Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

… flowers, grass, dancing …

I took a turn east while looking for something Irish to share for St. Patrick’s Day. Yeats took an interest in Eastern thought, and in Japanese Noh theater, writing poetic dramas based on Irish myths to be performed in a manner based on the formal, stylized simplicity of Noh. This poem struck me as a kind of awakening.

Imitated from the Japanese

 

A most astonishing thing—

Seventy years have I lived;

 

(Hurrah for the flowers of Spring,

For Spring is here again.)

 

Seventy years have I lived

No ragged beggar man,

Seventy years have I lived,

Seventy years man and boy,

And never have I danced for joy.

 

In Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, After the Quake, a man dances alone on a baseball mound in the middle of the night.

“Yoshiya took off his glasses and slipped them into their case. Dancing, huh? Not a bad idea. Not bad at all. He closed his eyes and, feeling the white light of the moon on his skin, began to dance all by himself … Unable to think of a song to match his mood, he danced in time with the stirring of the grass and the flowing of the clouds. Before long he began to feel that someone, somewhere was watching him. His whole body—his skin, his bones—told him with absolute certainty that he was in someone’s field of vision. So what? He thought. Let them look if they want to. All God’s children can dance.”

The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, Macmillan,  New York, 1974

All God’s Children Can Dance, short story in After the Quake, Haruki Murakami, Vintage International, 2003, translation by Jay Rubin

Silence and Words

There’s so much noise in the world—from engines and various electronic hums to the TVs that play in waiting rooms and laundromats to the music and ads pouring out of speakers in every retail space and even at gas pumps.  Partway through working on this post, I went to the hardware store to get a new battery for my car key. Ford chip keys are hard to open, like a kind of puzzle, and mine defeated me. I let the man who was helping me concentrate on solving the puzzle without talking, and over the speakers in the store came Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “The Sounds of Silence.”

How often do we really hear silence? Hiking in Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument a few years ago, I came through a slot canyon and stood alone in the desert, in awe of the view—and realized with even greater awe that there were no sounds.

Then, a single insect made a single sound. One living note in the stillness.

More recently, I was practicing yoga at home while my washing machine was running. I heard my thoughts running, too, chasing each other. When the machine cut off my head suddenly went quiet with it. Such a bright silence, that special kind that comes when noise stops. It made me think of my favorite section in The Phantom Tollbooth—a children’s book I’d recommend to every adult.  “Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

Last week one of my regular yoga students mentioned how much he appreciated the fact that I’d used some non-melodic tones for background music. Being a musician, he found that most music took so much attention that he didn’t meditate or focus as deeply as he had with these simple tones. When I told him that the studios where I take classes don’t use music at all, he said that sounded like the perfect way to practice yoga. His wife disagreed. But she works with words. Music without words helps her quiet her mind. She feels a need to get away from words.

In his book of essays The Man Made of Words, N. Scott Momaday discusses the relationship between words and silence in Native American songs and stories. He says that silence “… is powerful. It is the dimension in which ordinary and extraordinary events take their proper places. In the Indian world, a word is spoken or a song is sung not against, but within the silence. In the telling of a story, there are silences in which words are anticipated or held on to, heard to echo in the still depths of the imagination. In the oral tradition, silence is the sanctuary of sound. Words are wholly alive in the hold of silence; there they are sacred.”

Tent_rocks_MG_3174Tent_rocks_2

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, Random House, 1961

The Man Made of Words, N. Scott Momaday, St. Martin’s, 1997

Pictures of Kasha-Katuwe by Julius Ruckert, from Wikimedia Commons

 

“Stop Talking and Shoot the Guy!”

