As some of you know, my partner and I decided to make a pretty big change in our lives this year.
We sold our SoCal home and bought a piece of land in northeast Texas.
We’ll be building a new house there, but in the meantime…we are basically homeless. As in, we are currently sleeping most nights in a tent.
Luxury accommodations with an abundance of wildflowers.
Why did we do this? It was a combination of factors. The cost of living in our new home will be considerably lower. We appreciate that the state government here is more supportive of small businesses (no chance that Texas will pass legislation like AB5, which threw a wrench into my ability to do my contract writing work).
Our new home will give us more privacy and closeness to nature :)
We have room for a big garden, chickens, some fruit trees, and potentially other projects tbd.
Our neighbors are mostly quiet but a little bit curious.
There were other reasons behind our decision, as well.
It’s been only a week since we closed the door to our Pod, finished packing the car, and handed over the key of our house to our realtor. And I’ll be honest, it hasn’t all been exactly fun. Primitive camping is a chore. We have to carry in water and ice. It’s more humid here than we’re used to, and we aren’t yet acclimated. Little things crop up that test our patience (one of our air mattresses suddenly decided to develop a leak! Really???).
We miss seeing our friends. We made such great friends in Cali — we love and miss you guys.
But — and don’t ask me how this happened — one of the things my sweetheart and I have in common is that we don’t ever want to stop challenging ourselves.
Stove is lit …
So in a way, the discomfort we’re experiencing is the point. The human brain is a pretty adaptable piece of bio-machinery, but to keep growing, it needs to be challenged. It needs new problems to solve. By plucking ourselves out of one environment and setting ourselves down in one that is completely different, we’re forcing ourselves to adapt.
And we trust the pay off. We are surrounded by incredible beauty, here, and the people in our new community are incredible. We have so many new places to explore.
It’s not for everybody, but we are excited about this new chapter in our lives.
And once our house is built, our doors are open — so please plan to come visit us. Who knows, maybe you’ll like it so much you’ll decide to put down roots here yourself some day :)
If ever there was a book that the world needs right now, this is it
Let me start by saying that I’m not fully on board with the title of this book: Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess(subtitle, 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking), by Dr. Caroline Leaf.
The title suggests that the book is only for people who are struggling. That, IMO, is a mistake.
Back up a couple steps to how I learned about the book. It was a Dave Asprey podcast. Leaf was a guest, and during the interview she mentioned that she’s helped people with traumatic brain injury — people who other medical professionals had written off as permanently disabled — to not only recover from their injuries, but excel (in areas like academics, where highly functioning brain power is a prerequisite).
I thought, whoa. If her techniques are that powerful, imagine what people who aren’t recovering from physical injury could accomplish.
So I didn’t buy this book to deal with anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. I mean, I’m not perfect and my life doesn’t always run smoothly, but I’ve been around for a while, I’ve done the work, I’ve cultivated coping skills that do the job for me.
In fact, that is kind of the point. I’m not trying to fix huge problems. I’m looking for ways to set and reach stretch goals.
What, exactly, can I accomplish in whatever time I have left on this planet? What seeming limits can I break?
You can grow brain cells — intentionally
What grabbed my attention in the Asprey interview is that Leaf (a neuroscientist and speech pathologist) was an early believer in neuroplasticity. “Early” as in back in the 1980s.
If you’re old enough, you probably know that there was a time when Science told us that the adult brain could not grow new cells. Once we hit a certain age (mid twenties, I guess, or maybe they thought it was late teens) we would supposedly hit our peak number of brain cells. From there, it was all downhill. Over time, our brain cells would start to die off, and since they could never be replaced, we’d lose cognitive function.
We were fated by nature, the Experts intoned, to a sad, lifelong slide toward mental and physical enfeeblement.
Leaf was a practicing neuroscientist during this period. She disagreed with the consensus.
She was right. She proved she was right in her practice.
Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess explains, in detail, the techniques Leaf teaches to help people stimulate their brains to grow new cells and form new neural connections.
How cool is that?
Now let me also say that, if you suffer from anxiety, stress, or similar issues (and if you do, you are far from alone) just go buy the book. (That’s an Amazon affiliate link but you can order it from any bookstore.)
But there is also a lot of material in the book people simply looking to enrich their personal development by integrating the principles of neuroplasticity.
There is some great lay material, for example, on neuroplasticity itself — how it works, what stimulates it, and how it can be detected via changes in brain waves, brain activity, and neurotransmitter levels.
