I love you.  I never heard those words.  I would haven given money away just to hear them. Just to throw money away. I would have bet it all on the table.  Because they bury you, they suffocate you, they murder you in increments.  But they never fill you up.  So tired of being a hole.  Being the dump.  So they lie.  So fucking what? Everyone does. This is their secret.  But here’s my final secret, and my revenge on a world that never loved me or desired me. I hated everyone.

I have finished reading my mother’s great novel Poppa’s War. One is already predisposed to like an author, I suppose, without being related to them by birth. Either by word of mouth, reputation, or perhaps an intriguing title is enough to cause us to choose one author over another, zero sum. Rarely does one come to a book without preexisting feelings. Is this enough to shape our enjoyment of a book?

Perhaps. But there are other parts of judgment that make one feel they are on much firmer ground. Enough to make me confident to call this an amazing work of art, which is a triumph all its own, without feeling particularly biased in my opinion. It is crafted with painstaking, and exquisite detail, alive with vivid description. If the book were a ballet it would alternate between slow and fast movements through a shifting landscape. Each step is built upon the next. The message is clear and unmistakable. Something important is happening here and the details are where we must look to find the answers.

Life at the time (the 1940s) was far more involved in the minutiae, less automated than our responses and feelings are today. Washing dishes was then an experience. Today it is a simple task, pushing a button before you go to bed. You are there with Alicia every step of the way. This is life, the way it is truly lived and experienced, and it breathes across the page. There is an eternity found within the fleeting moment that most of us overlook but does not escape her inspired prose. This is what you look for, but rarely find in a novel, when the ordinary reveals its sacred and lyrical quintessence, and transcends words themselves.

I find myself, returning and retracing these steps to find deeper connections within the rich tapestry. It works like the movement of involuntary memory, coming alive in ways we don’t initially understand but discover later on there was a profound wisdom to be found in the trace. No single element should be overlooked or lost, for it is within the whole that we find its true meaning. Something in life demands transcendence, love, sexual awakening, the transformation of adolescence to adulthood, family, community, country. The tragedy is not that these things fall apart but that we are unable to realize how strong those bonds are, too late to save some of us in time. But, like a solemn prayer, the book insists they must survive and outlast us in another way.

In this, the book reminds me so much of Proust, not in terms of style or similarity of prose, but in the way it evokes within the reader the experience of being fully conscience. A story that is truly a poem.

On Sunday, May 15, we honor this great achievement as a loving family at the book launch party, appropriately held at the Museum of Natural History in Murfreesboro, Tennessee beginning at 5 pm. I am her son. I am proud of her. But my respect for this novel, Poppa’s War, and all her year’s of hard work, dedication, inspiration, genius and insight, is from one professional to another. From this book, I learned more about writing. This is my greatest takeaway and gift fom a story that will now live on inside my heart.

I’ve hit a good stretch, several breakthroughs on the Chou novel.  So my blogging schedule has been allowed to slide. Find me writing here a lot and this means inevitably I’ve hit a snag. This is called “taking time to process the story”.

Breakthrough implies the journey is filled with any number of pitfalls, traps, obstacles, and (moral) hazards. This is usually what is meant by “bringing the story together.” For me, it is like solving smaller mathematical puzzles embedded in a larger one. I can never see it until I arrive at the end.

I don’t claim this is the proper or best way to write. I think it’s quite possible to have a good sketch of the complete story in mind prior to execution. That’s just not my style. Not right now.

But for me, writing is a journey. And so it happens, I am reading Journey to the End of the Night by that “absolute bastard” and  “despicable human being” Celine. Immintely readable, it’s hard to put down. And hard to look away from the unrelenting critique of human existence. Rarely has misanthropy been so damn enjoyable.

Still, I don’t profess to understand how a great author can turn into a virulent Pro-Nazi anti-Semite. For me, the ends of the world exist at the edge of his novel. Looking beyond into the abyss of an angry soul is pure speculation.

