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.

For God hath Wrought no Greater Beauty than Man, part II

If I could explain my fascination with the human form!

In The Tales of Anieth I wanted to show a diversity of character, not just write the same plot with similar personalities. When I first began to write, it was enough to have a hero and heroine and a spread of other people, protagonists and antagonists. However, something in me demanded that I give my characters integrity, that they believe in who they are and what they are doing. As a consequence, no on in the series is evil or bad. I've come to believe as the Buddhists do, that no one is evil or bad, that the evil and badness we see around us is not the result of man, but of actions ill-considered, words said in anger or fear, the lack of responsibility or ownership that is fostered in each of us at an early age when we imitate our parents who give no reason for their anger or demands. We are born into slavery and why should any of us learn otherwise? I think that some people, like me, are also just born perverse, unable to accept anything as it is, doubters and questioners who say, "is there not a better way?"

I was also born without the ability to believe. You will read the word "god" here, but it is pointing to a feeling in humanity that is beyond what most people consider human. A creative force. A guiding force. A universal love. You could substitute "benevolence" or "the greater self" or "nature" in the place of this word; I leave it as god because I have discovered that even Christians want to better themselves, to be more like angels than like apes, to be rid of fear and pain and grief and to rise up and know joy. The pointer to god is the pointer to joy; it is not the fault of man that he is so critical of himself that he can't always see his own heart of glory.

Korutos Cheros o Gallanis began as a "bad guy." From interacting with this fictional character and his creation, I have learned some profound things. I have learned to respect the power of my own mind and to listen to myself. Characters can take on life for the author and Korutos rose up against the role I had assigned for him and demanded better of me. For twenty years, I have been on his path, "walking in his shoes" so to speak. From a beginning as a brutal, thoughtless man, he became another profoundly moral man, a man who defied an entire Empire to keep his word. He is also a tragic character, restrained by his belief in a corrupt system, trying to use himself as an example of enlightenment when he himself is the only one enlightened. But Korutos's heart evaded me for a long time until I heard a piece of music, a song, which made me understand him and honor him. It is only when we honor characters that they can have integrity.

Korutos was also an attempt to get away from stereotypes in Fantasy of British looking people. He is a Zelosian, rather like a Persian. I wanted to get away from beauty as the beauty shown in American films. A consequence of the creation of Korutos is that people identify with him very heavily and he is a favorite of many readers.

Kileen Ivava was another challenge. Original to the 1983 book, The Star of Aragon, Kileen was my attempt at drawing a character who was very different from a "normal" heroine. She turned out to be too much of a challenge for most readers who saw her passive resistance as open compliance. She was a character motivated by the superego and did what she thought she should do to save other people. She was so selfless that people overlooked that her path in the books was to discard responsibility for others and to take up responsibility for herself alone. She was another character who thought she was doing the best thing when all that happened as a result was to get more ensnarled in the wrong path.

Kileen was also an attempt to break out of American standards of beauty. She is based on several models who were popular in the 90's, but her coloring was anathema to British standards and American standards. She became four characters as the books expanded into a series.

Kileen's counterpart, Faol Abluaith, was also a controversial character, but remains my most "Objectivist" character in that he is a man who is completely self-contained. One of the ideas I got from reading Rand, was that of the maker or the creator. Faol became the essence of creativity, both creating art, his home, and his own self in the sense that he is a shapeshifter, but a shapeshifter of the mind, making of himself multi-mind, or the mind of the creator who lives through the images of Truth that he creates. He is another instance as well of a non-standard beauty. He was also my first attempt to do a character solely from a description since I have never found a picture that resembles him. I often find pictures of people who resemble my characters. Some, like Korutos, are a mix of those pictures.

One of my best characters remains Dubh Daracha. He is a successful instance of the creation of a character that was not my own personality. He is also an instance of a character who is not a intellectual character, but a character who is very wise. I was fascinated by characters like Quai Chang Kane who were not "head" characters but were still capable of wisdom and curiosity. I wanted, in Dubh, to celebrate a beauty that was very unlike what is usually shown to us through writers like Rand. I also wanted to show a male character who was not like the Luke Skywalker/Harry Potter type, but still very "male." I wanted to create a character of the earth, to contrast with his best friend, Trean Alonrach, who is a fire and air character.

But I wanted my characters to be the reality of man, to look like the sublime in man, to be men, not elves or another species that could be written off as "that's how elves behave because they're elves" rather than a reflection of what is possible in man. When I created the world, I also went to history to create societies that were possible for man and not an ideal that could not be realized. The irony of the Libertarian dilemma is that it was a common model for many societies, but cannot exist in this day and age, not because men are not capable of it, but because the model requires certain conditions, the largest of which is a very mobile society that is NOT real estate based. To expect Libertarianism to succeed under Empire conditions is like asking a starving man to share his food. Some will, some can, but it is not a successful model for a society.

The power of fiction in creating a sense of life has been demonstrated. Fiction is also very powerful in creating the illusion of a living society filled with instances of personality that are not common around us.

It is my goal, in creating a world, to be the god who wrought no greater beauty than man, for god is me and I am god and I am greater than any beauty by creating it.