First mind, then brain
There is some terrific insight into the relationship between the mind and the brain. The brain, Leaf explains, arises from the mind — not in any magical sense, but because our thoughts, feelings, and choices literally stimulate neurons to either emerge, grow, and branch or to prune, fade, and disappear.
And the book details the steps that Leaf has developed to help people use neuroplasticity to address a variety of challenges, including: replacing unwanted habits with desirable ones; something she calls “brain building,” which relates to what I referenced earlier about enhancing one’s cognitive abilities; and improving relationships and communications skills.
Writing, it turns out, plays a huge part in her approach. Leaf’s protocol is based on bringing existing thoughts, feelings, and choices into full conscious awareness, and then “re-conceptualizing” those thoughts/feelings/choices as a way to re-shape or replace associated neurons. Writing is useful during each step of the process by encouraging us to unlock suppressed thoughts, consider them, and find new ways to contextualize them. Interestingly, she states that “writing can even improve immune system function,” citing research she’s conducted that showed patients’ cortisol and homocysteine levels drop when they perform her Reflect step, which involves writing.
It makes me wonder what impact journaling has had on my life. I’ve kept a journal since I was a teenager, and while I instinctively turn to it during periods when I feel confused or stressed, or need to make some sort of major life decision. On the other hand, I’ve also thought of journaling as something of a writerly indulgence — a variety of navel-gazing. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so self-deprecating? Perhaps my lifelong habit of journaling has had a major benefit to my overall well-being …?
One thing is for sure: I’ll be applying Leaf’s program to some of my life goals, and as part of that, I’ll be more deliberate in how I use my journal.
Bottom line? Great book. Highly recommend to anyone who is curious about tackling life’s challenges, whether that means healing from trauma or pushing personal limits.
* * * * *
Pssst. You know who really needs to clean up her mental mess?
I’m getting close, with my work on Scratch, to a kind of writing that is very close to dreaming.
Full disclosure: I have crazy-good dream recall, and always have. I remember dreams I had when I was five, six years old. I remember dreams I had when I was a kid that talked to me, helped me understand things about myself, about why I was in conflict with people around me.
In my teens and twenties, I started writing down my dreams, and from time to time I do it consistently–every night or every other night.
I often remember multiple dreams. I remember them in great detail. I sometimes skip writing out my dreams because it’s not unusual for the account of a single dream to run two or three pages, and before I know it I’ve exhausted the first two or three hours of my day recording dreams.
I type out my dreams, any more, because that’s faster than writing them by hand. And I keep them in binders. Scary.
And then there’s interpreting them. Also time-consuming. And quite honestly, it’s taken a lifetime to get even marginally decent at that. I’ve come to realize that dreams are a language. They are a language that use “images” but not, needless to say, images of the eyeball. James Hillman, in Dream and the Underworld, wrote about this. “Psychic images are not necessarily pictures and may not be like sense images at all. Rather they are images as metaphors.” They not a function of the “front of the eyeballs” but “the flickering patterns within that physical reality, and within the eyes themselves.”
Dreams draw on “pictures” that we store while we’re awake; these pictures are analogous to the letters of a written language. I have a stored “picture” in my mind of a blueberry. Many pictures, in fact, of many thousands of blueberries, sine I’ve encountered blueberries countless times in my life: fresh, frozen, in pancakes, on the bush, in my hand, in the store. And so my dream takes a blueberry, but then adds to it. The blueberry in my dream is enormous, the size of a softball. It’s in my parents’ kitchen, in a bowl. It has a soft spot — it it overripe. It belongs to someone else, not me. She is pleased by it. I seem to have tasted it, eaten it, but it’s still there — the tasting and eating was, within the dream, a thought rather than an action.
My dream has taken a blueberry, and added to it. A blend of contextual and fantastical elements. The blueberry is literally distorted, and in the distortion and the context it is transformed from a thing-in-itself to an element of thought-stuff. And that element is so loaded with meaning that it becomes meaning itself.
It’s backwards, to try to figure out what a dream means. Dreams are meaning. They are nothing but meaning.
The difficulty is that we are like dogs listening to English. We’re aware, dimly, that there is some reason this primate that feeds us is making odd noises with its mouth. We grasp, at times, that some of the noises correspond to actions. “Want your dinner?” corresponds, generally, to food being dumped into our dish.
But there’s so much more, there. And we know it. We can’t understand it, but we know it. (My dog stares at me. Stands and stares at me, as I talk to her in my long babbling incomprehensible sentences. She can’t understand me. She’d like to — maybe — but she can’t. The old Far Side cartoon. blah blah blah GINGER blah blahblah.)
