Among the Angels' Hierarchies: The Novel (Part II)

1. Seeds of the Novel: Apocalypse Where? ...and Garbage

                           "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive."

                                                            Ursula LeGuin

                                                            Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness  

Looking back, I can see that the first seed of the novel was listening to a panel discussion called something like “writing the apocalypse in a time of apocalypse” at Wiscon (the world’s leading feminist science-fiction convention), back in 2004. I don’t remember specifics from the discussion (we’d been driving all day and I was pretty tired), but the question stuck with me.

How go about writing the apocalypse in these apocalyptic times?  

When I scan the news, I find that, for the most part, it’s mostly a technological, biological, and political freak show. Think about it: The US Congress is being held captive by men and women who believe that a white-bearded god created the earth about 6000 years ago; meanwhile, they lavishly fund projects like DARPA’s surveillance insects, created from the science they repudiate. Then there’s the horror of Transgenic Pigs and Web-Spinning Goats; Robot Jellyfish powered by a rat’s heart cells; Smart Billboards; “safe” memory erasure, and, of course, the great and powerful NSA data-suck programs, to name only a very few of the ‘sci-fi’ things currently out there.

How keep up? And is that even the point?

The best speculative fiction (Sci-fi, Fantasy, both together, and with various blends of other genres) is about what’s happening right now. As Ursula Le Guin once said: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” Speculative fiction is a way of talking about THIS world, the one we’re living in right now. And I would say that because the world right now is so amazingly, tragically, and horrifically weird, speculative fiction may be one of the most useful ways of approaching it, of trying to make sense of it.

The second seed happened while driving home from work in the spring or summer of 2006, listening to the local public radio station. At that time, I was working at St. Vincent’s hospital in Santa Fe, in the medical records department. 
 

(Working in medical records was a bit like living inside a Kafka novel – The Trial or The Castle – but instead of being the desperate protagonist trying to find a way into or out of the labyrinth, I was one of the faceless bureaucrats working deep in the bowels of the system. I would like to believe that I did not act like a faceless bureaucrat, but the health care system is a vast, clanking, somewhat chaotic machine, dominated by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and once you enter its domain as a worker-drone, it’s hard not to become assimilated...). 

 On that particular afternoon, the talk-show host was interviewing a journalist promoting a book about garbage (I’m pretty sure it was Heather Rogers’ Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage; but it may have been Elizabeth Roylte’s Garbage Land…I can’t be certain.). During the interview, the host kept trying to get her to talk about what individuals can do to cut down on waste. It seemed that he was coming from the point of view that all the troubles of the world could be solved if each and every individual, on their own – but still participating in the economy – simply recycled. 

The problem with that belief is that it assents to the economy as it is: We can continue with the kinds of jobs, the kinds of corporations, the kinds of business practices that we currently have – we just need to throw in a little more green energy and social justice and everything will work out fine and dandy.

Ah, but you can’t run the economy – as it exists now – off green energy alone. It’s not going to happen. It is a child’s dream. It’s possible (some day) to have a more just, equitable and green economy (yes, I’m one of those dreamers…and I’m not the only one…), but it will not look like the one we have now. In fact, it will look different in different locales, bioregions, and cultures. And it will require that the Western world live a bit closer to the earth (I mean this literally...and in all senses). 

You can’t have limitless growth in a finite world. This is another child-like dream. Huge corporations, especially energy corporations, already understand this. That’s why they are making a violent and desperate grab for the last of the world’s resources (coal, oil, natural gas, arable land, water...). 

My memory is that the author of the book on garbage argued with the interviewer, saying that the corporate world (and the economy they control) was the major perpetrator of waste. Corporations, and those who benefit from the wealth they generate, are dependent on waste. Planned obsolescence is built into the system. Still, the interviewer doggedly insisted that we were all responsible, and that if we all did our part then surely something in the world would change.

What is wrong with this guy, I thought. Why is he unable to grasp what the author is saying – that the problem is systemic? That the problem is the result of the economic system itself? Half way home, it occurred to me that, just like those who deny climate change, his mind had faltered in the face of such a huge problem. He had stared into a terrible abyss and his mind had shut down. The only thing he could do was fall back on old ideas, spouting some of that good ole American optimism. 

I was reminded of those Micky Rooney/Judy Garland movies from the late 30’s, where the solution to all problems was to put on a show. Usually in someone’s barn. 


Sing! 



Dance! 



Problem solved!

This happens not just when we are confronted by the effects of the economic system on which we rely, but also when we are confronted by the gargantuan dismantling of our constitutional rights by the corporate influenced executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government; or by the forests, animals, and plants disappearing at a rate too vast for the human brain to process. When I look at the photos of the shrinking polar ice cap (almost nonexistent in summer) or see the videos of the giant ice shelves in Antarctica or Greenland falling into the sea, my mind wants to shut down. What do we do such information?

And yes, there have been catastrophes before (world wars, genocide, plagues), but we’re talking about the end of nature as we have known it since the dawn of man. The human brain, the human heart, the human spine, the human hand, all developed on a planet that now, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. What do we do with that?

