Echoes in a Hollow Space

An essay, containing secrets that really aren’t secrets.

Yes, I know that Carl Jung is a deeply flawed human being, but his philosophy explains the world to me better than anyone else I’ve encountered. He makes poetic sense of the twisted labyrinth of human consciousness—and it requires poetry rather than logic to explore those paths. Besides, who better to act as shaman on such a journey than a flawed human being?

(Psst. Here’s a secret: no living, breathing human being is without flaws. Purity is not possible in the earth realm. And, in fact, shamans in tribal society are often “other” and strange and outcast people. They make the best interpreters of the less-than-upright world of the spirit and alternate realities.)

I have other shamans I listen to, other paths I explore, but always swing back to ol’ Carl. I don’t swallow his philosophy—or anyone’s—whole. (The story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is an active metaphor in my psyche.) But I do use Jung’s work as a basis for my own worldview and personal explorations.

(Psst. Here’s another secret: any philosophy worth its salt is a means for discovering your own way of looking at the world, not something slavishly to be followed. Anyone who tells you to walk in lock step or that you must attain righteous purity is probably a spiritual fascist.)

(Psst. There are many valid spiritual paths. What matters is finding the one that gets you closest to the mountaintop.)

I even went so far, in my flush days, of purchasing the complete facsimile edition of The Red Book when it was issued in the earlier years of this century. (It’s almost doubled in price since.) It was so visually amazing that I had this idea to display it open on a library pedestal so I and my guests could page through it if they had a hankering. I don’t know if that’s pretentious or not. I suspect it is, but at the time, it just seemed neato kobeato. And now I’m past giving a damn what people think, anyway.

That idea never came to fruition, however. First, because we had a bird at the time who flew freely through the house. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of birds knows they can’t be potty trained. Need I spell out the possibilities of open display of an expensive book in a house of fluttering birds? The bird, certainly, could not be contained in a cage, at least not during daylight hours. That would have been a violation of her spirit. And a metaphor, of course.

The second and more practical reason why I never got around to displaying it was because I never got the library pedestal and because I fell headlong into the emotional and physical pit of caregiving for many years. The bird, bless her, went to the sky gods a few years back and is no longer a risk to my book. But. It took me a long time to crawl out of the hole I existed in. In some ways, I am still crawling, though I think I may finally be sitting on the lip catching my breath before getting up and moving on. My energy, both psychic and physical, are still not at full strength. I will get there (or some form of there anyway) unless I croak first, but my feet are not quite resting on the earth yet.

Meanwhile, The Red Book gathers dust in a safe location. I have cleared a space in the living room for it, but must wait for an appropriate book stand, mostly for financial reasons. There’s another metaphor lying underneath that dust and waiting, but I’m not going to pursue it here.

Meanwhile meanwhile, my dreams are fertile again, full of archetypes and sendings from the Universe and conversations with muses and the dead. Dr. Jung, with one foot planted on mucky earth and the other in the Other, helps me interpret them in a way that Freud never could. In his stumblings down the crooked path of his life, he made ancient wisdom acceptable to (if not accepted by) academia. He prowled the borders of liminality, pulling hidden lore into the light. This made many academics (who are a conservative lot) deeply uncomfortable, but he did more to make the study of folklore and alchemy and such things valid to them as subjects of learning than anyone else in the early 20^th century.

So, I cast a skeptical eye on the trickster nature of the man, but am deeply appreciative of the magus.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.”

—Oscar Wilde, “The Poets’ Corner III,” The Pall Mall Gazette, May 30, 1887

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

So, here I am reading a book I’m enjoying immensely. I come upon a chapter in which the writer does something that I know, positively, I have told some young writers in my capacity as a critiquer to never do—switching POV late in a book to one not encountered before. Hey, I’ve been told not to do that myself. The thing is, it works perfectly in this book. As a reader coming upon that shift, I could give a hairy pontiff’s left ear whether the writer has changed POV. I want the information it can give me, I want to know what happens next. And in that moment of realization a great crap paper tide of old critiques fluttered behind me and a voice called across the abyss as it filled with the perfidy of my Writing Thoughts, It doesn’t really matter what you’re supposed to do. The only thing that matters is if you can make what you do work.

Not the first time I’ve had that thought, but it came home especially strong to me today. It may have something to do with rereading one of my older novels—a shuddering experience if ever there is one.

Experience. That’s the key word. The perfidy mentioned above is all about the difference between critiques based on experience (and maybe instinct) and those based on regurgitation. “The Rules” only matter if the story doesn’t work. And here’s the other thing, even if a beta reader or critquer or critic says the story doesn’t work, it still might not matter. That “doesn’t work” can be a question of individual taste, or prejudice, or the sour feeling left in the reader’s stomach by the cafeteria food. If your own gut—not the one turning sour—tells you that something is right, you need to stick by it.

I’m not saying we writers have a magic I’m A Genius Don’t Bother Me With Your Tiny Opinions card. No. If enough people tell you that something isn’t working, you should probably pay attention to that. Be very sure that your gut is talking, telling you a thing is right, and not some fractured corner of your ego.

And even as I’m typing that last paragraph, I’m thinking “Regurgitated Wisdom.” (Because, really, haven’t you heard the one about “if enough people” ad nauseam?) In this case, it happens to be regurgitated with a side of experience, so maybe it’s not total bullshit. Maybe I do sort of know what I’m talking about in this particular instance, as opposed to some of the half-assed critiques I have offered up over the years.

But you never know. Reading my old stuff and realizing how deluded I was about the quality of that work has me stumbling through a funhouse of fractured and distorted opinion. What do I really know?

This is an existential question and has no real answer. The question is the black matter holding the universe together like invisible glue. It is self-contained and complete and needs no critique to make it whole. Sufficient unto the day is the question thereof.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:


"The more openly it remains a figure of speech, the more it is a dissimilar similitude and not literal, the more a metaphor reveals its truth."

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (tr. William Weaver)






( Illustrated version. )


Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:


"You cannot put the same shoe on every foot."

—Publius Syrus





( Illustrated version. )


Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:


"We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on."

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, 1775-1776 (tr. R. J. Hollingdale)




( Illustrated version. )

Yes, this quote came up randomly. But I am profoundly grateful to the Universe for providing me with such an excellent example this week.

Random quote of the day:


"...Metaphor, springing simultaneously as it does from body, mind and soul, does not lie."

—Alison Fell, The Pillow Boy of Lady Onogoro

Education Czarina in interview: "We want long term solutions for our students, not silver bullet solutions."


The silver bullet solutions would probably work well for your students cursed with werewolfism, although the law suits would be icky.

I usually don't post progress notes because it's always the same story with me: I grind it out day to day, averaging between 500-850 words. Not a blistering pace, but steady and cumulative. Sometimes I write 1000, 1200, even 2-3000, but mostly it's just grinding it out. But I thought it worthy to note that I have just completed seven chapters of my new novel, Night Warrior. Okay, most of that was rewriting and editing old text to make it come up to my present standards, but it does mean that I am well and thoroughly launched on this new novel. I'm in the zone with it, can feel it spinning out ahead of me and delving deep inside me.

Pam's lessons learned.

Recurrent themes emerge from the darkness. Scenes involving transformative experiences, for one. In my novel Shivery Bones I had a scene where a wounded and desperate man crawls through a gap in a hedge and emerges into a place that will thoroughly change him. Apparently, my Backbrain liked that scene so much it copied it from this older work, ten years before. I'd completely forgotten I had a scene with a boy who crawls through a gap in a briar patch and has a transformative experience until I read it again. Too bad. I think the metaphor works even better in this one. Are metaphors like rivers, I wonder? Can you wade in the same metaphor twice or must they constantly be changing? I suppose it's failure of imagination to reuse such a distinctive one, but *sigh.*

But the positive thing about revisiting this old work after a flood of water under the bridge is that even the things that made me despair and abandon it all those years ago are just not that big of a deal to me this go round. Perspective. Learning more about the craft. Water under the bridge.

Having completed three novels now (and countless stories) I think it's finally sunk in to my creative spirit (and not just my brain) that first drafts are not a life and death proposition. You don't have to get it right the first time—in fact, that's virtually impossible. The job of the first draft is just to be there, a repository for the things inside yearning to get out. Writers have the great luxury of revisions and levels of approach. Here are my hard won (and not profound) lessons learned:

● First draft—just get it done.

● Second draft—fix those plot holes and character inconsistencies and pacing issues—the big ticket items.

● Third draft—maybe concentrate on the language this time around, make it pretty and bright.

● Fourth draft—no, don't go there, you'll get stuck in the never ending revision cycle.

Send the damned thing out and move on to the next thing. If it comes back to you rejected, you always have the option of doing that fourth draft, but if you have well and truly moved on to something else, your perspective will be so much better when the old thing returns—and you can do a much better job at revising it. And anyway, all your eggs won't be in one basket and it won't hurt as much if one of them breaks. Only like wrenching off one of your fingers instead of the whole limb. (And now I'm mixing my metaphors which has got to be as bad as reusing them.)

Your order of dealing with revisions may be substantially different from mine, but this is what's working for me now. As W. Somerset Maugham said in the blog of matociquala (as well as elsewhere):

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Of course, the immortal words of Han Solo are also coming back to me at this moment, too: "Don't get cocky, kid."

On another note: You may recall that the last we heard from Boyfriend and Girlfriend who live upstairs, Boyfriend had filled the back of his truck with dirt which then turned to mud when he drove home in a rain storm and drained all over the garage when he parked it in Girlfriend's parking space. The truck's been there ever since, round about a week and a half I guess, and the mud has dried and turned to stone (lots of clay in local soil). But sometime between 6:45 last night when I got home and 8:30 when I left this morning, someone had moved the truck out of the garage and onto the street. By Imperial order of Yuri? I don't know. And after they moved it, the City of Los Angeles came along and put a boot on the wheel for unpaid parking tickets...

I tried not to laugh too much because that would have been wrong, wouldn't it? I don't need the bad karma. But sometimes, ya know, life is just very funny.