So it takes work, to interpret a dream. To stay with it, long enough, to consider every image and every nuance of every image, and then how the images fit together — because they do. The images are words and the words, together, become sentences. Dreams are replete with “if this, then that.” “First this, then that.” Replete.
I’ve been recording my dreams for years. And at first, I did it because I felt there was some glamour to it. It was exciting to find, in dreams, hints of future events (and sometimes, more than hints. I dreamed my father was going to die weeks before he became sick). It was exciting to become lucid in dreams, to wake up and find myself in a fantastical, shimmering world of only thought, only ideas, to know I was at the same time both sleeping and awake.
But over time, I felt sometimes weary of it all. So many dreams were a re-telling of what I know, anyway. This relationship is problematic. This other relationship is a comfort to me. I’m afraid of this happening. I am seeking God. I wish we didn’t have to die. I’d rather die than not find God.
So why bother? Why record dreams? Why, after recording them, go through the tedious exercise of “interpreting” them, trying to figure out what they are saying?
But then recently, it struck me that the value in this exercise is the same as learning another spoken language. Have you ever tried to learn another spoken language? Have you ever gotten to the point in your work where you’re no longer “translating” as you try to read or interpret it? When the other language is suddenly on its own track in your head, its native vocabulary and syntax suddenly suddenly have meaning in your head, without having to first be corresponded to your native language?
I noticed, one day, that this was starting to happen to me as I “interpreted” my dreams. Suddenly, I was no longer looking at a dream image with its distortion and context and saying to myself, “okay, this means this, and this means that.” Suddenly, a string of images — distortion and context and all — were “speaking to me” directly. I didn’t need to mediate them through English, through the metaphor of Waking Reality language. I knew what the dream was saying without that intermediary step.
And I thought, okay. That’s why I’ve been doing this, all these years. To get to this point. To get here. To where the gap between me and my dreaming-self begins to dissolve, to merge.
I read a novel last year. Well, I should say, I finished it last year. I started it in 2019.A Glastonbury Romance, by John Cowper Powys. I took my time, reading it, because from the first page I knew it would be, for me as a writer, a momentous book. One of those books that when you start to read, you think, “oh wow. What the heck is this guy trying to pull off, here?” And so as you read you’re enjoying it as a novel, but there’s always another part of you thinking about that question. What the heck is Powys trying to pull off, here?
There are probably a lot of ways to answer that question, but I’ll tell you one answer: he was trying to dream. The novel is a dream.
I’m working on Scratch, now, as I’ve mentioned, and it’s a different kind of project than my Marion Flarey books.
It’s a dream.
For who ever began a dream? People always find themselves immersed in the the middle of some dream or other. The essence of sleep does not lie in dreaming; it lies in a certain dying to the surface life and sinking down into the life under the surface, where the other life — healing and refreshing — exists like an immortal tide of fresh water flowing beneath the salt water of a turbid sea. It is sufficient to remember the lovely and mysterious feeling of falling asleep compared with the crude, raw, iron spikes of the unpleasant things that happen in dreams to realize the difference. Between the process of going to sleep and the process of dreaming exists a great gulf. They seem to belong to different categories of being.
John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
And because Scratch a dream, I have to let go as I write.
And that’s a horrible feeling. It’s scary, viscerally scary.
I’m not talking about the way writers use fiction to create fantasies about scary things. It’s no secret that stories work when they induce and then relieve anxieties. If a novel is any good, it’s because something is going wrong. A protagonist is in trouble, therefore the writer is, by necessity, plumbing the depths of human experience to explore “things that go wrong,” whether that takes the form of a dangerous international spy ring, an evil monster, a lost love, a serial killer on the loose, a natural disaster. Good writers face our fears and bring them to life on the page.
I’m talking about something different: the sensation I feel in my body when I write fiction. It’s a feeling that I have to let go; that what is happening as I write is not me, controlling things. It’s a not-me, coming through.
The characters in Scratch aren’t “characters,” they are dream-things. Dream-things crawling across a dream-scape.
I’ll be honest. I avoid writing, more than I care to admit, because I don’t like the way it feels. It’s a loss of control. Yes, there are periods when I’ve let go that I feel a kind of ecstasy, as well, which I suppose is the flip side of giving up control.
But ugh. The feeling of writing.
Do you know what I mean? Have you felt it, yourself?
This is a peculiar book, in some ways. I loved it. But I am weird.
