AMAZING MENTAL GYMNASTICS, KEN KESEY

Facebook informed me last night that everyone was waiting with bated breath for my next entry. Also, nowadays, Facebook keeps inviting me to boost my blog entries with dollars. I have refrained from that thus far. Is boosting worth anything? I'm not going to pretend I don't want people waiting for my sci fi novel to come out.

My last entry, if you recall, was about all the balls one must keep in the air—the memory required—to write a novel, specially a detective novel with many mental mazes included within its pages. Sometimes the thing to be recalled is quite simple. Just this morning, my character, Charley Manning, was recalling his last meeting on the sidewalk before his apartment building with Misty Frampton. Then I had to recall whether or not I'd removed that meeting for some other important reason. At last, not able to find the meeting, I kept in his thought about last seeing Misty [for romantic reasons], but I removed the reference to any specific place. That's a simple example how things must be juggled. An example of why Ken Kesey quit writing.

PS: I keep extensive plot notes, but, then I make changes and don't update the notes. The notes become as much of a distraction as the novel itself.

THE ROOTS OF THE SILENT BOOMER'S "THE PORN WRITER"

The following paragraphs remain to this day as relevant to me as they did when I first read them decades ago. All my discoveries came from understanding our painful human experiences in those terms. I can't remember from which of many books I took it. I see the influence of Alice Miller in it, but I'm certain it's not her writing. These paragraphs are at the root of my novel, The Porn Writer. 

"Those who think they can will themselves back to health with the trick of forgetting only trick themselves. The trick of forgetting is the denial which kills them. We think we’ve come to terms with our pasts when we learn not to feel the feelings associated with our memories. Our feelings, specially if they’re rooted in severe childhood abuse, seem overpowering and too huge to face. So we refuse to feel them and pretend they don’t affect us.

"But hidden memories take a secret toll on us because we hide them under addictions. We control them by not acknowledging their powerfulness in our lives. We control them by getting drunk or getting laid or getting high or getting power in high places, or by working seven days a week or by losing ourselves in another person, by watching seven hours of TV a day. On and on. Control is addiction.

"Then we lie to ourselves and to others, thinking we’ve put our memories behind us because we are not able to feel them anymore, except in little flashes. We say to ourselves and we tell others, ‘A person’s got to get on with their life. You can’t dwell in the past forever.’ Yet everything we do, everything we speak, everything we are is influenced by the secret we try to keep.

"Of course we’re never aware that our whole present is but a reflection of our past. We think we’ve neatly escaped our memories, but it’s plain as day they haven’t gone away once you make the breakthrough from addiction to acceptance.

"The secret is, was always, a big billboard on the top of our heads which blinks the truth to everyone around us while only we are unaware of it. It’s like that card game in which each player places a playing card, face outward, to his forehead so that everyone but himself can see the card, then tries to evaluate the strength of his card by the cards he sees that the others are holding to their foreheads. We don’t know what card we’re showing, but to the others, it’s obvious.

"However, there is better though more uncomfortable way. We can choose to dwell from time to time in the past, to face the awful truths, to grieve our losses and accept them and, specially, to accept and embrace the wounded person inside us who needs our love and acceptance rather than our denial. We have a choice to be courageous and admit our pain or to spend the rest of our lives running from the truth in every deed we do and every thought we think.

"Sadly, if we deny the painful truths of our pasts, we deny ourselves and team up with the abusers of this world. We become self-abusers and, finally, abusers of others too. Abusive people are often the ones who most want us all “to quit crying and get on with our lives!” Then he or she can go on about their business of abuse without interruption.

"In the end, you have to lose control to get control. Eventually, you must give up and surrender to the pain. This surrender is no easy task. Re-feeling the pain, you become, for a time, helpless as the child you once were, the child who is being traumatized. All your defenses come down, and you are as vulnerable and naked as you were at the time when the wounds were inflicted on you. It’s a frightening and painful experience, but only then can you experience the magnitude of the damage done to you and begin to grieve and relieve your loses.

"Though recovery is actually practical and sane, the path back to a moderately-successful, healthy frame of mind feels frighteningly irrational and painfully emotional as you walk it. The way back is through pain and darkness and, at times, does not feel like the way to light. You may think you will drown in darkness, alone and unloved, but let me assure you, you won’t. You only think you will. However, it does take real courage to do this work, to walk this path. It’s not a job for the weak. It is the weak who scream out, ‘Forget it and get on with your lives!’

"So we do have choices to make. We can shut down and never feel any true feelings, except terror or nothingness, or we can dive right into them and experience our true feelings, our true selves, swim through them and come out on the other side. There is hope. Every time we honestly get in touch with our childhood experiences, we cry and take pity on ourselves and get a little stronger. The feelings get a little less blind control over us and we become a little more conscious in our choices.