Over the years, the rules and conventions of the mystery genre have changed, and they’re still evolving. In the process of questioning a couple of the current conventions, I looked back at some old ones: the “ten commandments” of detective fiction set out by Ronald Knox in 1929, and the Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories that S.S. Van Dine published in the American Magazine in September 1928. Van Dine’s list is long, so I’ve placed it at the end of this post.  Here are Knox’s commandments:

  1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
  2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
  3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
  4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
  5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
  6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
  7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
  8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
  9. The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
  10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

I imagine you’re laughing at some of these. Number five is glaringly dated, of course, an artifact of the biases and stereotypes of Knox’s times. The rule about the sidekick’s intelligence is irrelevant as well as comical, since mystery fiction seldom includes sidekicks anymore. Most recent books lack secret passages, also, so limiting the number isn’t an issue. And in the rare book that has them, the author might legitimately use more than one. I recently enjoyed M.L. Eaton’s When the Clocks Stopped, a well-crafted book that breaks that rule as well as the supernatural one. Historically, the Romney Marsh area of England, where the story is set, had a lot of smugglers and secret passages, and this aspect of the past shows up when a village seems to be haunted. This novel breaks one of Van Dine’s rules as well—there simply must be a corpse— providing plenty of mystery without one.

Van Dine’s rule number three—there must be no love interest—hasn’t held up as well as the corpse rule has. In almost every current mystery series, the main character’s love life is woven into overall arc of the books. In the past, the protagonist might be an eccentric like Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot, making a love story unlikely, and focusing the plot on the puzzle of “whodunit.” Those books are great, but the genre would have stagnated if writers had kept trying to reproduce that model of a mystery.

A convention in many recent mysteries breaks both Knox’s first rule—showing the criminal’s thoughts—and Van Dine’s second: “No willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.” I’m referring to the anonymous bad person’s point of view. All the other characters in the book have names, faces and identities, but then the author delivers information about a crime through scenes featuring a character who is only a pronoun. I’m not a fan of this device, even though some excellent writers have done it. James D. Doss wrote some creative variations on this kind of scene by using the point of view of a prairie dog, a deer, or a mouse. With Ute mysticism and vivid descriptions of nature integrated into his plots, and his mastery of the omniscient third person, he could pull it off, and it flowed more naturally for me than the faceless criminal’s viewpoint.

A convention that seems to be almost a rule now is the confrontation-and-confession. The criminal has the protagonist at gun point, or knife point, or on the edge of a cliff at gunpoint or knife point. He could kill her. But he delays. She gets him to talk. He brags about how he executed those last little details of his crime that she couldn’t figure out. He might even tell her why he did it. This buys her time to either come up with a way to disarm him, or for her colleagues—the cavalry—to come in.

Sometimes when I read a scene like this, it this drives me crazy. Sometimes I read one and it works. As a writer, I look for ways to get around it or to make it different and more natural. Of course, since I break the corpse rule and don’t have murders in my books, there’s never going to be a killer holding Mae at gunpoint, but I do have characters who do bad things, and I have to wrap up the mystery of how and why they did them. I asked fellow mystery writers what they thought of the confession convention, and I learned that I’m not alone in trying to reshape it.

One writer said she’d found the convention so unrealistic she didn’t use it, but then her editor told her to revise the book and put it in. The editor’s logic: It’s like a ritual, a catharsis, and readers may feel short-changed without it. They want to know motives, have a climactic scene, and have closure on the mystery.

Writers want to deliver that without using the same ending over and over, and without stretching their readers’ suspension of disbelief to the point that it crashes. When do we have satisfying endings, believable suspense, a kind of mythic pattern of danger and redemption, and when do we have a cliché?

One fellow writer who calls herself a recovering lawyer said that in real life the bad guy tells his lawyer, not the sleuth who caught him.  Another mentioned that before they’re caught, criminals sometimes boast to drinking buddies and family members. Anyone who thinks he or she got away with something clever may feel the need to share it. Criminals convicted of one crime may tell cell mates about another crime that was never solved, feeling they have nothing to lose. In fiction, the bad guy (or gal) more often feels proud and safe boasting to the sleuth he thinks he’s about to kill. This urge to display one’s success is one of the motives writers have used to make this convention—sometimes—effective and believable.