I picked it up because I’ve turned back to a novel I’m writing (Scratch) that is a retelling of Goethe’s Faust.*
And as I’ve chipped away at Scratch over the past several years, I’ve read the Goethe a couple times, of course, and Marlowe, and I’ve poked around the Interwebs. And then I found this book by Ruickbie, and bought it, and stuck it on my shelf (my real shelf, not my Goodreads shelf, there’s only so many hours in the day).
And then a month or so ago I started to read it. And I loved every page.
Start with a historical figure, Doctor Faustus, who is with us, today, almost entirely as a myth. He existed. He was a flesh and blood man. But there is scarcely any record of the historical Faust. There are scattered mentions in letters and such, but they are typically little more than a sentence or two. There are published accounts of Faust’s life and deeds, but they appeared decades or centuries after his death; they were typically passed off as authentic, but upon close examination can be confidently dismissed as fabrications. We aren’t even sure what the guy’s real name was.
Enter Ruickbie, who is a historian. And he sets out to write a historical biography of this historical figure, Doctor Faustus. He digs into the correspondence of Faust contemporaries, he digs into legal documents. And he chases down a bunch of “local traditions” that Faust was involved in such-and-such shenanigans in such-and-such a town or inn or house, but when he looks into them, almost all of them appear to have no basis in historical fact.
So now what?
Ruickbie does something that I think is pretty cool: he builds a historical account around what is often an educated guess about where Faust was, what he was up to, and how his contemporaries were reacting (or in some cases would have reacted) to him.
So you don’t really get Faust, with this book (I told you it is peculiar!). What you get is tantalizing wisps of Faust — and then, what you really get is Faust’s milieu. And it’s very granular and vivid, because Ruickbie knows his stuff and has put in the time to build it out in a very granular but vivid way.
And it was a crazy time, the late 1400s, early 1500s.
And yes, I love history, but I haven’t been exposed to a ton of European history from that time period, so for me it was a delight. I didn’t know, before I read this book, about the Peasant’s War (spoiler: the peasants lost). I didn’t know that in 1524 there was a conjunction of seven planets in Pisces (my sign!) and the astrologers of the time predicted massive floods (water sign!) and people panicked. Widespread panic. Half of the population of London at the time fled the city, convinced that if they didn’t the Thames was going to rise up and drown them. I didn’t know that in 1532, Anabaptists took over the fortified German town, Munster, and were besieged and then Munster fell and the Anabaptist prophets were captured and tortured, yick.
I love history. I love how everything is different and yet everything is the same. It makes my head spin — in a good way, like when you look up at the stars and realize how big space really is.
Ruickbie is a good writer. It’s hard to write history because history is about people and personalities; to write history, you have to introduce the reader to piles of strangers; if you don’t make them come alive, your reader won’t be able to keep track of them, and the history dissolves into a mash of meaningless and forgettable faces.
L’ombre de Marguerite apparaissant Faust (Marguerite’s shadow appearing to Faust), Faust, Lithograph print made by Eugne Delacroix, printed by F Villain, 1827
But Ruickbie pulls it off. I suppose it is because, in the end, he has a point of view about everything that was going on, during Faust’s life–about Faust, his contemporaries, the religious and political leaders who were alive at the time. So Ruickbie isn’t reciting dates and names. He’s pulling the covers back, revealing what all those people were probably like, what probably motivated them to do the things they did. A big example, and pivotal to Ruickbies point of view: did the historical Doctor Faustus really make a deal with the Devil? Or was that a slanderous fiction promulgated by Faust’s contemporaries who, it turns out, were probably competing amongst themselves for lucrative gigs doing astrology and such for kings and princelings?
And if it was a slanderous fiction, where does that leave us? For Ruickbie, the real story is about the religious tensions of the day. Faust lived at a time when the Renaissance was giving way to the Reformation. Faust, like every other person alive at the time, was caught in the current of history. As are we, today.
Highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys history.
*Sidebar: as I’ve mentioned that’s not to say I have the chops to pull off a retelling of Goethe’s Faust. I’m sure I am not up to it. But it so happens that after this awful year, losing both parents blah blah blah I needed to take a break from the lighter romancy stuff I usually write and do something that, to me at least, passes for Art. So I set aside the Marion Flarey project for now and went back to Scratch for a bit.
I came across this tweet around the time Kirn (substack here) posted it, and it continues to haunt me.
I don’t know how many physical books I have collected. Five or six hundred, perhaps. It seems, to me, to be “not a lot,” so it shocked me just now when I quickly estimated the count.
If they were shelved compactly in one place, they might cover one wall or so of a smallish room. And yet. They take up space and gather dust. And every time I move (I have moved, on average, every 3.5 years since I graduated college — does it ever end, this moving?) they are such a troublesome thing to pack and unpack and sort and re-shelve.