Take, for example, the fact that he was a doctor. Did this shape his unremitting diagnosis of what’s “wrong” with the human condition? Perhaps. It is easily for an obsession about one’s health to devolve into a phobia for germs and diseases, into a pathological need to cleanse the body and rid the soul of infections and contaminations. Did this lead to his support of racist, Anti-Jewish policies? Is this why he was found within Fascism the power of elixir?

Pure speculation. I am not his biographer or psychologist, and would never wish to be.

We can sympathize with the voice of a novel, but must bear in mind that this is not the author, despite what all reason and common sense tells us. I assure you, as a writer you should reject authorship.

Anonymity is vital. We square the novel, by removing all traces of the “authentic” author. We must, for then only famous people could write books that we understand.  Illuminate the history in which a novel is created, fine. But the author is truly a dead weight to the whole enterprise of writing and reading and should be quickly kicked overboard. It gets in the way. Do we need to take a moment outside the creative process to voice once more our disgust at his indefensible politics? Very well. But Celine is a symptom. Keep that in mind lest we think we have advanced the cause of equality and freedom one bit.

Otherwise, we don’t have a story, but pedagogy, moralism, and the tediousness which Celine exploited with great effect.

The challenge of writing a piece of historical fiction is the tendency (or perhaps fear) to get the history wrong. The journey barely begins and already you are stuck. Choices become petrified, ossified. To speak in the language of science, you have no vector. Which way did this go? Can it go? I can’t explain.

The first instinct is for research. But a tool can quickly become a crutch, a way of thinking without imagining.  Historical thinking. Recreating the space of history, edification without the need for a story to emerge. Your story.

Is it from a fear of getting things wrong? Or a desire to speak in another voice, to become the muse and let the oracle of history speak through you?

The challenge is made harder when you are forced to think and breathe in a completely unfamiliar landscape, a different language, a different organizing principle. And I don’t mean because Chou is set in the Middle Kingdom. Because that’s not actually true. My challenge is writing a story that exists between the gaps of history because this is really where Chou exists.

When asked to explain what the book is about, I say it is a story about a Chinese philosopher set in Ancient Times. All of the problems alluded to are contained in that misleading description. Ancient Times is such an expansive terms covering 3000 years of history up to the present which continues to be haunted by this ancient metaphysics.

I offer no solutions because the problem is history. The most radical stance, the most revolutionary and therefore fully conscience act of defiance is to will into existence the counter-narratives upon which history is built and also excludes. To reintroduce the contingent, the accidental, the nonlinear, the daring, discrete, unstable broken up ground of history not the smooth, continuous arc of deterministic history. History not as a cure but as a disease, and writing as the virus.

This arc is almost here. This is our time. We are entering it whether we want to or not. Very soon this Chou virus will be unleashed upon the world. The arc is almost here. But I fall back doubting unclear. History – cure, crutch, cancer.

 

Hiatus. An opening or a gap, or better yet – a gape.  There are two kinds of breaks from writing, one within, and one without. Why only two? Because I can think only in twos, one good and one bad, because I think only in dualities.  Without, one stops writing altogether. Within, one suspends writing One thing to take up another. I would count reading a novel in this second category. The enjoyment of reading another author is a gratifying form of plagiarism.

Within writing, the hiatus can be either good or bad. It is good if the compulsion is driven by all the wrong reasons, that is to say, done out of sheer boredom, laziness, or hating what one had been working on.

It is bad if done for all the right reasons, that is to say, by the need to set goals and hit deadlines, setting aside a Ulysses, as it were, in order to finish a book report. I don’t mean that one is grander than the other. Rather, it is where one’s inspiration lies. Ulysses is inspired writing. The other is sometimes necessary to put food on the table.

It is why deadlines are essential to writing and also a nuisance and often a hindrance. But essential, nonetheless.

My latest gap (a week or so) came at the expense of my blog for the benefit of my novel. The good kind of hiatus. But, a self-imposed deadline made me feel the need to post SOMETHING. Bad hiatus. So keep it simple and to the point, and get back to the good stuff. Simple, something that seems to escape me, chasing those lines that I have yet to find.

The deadline achieved, I can safely turn back to inspiration till the next book report is due.