 A writer who had attended several citizens’ police academies said she’d learned that criminals often confess once they realize there’s a convincing amount of evidence against them, but they seldom do so with the insight into their motives that we get in these mystery novel confessions. Many of us law-abiding folks don’t know why we do what we do. We lie to ourselves, fool ourselves, and rationalize and justify. It’s more believable when the fictional criminal does that, too, if and when he explains his motive.

My favorite response to my question about the confession-confrontation was from a writer who said she and her husband see it done all the time on TV and find themselves yelling at the screen, “Stop talking and shoot the guy! For gosh sake!”

Van Dine’s rules:

  1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.
  2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
  3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.
  4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering someone a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It is false pretenses.
  5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions—not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.
  6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.
  7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much bother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.
  8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, Ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.
  9. There must be but one detective—that is, but one protagonist of deduction—one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader does not know who his coeducator is. It is like making the reader run a race with a relay team.
  10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story—that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.
  11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person—one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.
  12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.
  13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.
  14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.
  15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent—provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face—that all the clues really pointed to the culprit—and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.
  16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.
  17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.
  18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.
  19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plotting and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.
  20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f) The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

 Sources:

Thanks are due to my fellow members of Sisters in Crime who answered my question about the Confrontation/Confession

http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/303

http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7932401/Van-Dine’s-Twenty-Rules-for-Writing-Detective-Stories

Crystals

DSCN1219crystalsglow

This post is a short summary of what I’ve so far learned as a novelist incorporating the use of crystals in my books. I have more to learn about the subject, but I thought it would be interesting to share my explorations.

When I researched energy healing, I easily found twenty-six articles in the archives of just one peer-reviewed medical journal. In another, I found a meta-analysis of healing studies, including those done with subjects other than “whole humans”—healing done on animals, plants, and cell cultures, which are presumed not to experience placebo effects. A number of years ago, I read a study on Qi Gong done in China with pigs as the targets of healing by emitted chi. I can’t remember what their malady was, but I recall that they improved at a statistically significant level. Healers have measurably affected fungi, seeds, plants and mice. When researching the use of crystals in healing, I looked for a similar level of scientific investigation and couldn’t find it. However, I found anthropological literature on the subject as well as modern books on crystals.  My reading gave me the impression that the primary use of crystals historically has been for strengthening psychic ability rather than for healing.

 In North and South America and in Australia, shamans have used quartz crystals to enhance their ability to see into spirit worlds and other places and times, as well as into a sick person’s body. For example, Navajo crystal gazers use quartz crystals perceive the nature of an illness. One crystal gazer I read about also used his visions to find lost sheep and lost children. In Australian Aboriginal traditions, quartz crystals were used to make ritual cuts as part of a shaman’s initiation and sometimes embedded into a finger or under the skin. The crystals also become spirit forms or energy centers in the shaman’s head or belly.

Quartz—sometimes called a “wild stone” or a “live stone” by indigenous people—has the most uses in shamanism, but other stones have been seen as powerful. In ancient Taoist alchemy, jade was considered to enable one to fly up to heaven, which sounds like a shamanic journey. In European folk magic, any clear surface like a mirror or water as well as a crystal could be used for scrying. The Druids are said to have used beryl crystals when seeking visions.

The present-day practice of crystal healing has grown up from a mixture of influences from the East and the West. In the American colonies, European folk healers met Native healers, and their practices began to cross cultures. This blend is the root from which my character Rhoda-Sue Outlaw Jackson’s idiosyncratic folk healing springs. With the introduction of yoga in the West, color symbolism from India relating to the chakra system was integrated with the shamanic use of crystals. In The Calling, when Mae starts working with crystals, a book on this contemporary East-West approach is her primary resource.  She uses crystals in both the traditional shamanic way as a seer and in the modern way as a healer.

Practitioners of crystal healing ascribe specific influences to certain stones, referring to effects of their harmonious structures and their unique vibrations or frequencies. Crystals grow; they have a kind of vitality or life force, and yet they are also stable. An interaction is assumed to take place between the vibration of the person being healed and that of the crystal. Skeptics assume that any results are due to the placebo effect, or that hypnosis is somehow involved in healing with crystals. This latter guess makes sense to me. Trance states affecting both healer and patient are part of the shamanic tradition. **

I first encountered crystal healing at the home of some friends in Santa Fe. After running a five-K race, I’d been experiencing pain in my left ankle, which had developed a ganglion cyst. My friend Jon held an enormous clear quartz point and made circles with it over the painful part of my ankle for about twenty minutes. I was skeptical but open-minded, willing to test out his belief that he could help. That was in July 1999. My ankle didn’t hurt again until June 2013. When I went to the foot and ankle doctor in Santa Fe to have the cyst taken care of, I told him this story. We joked about my getting it treated again with another giant crystal, but I wasn’t sure I could get another fourteen years of relief from just any healer, and Jon and his giant crystal had moved away.

When I lived in Norfolk I met a young woman who used crystals in energy healing. I can’t say if they had an actual effect or contributed to a mutual trance, but the sense of lightness and peace I felt from her work was strong.

While preparing to write the Mae Martin series, in addition to reading about crystals I acquired a collection of them to experiment with. Sometimes I’d try leaving different ones next to my bed at night, in the space between the lamp’s curved legs on the bedside table, to see if they affected my dreams. One night I placed sodalite in that spot—it’s supposed to be good for perception and creative expression, among other things—and I dreamed that people were sitting at a bar playing a gambling game with crystals, shaking them like dice and throwing them. I woke up in the morning and reached to the table to get my glasses—and noticed that the blue-and-white stone, which had been a smooth solid oval the night before, was now broken as neatly as if the end had been sliced off with a saw. Sodalite does fracture easily. If any crystal was going to break, this was the one, but I doubt I picked it up and threw it in my sleep, acting out the dream. If I had, I probably would have knocked over the lamp, and I don’t have any history of parasomnias. The stone lay right where I’d left it. Maybe it already had a crack it in and quietly fell apart while I dreamed it was being thrown. This is one of those strange little things that I could explain away, but that’s different from actually explaining it.

Sources

Harner, Michael, The Way of the Shaman, Harper, 1990

Benz E and Luckert K, The Road of Life: Report of a Visit by a Navajo Seer, Ethnomedicine II 3/ 4, 1973

Cowan, J. Wild Stones: Spiritual Discipline and Psychic Power Among Aboriginal Clever Men,        Studies in Comparative Religion, V. 17 no. 1&2, Winter-Spring, 1985

Permutt, Philip, The Crystal Healer, Cico Books, 2007

Knight, S., Pocket Guide to Crystals and Gemstones, Crossing Press, 1998

* I use the male pronoun because my sources focused on male shamans. Female healers’ and seers’ roles in traditional societies often differ from the men’s.

**If I understand correctly, people in shamanic cultures who use crystals don’t feel the need to differentiate between placebo, trance, and spiritual effects, or between power objects and symbols of power, or between the crystals the shaman carries in his belly or forehead (spirit objects) and the ones in his medicine bundle (physical objects). Their world view is of a whole system, not separated by the veil modern people place between the spiritual and the material.

 

 

Interview with B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree Author Amber Foxx

Stephanie asked me some great questions. I got to talk about T or C as well as my writing process.

Healing Hands

uttabodhi mudrakalaswari mudramatangi mudraapana mudra

Energy healing or healing through touch is practiced in many forms and many cultures. Some people seem to have a natural gift for hands-on healing, with no special training. Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere had the ability first and then studied how to enhance it. She has been studied extensively, too, as she collaborates with scientists in research on healing. Dr. Barbara Brennan started out in atmospheric physics but she found she had a gift for hands-on healing. Both have now created modern systems for training healers. I say modern, but both use the chakra system from Ayurveda and yoga.

Traditional medicine in India, China and Japan includes a sort of energy anatomy and concepts of prana, chi, or ki (all meaning life force or energy) as part of the health of the mind-body complex.  The Chinese qi gong (or chi kung) and the Japanese Reiki are probably the best known traditional energy healing methods.