So when my sweet father, who read books constantly, gave me a Kindle (I’d begged him not to, but he loved his so much, and so much liked to share that kind of thing with his family) I thought, okay, now I’ll be able to read on without piling up more and more physical books. This is good, I thought. “I’m comfortable that certain experiences are supposed to be ephemeral,” I blogged. “I’m okay with some books as experiences rather than things.”
But then came the stories about Amazon erasing peoples’ books from their Kindles (some sort of issue with copyright or publisher disputes, the story would go) and I became a bit uneasy.
When you buy a “book” for an e-reader, you don’t really own the book, as it turns out. You have paid for permission to read something that belongs to someone else. And “they” can take back that permission any time they please. (And my father’s Kindle? The books on my father’s Kindle? I took photos of the screen — screens, pages of them — so that I would know what books he “owned.” They are gone, now that he’s passed and no longer “pays” for his “account.” There’s your “ephemeral.”)
I have also had a longtime habit of picking up used books that struck me as unusual, or that I learned would be going out of print. I bought an old edition of The Joy of Cooking when I learned that new editions have dropped the recipes for cooking game. I read at some point years ago that Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations was being revised — modernized — so I hunted down a second-hand copy (the centennial edition published in 1955). (I adore that book. It may be my take-on-a-desert-island-game book.)
I’m old enough to have lived through the transition as second-hand booksellers began selling online. It drove up the price of old books — that copy of Lyrics of a Lowly Life by Paul Laurence Dunbar that I picked up for 50 cents in a junk store in my home town in the early ’80s would be displayed in a locked case, today, and likely priced at $100 or more. (Of course you can buy reprints of it for pennies — have you ever bought a book, thinking it was second-hand, only to find out it was a cheaply made reproduction? The quality so poor it was basically unreadable? I have. I will not, ever again, if I can help it.)
And I remember as well reading — also years ago — that decorators were buying up antique hardcover books — the ones with ornately decorated covers and gilt-edges pages — and using them as, well, decorations. In some cases they were gutting the books and using just the covers. Because what mattered wasn’t the words inside but the effect walls of books would convey, the image they’d convey of erudition.
It was around this time that I became weary of being outraged. Is that cynicism?
Not to say that I’m no longer outraged, ever. I am, believe me.
But — and this is more pronounced now than ever, since I lost both of my parents (within a span of less than a year), my birth family now basically as gutted as a home decorator’s empty books, not to mention these godawful exhausting never-ending lockdowns — I am, more and more, handling my outrage by becoming quiet, by turning inward. I am thinking — all the time, basically — about soul, and about words, and about preservation. Not preservation of myself but of what really matters — what will always matter.
Thinking about whether the outward things I preserve, the words I preserve, could ever help someone else, one day, grope a bit closer to some faint Light.
That I shouldn’t gamble with such a thing.
It’s been several years, now, since I began to regard my Kindle as a device, solely, for what I consider to be throwaway books — I know that sounds pejorative but what I mean is books I would under any circumstances read only once and then pass along (and the Kindle is also very good for reading samples for free).
I’ve started to buy up physical copies of the books on my Kindle that I do not consider one-time reads.
Which leads, of course, into the next phase of my weird relationship with Amazon. (Seems it’s always about Amazon, isn’t it?) Now with their new policies, their decision to start taking books off their platform — once again reminding me as it does all writers of our uneasy truce with That Company: I am utterly dependent on Amazon if I’m ever to sell my novels in any numbers whatever; “my” readers are not really “mine,” they are Amazon’s “customers,” no matter how ridiculous and unfair that may be (and before you defend them — because yes, I know they do me a service by building their platform and attracting traffic and letting me sell my books there — when I have, in the past, bought other things from them, cosmetics or whatever, I have gotten emails from the seller, I have gotten direct mail, snail male from the seller. How can other vendors “own” customers that came to them via Amazon but writers cannot? There is no happy answer to this, I suppose. I suppose these other sellers have done their own fulfillment. I suppose there are so many writers that we are, to Amazon, something of an unwashed hoard, with a handful of exceptions more trouble than we’re worth.)
