The Loneliness of Vision

(Alan Lee's Túrin Turambar surrounded by the outlaws who dwelt south of Brethil)

I am trying to read new Fantasy, Children's, YA, and Adult. I've noticed a trend I find very sad, a trend toward very gritty, quasi-horror kind of Fantasy, not vampire fantasy, but Medieval in the sense of gore, lice, torture, corruption, and a Conan type religious mask put over on a parody of the Middle Ages. This is not to say that the fiction does not work; some of it is masterful, as in George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. But it is depressing, very. It's depressing because much of it has a very nihilistic, hopeless sense of life.

I think it is vital, when writing tragedy or about humans in extreme conditions, that the fiction "message" should be: that it is not human to accept the tragedy or the conditions; it is human to keep fighting. Tolkien's story of Túrin Turambar is an excellent example in that you can't get more Gothic, tragic, or oppressed than this story. And it is uplifting. Why? Because, although he is a tragic character, Túrin is heroic. Tolkien understood, first hand, from his experiences in the worst war ever fought (trenches of WWI) that HOW a man acts in the face of impossible tragedy decides everything. He becomes angelic if he refuses to let tragedy defeat his spirit. This was demonstrated over and over and over so many many times in history that the message should be clear, or so I think it should.

I've just finished "Firethorn" by Sarah Micklem. This book was lauded by everyone, and I mean everyone. Picked up by the top agent in the field, first time writer, etc., etc., etc. and the book is evil in a way I find almost impossible to describe. I spent two hours this morning trying to tell Sky why I found it so. It is written by a masterful storyteller, and I will not quibble about her details and how her society is untenable or any of my other petty complaints about world building. I won't go on about how if one does something "realistic" it had better damn work on the larger scale, not just the way the cloth is woven. I really, really, really wanted Micklem to save the book and save the character. Instead, she let me down. In shorthand, this book is an SP, Nomad, Gen X book that substitutes the lowest of human animal traits for anything noble or heroic. I will not mince words. Sarah Micklem has no reason to heed my comments; she's obviously wildly popular and successful. The book gave me nightmares.

(One of my favorite artists: Chmiel, who does quite a bit of Tolkien work.)

Okay. To go on. Entirely depressed by Micklem's book, unable to tear myself from it, I started having that terrible sinking feeling that my own work was lousy and that even if my intentions were good, I was going to fail and fail badly. Ad nauseum. I will not go on and whine about my own severity to myself that demands that I keep trying and trying and trying when it's obvious that I'm missing the gene that will get me published. It's not anything with my work; it's a kind of feeling that my work doesn't have.

But I pushed through the depression even though I am really sick today on top of being depressed, and was sorting through my art collection (some of which you see here) trying to think of a style that will work for my own book. I opened up the ms to go through the basic visual elements of each chapter and skimmed.

To my surprise, this book is light years beyond "Firethorn," for all Micklem's talent. It needs to be combed more and polished more, but the backbone is there. I have no confidence in it, no hope that anyone at all will see what I see, but that doesn't mean that it is not there. The book is shining. This has not happened to me before; I've always only seen the flaws, not the light of it, the shape of it, shining there, despite the flaws.

All during the work on this book, especially since joining Facebook, I've realized that this work that I have chosen to do completely isolates me. I have chosen a very, very hard road. I have chosen to speak from the heart and from my mind, no matter how subtle, no matter how complex, no matter how sublime. I have chosen, not to try to get published or to sell a book or to write something that people will read; I have chosen to give the best within me to the best out there. I suspect that if the series ever does sell that most people will like it for wrong reasons. But if only, if only, they will somehow sense what I am trying to set down on paper...

I feel cursed for this work, for this desire to do this work. Maybe not cursed, but cast out. I don't talk about it, fearing to bore people. I don't even like to allude to it or brag about it or complain about it. I'm completely obsessed with this work, so much so that I've almost destroyed my life over it, and I cannot even tell people, whisper to people, "do you understand?" I feel so completely isolated and cut off, more and more and more so as the series rises up out of "hopeful wannabe" to a sledgehammer of accomplishment, and I want more and more to hide it away, to keep it from people, to pretend that I am not doing anything. Part of me finds this shameful and so I'm trying to write this blog about it.

But I cannot possibly go to Facebook for what it is and say, "I am so filled with passion over this work that I am shaking as I sit here." How can one say that? It is like being a closet something--a friend of mine once said it was just like being an alcoholic. The most sublime thing in my life, the great Joy, is, to others, like being an alcoholic. Is it any wonder I cannot speak of it? I retreat into technical discussions to pretend I don't care.
(Tony Dezuniga, a magnificent comic artist)

And so, I've decided (as you might can deduce from these three drawings) that these are closest to what I want as the style of the artwork. Dezuniga's warrior here is stunning, not because he's a barbarian, but because Dezuniga has the ability to gesture. I do not want to do photo-real art or cartoon art or polished art, but to give the allusion of emergence out of the page like Lee's picture at the top of this entry. Chmiel does this with marvelous skill.

I want now to go on. I have the backbone, both in drawing and in writing. I want now to do to my art as these three pictures will indicate and to my writing the same way. I want to learn when to leave something white, unfinished, raveling off. Rand was hard and clean, Vermeer. I do not want the complexity of Dickens or George R. R. Martin--I want this emergence, this drawingness feeling.

I am in complete and utter pain, unable even to talk about the vision that I have. I am so completely and utterly in the grip of it, struck dumb with Joy, and I feel like a babbling idiot. I walk so softly now, so afraid that just as I am gripping it, I will slip up, mess up, somehow not be able to show the light. I feel that it is also so important to talk of the importance, to try to express the complete and utter pain and joy of the creation, of the making of the best within me.

And my question to Sarah Micklem is: how can such effort have been for this book you have written? To make the effort alone is so heroic, and to make it to show art that despises the Will, the Joy, the Beingness of this--how is it possible? Does she feel responsible? Does she even know? How can she live it it and know? Are her values so completely different, so utterly hopeless and nihilistic? Does anyone else see this or will I just sound like a fool? An old fuddy-duddy. Somehow concerned with heroism and morality in a world that scorns such things.

A hard day today. I am saved only by the Will within, my own pigheaded stubborn love of this vision, a desire to keep trying to bring back the fire of God.

Poetry in Translation

(This is an old blog from my old web site.)

Níl cosaint ar an mbás agam;
gabhann an lasiar i ngreim ar a bhfuil lamuigh na huaire;
cuireann an bás m'anam ar lasadh;
is mé an cleite agus is amhlaidh an sciath.

An Hala Havac
by A. R. Stone

"If we set our Souls on Fire, would we Bleed?"

The Celtic languages provide for me a way to directly connect to the mind of the ecstatic. Let me repeat, I have no ability to believe, in god, in afterlife--in anything. This does not mean that I don't think gravity is real; I have the expectation of gravity working, but no belief. The above lines from the poem are a way of describing a state of living which is celebrated in ceremonies like the Japanese "sepukku" or some Catholic ceremonies involving torment of the body. It is well known that, at the point of no return, the mind suddenly clears, as if a huge wind has swept across it, and the jumble of concerns about the body, about one's state, about all the trivia of input that occupies our daily thoughts, is completely gone. It is a very freeing feeling and often associated with a group of experiences: extreme clarity of mind, heightened awareness, sensory overload, feelings of time stretching out and vanishing--much of the same sorts of experiences of a drug trip or an advanced bout of meditation.

There are many, many things I don't understand. One of these is: if one experiences a mental state by accident, why cannot one then have access to it at will? I have found that the experience of any mental state is an opportunity to load that into my selection and to call upon it at any time. I find that the mind is what it is willed to be. Yes, there are the distractions: exhaustion, hunger, distress, and etc.; yet I find it possible, barring no extreme circumstances, to call up any mental state I choose. What I don't understand is why this is hard. I suspect that it is merely a matter of will and maybe people who report the difficulty of doing this do not want to do it, for whatever reason. Madness, ignorance, fear--there may be a number of reasons. However, one of the easy ways (for me) to call up mental states like the one above is to tie it to a language or a set of words, or, of course, music.

Yet part of calling up a mental state is knowing it. The above state is a bit dangerous to experience for the first time. Often people will go to extreme lengthsto recall it. It is a state closely associated with death, usually death by violence. However, it is also associated with religious ecstasy. I find it to be much more common among the confederation mythology as the berserk or poetical frenzy. Our ancestors were much more comfortable with frenzy than we are. Yet, as people who meditate realize, this state can be one of great calm as well as "the edge of adrenaline". The above poem translates something like this: "I cannot ward of death; everlasting glory has consumed my mind; because of death fire fills my soul; I am the feather and so the wing." It is a common form in both Japanese and Celtic poetry to set up one kind of state and fling the mind into the true state with a juxtaposition of an unexpected thought. Irish Gaelic works extremely well for this kind of set-up and works equally well for talking about the "flaming soul" or the skull of Baba Yaga. This state works best to "change" the shape of the mind, especially if one is stuck in a certain mind set.

All languages can be ecstatic or melancholy or express the nuances of scientific thought. However, the languages descendant from the confederations are exceptional at expressing heightened states of awareness such as the berserk. Their cultures "grew up" in extreme conditions where life-expectancy was short and men were eager to die in battle and ashamed to die of disease. Julius Caesar speaks with great eloquence on the battle madness of these people and their joy in near-death situations. Some have decided that the cults of worship associated with this kind of mind were caused by drugs, yet I believe that it was simply part of their culture. So, in modern German, you can evoke images of the "übermensch" which in English sound a bit embarrassing. In Irish you can summon up images of bloodthirsty headhunters and sound poetical rather than just crazy.

The converse is also true. In the South, death was very closely tied to sex and in the North death was closely tied to ecstasic berserker frenzy. So in Southern languages one can more easily express grief, pain and dying of love, which in Northern languages sounds a bit less macho. One should die on the hurling field, not in a woman's arms, so to speak. The love of battle is not so prevalent in the South, where battle and religion are handfast and battle becomes a holy duty, not a rough and tumble drunken party. One cuts one's arm off, not in love of battle, but in love of unrequited love. God becomes love, obtainable and painful to experience. The Northern hammer and eagle gods wielding their lightning spears become, in the South, the god tormented, sacrificed and wept over by his women.

Here is a poem from the Wim Wenders angels movies, "Wings of Desire" and "Faraway, So Close" to show what I mean by the angels working in German, but not well in English:

Als das Kind Kind war,
wüsste es nicht, dass es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

The real problem is with the word "seelen" and "beseelt", a cognate. In German there is a COMPLETELY different architecture for the words "spirit" and "soul" than there is in English. This is one of the reasons Max Stirner is hard to translate, because his primary point is over the word "Geist" which has a different architeture or cognate structure than the word "ghost". This is where things get interesting. English although descended from a Germanic language, was heavily influenced, not only by French, a Romance language, but also various forms of Goidelic and Brythonic. Both these Celtic influences upon English have been downplayed, mostly due to the politics of the Normans. However, to be brief, the influence of Latin thought AND, more importantly, Celtic thought, upon understanding the soul and spirit, encouraged a completely different way of talking about these two subjects than one finds in German. This difference in thinking has led to a mess of misunderstanding between the Germanic peoples and the Anglo-French that exploded in war twice in the last century. However, for our little translation, the difference in thinking is profound, but hopefully won't lead us into war!

In English, we have the word "soul" which seems like it would fit the word "seele" and appears in dictionaries thus. Our word is from the AS word "sa-wol" which means "having life" but is related to the words dealing with "sowing" or "sawen" all implying the setting of seed as related to having life. The world "wol" means "disease", so given the Anglo-Saxon drudge mind (they were so literal and so prosaic that it makes me blush to be related to them), "sa-wol" probably meant "without disease" or "capable of siring children". Well, something happened between "sa-wol" and "soul", probably when the foreign word "espiritu" or to breathe, came in to give us "anima" or life imbued with breath. In the Celtic languages, the language of life is the language of breath. Now, in the Celtic world, "anam" is basically "life" and related to breath. But the older word for soul, used in more cognates and compound phrases (how you get an older word) is "intinn" which is "brain" (inchinn) and "mind" but cognates with "tinne" or "fire". So the Anglo-Saxons could be with seed and the Celts could have minds enfired. Two really, really different people. But let's continue. The Latins were basically with breath, or animated, but the Greeks were with breath "pneumos" but also "psychic" giving the English borrows another set of words. So, for the Celts, life was in the head, the seat of the soul, and for the Classical peoples, life was in the breath or the chest or the heart of the soul. What about the Germans? Does "seele" mean merely "not-diseased"?

Like the English, the Germans have ten different words for the meaning of "soul", all of which change in different contexts. Like most Europeans, they don't know whether the soul is the heart or the mind, but the word "seele" is not the prosaic word it is in Anglo-Saxon. Like the English word, it has evolved into a word deeply connotated. But, the architecture went a different way. The word "seele" stayed close to the word "animus" and is popularly used in psychology. In cheap dictionaries, the word "seele"translates as "soul" but let's see what happens when we understand the MEANING of the word in it's architectural surroundings. Here's our poem again and the translation:

Als das Kind Kind war,
wuüte es nicht, dass es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

Let's do some translation based on understanding the German context of the words and not just using the dictionary.

While the child, child was
he did not grok that he child was
everything to him was alive
and all living were one.

However, this translation still is not right, in that you can't say what is implied in German, which is a very simple idea, carried all through the movies, the idea that while one is living innocently, one can't see the separation: all is soul, all is life, all is breathing all in one. So the words are tied to the Fall, or the awareness of being separate from the world, or individuated, the theme of the movie. The angels are beings who are all beings, and then they "fall" into life "literally" and are dismayed or delighted to find that they are separate beings from life, or self-aware, a gift of humanity as controversial as mortality and maybe tied to it? So the religious would have us think that to die, one joins again into the un-distinguished "oneness" of life.

One of the points in this discussion, is that in German this is said very succinctly and eloquently in this short verse, where in English it took a long time to wind around into it. Even when I took liberties with the translation, it didn't work very well, and the translation of Hanke's says little of what is implied in the German.

Does this mean that translation means that the translator has to be on the same page as the writer? You bet, but there is still the problem that even with a good translator, the connotations of the word may defeat the argument presented in the orignal language, especially when the throughts vary so much, as in the nature of the soul. And I haven't even got into the implications of German in capitalizing all the nouns and the fact that the neuter tense of "das Kind" further strengthens the innocence of the child. However, to be fair to Hanke, the ENTIRE poem (about sixty-five lines) translated into English begins to build a word picture that points better in the direction of the original German, however, so sadly, the music of "als das kind kind war" is completely lost. :(