and unconvincing.

The historical novelist must necessarily face the problem of the tour de force--a literary phenomenon that I'm generally skeptical and disapproving of.

What do I mean?

Webster's defines tour de force thus:

tour de force : a feat of strength, skill, or ingenuity

My idea of a literary tour de force is a story that involves persons and places remote from the writer's experience. This would be those stories in which a man narrates a story in the voice of a woman, or vice versa, or a European sets his story in an African village. It's not that I have anything intrinsically against it--and I deplore the concept of, what's it called, can't think of the name...the criticism that for a white writer to write a black character is paternalistic...cultural appropriation? Seems I've successfully dismissed that concept from my mind.

I have nothing against that in principle, but my question is: why would you want to do it? Why does a Dane need to write about a Nigerian village? I can't help but feel that at least part of the answer is: showing off.

Showing off is a bad motivation for a writer, in my opinion. I've had a lot of that motivation in my writing life, and maybe I still do. It's not something I'm happy about.

And yet I do think that both self-esteem and ambition are necessary for a good writer. John Milton, before writing Paradise Lost, said that he wanted to create a work that people would not willingly let die. No doubt Dante and Tolstoy and Melville must have had fevers of ambition in writing their masterpieces. But I don't think this is the same as showing off. What's the difference?

Showing off has as its primary motivation the desire to impress and draw admiration and praise. The ego needs of the writer are placed ahead of the meaning of the work itself; the work is subservient to the writer's ego. Just like the showoff child, who aims to grab attention by any which means, you're making demands on people's attention without fully earning it. Instead of moving people and seeking to enrich their souls, you're tying to get them to say, "wow".

So if you're a proud, ambitious writer, the proper way to exercise your abilities is in tackling a project of suitable size and importance (Dante, Tolstoy, Melville). If you pull it off, people will indeed be impressed, but they will be impressed by the depth and scope and power of your message--not by your tricks. The Divine Comedy is 100 cantos of a verse form known as terza rima, structured in three equal parts, each devoted to one of the zones of the nonterrestrial cosmos: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It is a poetically conceived map of the universe, structured as an epic journey by a visionary poet conscious of his unique cosmic mission. There is no lack of ambition or self-esteem in Dante's work, but the work itself demands these from its creator, and its message is worth it.

But if I, a man born and raised in Vancouver, sat down to write a story from the point of view of, say, a little girl growing up in Texas, what the hell would I be doing? Even if I could pull it off, why am I pulling it off?

To show off.

The historical novelist is taking on a burden that is not dissimilar in some ways. One excuse we have is that there are no living writers who are in a better position than oneself to write about a bygone age. There are women in Texas who are better placed than I am to write about their childhood there, but there is no one who is better placed to write about the ancient world.

But in my opinion the "research overhead" of a historical novel means that it should have something important to say. The writer who's writing a trivial story set in Elizabethan times is, I think, guilty of the tour de force syndrome: he or she is showing off. Yes, maybe you love the Elizabethan period and happen to know a lot about it, but, I don't know...there should be a reason for setting a story in a certain time and place. It shouldn't just be about local color, trying to elevate your pedestrian story with an exotic setting.

Readers of this blog know that I have plenty of anxiety about the scope and nature of my project. I don't doubt its importance, so it's not mere showing off. As for whether I can actually execute the idea, well, time will tell. I'm guessing it wasn't easy for Dante, Tolstoy, or Melville either.

why writing is hard

To my own surprise (since I didn't see it coming), yesterday was a good writing day. After rising rather late (6:00) and tired, I keyed notes from A Study of History, vol.1, wrote what I thought was a pretty meaty blog post, and moved on to a rare day of insights and ideas into my chapter and my story generally. My typing could barely keep up with my thoughts--and I type fast.

What happens is that after a lot of research into a topic, a mist clears and I am able to see the wide picture. In writing terms, I'm able to sum things up to my own satisfaction. It is the intellectual equivalent of reaching a mountain peak--or at least a mountain pass--and the exhilaration, as well as the fatigue, is comparable.

It's strange, because the result of much research, much travel through jungles of complexity, is to arrive at simplicity. I think of the old slogan: you don't really know something until you can teach it. Teaching requires that knowledge be explicit and active: you know and understand the concepts clearly, and can bring them to mind at will.