Denial is a very human response. Acceptance, and then becoming endlessly distracted by more trivial things, is also a tried and true response. Becoming depressed and withdrawing from the world (dosing yourself with antidepressants) is yet another response. These responses are all about escape. 

But there is no escape.

2. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here: An Affirmation?

“When we talk about hopelessness and death, we’re talking about facing facts. No escapism. Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, not to run away, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on. If we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.”

                                                                        Pema Chödrön

                                                                        When Things Fall Apart   

Listening to that interview, I wondered at how I had compartmentalized the enormity of the situation. I drove across town, back and forth each day, to a job I did not like. The drivers in the cars ahead of me, behind me, were, for the most part, doing the same thing. No one was particularly happy. Everyone I knew was mostly living hand-to-mouth. Why continue? What was the point? 

Faces in the hospital, especially those eating in the cafeteria – workers or friends and relatives of patients – began to haunt me. I began to hear Blake’s London in my head every day while eating lunch:

 London

By William Blake
 

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls, 

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear 

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. 

(It’s important to remember that in Blake’s time his use of the word chartered referred to chartered companies – what are now known as corporations. A good explanation of the poem can be found at the 21^st Century Socialism site here)

So, I finally reached a point where everything had become impossible. How find a way out of that? I kept returning to that radio interviewer – his optimism, his hope – and how it seemed to be getting in the way of his ability to see the nature of the problem. What I eventually realized was that hope itself was getting in the way of seeing what was right there in front of us all.

So, to cut to the chase (finally!), it seemed to me that the only way out of this collapsing world was by abandoning all hope. We can’t leap over the terrible present by hoping for a just and green future. First, we have to look at what is. 

And what is?

We’re not living on the same planet we were fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago. And, because we’ve spent so much time doing absolutely nothing about climate change, things are going to get quite a bit worse before they get better. We’re making too few changes far too late. (A great book on the subject of this new earth we’re living on is by Bill McKibben, called Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet)

NO! NO! 



Look away, look away! 



Oh Great Smiley Emoticon Save Us!

But, as I said before, there’s no escape. Not really. It is only by actually looking at what is that we can figure out what can be done. If we’re always trying to project ourselves out of this reality and into what can be – well, we’re lost.

And so, when I started to write the second novel, I landed on a strange, barren planet; one that looked remarkably like the one I was already on…

Detroit

Next: Among the Angels’ Hierarchies, Part III

                        (A Question for the Damned: “So...what’s your novel about?”)

Among The Angels’ Hierarchies: The Novel (Part I)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ 
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me

 suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

 in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

 but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to 
 endure,

 and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

 to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.


                                                (Duino Elegies, Rilke

                                                 Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

1. The Submarine Life

It has been a year and a half since I’ve ventured near this blog. Back in May of 2012, I plunged into a re-write of a novel that I’d been struggling with – on and off - since the summer of 2007, and once I got going, it occupied all of my time. 

The only verb I can think of to describe the process of writing that last draft would be submerged. I was down in dark waters, swimming with dark angels. You know the kind of angels I’m talking about, the ones you find near the bottom of the sea, with large jaws, tiny eyes, and strange fleshy phosphorescent lamps dangling from their foreheads...to lure their prey close...

                                                                                                Every angel is terrifying.

The irony of being deeply submerged in a work of the imagination is that it is one of the ways of being truly engaged with the world. Fiction – or the fiction that I mostly read...and attempt to write – is not a form of escape, but an exploration into the complexities of truth. The novel I’ve been working on – a speculative story set in a dystopian near-future – was my attempt to look straight into the yawning black mouth of our collapsing, broken world.

What broken world, you may ask? (if you’ve been living inside Fox News Headquarters or stuck in a basement endlessly playing “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.”)

To summarize: According to the UN Environment Programme scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. Remember hurricanes Sandy and Irene? Typhoon Haiyan? In the US, Wall Street business is booming while Congress ruthlessly cuts unemployment benefits . Meanwhile, according to a study conducted in late April (2013) by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read – that’s fourteen percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of all high school graduates can't read at all (which leads to the question “Why bother writing a novel in this day and age?” But that’s a subject for another blog.). There are 610,042 people on the street, without a home, on any given night in the US, and of that number 222,197 are families. Climate refugees are increasing around the globe; and GMO corporations like Monsanto basically control the world’s food supplies. Shall I continue?

You know the drill. You’re living it. The water levels are rising….

2. The Novel Begins: In a Barn in Wisconsin with Rolling Puppet Heads 

In the spring of ’07 my wife (poet/novelist Michaela Kahn) and I quit our jobs, sold most of our stuff, and left Santa Fe, New Mexico, heading out on a journey of discovery, trying to find the story that would help us understand this brave new world we found ourselves in.
We thought we’d be gone a year, two at the most. It ended up being seven: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Washington DC, Iowa, Mexico, Wales, New York again, then, finally, just this past fall, we returned to Santa Fe.

We started the first year of the journey doing several artist residencies and house-sits. 

The first artist residency was on an organic farm in Wisconsin, Wormfarm, about an hour’s drive north of Madison. We chose the residency because we wanted to learn a bit about the operation of an organic farm.

 We worked for two or three hours in the market garden every morning and then had the rest of the day to write. We lived and worked in rooms built into the upper loft of  an old barn. At the time, Wormfarm sponsored a puppet-making week and parade in Reedsburg, a nearby town, and so there were huge puppet heads sitting on a stage at one end of the barn’s loft, leftover from parades of the years past. There were also heads sitting on the roof of the rooms where the artists lived. During thunderstorms, the wind would tear through the barn and the massive puppet heads would roll back and forth above us, rumbling, rumbling, trying to speak.  

 
 


















So, rolling puppet heads, starling and swallow nests, skittering mice, a ram who lived behind the barn and grumbled in his sleep all night long, and a barn cat that woke me at 3am every night to show me her latest kill, insisting on praise and petting before chomping her prey down in three or four quick bites. I was in heaven. What more could you possibly want for inspiration?  (One of the few things that put me off, though, were the spiders that appeared around nine at night, like clockwork, in the room where I wrote. I am a fan of spiders, for the most part, but these were huge, with the accompanying myriad black glistening eyes, and they came in waves – across the walls, ceiling, floor...) 

 Although the puppet heads did not make it into the novel (there were enough puppets and doll-heads in my last novel), the barn became a late night haunt for one of the main characters. And Itchy, the barn cat, has a few guest appearances. Never forget the barn cat, I always say. A good dystopian novel always needs a barn cat. You know, for balance...

After Wormfarm, we attended another artist residency in Pennsylvania, living in an old white church in the Endless Mountains, just south of the New York state line, in the Susquehanna River Valley.  The same area where the novelist John Gardner (best known as the author of Grendel and The Sunlight Dialogues)  wrote his last novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts. There were late night spider issues there as well...

Two Months Writing a Novel in an Empty Church

 

1.

      A creature haunts the cold cellar,
releases spiders through the floorboards at night.

      The table lamp casts

                 long shadows across the wall.

2.

    A local school board allowed Creationism

         to be taught (God made the earth
     6000 years ago, in 6 days?).

               There was a lawsuit, thank god.

 

 3.

               If I could crawl inside

   the milkweed pod next to the mailbox across the road

   when the seeds take on the colors of the setting sun…

4.

       Down the road

The strange porch to nowhere at the church

a man sits on a mower in his front yard, hooked

     to an oxygen tank, .22 pistol

                          wedged in his belt.

Wife left. Daughter far away. Two heart attacks.

5.     

   Two squash-faced dogs

wait under the apple tree all day, every day,

 for the same tractor (the only tractor) to pass.

At dusk they leap up, baying, disappear

     into the tractor’s road dust.

                    

6.

 And every sunset, hundreds of geese,

           heading south,

  white feathers tainted red.

               A map in the blood.


                                   (previously published in Mudlark)

3. What a long strange trip it’s been...

After our stint in the church, we spent the next two years on the move, rootless, living a bit hand-to-mouth, scrounging for work. Once you leave the world of work for longer than six months, the wage-slave machinery becomes somewhat unforgiving:

“What were you doing during this time...during this gap in your employment history?” 

“I was writing a novel.”

 “A novel?” 

“You know, a long story, bound into what is called ‘a book’.”

“Hmmmn, I see...yes...so, what does excellent customer service mean to you?”

“Let’s see...doing the humility shuffle day after day, week after week, year after year...wait, did I just say that out loud?”

From Woodstock, New York, to Bethesda, Maryland; from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to Des Moines, Iowa; from Longmont, Colorado to Los Angeles, California; from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Swansea, Wales;  then on to Cardiff , the Gower peninsula, and finally back to Woodstock again. All the while the novel revealed itself slowly, oh so slowly. 

 

Cave, Gower Peninsula, Wales

My own view of writing is that it’s like an archaeological dig. The story, or the poem, is already there, somewhere below the surface, and it’s my  job to slowly bring all the pieces to the surface and put them together into it's original form. Sometimes this is simple – the first couple of spadefuls and the story is revealed, intact.That happened with my first novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind. The new novel was not like that. I had to keep digging and digging. And digging. Over time I began to recognize that it was about having the understanding and patience to actually see the pattern in front of me. Nothing was actually hidden – it was just that I couldn’t see it...not until I was ready. An old Zen saying: "When you're ready, the teacher will appear." In this case: "When you're ready, the true story will appear."

Wyrm's Head, Gower, Wales

During my two years in Wales, I left the manuscript alone, thinking it was done (oh sad, poor ignorant mortal) and concentrated on a long poem about mass extinction, unemployment, the US war economy, language, and the body – all centered around Swansea Bay (called Tidal Flats). I was under the spell of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts during that period and wrote very little fiction. But writing this long poem helped me focus in a more coherent way on many of the themes that were in the novel. So when I returned to the US, I hauled the manuscript out of mothballs to attempt a final (no, really) rewrite. I foolishly thought: “Oh, this’ll take about three, four months.”

It took another year and a half...

Next, Part II: Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here