"Qui plume a, guerre a." — Voltaire
I’d like to share two thought-provoking quotations in today’s Washington Post Magazine that resonated with me:
Power is the ability not to have to please others. — Elizabeth Janeway
Liberal institutions cease being liberal the moment they are firmly established.— Friedrich Nietzsche
Is it just me, or do the Enron energy traders in those recently-disclosed transcripts sound an awful lot like the weary cynics in David Rees’ Get Your War On?
As I begin my second novel, I’m gradually realizing that I need to come to better terms with the concept of conflict as the driving force of narrative, which means developing a better understanding of my own particularly bad relationship with it. Conflict — the friction of people bumping against each other as they move in different directions — really made my childhood miserable. I grew up watching my family members all taking turns hating or fearing each other, or running away and coming back, like they were unable to escape their orbits around a radioactive planet. Like all humans, I was born without conflict — I only wanted to love, and to be with, and to share with, people and the world. I just happen to remember what that state of being felt like. Thats a big advantage for a creative person.
Since that time I think I have tried to avoid conflict — by seeking and studying philosophies that arent driven by conflict, by trying to act as a conciliator and a communicator, almost like a grease to reduce friction between grinding people — which of course means that all I am is something that gets caught between things. So I thought I could write in ways that avoided friction too.
So I picked history. Nonfiction. Non-friction.
But nonfiction, I discovered, isn’t really like that. Well, good nonfiction, anyway. Things in history didnt “just happen.” They happened because people saw themselves in conflict with other people, with nature, with themselves — the “classic plots” do apply to reality. Otherwise, nothing would happen. This is a roundabout return to the central premise of my future novel The Human Algorithm. And simply the heart of the Buddhist precepts of “nonaction,” “nonduality,” etc. as I perceive them. It’s the difference between passive voice and active voice, between systems and people.
I need to look at my relationship to conflict and to take from that examination the tools I need to write fiction without fear. I personally believe that the challenge-reaction way of responding to conflict is just silly. In other words, conflict — like shit — happens. Its our way of treating conflict as a challenge, a threat, a negative thing, or whatever, thats the problem. Someone once described story as the effort to move from a position of imbalance to one of balance. Someone else described it as the impulse to wholeness. There are many ways to return to balance and wholeness, though our culture’s penchant for kitschy Romantic, Nietzscheian heroic Man Versus God Wagnerian melodrama has conned us into believing that there is but one way, the Struggle Against.
Yeah, right.
With such a deep resentment toward conflict and what it has meant for me — the destruction of a world-view that was very pure and whole — I have avoided conflict, and I have tried through my spiritual awareness not to be a cause of more of it in the world. But I have to come to some sort of real peace with conflict if I am going to be able to understand it as a writing tool. That is my challenge, that is my real quest. Because to understand it, really fully understand it in my life, is to be able to use it most wisely. And my writing will then be even more truly of me.
Today I posted a selection of quotations from some of the fiction and nonfiction books and periodicals that I’ve read over the years. They appear in roughly the order that I encountered them, and you’ll probably see some evolving themes that are reflected in other writings on this site. Many of these pertain to specific writing projects. For example, the quotes dealing with “first principles” are ones I collected for my work on — you guessed it — First Principles.
I added some additional thoughts and implications to the Tutorial School Dispatch on cognicentrism this morning.
I’ve been a busy boy. I finished the first and second revisions of my YA novel, now called Seeing Through Clouds. I’ve come up with a list of lucky publishers who will have the privilege of sending me my first rejection letters, and this week I’m going to be writing a kick-ass synopsis and chapter outline to accompany my solicitation for rejection — er, I mean my query letter.
No one can accuse me of going into this with unrealistic expectations!
In the meantime, I’m putting up an article that I wrote a couple of years ago that was published elsewhere on the Web under a different title. I think it’s just as timely as ever, and I’m hoping that the act of putting it up here will inspire me to write some more on the subject. Public access to government information may seem like a dry topic, but it really isn’t; it’s an essential civil right and a foundation stone of a truly democratic society.
Another diary entry today, from November 6, 2003, discussing some ideas I’ve been working on with regard to unity, separateness, and relationship. Don’t read it if you’re hungry.
One of these days I am going to write an essay called “Two Views of an Exploding Rocket.” It’s going to be about how movies can completely change your life.
Back in 1983, when I was but a lad of 15 living in Santa Fe, the El Paseo movie theater (the first one in the area with lounge seating) showed Koyannisqatsi and The Right Stuff within a few months of each other. Koyaanisqatsi was a meditation about time and timelessness, the natural vs. the artifical, and so much else; it appealed to my nascent spiritual side. The Right Stuff was a paean to the “can-do” attitude; it resonated with the part of me that was the son of a toolmaker and a brother of draftsmen.
Both movies used the same archival film footage of an exploding rocket. In The Right Stuff, the footage is part of a montage showing many rockets fizzling, exploding, and going haywire. The scene, which has a deliciously humorous overtone, symbolizes the progressive (and eventually triumphant) engineering effort to build a reliable rocket. In Koyaanisqatsi, a mch longer version of the same footage appears at the end of the movie, and (at least to me) serves to warn us that our efforts to outperform or override nature are doomed to fail.
Now, anyone that knew me growing up knows that I loved rockets and space travel. They symbolized everything that could be noble about mankind: how heroic engineers will create better and cleaner worlds on Earth and in space, worlds where people will be free to excel, etc. etc. (When you’re 15, you still believe that people are driven only by the purest of motives.) Along comes Koyaanisqatsi and suddenly my symbol of progress has been turned into a symbol of arrogant short-sightedness.
I wrestled with this contrast a lot. Which view was right? Instinctively, I knew that they both were valid within their own frames of reference. Something could be an expression of knowledge and ignorance at the same time.
Could I still cheer for the technological accomplishment while also appreciating the “wrongs” it represented? The answer turned out to be yes. My awareness of the dichotomy did not cause me to reject or invalidate the Right Stuff frame of reference, or force me to deny my fondness for it. By embracing this contradiction, I could in effect grasp something larger than just the single aspect. Someday I may understand how and why I was able to do that.
I doubt I’ll keep updating this site on a daily basis for much longer. Consistency is not one of my hallmarks when I’m not getting paid for it. I just feel compelled to make sure there is enough content and context on the site to serve as a kind of “core” around which to build anything else that may follow. And to keep you from getting too bored too quickly.
Today I am offering three more diary entries (April 17, 2002; May 1 and 6, 2002) that take the concept of “Right Organization” right up to my psychological present. The first and third entries are long; the middle one is short (what I like to call a “bridge entry” because it serves as a connection between the entry that leads up to its conclusions and the entry that follows from its implications). See what you think.
Today I’m offering a trascription of an entry from my diary. This entry, from February 4, 2002, builds on some of the issues discussed in the Tutorial School dispatches, specifically the concept of “right organization.” This concept has been a subject of much interest to me as I have sought to articulate my personal philosophy.
The diary entry discusses how a better understanding of our relationship to institutions might help us come to terms with the concept of guilt. Being a recovering Catholic, this is an issue of no small weight for me. As with all future diary entries, the text is presented with all the convolutions and stream-of-consciousness style of the original, with commentary at the end to bring the ideas up to date, clean up the structure, and relate the ideas to other offerings on Sotto Voce.