It may be surprising to think of yoga as a form of energy healing, but it is, and it even has healing hands. I use Uttabodhi Mudra as my image when I comment on other WordPress blogs, and someone may have seen it and wondered about it. What you’re seeing is my hands doing yoga. In addition to being a writer and professor, I’m a yoga teacher. All yoga poses not only move prana through channels in the mind-body complex called nadis, and they also work like antennae to draw prana in. Mudras work the same way. They can be integrated into asanas (poses), practiced in a series for a particular effect, or held during meditation.

I first realized mudras were powerful medicine in my yoga therapy training. We had an early morning class in mudra practice, and I had not had coffee. Sleep clung to me like cobwebs. Then we did Vajrapradama Mudra. (Spread the hands and fingers, like a “jazz hand” and interlace the fingers right over left, palms facing but not touching the heart.) Suddenly, I was awake. This mudra was like espresso.

Uttabodhi Mudra (1) balances and energizes the whole body and all of the chakras.

Kaleswara Mudra (2) is a strong self-healing mudra, affecting the first, third and fourth chakras, with an emphasis on the fourth—the heart. Its shape looks heart-like.

Matangi Mudra (3) revitalizes strength and energy at the third chakra. It can be used to enhance creativity and shake off lethargy.

Apana Mudra (4) is grounding— good for letting go and for balancing energy at the root chakra.

Sometimes in a class where everyone is in a mudra, I see all the hands with my eyes closed. I’m not sure what that means, but it feels blissful.

Translations of the Sanskrit: Vajrapradama, unshakeable confidence; Uttabodhi, highest wisdom; Kaleswara, Goddess of time. Matangi , Goddess of inner power. Apana, the downward current.

A great resource for this practice is the book Mudras for Healing and Transformation, by Joseph and Lillian LePage. (These are the only two editions I could find.) I studied with the authors and they are wonderful teachers.

https://iytyogatherapy.com/product/mudras-healing-and-transformation

http://www.amazon.com/Mudras-Healing-Transformation-Joseph-Page-ebook/dp/B00I11P6VS

Research on energy healing can be found under the research projects links on

http://www.rosalynlbruyere.org

and on

http://www.centerforreikiresearch.org

There are also numerous scholarly articles published in

http://www.explorejournal.com

and

http://www.alternative-therapies.com

Other links: Barbara Brennan School

http://www.barbarabrennan.com

 

Hug

I have a friend whose favorite saying is “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” He’s a wonderfully eccentric and open man, the one who walked into the Little Sprout in his bathrobe on his way to water aerobics and struck up a conversation with me. (See post on Talking to Strangers, link below.) Some people have the gift of fearlessly being their true selves in public without any worry about what others will think.

I love it when people don’t try to be cool. Enthusiasm, eccentricity and honesty are all so much more appealing. I was walking with another professor today, about to cross a street through the middle of the campus, when I saw a student who’d been in my freshman seminar last semester running toward me from a block away with open arms and a glowing smile. Of course, I stopped. He hugged me and said he missed me. Wow. You don’t get that often when you teach a required first-year course. Faculty members don’t get a lot of hugs for teaching, period. It made my day. We talked about what he’s currently studying, hugged again, and I caught up with my colleague, who had been dealing with a disgruntled student who’s fighting a failing grade. We often hear more from the dissatisfied few than from the happy ones, so my day was set alight by this happily “uncool” young man. Now I feel like going around showing other people how much I appreciate them.

Anyone who takes the time to read anything I write—books, reviews, blog posts—thanks. Fellow bloggers that I follow—thanks. I appreciate you. Everyone who surprised someone with a hug today—thanks. Keep on hugging, reading and writing.

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/talk-to-strangers/

Reading over a Character’s Shoulder

Readers who picked up Snake Face when it came out in November may have had time to finish it by now. I thought it would be interesting to share this while the book is fresh in those readers’ minds.  In the scene where Joe Wayne Brazos is reading Yeats, the poem he’s reflecting on is The Mask, a dialog between a man and a woman.

“Put off that mask of burning gold

            With emerald eyes.”