For most of us, relatively little knowledge exists in this form. Recently when I was explaining some political thing to Kimmie (she'd asked--don't worry!), I mentioned the word republic, and Kimmie asked what exactly a republic is. I fumbled.

"Well, it's a country that has a constitution...it's, uh, usually democratic...."

I didn't know exactly what a republic was. (Do you?) I'd read Plato's Republic, and have read a couple of texts on political science in the past year. I know that I've read what a republic is, but I couldn't bring it to mind on demand when asked. My knowledge was not explicit and not active.

If writing is any one thing, it is just this: making things explicit. This doesn't mean that writing is all superficial and on-the-nose (although too much of it is). It means that all writing involves turning implicit, inchoate, and undifferentiated ideas and experiences and feelings into precise concepts, and arranging these in a meaningful order. This, in my opinion, is what constitutes the labor of writing--why it is hard work. It's not hard like coal-mining, but it's hard in the sense of requiring a continuous, demanding effort of attention--like learning your lines in a play, or studying for an exam. It doesn't happen automatically; you can't coast. If you're laying bricks--or mining coal--you can get into a rhythm and your mind can go elsewhere for a time while the work is still being done. Not so with writing. If your mind is not there, no writing is occurring. Every inattentive moment is downtime.

The difficulty that even experts have in explaining what they do or what they know shows how difficult it is to make knowledge explicit and active. You can probably be the world's best brain surgeon without being able to explain exactly what it is you do.

Yesterday I felt that I reached a milestone in my understanding of what I'm writing about--my knowledge became explicit and active. I also found more exact views and tasks for three of my characters, a rich haul for any dramatic writer. I moved a step closer to being able to teach the world of my story to an audience.


republic 1 a : (1) a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usu. a president b : (1) a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law

on dilettantism

Ever since I learned the meaning of the word dilettante, I have lived in fear.

Here is the definition in my Merriam Webster's:

dilettante n [It, fr. prp. of dilettare to delight, fr. L dilectare--more at DELIGHT] (1748) 1 : an admirer or lover of the arts 2 : a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge : DABBLER syn see AMATEUR

And on to one of my favorite features of the Merriam Webster's, a paragraph on synonyms, in this case under its entry for amateur:

amateur n, often attrib [F, fr. L amator lover, fr. amare to love] (1784) 1 : DEVOTEE, ADMIRER 2 : one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession 3 : one lacking in experience and competence in an art or science

syn AMATEUR, DILETTANTE, DABBLER, TYRO mean a person who follows a pursuit without attaining proficiency or professional status. AMATEUR often applies to one practicing an art without mastery of its essentials (a painting obviously done by an amateur); in sports it may also suggest not so much lack of skill but avoidance of direct remuneration (remained an amateur despite lucrative offers). DILETTANTE may apply to the lover of an art rather than its skilled practitioner but usu. implies elegant trifling in the arts and an absence of serious commitment (had no patience for dilettantes). DABBLER suggests desultory habits of work and lack of persistence (had remained a dabbler who started novels but never finished them). TYRO implies inexperience often combined with audacity with resulting crudeness or blundering (shows talent but is still a mere tyro).

What makes me think I might be a dilettante? For one thing, I have a wide range of interests, and I pursue them all to some extent. Since time spent on one thing is necessarily time you're not spending on another, this inevitably means a certain scattering of focus. I remember tussling over the question of whether to enter the Arts faculty or Science at university. I mulled the question for two years while I was out of school, then, still unsure, opted for a program that kept my options open. (In the event, I dropped out of first year, nullifying the question altogether.)

Earlier, as a teenager, I was very passionate about playing chess, and wondered whether I might be potentially good enough to pursue it seriously (I wasn't). Later, in my 20s, I set up a garage band with a couple of friends, and found great enjoyment in playing with them (our sound, found through trial and error, turned out to be basically R & B--a surprise to all of us). I considered making that a vocation, but again, did not.

