Echoes in a Hollow Space

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say….

Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.

—Carl Jung from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written circa 1960

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

How do you tell the difference between a deep, instinctual, intuitive knowing and a deep, instinctual, obstructionist fear? That's what I want to know.

Because one thing I do know: the difference is crucial, and acting on them is even crucialer.

I missed two of my weekday writing sessions, plus I didn't get any writing done over the weekend. Fortunately, on the days when I actually did write, I had better-than-average sessions, so the word count isn't as pitiful as it might have been.

I was also convinced most of the week that I was writing the current chapter from the wrong POV, but as I closed in on the end of it, I finally saw why it needed to be from that POV and it smoothed out nicely. Funny how that happens. It does me absolutely no good to ask myself, as They recommend, "Who has the most at stake in this scene?" to determine who's telling the tale. Once my instincts decide on a POV, that's pretty much it and I've got to live with it. Every rare now and then I'll switch the tale-teller in rewrites, but usually, not so much. Because most of those times, the instincts seem to have it write. Or right.

Or I could be delusional. Funny how that happens.


Venus In Transit (SMF)

87,750 / 100,000 (87.8%)

First: critiquers who given honest, constructive criticism are pure gold. I am grateful to have such folks in my writing life.

Yes, that's right, I've started revising something—the novel I finished last fall.

Sometimes being an instinctual writer makes for a painful revision process. A contributing factor: I no longer fix as I go. That means when the inevitable revision (or revisions) of plot occurs somewhere during the process of writing the first draft, I simply change horses in midstream and push forward. No circling back to make everything conform, no rounding up of stray doggies, or magnanimous rescuing of sodbusters from the evil cattle barons. This was a hard habit to break, but overall I'm glad I did. It means I can push through to the end of the ms. faster, without risk of bogging myself down by obsessing over the details. (Believe me, I've been known to put the ss in obsess and have the rope burns to prove it.)

Now and again, if something really jars my psychic landscape, and if it's necessary for what I anticipate writing up ahead, I will circle back so I can reinhabit a scene. I need a gut feeling for certain things in order to maintain a psychic imprint of the totality of the novel. I always know the endpoint of the story before I start writing, and that's usually the one thing that doesn't change. I aim myself for that ending, kick the sides of my mount, and take off hell bent for leather. But on those occasions when I feel some stranded maiden crying out back down the road apiece, if I really need to know what it feels like to wear her gingham dress, I turn Old Paint and go in for a rescue. I once stopped the forward progress of a novel in order to write a 14k novelette (based on a key scene) from another character's POV. It was essential to get inside that character's head to understand her dynamic on a gut level and how that would play out in her interactions with the hero. I wound up using almost nothing from that 14k, but I don't think I would have finished the novel without it.

Sometimes the emotional consistency of the characters suffer from the push forward, often more than the plot itself. That's not always easy to fix, but my instincts appear to be on the job because just this morning the answer to handling a key problem popped into my brain as I drove to work. There are other issues to solve, some plot, some worldbuilding, some character. I think I see clearly what needs fixing, but you never know about these things. Sometimes as you mosey down the trail, what looks like a stranded maiden from the distance turns out to be Jesse James in drag.

I was reading a post by handworn yesterday in which he was talking about his earliest memories. Naturally, that started me thinking about mine.

There is a bit of familial controversy about what I classify as my earliest memory. My parents used to take me out to a local lake where we'd float on a raft. My father would go swimming and he'd sometimes hold me in the water next to him and the raft, bobbing me up and down while I splashed and laughed and loved it loved it loved it. I remember the joy of that water quite clearly, the cool temperature on a hot day, the feeling of buoyancy, the worn, dark wood of the raft, my mother sitting on it watching us, dressed in some light colored shirt over a bathing suit, and she was laughing—just a moment in time, but a lovely one, preserved in my memory.

The trouble is, my mother says that they never went to that lake once I was past a year old, and she doesn't think I was more than ten or eleven months old the last time they went. Both science and my mother say I shouldn't (couldn't) remember something from that early in my life. Scientists would insist that I'd heard family stories, or seen pictures, and created a false memory for myself—and I'm familiar enough with how easy it is to create false memories to see how that could be so. The problem is I don't ever remember my family talking about those outings until I mentioned them many years later, "Remember when we used to go out on the raft? Where was that?"

"How do you know about that?" my mother asked, startled. I told her I remembered it. She said it couldn't be so.

If that isn't my earliest memory, then I just materialized one day when I was maybe four, playing by myself in the lovely green alcove between the front of my childhood home and the house which stood on the front of the property. This was my sacred combe, my favorite place in early childhood, always cool even on the hottest days, always the place of greenest, lushest grass, the high wall behind me covered in fragrant yellow climbing roses, the tall march of calla lilies along our house beside me, the other house tucked in on my other side. A small space, no more than ten feet square as I think back on it now, but a cozy, green place of dreams.

Reaching back for that memory, I can sort of see why some people believe in magic. Our consciousness just comes into being on a certain day, as if by some conjuration. The who that we are emerges from our instincts at that moment and starts marching forward through our personal history. But who were we before that? Why is it so misty and gone from our minds?

Oh yes, I'm well familiar with the science of consciousness, false memory, early memories and their explanations for these things. But for me, none of it can hold a bell, book, and candle to the mystery of who we are.