            “O no my dear, you make so bold

            To find if hearts be wild and wise

            And yet not cold.”

 

            “I would but find what’s there to find,

            Love or deceit.”

            “It was the mask engaged you mind

            And after set your heart to beat,

            Not what’s behind.”

 

            “But lest you are my enemy,

            I must inquire.”

            “O no my dear, let all that be;

            What matter so is there is but fire

            In you, in me?”

It would break up the scene to have him say what he read, and I don’t use his point of view. If you’ve read the book I think you’ll understand how the poem fits. And if you haven’t, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this lesser-known Yeats work on its own.

The Fifth Soul

In Charles Hudson’s Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa, a fictionalized ethnography of the early Native people of the American South, the priest explains the four souls to the Spanish narrator. The Coosa, the ancestors of the Creeks, Seminoles and other Southeast tribes, believed that a human had four souls. The life soul, residing in the crown of the head, was the first to depart the body after death, and also the one that could linger as a ghost; the liver soul, which lingered for seven days after death and then dissipated; the heart soul, which lingered for a month and then went into the earth; and the bone soul, which stayed for year, and still connected with the feelings of loved ones. It wasn’t a ghost, but an awareness that could recognize when the living honored its memory. The people who had this belief were my ancestors on my mother’s side.

In modern world, I think we have a fifth soul. The word soul. It lives on even longer than the bone soul. It resides in papers, letters and books. A few years after my father’s passing, my sister and I finally sorted through a huge box of family pictures and papers he’d left us so we could donate them to the state archives. They dated from the civil war through to the twentieth century. The letters written in World War II were touching and charming, and the vacation pictures from the nineteen-twenties, in those modest swimming costumes, delightful.  Among those papers were two short stories I’d written. I’d forgotten about them. One had been published in a teen magazine when I was twelve. The other was one I’d written when  I was in high school.

I felt my father’s word soul with me, not only in his letters that were in the box, but also in the love of words that made him save other people’s letters and my stories.  That box was what made me get serious about writing. I had novels in progress and a head full of ideas and characters, but hadn’t thought about trying to get published. In retrospect, I realize it did it to honor my father’s word soul. He loved theater, especially Shakespeare, and he also loved a good mystery series. (His favorite was the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters.)

By writing books and short stories, blogging and reviewing, I’m honoring the word souls of other ancestors as well. My mother was an English professor. She taught mostly freshman English—my sympathies are strong now that I teach freshman health and intro-to-college seminars—but her pet project was a course on the development of mystery novel. She loved Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey novels. I grew up surrounded by mystery books. When we were too young to read them, my sister I used to pull them off the shelves and look at the scary covers. If I’d kept any of those old paperbacks, I think I’d meet my mother’s word soul in them.

Her father was also an English professor, and a poet. Through some bizarre coincidence, the college where I now teach has his papers. His word soul is in its museum, though he was a professor at another college altogether. I wonder if, like the bone soul, it knows when it’s being honored, and feels the nearness of a descendent.

The past, the present and the future walk into a bar …

… and the bartender says, “this could get tense.”

The only stories we normally tell in present tense are jokes. It’s hard to stay in the present, either in telling a story or in daily life. I’ve been thinking about this because of two books I just read. One is Jack Kornfield’s The Wise Heart, a Buddhist approach to psychology. The other is a short literary novel, Escaping Barcelona, which is written in the present tense. The pairing got me thinking about awareness of the present moment, narrative in the present tense, the nature of what’s in our minds, and whether or not the stuff which fills our heads makes for good fiction.

My freshman seminar students read The Wise Heart with me. One said the most valuable section of the book for him was the one on Delusion, especially the topic of inattention. In his words, “I know there are plenty of moments where I walk around lost in thought, not focusing on my surroundings, to the point that I’m basically sleepwalking.” Mind full, but not mindful.