At around the same time I was passionate about my spiritual quest for meaning and truth. I felt that the only wholehearted way of expressing that passion would be to make it the top priority in my life, and specifically to immerse myself in a spiritual education, as at a Zen monastery in Japan. I considered it, but again did not follow through, feeling dilettantish about something in which I regarded dilettantism as particularly shameful.

Another passion at that time was astrology: a field that I had dismissed as obvious bunk, but that, in my quest for other ways of knowing, now beckoned to me. I included it in my studies, and got some tutoring from a prominent Vancouver astrologer. But it takes long time to become good enough at astrology to be paid as a consultant, and anyway, I lacked the consistent passion for it.

And there perhaps is where my true fear of dilettantism stems from: the feeling that the hallmark of the dilettante is inconstant pursuit of a field of effort or study. And of that I knew I was certainly guilty. Where was the commitment? Where was the passion? I was an intellectual and artistic philanderer, endlessly chasing skirt.

Always in the background was the vocation of writing. I knew could write--and I wanted to. But the question was: what do I write? What do I have to say? I launched on ambitious projects that mostly did not see completion. I fretted that it could take me years, decades, to find something worthwhile to say to my fellow human beings. What would I do in the meantime?

What indeed. I suppose the answer lies in my life to date. Yes, I've certainly known success: I got The Odyssey on the air, and that was no mean feat. But I've also toiled in blue-collar and office jobs, with stretches away from wage-labor to pursue my craft. Indeed, that's what I'm doing right now. At a time when some of my friends are starting to muse about retirement, I'm still tooling up for production.

For some reason, I recall an old TV ad for California wines, in which Orson Welles intoned the tag-line, "Paul Masson will serve no wine before its time." Well, this wine has been in the bottle, in the cave, a good long time. Has it merely been forgotten? Or is a wise vintner keeping his eye on it, ready to draw it from darkness and serve in its own good time?

write when ready

Yesterday the train lurched slowly from the station one more time: I started writing chapter 28.

There comes a point where I feel ready, or anyway, ready enough. It happens when I develop enough knowledge of what the chapter is to contain, what it's about, and when I feel a certain excitement or enthusiasm about it. This, at its own small scale, I understand to be the "intoxication" that Nietzsche said must precede the creation of any work of art. The word enthusiasm itself, which I just used, from the Greek enthous, "possessed, inspired", originally meant to be possessed or inspired by a god. No doubt this is also the same as what the poet seeks in turning to his muse, as John Milton did right in the text itself of Paradise Lost.

Many times in the past, impatient to get going, I have launched into writing before the material was ready. It never works out. I start out with the thought, "I'll fix it up in the next draft", but this is hopeless. What happens is that I wind up struggling with the wrong problems at the wrong stage of the process, and therefore in the wrong way and with the wrong results. I don't know enough to be able to write well, and so struggle with the material, feeling blocked. Indeed, as I've said before, I think "writer's block" is just simply insufficient knowledge of one's subject. It's not that the writing is blocked, it's that there's nothing to write.

So I'm learning to be patient. I get worried and depressed when I'm not turning out prose for my work, yet experience has taught me that there's no use writing scenes whose purpose and content I don't yet understand, at least provisionally. I take that worry and direct it at my research--"research" including the thinking-through of the world of my story, including its fictional, made-up aspects. To do this I must make decision after decision, which is hard. But once a decision is made, I feel a sense of solidification and definiteness, as though I had just added more concrete to the foundation of my story.

That definiteness, specificness, seems to be the essence of good writing. The whole process of a work of writing, including "creative" writing, seems to be one of taking a vague but inspiring feeling and gradually shaping it into a definite, intricate, detailed form. A weak piece of writing shows signs of lingering vagueness. The writer contents himself with "he put on a hat", instead of visualizing the scene definitely enough, and knowing his character well enough, to write "he put on his tweed motoring cap". Notice the difference?

The vagueness of course can run right through a project, all the way up to its thematic level--its heart. These will be the weakest works of all--those in which the writer is unsure of what he or she is trying to say at all. When you're not sure of what you're trying to say, you don't know what belongs in your story or what belongs out.

You can't start out sure of what you're trying to say. You might think you know, but if you don't discover anything new in the writing, you are merely a lecturer. This is why nothing can be any good after only one draft. I think only the most rudimentary and uncreative stories can be written that way.

No doubt there are lots of exceptions to these rules. It may well be that a great work can be written without the writer knowing consciously exactly what it means, what its deepest message is--it will be unconscious knowledge. But I believe that the ideal process for writing a creative work is one in which you work your way through a first draft as best you can, then read it over and discover what you're really writing about, that is, become conscious of it, and then go on to write the subsequent drafts in that conscious knowledge. Now you can throw out scenes that don't belong, and do this with a sure hand. And you can beef up scenes that are not strong enough, because you know why they're necessary.

Yes, I'm trying to convince myself that it's okay to tinker so much with my material before writing each chapter. But it is okay, dammit. It is.

breakdowns large and small

All kinds of ideas swirl in my head of things I'd like to write about as I go about my day(s), but now that I open up the text box here at Blogger.com--nada, or near-nada.

I'm underslept, that's one thing. Today I feel it. And the heavy cold rain has returned, falling from a featureless sky of thick watery cloud. The tapwater will continue to run yellow-green, the bathtub will fill with a brownish liquid like pond-water. The "boil water" advisory is still in effect.

These past two mornings I've spent time reading, on what has become my favorite source of online news or political commentary, a preview of an essay by Mark Danner called "Iraq: The War of the Imagination", which will be published in the December 21 edition of The New York Review of Books. In some ways it's like a compressed recap of Thomas Ricks's book Fiasco. And fiasco it is, lest there be any remaining doubters out there.

I'd read once that the word fiasco was someone's name--some Italian naval officer who'd screwed up in an exemplary way. But according to my Dictionary of Word Origins, it is simply Italian for "bottle", from an Italian phrase far fiasco, "make a bottle", theatrical slang for "suffer a complete breakdown in performance."

Performance breakdown. There are many ways for one's "performance" to break down. It's no doubt best done in the privacy and comfort of one's own home, rather than being writ large on the world stage, engulfing millions of lives and billions of dollars. So I've got that to be thankful for.

Another post I recently read at the Tomdispatch site was a piece on NASCAR racing and its political overtones. It gets me thinking about car-racing--seemingly a field rife with breakdowns. And yet, in some sense, I reckon they probably don't see mechanical failures that way. I'm assuming that in NASCAR they have pit stops as they do in Formula 1 racing--places where the cars pull in for quick servicing during the race. The key point is that they expect these--they're part of the race. You don't go out there without having a pit crew ready. The car is complex, expensive, and you're driving it hard, at the limits of its performance envelope. Things are going to go foo-foo here and there.

I suppose I'm driving toward the idea that "breakdowns" (which my Webster's defines as "a failure to function"--I love Webster's!) can be reframed as "pit stops": not (necessarily) disasters, but an inevitable part of pushing one's performance to the limits. Your car's pulled off to the side, the wheels are all off, you're not moving anywhere--but you're still in the race. Your stressed parts are just getting a little TLC.

I'm in the pit stop, and the wheels are definitely off. C'mon guys--put 'em back on!

working with symbols

I'm back.

Lately, as I rehabilitate myself after my long hiatus, I have been confining my blog posts to weekdays. Yesterday I missed again due to a time squeeze in the afternoon: Kimmie and I were to head out to my mother's place to join two of her sisters, here on their first visit from Ontario, for dinner. Mindful as ever of getting my reading-time in, I went to my reading-chair early and never got to the blog.

I haven't been doing much on my book for the past week or so, focusing mainly on this copywriting gig. In a burst just before lunch yesterday I did manage some more notes in my steadily growing Notes document for chapter 25 (49 pages and counting, I'm almost embarrassed to admit--though quite a few of those are extracts from research books). I just repeated and consolidated to myself some of my thoughts about the imagery and symbolism of this chapter and therefore of the work as a whole.

And what exactly is a symbol, anyway? I must have some definitions of it around...

I turned to the bookcase and pulled out my old hardback copy of Jung's The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. I checked the index for "symbol", and, among many other entries, there was this in the chapter called "Spirit and Life" (slightly compressed):

By symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in language. Spirit that can be translated into a definite concept is a psychic complex lying within the orbit of our ego-consciousness. It will not bring forth anything, nor will it achieve anything more than we have put into it. But spirit that demands a symbol for its expression is a psychic complex that contains the seeds of incalculable possibilities. The Christian symbols’ power changed the face of history.

In this context he is talking only about symbols of the spirit, but what he says goes for other symbols too--they express the inexpressible. They are the best way of saying something that cannot be said. Their very lack of explicit meaning makes them more meaningful than conventional signs--"symbols" in the everyday sense.

Since, in storytelling as in all true art, nothing is as it appears, this means that everything is a symbol. And therefore symbolism is another rack of tools in the writer's workshop. These are the tools I've been working with lately.

life as adventure

It's a sunny day. I was just out running. The city was almost hidden in smoke-blue haze. The harbor water flared like white-hot metal beneath the low sun.

Last night, at teatime, I sat with my tea at the coffee-table, looking at the two stacks of books I've got on the go, and again did not feel like reading any of them. (I did spend a bit of time writing a review on Amazon.com for Peoples, Nations and Cultures; if you want to check out the link. My policy for writing Amazon reviews: I'll write one for any book I've read that doesn't already have a review, or if I disagree with the consensus of reviews. The main thing is to have a usable review there when someone looks for the book; I so appreciate that when I'm looking for one.) I came down again to pick up my copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces and read a little more of that. This morning I opened my new document based on Campbell's text and tunneled further into the question of my life.

As ever, the material hit me hard. I reread this extract:

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family. But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life--that is the lure, the promise and terror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within.

I feel a cold clutching at my own heart. The "realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self" is exactly where I want to go. Or is it? Am I merely a lollygagger in the foyer of life? Am I deluding myself about how cemented in habit I truly am? A cosmic sofa-spud, willing only to watch others' adventures? It is an anxiety-provoking line of thought.

I wrote these notes this morning under the above extract:

Life is a gamble. Campbell stresses the adventure quality of it as that which we seek and yearn for. "The desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self": risk. Risk is about uncertainty, about the unknown quality of the future, and the recognition that life brings both pleasure and pain. We make choices, which is always a gamble, a speculation, an investment, in some sense. We're looking to make a return, to invest our time wisely.

For is this not what it's about? My recent thoughts have included ideas about how the finiteness of our lives has a fundamental effect on our thinking and behavior. Even in avoiding the thought of death, trying to deny it, we are giving it huge--even exaggerated--psychological importance. Time is the ultimate wealth, the ultimate currency. We exchange the minutes and hours of our lives for...what? That is our basic decision. What's the best way to spend our time?

We trade in each minute of our limited, nonrenewable stock of time for what? Right now I sit typing this blog post. In less than an hour I will drive Kimmie up to her after-work hair appointment. Thus I spend the currency called life.

The hero by definition is he who crosses the threshold of adventure--the adventure of the discovery of the self. And what is an adventure? My Webster's, once again:

1 a: an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks

There are levels of danger. As Campbell puts it later in his own book:

Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former--the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers--prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. Tribal or local heroes commit their boons to a single folk; universal heroes--Mohammed, Jesus, Gautama Buddha--bring a message for the entire world.

Later on, in his Masks of God series, Campbell goes on to say that the primary myth-makers now are not priests, theologians, or philosophers, but artists: the writers, dramatists, and filmmakers who are able to command our attention and move our hearts. That includes me. How I live and understand my own life makes all the difference in the kind of work I can produce, and its value for my fellow beings.

Peering down into the Aladdin caves...what is there?

myth and suffering

Awake at about 2:45, and lay roiled in energetic thoughts till the alarm went off at 5:30. I think I dozed for a few minutes before 6:00, when Kimmie was up and the radio went on. (It was news. The song that launched me from bed: "The One I Love" by REM.)

Robin had the early shift, starting at 7:00. She belatedly stumbled down the stairs to the basement to put on her runners, with a travel-mug of my freshly made coffee. I saw her out the door to the garage so she wouldn't have to use time locking it with her key.

"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," I said. "What it does for women I'm not sure."

Robin did laugh.

"It makes them grumpy," she said.