In any event, I’ve been going to Alibris instead of Amazon more and more. Telling myself maybe that helps, in some small way, other booksellers (“hello?” “echo echo echo…”). And I am picking up more and more second-hand copies of old books. Despite the fact that my shelves are full and we’ll likely be moving again sometime in the not-too-distant future and once again I’ll be packing books in boxes…
And I am increasingly aware of how I feel, when I sit near my shelves of books, thinking or journaling or writing, and I need to look something up and I scan my titles and find a book and page through it. Like right now, for example. Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village (I own the Oxford University Press 1989 edition):
All media are a reconstruction, a model of some biologic capability speeded up beyond the human ability to perform: the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, and electronic circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system…
My books — I feel this as I sit near them, scan their titles — are also an extension of my mind, of my memory. I very often go back to books I read decades ago (I haven’t opened the McLuhan in probably 20 years) with that same felt sense that arises when we go back into our mind’s memory banks to pull something out that we once experienced and would like to look at it again and draw upon, again, because it will add some sort of richness or meaning to what is happening now, today.
So if I look for a title and can’t find it right away (I don’t have enough space on my shelves; about half of my books are stacked behind the other half; my books hide on me, sometimes) I become anxious, even, at times, agitated. It’s like I’ve lost a bit of what should be there, should be recallable. (I was looking the other day, for my copy of The Great Gatsby and can’t find it and it still bothers me…did I lend it to someone? Should I buy another copy? Would I be able to find the same edition I owned?)
Ephemeral, indeed.
Sigh.
Buy physical books now. Great ones, good ones, bad ones, ones you happen to like. Store them safely as you would treasures. They are. Some will become unavailable soon, I suspect, for reasons that may not be stated candidly. If I’m wrong, what have you lost?
Books as an extension of mind — an extension of our thoughts and memories. Individually and collectively.
“We, the library.”
What happens to our books, if we, their contemporary guardians, decide to begin culling them?
And if we cull them, what injury are we committing that we cannot feel (the brain can’t feel pain, right?) but that will one day exact an awful price — one day we’ll wake up and sense a gaping hole where, we know, some memory ought to be?
I am buying more books, now, than I’ve bought since I was in college. Unapologetically. Knowing that it means I have more “stuff” that I will need to cart around, that someone will one day have to dispose us when I am dead.
So I learned about Physics of the Stoics via a wikipedia footnote and hunted down a copy because the protagonist of one of the novels I’m writing (Scratch) is a Stoic, in the formal sense.
And as I read about Stoicism (sticking to translations of ancient texts, since my protag isn’t a herd guy; he consults the originals, not the burgeoning pile of Stoic pop-lit) I became curious about what the ancient Greek stoics meant when they talked about “nature.”
Don’t ever forget these things: The nature of the world. My nature. How I relate to the world. What proportion of it I make up. That you are a part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.
What, I wondered, would Aurelius have meant when he thought about “nature”?
Physics of the Stoics helped me get a bit closer to imagining an answer (whether it’s the right answer or not, who knows. hahahaha.)
For the ancient Stoics, reality was permeated by pneuma, which they in some cases defined (as translated) as a substance consisting of “air” and “fire.”
What I try to do as I consider these concepts, however, is to achieve a kind of mental elasticity.
As a modern human, I was taught that pre-modern scientific models were nonsense. The world is made of whirling electrons, not a mix of air, fire, water, and earth.
But perhaps that dismissal is a bit too pat and a bit too arrogant.
Full disclosure: Per a review of Bernardo Kastrup’s Meaning in Absurdity that I recently posted on Goodreads, I’m a philosophical idealist. Ergo I believe that reality is actually consciousness, not matter.
Therefore, I believe that the models we use to examine reality and explain it phenomenologically are just that: models. Insofar as they seem real, it’s because we are interacting with reality and our interaction collapses possibility into the seemingly-objective.
So in considering how the ancient Greeks understood the world, perhaps their model was as valid as anything we’ve dreamed up.
I mean “valid” quite literally. In “Meaning,” Kastrup discusses the work of Thomas Kuhn, a 20th century philosopher of science, who proposed that objective data “cannot be gathered and interpreted outside the context of a paradigm,” defined by Kastrup as the “basic assumptions, values, and beliefs held by scientists about how nature is put together.” Continues Kastrup:
…we cannot know for certain that the laws of physics are the same throughout space and across time…paradigms change over time, and along with them what science considers to be true or reasonable.
Kastrup is careful to add a strong caveat that this is not an argument for relativism. But for the purposes of my Ancient Stoics thought experiment, insofar as they developed a model that made complete sense and actually explained the world, absolutely it was “valid.”
So, to play along: pretend you were never taught anything about modern physics, but understood the world strictly on the basis of your own senses and mind.
Air is, essentially, nothingness: it’s undetectable by our senses. Yes, we can detect its movement but not air per se.