In class, we did a thought-counting exercise from The Wise Heart. As we noticed our thoughts and began to find space between them, the messy and nonlinear nature of thinking showed up. Thought is seldom focused in the ongoing flow of experience. If consciousness is a stream, the water is full of floating debris: the repetitive cycle of “top ten thoughts” and stuck songs, digressions into past and future, sudden awareness of bodily processes, or commenting and judging and craving, interspersed with moments of clarity and attention.

In a May 2013 article in the New Yorker, Giles Harvey examined stream of conscious in literature from its early roots to the present. (I encourage anyone interested in the topic to read the whole article at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/minds-are-the-strangest-thing.) Here are few of his observations I found relevant to my recent readings.

How much thought can a novel contain before bloating, or bursting, occurs?

 Does the pleasure we get from seeing the mind at work, or the illusion of seeing the mind at work, cover the cost of the tedium involved in reading this? Art is meaningful because it is life-like without incurring the disadvantages of actually being life—that is to say, without being boring and formless. …

 Minds are weird, without a doubt. But not everything that goes on in them is worth our attention.

Author Henry Martin has described Escaping Barcelona as being written in first person, present tense, stream of consciousness. It is intimate and internal, but no more so than any literary novel written in the past tense. Most of the book doesn’t resemble the actual stream of consciousness. Martin usually shows inner processes fluidly embedded in a compelling story. Once in a while he stalls for a long rant or ramble from the nineteen-year-old narrator, Rudy—and like most mental chatter, Rudy’s inner material, while authentic, isn’t profound. Overall, however, Martin avoids tedium, and his book is neither boring nor formless.

To achieve this, he has to compromise the flow of the present tense, which at times compromises the flow of the story. For around two thirds of the book—not a continuous two thirds—the present tense is inconspicuous as events take place in dramatic sequences with the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings smoothly integrated into them and the clutter filtered out. Rudy encounters situations that provoke intense awareness—new places and people, relief after deprivation, and danger. Such moments could be told effectively in the present tense in poetry or a short story. In a novel, though, the story takes place over time, and the author has to skip over the dull parts and cover the gaps with summaries as he would in the past tense. Because of the present tense wording, I found myself jerked out of the plot by the awkwardness these transitions and summaries. Some of these shifts implied the perspective that what was being narrated in the present tense took place in the past. I want to be fully absorbed when I read, and this distanced me from the story.

In one of the last chapters of The Wise Heart Kornfield gives detailed descriptions of the inner experience of deep concentrated attention, a state of consciousness few of us will ever reach. “With concentration, no matter where we place our attention, it will stay focused.” He explores how this translates into concentration on bodily sensation, on a wide-angle perspective on our whole experience, or on a feeling like loving-kindness. After years of study, a practiced meditator might be able to stay in a state like this for an hour or two. Such a person’s stream of consciousness could stay in the present moment, and with that expanded wide-angle attention, could make a readable, continuous story. Except, a person with that level of wisdom wouldn’t make a good fictional protagonist. He or she wouldn’t make impulsive decisions such as Rudy makes that get the events in Escaping Barcelona started.

On p. 247 in The Wise Heart. Kornfield quotes a Jungian teacher and analyst. “There is in life a vulnerability so extreme, a suffering so unspeakable, that it goes beyond words. In the face of such suffering all we can do is stand in witness, so no one needs to bear it alone.” Escaping Barcelona portrays one young man’s suffering and vulnerability, and asks the reader to stand witness.

I cared about Rudy. He goes through hell without losing his humanity, struggling to maintain what he can of his integrity in a situation that challenges him just to survive. When he gets his big “aha” about himself, it’s a lesson worth learning, though it’s one the reader can see coming long before it hits him. I suspect most of our life lessons are like this. Other people can perceive that we need them, but we can’t until we suffer. The value of a story like this is the engagement of compassion. Escaping Barcelona has many strengths, but sometimes I found myself watching the author write instead of living the protagonist’s struggles. I reached the end impressed by Rudy’s resilience and wishing him well in the next stage of his journey, but I won’t be reading the sequels unless there should be special past tense editions.

I’ll read The Wise Heart again. It has made me stop more often to examine my inner noise and find the stillness beneath it, conscious in the present moment.