cogitation_station

Need a Good Book? Try "Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, published 1983 by Harcourt, Inc.--yes, 1983!--deserves the title Masterpiece. That's a word I rarely use.

In the 19th Century, Charles Dickens became, arguably, the reigning English language author in Literature. In the 20th and 21st Centuries, Helprin became our Dickens. Argue with me if you will; I stand by my statement. But this is not intended to be a review.

So much of Helprin's work is quotable and read-out-loud-please great that to pick one passage becomes a challenge of mammoth proportions. However, given our current state of government affairs here in the United States, his message in this particular book is too pertinent to dismiss. I've chosen a few paragraphs to quote this morning.

Peter Lake, the protagonist of the novel, tries to retrace his first experience of New York City twenty years earlier near the turn of the 20th Century. At that time, Peter Lake saw a very young child, dying, alone in the hallway of an abandoned tenement. The sight haunted him so that he has returned to the site to find out what happened to the child--so damaged that he cannot tell you if it were boy or girl. His search leads him to the morgue of the hospital in Printing House Square and the doctor who performs autopsies on the dead, the nameless unclaimed poor of New York City. It is the doctor who speaks here:

"...'Maybe you're from some reform group, and you've come to gather evidence.' He glanced at Peter Lake and concluded from his expression and appearance that he was not. 'They come down here to snap pictures. They get a thrill here--that's why they come. They take stupendous joy in the indignation and compassion they feel on account of these mangled stiffs; it's their roller coaster. I know this,' he said, making a tragic incision across the abdomen of an adolescent girl, 'and I'll tell you why. Since I'm here all the time and take apart fifty of these things a day, I can't feel for each and every one of them. I'm not God. I don't have that much in me. The ladies' aides and the social critics sense immediately that I couldn't give a goddamn about all this inedible meat, and that's just what they want. They know they're better than the miserable bastards they try to help, but they really enjoy thinking that they're better than the rest of us, who aren't as "compassionate" as they are.' He turned to Peter Lake again, and said, 'You notice how often that very word escapes their lips? They use it like a cudgel. Beware.'

"What he did next, as a matter of routine, made Peter Lake close his eyes in horror. But the doctor continued, his hands glistening, as if nothing had happened. 'They come down here for their own benefit. It's as clear as day that they love it. The great irony and perfect joke is that the wretches on the bottom of the barrel get these self-serving scum as champions. Some champions! They feed off the poor--first materially, and then in spirit. But they deserve each other in a way, because vice and stupidity were made to go together.

"'I know this, you see, because I was poor. But I rose like a rocket, and I know how the whole thing works. The ones who are always on your side, or so they think, are the ones who keep you down. Everything they do keeps you down. They'll forgive you for anything. Rob, rape, pillage, and kill, and they'll defend you to yourself. They understand all outrages, and all your failings and faults, too. Perfect! You can go on that way forever. What do they care? Excuse me: they do care. They want it that way.'

"He bent over to make a short cut, as thin as a hair, across the chest of the emaciated blond girl that he had just eviscerated. 'How would they make a living, these servants of the poor, if there were no poor?

"'What enabled me to rise above all the people who don't know enough to come in out of the rain is that one day I looked face to face at a man who hated half of everything I was and had the courage to tell me so. I remember his very words. He said, '"What you're doing is hideous--a perfect way to die young. Unless you want to live sweetly only in the hereafter, you ought to learn how to do the right thing."' The doctor stopped what he was doing, dropped his hand to his sides, and looked directly at Peter Lake. 'I hate the poor. Look what they do to themselves. How could you not hate them, unless you thought that they should be like this.'"

This is an excerpt--a minor one in view of the enormous scope of this 748-page novel--from Winter's Tale and an example of the social commentary both Helprin and Dickens write. But the book is not pedantic; far from it. The novel is a beautifully realized love story about New York, human beings and their various conditions and characters, a white horse, and infinity.

Characters are richly drawn as are descriptions which refuse to be skipped over and ignored. Discription as a word pales beside the richness of Helprin's similes, language, color, olfactory teases or assaults. He is incapable of imprecision, whether dialogue, action, description or characterization. His humor is subtle, but at times you find yourself laughing out loud.

I usually refrain from superlatives even when discussing superlative authors. There are many writers I admire and recommend. But I use the word "genius" sparingly; Mark Helprin is a story-telling genius. Fortunately for his readers, Winter's Tale is just one of many beautifully told and compelling works. I urge you to read Mark Helprin. His writing informs and invites our generation to change for the better; I hope his message does not go unheeded in this time of "change" for the much, much worse.

Writing Journals

I just added a new blog site to my list of good blogs, "Writelife." It's written by a Canadian whom I felt a kinship with, even though I have nothing but his picture and his words to guide me.

He wrote an interesting blog on journal writing and on the DVD "Finding Neverland." Curiously Barrie always kept a journal, and I can't remember when I started writing journals, but I agree that it is a necessary outlet and "flashes-of-genius-keeper" for any writer.

I also like his idea of a real journal...the paper kind on which you write with a curiously archaic object, known as a pen. Nothing like it, really.

When I taught at the University of Oklahoma back in the Dark Ages, I became friends with a young man from France, who held dual citizenship in both that country and England. He was at OU teaching French in lieu of paying tuition. As it happens, he had to take my class (poor thing).

Most English teachers tell student to keep a journal and then hand out grades. I had a bit of a twist, because no one wants to really write personal things--the things that matter--in a journal which someone else might read or even grade. Result: Journals as assignments are useless. However, since I had been forced to write in one myself, and resented every minute of it, I decided that the students had to write in the journal every day, but that I promised I wouldn't read a word, unless they put a note on the front of their journal saying "Please Read." Everyone who kept a journal got an A.

Well, the young French teacher found it particularly cathartic. Journals are therapists, too. He found that because I didn't read it (and I never did), he could actually talk to his journal about his deepest concerns, ideas, etc. It freed him. When he told me about the drastic improvement his life had made since keeping a journal, I was not surprised.

Writing automatically objectifies the subjective. If something is really bothering you, get it on paper. It's amazing. By the act of writing it, you release it from your brain to free yourself to look at the thought from an "outsider's" Point Of View (POV). It's even more useful for evaluation if you leave it for a few days and then come back and read what you've written.

Regardless of the problem or conundrum, it's out of your head, screaming to be heard, and set down in ink. Black and white LOL. Or, if you're like me, you can write in colored inks according to your mood.

Try it, you'll like it. And while you're at it, if you can find a copy, you might want to try reading a very short wonderful book by Brenda Ueland entitled, If You Want To Write. The copy I have is from Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, MN, Second Edition 1987, so you might have to look. It's a little nugget like Strunk & White's Elements of Style.

A bit short tonight, I know, but I have to go write in my journal.

Time and Forever

Forever. I've heard that forever is a "long, long time," but that's simply not true. Forever means no Time at all.

I'm beginning with this concept, because you must think about it. It's not a cute quip; it's not just pithy; it's Truth. I believe even Einstein would agree with me....

Time does not exist in space. Don't you love how "space and time" are always linked, yet they have absolutely nothing to do with one another? Two entirely separate realms.

Our lives owe obeisance to "Time" only if we choose. In other words, Time parades in costume of Majesty and Control. But remove the costume, and naught remains but our own subjective view of an artificial reality.

What is time but an artifice based on the movement of sun and moon and stars around which our planet revolves? Remove us from this small sphere, and it ceases to exist.

A long time ago I decided that since time didn't exist except in my head, that it didn't have anything to do with my day. A day could encompass an entire lifetime. A day could be a year or a second.

When I began to think of a day in that manner, I started paying attention to events and moments that wouldn't have caught my notice on other "days."

Have you noticed how some days fly by, while others drag on endlessly...until, they end LOL? Of course you have! But have you ever considered that there might be a reason behind that?

I have tried this experiment several times, and it has never failed me yet. I arrived at this epiphany because "things" piled upon other "things" overloading my life, and several important people, events, opportunities, responsibilities spilled out, sometimes without my notice, until I had driven past, and they were lost to me.

My mind "shotguns." Michele Miller calls it something else, but I call it shotgunning. It's brain, life, overload.

Too many urgent calls for help from equally important sources at the same time...how does one prioritize, much less think?

It was then I thought: If Time is artificial, and God made Time, and He controls it, and He could stop it for Joshua, then why can't He do the same thing for me?"

(OK...you don't believe in Jesus Christ. I do. You don't believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible in context. I do. So sue me. I just know, it works.)

So I asked one morning, when all things were impossible to accomplish within given deadlines, and my family needed me, and there were family emergencies, and I was in grad school, and I had to take a Journalism Law final that day, for extra time.

I got it. I don't know if God sped me up, or slowed Time down, but I do know that some things that were so urgent got cancelled and not by me, and things that should have taken an hour, took 10 minutes.

Near the end of the day, after spending the entire night at the hospital with one of my sons and getting no sleep and no opportunity to study, I walked out of the final, knowing I had failed it. I had no idea of what the questions meant, much less what the answers were. But I didn't care. The day was nearly over.

I had met all the deadlines that existed, my son was fine, and I had taken the test.

It was a good life that day.

Two lifetimes later, I got my final back. Not only had I aced it, but I'd gotten the highest grade in the class. I truly thought my blue book had been mistaken for someone else's. I got up and went to the prof and told him I thought there had been some mistake. He said, "No. Your answers were simply perfect."

Well, I'm here to tell you that I'm not perfect. I don't know how all those answers in my handwriting got into that blue book, but there they were, and they were perfect. I can tell you, I didn't do it.

It was a good life that day.

I'm not the only one to whom this phenomenon happens.

Several days later my neighbor called in panic. Same story: way too much to do in too little time. What she needed was the impossible. So I told her what I had done. She thought I was nuts. I thought so too, but what did she have to lose? The whole situation was impossible, so what was one more impossibility?

She called me three hours later. Everything was done. She was in shock. She had an hour to spare. We had a drink and laughed and watched Callan Pinckney do her bit in "Callanetics." Then my friend left to entertain her housefull of guests who were arriving within 15 mintues.

She enjoyed her day of life; so did I.

When I remember, and that's the trouble--as Peter said, "I know that you know these things, but you have need of reminders..."--I have trouble remembering that each day encompasses an entire life, if I choose to view it that way. But when I do miracles happen. Sometimes the miracles are minute, so tiny that a microscope can't see them; sometimes they are mistaken for "luck;" sometimes the miracles overwhelm me; sometimes my mind can't quite grasp the day's events. But somewhere in my soul, in my mind and spirit, they live on building...life upon life, paths making paths, and leading me into the unknown where Adventure and more miracles await.

Reading, Truth, and the Mind

"Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table." -- C.S. Lewis in an essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children."

Before you misunderstand Lewis's use of "childish," it has the same meaning as reading books meant for children--not the pejorative term "childish" as commonly used in American parlance.

I must confess I conform to his statement: I read books much "too old" for me when I was a child, and I love children's books as an adult. Discovery of Truth knows no age limit. And the brain, when exposed to Truth, innately recognizes it.

That is not to say that the adult chooses to admit that Truth or even remember it, but simply that it exists, whether or not the conscious mind chooses to acknowledge it, and it shapes our personality, whether we will or no for good or ill.

"You are what you eat." Well, I don't happen to think so. I had eggplant the other night, and I'm neither purple, nor elongated with a bulbous end. (Although, now that I put my mind to it, I do absorb much more than my apparant capacity would indicate...think litres of olive oil and translate that to information.)

I believe "you are what you read, see and experience in any form." Books, movies, videos, CDs, music in every genre, lyrics, theatre,newpapers, news, ideas from anywhere, and people--all kinds--what they say and the manner in which they behave, end up shaping us. We pick from this, discard that, and mix them all up and make out of these pieces our whole.

You may wonder at the popularity of such books as J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories, or J. R. R. Tolkien's resurrected books: "The Hobbit," and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy in both book and motion picture genres. You may smile condescendingly or indulgently at "Lemony Snicket's" series, which translated recently into film. "The Polar Express," "The Wizard of Oz," "The Secret Garden," "Babe," "Babe in the City," "Finding Nemo," "Mary Poppins," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Beauty and the Beast," and the list goes on and on and on, all are supposedly for "children," and most of them are in at least two genres, some in even more. I know adults who look for children to take to the movies so they won't look foolish going to a children's flick alone. Please... Wonder and awe, beauty and fantasy, mythological beings and adventures, ideas so big they boggle the mind...are they the province of children alone?

Face it: Tom Peters believes in fairytales. He believes in giants to conquer, dragons to slay, and mountains so tall he needs climbing gear, but he believes he can scale them and that you can too. I wonder where he got his initial ideas? Humm....

So does Roy H. Williams, who is known as "The Wizard," and his website is www.wizardofads.com. So does everyone in one way or the other. You are either a Grinch or a Hero in your own life story. It all depends on what you've done with the information you've gleaned from what you've read, what you've seen, and what you've heard and experienced.

Donald Trump probably loved "Monopoly," because that's what he's playing now, along with Wal-Mart, and other "giants" I could name.

I know I'm digressing. I do it all the time; in fact, it's probably one of the things I do best. But I know where I'm going; I just like to take odd paths to get there.

I don't believe in coincidences or accidents or mistakes. I believe there's a reason for everything, no matter how good or how evil it is. Where did I get that idea?

My job, as I see it, is to "extract the precious from the worthless," which means that nothing is without purpose. "God never said it would be easy; He just said it would be worth it."--Me a very long time ago. (I am Pamela Kay Hawkins...not the other Pamela Hawkins who lives near me.) What made me believe that? Reading, "rubber-hits-the-road" experiences, and taking John Milton's advice in his "Aeropagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton...to the Parlament of England," printed 1644. (Hey, just because they're dead doesn't mean they aren't totally contemporary.)

Milton wrote the "Aeropagitica" to "deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered." In other words, he was writing against censorship. (I do love this man, so indulge me.)

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them...." (Take that Deconstructionists!) "And yet...unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."

More Milton, same source: "If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of....

"Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions."..."Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity, will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making."..."Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties....

"And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing."

As you may have gathered, I agree. I also think strangely, as I "see" conversation on a giant blackboard for which I carry a very large eraser. Arguments go up on the board. When my "adversary," in the best sense of the word, finds a hole in my argument, I take out my eraser and erase what I find to be false. In that way, by opining and controversy, Milton's grappling, what is finally left on my blackboard is the closest thing I can get to Truth.

Some find this method of discourse disconcerting and nothing but argumentation. I tried explaining this methodology of my mind to several people, and I finally came up with this: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" That's about as close as it gets, folks.

So what influences formed how you think? They may surprise you.

On Being a Writer

Why would anyone wish to be a writer? I've been a published writer since I was thirteen, and I can tell you why I began, but why I keep at it? Well, now, that's the question isn't it?

I started wanting to write when doctors forced me to remain in bed for one entire year, the year between four and five years old. I had a heart murmur, and if that weren't all, I managed to acquire all the different kinds of Measles during that year as well.

At that time doctors believed you could go blind if exposed to sunlight while ill (and I was very ill) with Measles. So I spent most of the time in the dark.

My mother became the only voice and connection to the outside world, except for the doctors, of course. (They actually made house calls back then.) She read to me until her voice left her, but the next day, she would return and continue reading.

She chose L. Frank Baum's OZ books...all of them (for the uninitiated there are many more that the first, The Wizard of OZ, which to tell the truth lacks when compared to the other works). It may have been dark in my room, but my head filled with pictures and people and grand adventures.

By the end of the year, I could read on my own. My first experience with teaching came in First Grade, my murmur healed, my measles over. (I'd skipped Kindergarten because of the year in bed.) It seemed I already knew how to read, so my teacher assigned me the task of helping the children who were having difficulty learning the skill.

My dedication knew no bounds! I knew the value of books: they opened the eyes of imagination to worlds unthought of. To deny anyone the key to that door was unthinkable. So I taught reading for three years to the children in the First Grade, to the great annoyance of my other teachers who were often forced to excuse me from their classes to help in someone else's.

Of course I kept reading. I read everything I could find in my parents' house, my grandparents' houses, the library, and finally I started asking for books...nothing else...just books for presents for my birthdays, Christmas, or any other time someone asked me what I wanted. A really punk Christmas was a Christmas without one book....

By eight, I had read all of the OZ books and waited for the ones by the illustrators. I had read all of Louisa May Alcott, "The Little Colonel" series, Charles Kingsley, and two books by George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblins and The Princess and Curdie, which left me with a profound sense that there was something I wasn't getting, something which lay just beneath the surface, and I had to find out what it was. There were many other books, Black Beauty and The Black Stallion being two which stood out; the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson; and mythology. (Mother had a textbook from Hockaday in Dallas for mythology, and I couldn't get enough of it.)

So these are the early influences, and why I decided I must be a writer: who wouldn't want to affect people's lives the way these authors had affected mine?

I had a marvelous education at Casady School in Oklahoma City. One teacher, Mr. Bloodgood--sadly deceased--made us write a "theme" every weekend of the school year. Sometimes he would assign a topic; sometimes he gave us our heads. (I laugh when people think writing 500 words is a big deal.) Each theme, typed and double-spaced, was at least five pages long and no more than six. The training and feedback helped me more than I can say.

I always wrote: in my diaries, in journals, for school, and later for newspapers, children, novels and business. I've really written everything except technical.

But there is a wonderful saying: "I hate writing, but I love having written"--that's probably a paraphrase, and I can't remember who said it. (It's not in Bartlett's so I'm lost for the moment. Forgive me.) But it is so true!

When I decide to write, I also see everything else I really should be doing, and because writing can be put off, it is. That is until I met Jack Bickham. (Jack is also now dead through no fault of mine.) You may not know his name, but he wrote over seventy-plus published novels in his time. He's the author of "The Apple Dumpling Gang." He also taught me how to write, by teaching me how to sit in front of the typewriter, paper, computer, and just begin. He didn't care what I turned out; I just had to be in front of the computer, etc., at an appointed time of day, for an appointed amount of time or for a predetermined number of pages produced. To pass his class, you had to write 300 pages of a novel in one semester. To get a good grade, you had to write a pretty good one.

His mantra was: "Your brain is a muscle, and it needs to be exercised. When the process first begins, your brain will rebel, and you will think ' this hurts too much; I think I'll stop.' But you can't stop! The moment your brain figures out you're not going to quit no matter how much it rebels, it will become easier and easier to begin the blank page in the middle of things, not from scratch."

It worked.

The second thing I learned: "writers write." This truth hit me squarely between the eyes over coffee with another friend, who was a university professor.

"You say you are a writer?"
"Yes, I am, " I said.
"What have you written lately?"
"Oh, not much. I'm really just writing for myself."
"Then don't call yourself a writer."
"What?"
"W-r-i-t-e-r , one who writes. If you're not writing, you're not a writer. And if you do write "for yourself," then you're either a coward or fooling yourself. You're certainly not doing anyone else any good, since all of your writing is probably in a drawer."
"But--"
"Hit a nerve? Well, look into that drawer, get something out that actually says something, polish it until you can see yourself in it, then find a publisher of that sort of thing, and send it out. And that means putting a stamp on the envelope!"

I did. I was ashamed not to. The article sold, and a children's book that I'd been doing as a lark, got me a series with Golden Books. Who knew?

OK, so now you know. Writers write, not because they have to, the plain fact is we don't. We choose to for lots of reasons, but the main reason is communicating with some other person out there.

It's hard. Anyone who thinks writing is easy hasn't done it. (Why do you think we all try to find distractions?) The first draft (which is what my blogs are--sorry) is fairly easy and fun. We just babble on about anything. The second draft--oh, God!--pure torture. You find out your heroine has inexplicably changed names two, maybe three times. You've lost a plot thread, and you've got to find it, unravel it, place it seamlessly into the narrative, or nerve yourself to dump it. It adds nothing, but it's so well written!

My particular flaws (yes, I do know what they are) are verbosity (an example of which you are now reading, brave soul you!), falling in love with my characters and forgetting about plot, and reading way too much Dickens as a child and adult. (How can you not love Dickens?) I take the long way round, when the more direct route would serve better. I'm too direct when the long way would add a lot. In short, the first draft equals total rubbish. But I find the nuggets of "possibly great stuff here," and I begin again. But this time, I'm clearer about what I want to say, where I'm going, and who and what I need to get there. By the fourth or fifth draft of a novel, it's getting pretty darned good.

So why do I write? Because I choose to communicate with you, and occasionally, I'll actually have something useful to say.

For my final helpful hint: Rent the DVD of "Finding Forrester" with Sean Connery. It's full of great advice and pretty faithful to the creative process and hard work that is writing.