For my part, I was working not on my research notes, for which I had no stomach, but on a document I created last night: an annotated file of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I simply saved my existing typed compressed version (which runs 38 pages in Word) under a new name, and started reading through it, typing in any thoughts that came to me as I read.

It started last night at teatime--time to push on with my research reading, which I have been enjoying very much lately: works such as A History of Warfare and entries in Peoples, Nations and Cultures. But last night I felt distracted, uninterested. I thirsted for something else--something to remind me that there are deeper, more important truths. So I turned where I usually turn now for inspiration: to Joseph Campbell. My vague plan: to apply his insights to my own current life-problems, questions. Here is paragraph 2 of chapter 1:

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.... [M]yth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Consider the boldness of what he's saying: what he's calling myth is antecedent to everything we call knowledge, art, or culture. I next wanted to remind myself: apart from metaphor, what is myth? Webster's gives this:

1a: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon

Fairly pedestrian. I turned next to S. H. Hooke's Middle Eastern Mythology, where, I remembered, he has a useful analysis of myths by way of introducing his subject.

First, the Greek word mythos itself comes from temple rituals, which had both a physical-action part and a spoken part. Mythos referred to the spoken part of a temple ritual.

Hooke stresses that myth is above all intended to do something, and therefore the right question to ask of it is not "Is it true?" but "What is it intended to do?" With this functional definition in mind, he sorts myths into five categories: the ritual myth, the myth of origin, the cult myth, the prestige myth, and the eschatological myth.

Interesting, but really only taxonomic, rather than cutting to the heart of the question. For this, I turned back to Campbell himself, this time Creative Mythology, volume 4 of The Masks of God series. Yes: this was what I was looking for. He introduces his topic with a recap of what mythologies are (this is my own compressed version):

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source.

Those three sentences could easily be the basis of a lifetime of contemplation--as they are the product of a lifetime of study and reflection on myths.

Campbell goes on to describe the third function of a mythology as the enforcement of a moral order: shaping the individual to the requirements of his social group. In this way it is a map of how society is supposed to be.

This is what he says about the fourth function of a mythology:

The fourth and most vital function of a mythology is to foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity, in accord with d) himself (the microcosm), c) his culture (the mesocosm), b) the universe (the macrocosm), and a) that awesome ultimate mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things. Creative mythology springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out.

On reading that, I felt a fresh surge of energy, vitality, flow through me. A functioning mythology enables--in fact is that which alone can enable--an individual to live in accord with his or her world. This is why I do what I do. To serve this function, I turned my back 26 years ago on worldly achievement and success. I have not always lived in integrity with that choice. And for not living in integrity those times, I am now suffering.

There's much more that could be said on this topic, but I'll leave it there for now.

memes, genes, and joy

Yesterday I happened to look in on The Lost Fort, a blog by Gabriele Campbell, a German writer of historical fiction in English, who has been kind enough to link to this blog in her list of blogs worth visiting. I was surprised to see my name in a list with four others that Gabriele was assigning a task: to participate in a "meme" called The Search for Joy, in which a blogger is asked to search his own blog for the word joy, link to the associated post, and write a bit to expand on the experience of joy mentioned.

Gabriele, I'll accommodate you. But a couple of thoughts have arisen for me in the process.

First, I had not heard of the word meme in the context of blogging. I gather that these memes are simple instructions or tasks that bloggers send to selected other bloggers to execute and pass on, rather like a chain letter. A chain letter, when it contains a financial component ("send $1 to each of the people on this list, then add your own name to the bottom..."), is known as a Ponzi scheme, a swindle in which early entrants are paid by later ones, the last entrants being only payers and never payees. In developing countries, whole banking systems have been set up as Ponzi schemes. Mathematically, every Ponzi scheme must collapse sooner or later. A "successful" one is one in which its initiators get rich--and out of the country--before that happens.

In chain letters I've more often seen "luck" as the thing being multiplied, rather than cash. I have no idea how that's supposed to work. In practice, the further such a scheme goes the more resources it ties up, both with snail mail, where thousands and then millions of "good luck" letters are being sent, and with e-mail, where a "successful" chain letter can clog the whole Internet.

The other thought had to do with the word meme itself. I recognized it from where I first learned it, reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins sometime in the 1980s. Dawkins was and is famous as a fierce proponent of rigorous Darwinism (a recent Discover magazine feature called him "Darwin's Rottweiler"). His central thesis in The Selfish Gene was that the true actor of natural selection is not the individual organism but the individual gene--a cohesive biological unit carrying a single package of hereditary traits. Organisms--like you and me--exist for the purpose of transmitting genes. All of our other activities--eating, finding shelter, fighting predators, shaking off disease--serve purely to get us to the point where we can transmit our genes. According to this view, in a fundamental sense, our bodies and minds are simply delivery systems for genes; we are a complex mass of molecules purpose-built to propagate a set of simpler molecules. The concept of meme he threw out at the end of the book as a kind of image to suggest how knowledge and ideas propagate. These too would have "survival value" and generate behaviors and structures to ensure their propagation. The theory of evolution itself would presumably be such a meme.

At least, that's my memory of it. But even when I read The Selfish Gene I found Dawkins too authoritarian, too fanatical. He seems to be more about browbeating opponents into silence and submission than about winning hearts and minds. The concept of the meme I took to be more of a poetic idea than a scientific one. I didn't get the feeling he was seriously proposing it as a scientific concept on a footing with that of the gene.

Nonetheless, meme seems to have taken off in pop culture. It means, I suppose, something like "an idea with survival value", but it appears to have morphed, in the blogosphere anyway, into something akin to a virus--a thought or idea you can't get rid of, even if you want to. Something infectious and annoyingly persistent. A thing that spreads, Ponzi-style, from blog to blog until the next one comes along.

So here we are: a blog-meme.

I searched my whole blog for the word joy. It crops up almost exclusively in variants of the word enjoy, which, I found out, I use a lot. It's closely related to joy, of course. Sense 2 in my Webster's says, simply, "to take pleasure or satisfaction in", which is the sense in which I use it. So I scanned back, looking at each instance for a use that most reflected what is being sought in the meme: a genuine expression of joy in one's life. I decided to use this instance in the post titled writer: know thy world. It crops up thus:

I had lunch at the local Japanese restaurant Honjin with Greg, a fellow fiction-writer and former coworker at ICBC (former because I no longer work there; he still does). It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. I really enjoyed it; we talked about the projects we each currently have on the go.

There: "I really enjoyed it". In the Buddhist training I received, much of the spiritual practice was devoted to being aware of the present moment, whatever that moment is. Ordinarily our minds leap forward and back, going everywhere but the present moment. When we're having fun, however, or experiencing true joy, we're naturally in the present moment. We're paying attention to what's going on right now, and happily so. This was the quality of the lunch with my friend Greg. I am a writer, but a solitary one: I don't usually fraternize with other writers. But as a result I often have no real opportunity to talk about writing with someone who understands. Greg is an exception: he is a writer, and more than willing to talk (or listen to me talk!) about writing. There is no time when you're absorbed in the present, so before we knew it, it was time to pay the tab and part ways. So that sense of enjoyment of a good meal, companionship, and a brief window of time in which we could commune about shared experience and interest, were certainly an experience of joy as meant by this meme.

I hope that satisfies Gabriele. I understand her mother died recently, so she is looking perhaps for reminders of the good things in life. This was one of mine.

watching shows, finishing books

When I sat down to compose my post yesterday, I received a notice from Blogger.com that the site would be down for an hour. I retreated to post another day.

Sunshine has returned. I just walked down to Blockbuster Video at Park & Tilford shopping center to pick up disc 1 in the DVD series for season 2 of The West Wing, a show Kimmie and I are watching and enjoying--much more than we thought we would. As I watched all 22 episodes of season 1 I was astonished to see that they were almost all written by the show's creator Aaron Sorkin. As a TV series writer-creator myself, I have some idea of what that entails--and I (co)wrote only 13 half-hours for all of our season 1. His days must have been grueling. And with that many episodes in a season, you don't get much of a breather before the next year--perhaps none, since the more prepared you are as you go in, the fewer guns you have pointing at your temple as the season wears on.

Anyway, I find myself inspired by the show, which is how one should be affected by a work of art. It should provoke your mind and your heart with questions about what is important, about how to live life.