"The process isn’t a clean, neat scientific work. It’s a magical work in a wonderland of seeming monsters and heroes, with princesses and princes, villains and good guys. It’s all within you. Many things are inexplicable, things happen as a result of re-experiencing them that are completely magical and very real. Reason will never get us there but fearlessness and feeling will."

BOOMER BEATNIK GETS A BOOST

FIND THIS IMAGE AT

Currently rewriting  a short story I first put on paper—yes, lined paper and pen—sometime during Fall of 1964 through February 1966 while floundering as a teaching assistant on the campus of Southern Illinois University—The Acceptance of Jane. The first version is very simplistic, almost childish, written in an emotional burst of high energy, and I more or less set it aside for 50 years. Now I'm trying to give it some depth. It's original impetus was okay, but I tried to make an image carry the story and the narrator lacks sufficient depth. Of course, the narrator is an older man, looking back on a moment in his high school life. Such a narrative offers technical difficulties. How much does any adult narrator truly know about his past life, eh?

On a good note, I received an immediate rejection of a story I sent off last week, BUT the editor said the story was well done but too long for her magazine. Could I send a shorty piece of writing, she asked. You bet I could, and the turn around time was less than 24 hours. The magazine is located in Philadelphia, and I forgot to say, "Go Philanova". Basketball fans will recognize the reference. 

FOOLISH CONSISTENCY: HOBGOBLIN OF GOOD NOVELS?

My memory struggles as I write my best selling, futuristic PI novel that Hollywood and I make a big pile of money from when it becomes a movie. Cross fingers, spin twice in a circle and lay on the charm to potential agents.

Yesterday, I caught a memory slip while I was rewriting a passage, but it led to a happy outcome. Chapters apart, two people come to Manning's apartment on Everett Street in Portland. The first has to stand downstairs and ring up to Manning's apartment on the 5th floor so that Manning can release the downstairs door. The next visitor magically appears at Charley's door on the 5th floor and rings his doorbell there. INCONSISTENT! Then, I decided the live in landlady sees the second visitor and lets him in because she knows that the visitor and Manning are friends. It would be a nice touch of apartment dwelling interplay.

While concocting that little piece of business, I suddenly recalled that Manning is set 250 years in the future. Already autos are being started with equipment that reads thumb prints so, certainly, most locks 250 years hence will be opened by thumbprint or whole body scanners. Something! I put a note in my rewrite file to make this consistent when the final rewrite begins sometime within the next hundred years or so. Cross fingers.

The great fact about the tale above is that, after all, I did remember the two different visitors when I needed to recall them. My memory actually worked.

WHAT A CREATIVELY WRITING OLD COOT READS

The following is a selective list of books I've read over the last  two years. I'm an eclectic reader. I don't understand all that I read, but I do credit myself for trying! Some are rereads:

Franny and Zoe by Salinger
Breaking The Spell by Daniel Dennett
An American Trilogy (all three novels in Philip Roth's trilogy, the 60s so real)
Foundation by Asimov 
Deeper Into Movies, Pauline Kael 
Axis sci fi by Robert Wilson
She Left Me In The Middle of Nowhere great poetry by pal Geoff Peterson (on Amazon)
The Drunkard's Walk, science by Leonard Mlodinow
"Evolutionary Social Psychology" in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. by David Buss
365 Days by Ronald Glaser (Vietnam vet personal history)
The Falling Man by Dan DeLillo
Greatest Show On Earth and Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (both evolution) 
Pentimento, An Unfinished Woman and Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman (memoirs and interesting insider look at the McCarthy Era)
Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut 
Feathers by Thor Hanson (a book about the evolution of feathers) 
The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (poetry of William Stafford)
Darwin a bio. by Desmond and Moore
Harmony scifi by Project Itoh
Idoru  scifi by William Gibson
The Emotional Brain and The Synaptic Self  both by Joseph Ledoux (neuroscience which has influenced my writing and my understanding of the human condition)
Einstein: his life and universe by W. Isaacson (excellent book which capsulizes his theories as well as Einstein's bio)
 

The writer among his books

That last Einstein book is very representative of how reading works for me. For a fraction of a day, I almost grasp his theories. By the next day, the knowledge is lost among the synapses. The older I get, the more advanced is this process of forgetting, and I do not like it one bit!  

As I said...if I remembered a fraction of what I read, I'd be a man of wide and deep knowledge, a man for all seasons, but, genetically, that was not to be my fate, so I read and recall mere fragments and am forced to build my flawed picture of the Cosmos and my place in it from scraps and personal suffering. When I was younger my most anguished moments of self-knowledge came when I knew I would never have the understanding or reputation of a genius. Laugh at me—I finally did—but when I was a youth and often in my cups, that knowledge was a source of ceaseless anguish.