Warm air is nothingness with a quality associated with life (warmth) (movement is another quality that is associated with life, and fire is both warm and in constant motion).
So why not propose a model of reality where everything is permeated by “air” (a nothingness that is also a something); and where “nothingness” merges with other qualities to generate phenomena such as objects and living beings?
In addition to qualities like warmth and movement, other subjective qualities such as rationality are also self-evidently aspects of that nothingness; after all, they have to arise from something, right?
That is pneuma. It is cohesive; it is everywhere; it must be what holds everything together. It is the “field” from which everything else arises. It’s the logos of the Gospel of John: there from the beginning, that through which all things are made: the light of man, the Christ consciousness.
To be clear, I’m not rejecting modern physics. That would be stupid; it’s very useful and I am eternally grateful to have been born today instead of 2500 years ago. But as a way of penetrating the nature of reality by seeing it through fresh eyes? This book was a lot of fun :)
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Not in the sense of genre romance, but Romance in the sense of an affirmation of the centrality of the heart in human experience. Of the perils of our alienation from nature, and because Romance gives us a break from the sheer awfulness of life (Byron: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, Tis that I may not weep.”)
My question is: can novels help people learn better (learn again?) how to think?
Yes, reading novels is a form of escapism.
But can they draw people into stories and then use those stories to train people, not what to think (blech) but how?
Those of you who know me personally know that this past year has been incredibly difficult. Yeah, I know I’m not alone. COVID etc. But in addition to the social upheaval, my personal life was turned upside down as well. First, my dad passed in April. And now my mom is gone, too. January 9.
She’s got her prince. If she can figure out how to keep him…
I am not even sure how to process it, to be honest. Looking forward to when this is all something that happened instead of something that is still happening.
In the meantime, I have been getting some writing done, although work has been a bit slower than I would have liked.
Now the second book in the series, Fo Fum Flarey, is available.
Here’s the description of Fo Fum Flarey:
A tale about love, life choices — and how trusting the wisdom of old stories is sometimes the best choice of all.
Marion Flarey has finally found him. Fletcher Beal. Her Prince. And when you find your rich, handsome Prince, everything is settled, right? The fairy tales say so! You live happily ever after. No more questions, no more stress. But as much as Marion loves those wise old tales, there’s a limit to their magic. How is she supposed to make her place in her new prince’s world — especially when Fletcher is always busy, flying around the country, exploring new domains and adding conquests to his kingdom? The stories don’t say. To make matters worse, her family is gripped by stories of their own — and Marion can’t figure out what’s going on. Her mother is distracted and unhappy. What secrets is she hiding? And then Marion’s brother, Ace, shows up in town — and Marion learns why he left. He’s a thief. He stole from their family. Worse yet? He stole from Marion’s prince. Can Marion unravel her family’s secrets? Can she rescue her brother? Can she put her broken family back together again? And should she even try? Or will her family’s crazy problems sabotage Marion’s life, robbing her of the one thing she wants most: a happy future with her sweet, rich, sexy prince?
As some of you know, one of the novels I’ve been working on for some time, now, is a retelling of Goethe’s Faust.
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt.
The translation I purchased when I first got the idea for the novel is the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Walter Arndt. (And if you would like a copy, shoot me a note, because I own two and would gladly give one away.) (Why do I own two, you ask? Because last time I moved, I couldn’t put my hands on my copy and bought another, and of course precisely one nanosecond after copy #2 arrived in the mail, I spotted copy #1 on my shelf, because nothing on this planet makes sense. But I digress.)
With regard to my novel, first let’s get one thing out of the way. I am in no way up to the task of retelling Goethe’s Faust. It’s ridiculous for me to even type the words. I should be ashamed of myself for even thinking the words.
But nothing on this planet makes sense. So: onward.
As I planned the novel — the title is Scratch, in case you’re wondering — I read and re-read my edition of Faust.
Have you ever read it? The whole thing?
It is … not an easy piece of literature.
I knew Act 1 from college. Somewhere, along the line, some professor assigned it and I read it.
You probably know the storyline as well. The devil (Mephistopheles) makes a bet with God that he can trick Faust into surrendering his soul. He then appears to Faust and strikes a deal with him: if he can deliver a certain type of experience to Faust, he can have Faust’s soul.
The experience Mephisto promises is one of total fulfillment. He’ll set things up so that Faust finds something happening to him so marvelous and engaging that he never wants it to end. And if Mephisto can do that, the devil wins his bet.
Faust agrees to the terms.