A couple of days ago I finished reading a book (not that common for me): Coal: A People's History by Barbara Freese. I thought it was very good. Freese, an assistant attorney general of Minnesota, is also an environmentalist, but I believe she treated her subject fairly, and has delivered a well-written and engaging introduction to this important commodity. I bought the book partly because of my own environmentalist leanings, and partly out of an interest in economic commodities. As I am also learning from A History of Technology, history is shaped to an even greater extent than we might think by technological change. Coal, the first fossil fuel to be widely exploited, essentially launched Britain's career as an industrial and political leader of the world.

I also am retiring one of my vocabulary-building bookmarks: it's covered on both sides with words and their definitions written in my small, cartoonist's majuscules. The first word on the bookmark: enjambment (running-over of a sentence from one verse or couplet into another so that closely related words fall in different lines). I don't remember now what book I was reading when I looked up that word. It might have been years ago. The last word on side 2: pintle (a usually upright pivot pin on which another part turns). I believe this word was from David Rohl's From Eden to Exile.

I'll review the words and their definitions, trying to impress them on my memory, then drop the bookmark in the recycling bag. I have no need for a full bookmark.

the dead hand

Coming down a bit early today to do my post. Rain drips down from a drenched cotton-batting sky. Kimmie's office is having a barbecue at a coworker's house. I'll be heading up in due course, so I wanted to take care of this, and also get some afternoon reading in before attending the gathering.

I've been meaning to do a post based on the powerful and chilling term dead hand. Here is my faithful Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:

dead hand 2: the oppressive influence of the past

The term swam up into my mind when I was writing something a few weeks ago. When I looked it up I was surprised at its strength. The oppressive influence of the past is a vast topic, and, phrased that way, also chilling.

It feels very relevant to the writer of historical fiction. One question I sometimes ask myself is, Why write (or read) historical fiction? Robert McKee's answer (in his storytelling text Story):

Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it's difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time.

He of course is talking about screenwriting, and how to justify the tremendous added production expense of setting a story in a past period, but I believe the argument translates to fiction-writing as well.

While I'm sure there's something to that, I don't believe McKee's explanation gets to the heart of the matter. I'm thinking that historical stories have, for one thing, a quality of "once upon a time"--they evoke the mythical realm of the fairytale. Closely related to that is that they show people of remote times to be the same as we are now, merely with different fashions, social codes, language, and technology (which in turn reveals all these things to be incidental to the human condition). The problem of life, of how to live, was ever the same. The human condition has an eternal quality, which points to questions of meaning, of the spiritual.

At the same time, those very differences call attention to the corresponding aspects of life in our own time: we are thereby made aware of our own existence by seeing it through the eyes of another time, so to speak. We may notice afresh, and appreciate--or question--the social structures and things in our world that we usually take for granted.

And now: the dead hand of the past. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I'm sure many neurons have fired in the effort to unpack his meaning. Mircea Eliade, in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, says that for archaic man,

neither the objects of the external world nor human acts...have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.... [H]uman acts...are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning...by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

Later on he says:

[I]nterest in the "irreversible" and the "new" in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic humanity...defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails.

For archaic man--who, after all, is us under our Calvin Klein briefs--historical acts, that is, acts that were not performed originally by a god or hero or ancestor, are necessarily imperfect and in fact sinful. It is the accumulation of these sinful, profane acts that is wiped out each year with the ancient New Year festival--a rite we still practice with our saturnalian New Year's party and list of resolutions. In the ancient world, much more than now, life started afresh after the New Year. History was erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and everyone was reborn.

What I seem to be creeping toward, here, is the idea that the dead hand is the accumulated dead weight of profane history--the irreversible events that have piled one on another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or since the Big Bang, depending on your view. The dead hand makes its way into spiritual thinking as the doctrine of original sin, or as karma: what was done in the past, by people we no longer identify with as ourselves, catches up with us.

The dead hand says that past and present are connected, not only in obvious ways, but in a deep mysterious way that affects each of us like a powerful current we usually don't even know we're swimming in--or drowning in.

I'm not quite sure, but I think I'm suggesting that historical fiction, historical drama, brings us closer to this reality by showing us the relativity of time. The past is now if we know how to look.