Mephisto spends the rest of Act 1 trundling out the usual experiences. He makes Faust young again, and rich. Faust falls in love with Gretchen, a sweet young virgin, and Mephisto arranges for them to become lovers, thinking that will be Faust’s ultimate experience. It doesn’t work. Sex with Gretchen is nice but doesn’t quell Faust’s hunger to keep striving for Something Else, Something More. Gretchen’s life, however, is utterly ruined. She becomes pregnant and, in her shame at being an unwed mother, kills her child and is sentenced to death herself. She dies in prison before the execution is performed.
This portion of the play is fairly easy to follow. Pact with the devil, ruined woman, isn’t it awful that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was once considered to be so sinful that it would drive women to commit atrocities.
Marguerite’s shadow appearing to Faust, Lithograph print, Eugene Delacroix
The next four Acts, on the other hand, are complex and often surreal. They are laden with allegorical characters and events that in some cases are comments on contemporaneous European and German politics, on the tension between Romanticism and Classicism, on fiscal policy, on urbanization. The settings are at times “reality” but at times fantastical places — imaginary realms.
And then comes the final bit, where Faust dies. He’s in the process, during this last act, of reclaiming land from the sea and using it to build out a planned community — an urban utopia. He is also struck blind by Care, an event that is associated in the drama with Faust’s cold-hearted theft of land from an elderly couple (Faust wants the land as part of his urban development project; he asks Mephisto to get it for him; Mephisto murders the couple).
Because he’s blind, Faust doesn’t realize that the digging he hears at the end of the play isn’t workers, laboring at his urbanization project. It is demons, digging Faust’s grave.
Faust proclaims he’s so pleased with the idea that people will benefit forever from his reclamation project and the community he’s designing, that he would gladly tarry in that moment forever. He falls over and dies.
Bingo. The devil wins, right?
Not so fast. Angels intervene, distract Mephistopheles, crowd him away from Faust’s body, take possession of Faust’s soul, and whisk him away to heaven.
And ever since, people have been arguing about those last few plot twists. What, exactly, was Goethe trying to say?
On the face of it, it seems like Mephisto won the bet, and then heaven essentially cheated. Pulled a fast one. He certainly believed he was cheated. “Where do I sue now as complainer? … This thing was wretchedly mishandled.”
Or maybe not. Maybe the devil didn’t win the bet. Mephisto himself says, right after Faust dies:
So it is over! How to read this clause?
All over is as good as never was,
And yet it whirls about as if it were.
The Eternal-Empty is what I prefer.
If all, in the end, is nothing, then Faust’s proclamation that he would tarry forever in the feeling of building his new community is also “nothing.” So did Mephisto, in making this statement, essentially void his own bet?
Another observation. Blind Faust may have thought he was experiencing the building of his community. But he was not. He was experiencing the digging of his own grave.
It was a trick. So was the bet won not fairly but by cheating? And did that negate it?
The Prince of Lies cannot resist lying. It is his nature. Did he undo his own success by founding it on a lie?
Another possibility is something along the lines of theological determinism. Heaven and its beings are outside of time and space and are not, therefore, subject to the same laws as we humans are; outcomes of our actions are pre-determined. Any wager made on Earthy may seem valid to us, but its terms can’t necessarily be applied in heaven, because in heaven, redemption and damnation are decided on completely different terms. Whether we are to be redeemed or not has already been decided, and can’t be changed just because we cut a bad deal with the devil while we’re incarnate.
Redemption, from our perspective, is therefore inexplicable, irrational, and probably undeserved. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Faust is a metaphysical work. Its roots are in Medieval morality plays, which are as straightforward as a child’s story. The devil is evil. To do evil is to enter into a pact with the devil, and the price you will pay is your eternal soul.
But in Goethe’s world, things aren’t so straightforward. His Faust is no saint, but is beloved by God for all his shortcomings (“Though now he serves me but in clouded ways,” God says in the play’s prologue, “Soon I shall guide him so his spirit clears … Man ever errs the while he strives.”)
Perhaps, in Goethe’s drama, the omniscient God is unworried about his wager with the devil because He knows from the beginning that Mephisto will fail, partly because of the devil’s own nature, but perhaps also because of the nature of redemption itself.
And so, Faust was mistaken when he thought that what he heard, in his last day on Earth, was loyal laborers, busily working on his project. “Man ever errs the while he strives.” Add to that intercession — Gretchen, in heaven, prays for Faust — and you have everything you need to overrule Mephisto’s trickery. As the angels say while they’re carrying Faust’s immortal essence up to the highest heavens:
