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.

Psychodrama as Symptomatic of Our Times

The message is that we are all broken.

We are all broken.

We are all broken.

I admire my sister greatly for her response to this message, which was (I paraphrase) "so you get up at some point and you just go on from there." That is real bravery, to say, "today is right now" and refuse to live 10 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, stuck at the moment when the vessel was cracked.

What I find appalling about people's opinions about emotions is that people look at emotions as they might look upon car crashes; they tend to focus on the damage, on the emotional life that is on the extremes of pain or excitement or danger. As if they were all emotional adrenaline junkies. I do not discount the fact that most people feel that sharing emotions is to share pain, for we live lives of stress and trauma. My disappointment is not with emotions, but with the imbalance.

Drama is a way of expressing a story. In drama, one watches actors and those actors must convey believable human involvement with the characters or something is lost, the story is no longer captivating. Jane Austen believed that the novel was the place to explore, not drama, but the evolution of a single human mind through different states. Many writers of the 20th Century used this powerful vehicle to explore differences in humans, from the pathological, to the sub-standard, to the eccentric. As it became more and more popular to explore psychological pathologies, I believe that people started to glom onto pathology as their own, sympathizing with it and wanting to heal themselves. Not only is this dangerous, but it is attractive to the degree that it is addictive for some people. Worse, yet, it is so attractive that the publishing industry has found, in pathology, a huge market.

I recently picked up two series of books to read: C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. The juxtaposition of these two series gave me the opportunity to see the range of psychodrama in novels. Both series are best sellers, both writers went to the screen with great success, both writers are separated only by about thirty years. C. S. Forester was English, but he lived much of his life in the States. However, the differences between these two writers in time, in gender, and in nationality, influenced their writing styles. Let me be explicit now about my prejudice: I found Hornblower to be a joy to read and Bradley to be painfully boring, almost unreadable. Despite my own prejudices, it is important to note what is popular and why. Hornblower continues to be popular, but editors lean toward buying more material like Bradley's wildly popular Mists of Avalon. The reasoning behind this is that Bradley is what the market wants.

It is not my intention to talk about the market here, but psychodrama. I define psychodrama to be drama that is based on an emotional fixation in one or more characters that is potentially disabling to themselves or those around them. This can be a powerful tool, such as in Macbeth, Hamlet, or the Shining. There are types of fiction that depend heavily on psychodrama: some Romance, Horror and some Suspense/Mystery. I do think that psychodrama, like cheeseburgers is best when indulged in sparingly, especially when it is "supersized" as it is in the powerful book, the Shining. Unfortunately, it is so powerful, that it has become bloated and has poisoned popular fiction.



It astounds me that music missed this, dance missed this, even art dabbled with it and missed it, but what of fiction? Even movies are saved from it by the beauty of the scenery that often accompanies even the more horrific of tales. But what of the novel, what of the story? I am sad to see that too often action stories, space stories, Westerns, History and Fantasy are filled with psychodrama. I think that it is more powerful, when depicting some situation that is in itself tense and horrible or action-packed that if the emotional element is a bit downplayed it is more powerful. One does not have to focus on every blown-up soldier to appreciate the Napoleonic wars. One does not have to know the captain's torment with his dying wife to appreciate the story of his sub fighting off the Nazi U-boats. One does not have to be tormented by aliens to explore the galaxy.

What makes Hornblower work so well is that Forester downplays interpersonal drama. His captain goes mad, but it is referred to with a single line or two SHOWING us that the captain huddles in his bed and whimpers whenever anyone comes near him. Hornblower works as a character because he is intensely aware of his own failings so much so that he refuses to acknowledge them to the audience, both the reader and the men around him. With one short sentence, he dismisses his overwhelming fear of heights to climb up into the shrouds and perform a miracle to save a sail in the midst of combat. He does so because the action forces him to do so. He is the hero, he cannot stand by and worry, he must act. And so we believe his rise through the oppressive navy despite being poor and having no influential friends. We believe him when he burns his glove up putting out the fuse of a bomb that has landed on his ship because we know that no matter how he FEELS, he will act. We end up cheering him because we know that his feelings toward himself are those of a man broken, but he picks up, he goes on, and we know that he is braver than the man who cannot go on for fear. We know it. We feel it. We feel the uplifting of a MAN, a man who will go on from this moment, this now. It is a human thing to put aside the pain, the suffering, the past and to do what has to be done.

There is a time and place for both the stoic and the psychodramatic in fiction. I'm not sure that they should be mixed. I think that that is the failing of Bradley.

Bradley tells action tales loaded with believable magic, usually of the psychic kind. What ruins her stories (this is my opinion) is that her characters do not participate in the story, but are constantly distracted by their brokenness. Now why excellent novels like the Shining work so well is that the situation is so, well, normal. King specializes in abnormal or paranormal characters in depressingly normal situations. What could be more banal and normal and boring than a family caretaking a hotel over a winter? Layer upon layer, King builds up the tension that is only inside these characters--the situation remains so quiet, so boring, that we are totally caught up in the nightmares. We want the flood of blood, the ghosts, the horror, because the situation is so bereft of anything interesting. Thus we can say, "if I were alone, stuck in a place like that, with cabin fever, stir crazy, yes, I would start seeing things too," and it WORKS.




Bradley has a remarkable set up in Darkover. She has a planet where people have evolved psychic powers to the extent that they can teleport and blow each other up. They call upon forces so strong that they are taken over by interdimensional evils and they fight each other to the death. Very like Andre Norton's Witchworld series. She has the Terran Empire try to exploit Darkover or interact with it, and she has complicated politics where one faction is trying to save the world by forbidding the use of these powers and another trying to cut themselves off from being exploited by Terra. The world is hostile and different from Earth. And what do her characters do? Worry about whether they are gay or not. Worry about whether they can handle marriage or not. Worry about whether their fathers like them or not. Worry about, well, you get the point, although I'm belittling it with sarcasm, they spend much of the book worrying. So much so that the action suffers and Bradley spends a great deal of time with characters standing around talking to each other about their problems.

One of the reasons that horror can work extremely well is that all the psychodrama is internalized to the point where the characters become afraid to talk to each other. Thus they make mistakes and cannot perform simple reality checks with each other. Bradley's characters end up in impossible situations where they cannot talk to each other (and thus solve some problem) because they worry that their father might misunderstand them or reject them. In an action story like Bradley has set up, she doesn't have time to lay the groundwork for a father-son exploration, but throws this in and we are left saying "why don't they just talk about it and we can get on with the story." After a while, the characters cannot DO anything at all, the action slows way down, and there is way, way too much dialogue and people spend all their time trying to figure out the other person's feelings. This can work in drama, if that is what the drama is about. Romantic comedy specializes in misunderstandings. Family dramas work if that is the focus of the story. In action adventure, there are too many loose ends, too much going on, and the psychodrama gets way, way too distracting.

I've noticed in the workplace, that in places where there is real work to be done, like restaurants, the workers tend to downplay psychodrama. They may shout, curse, stomp, rage, and yell at each other, but they have to keep cooking. Most of the time, the tense action of the work makes it so people just don't have time to sit around and wail about their feelings. In offices or in retail where the pace is sometimes so boring that you're about crazy, psychodrama tends to play too large a part. Personally, I have a distaste of indulging in emotional problems. I from a blue collar background where people had so many problems that the prevalent attitude was "deal with it." Boredom was relieved by the latest drama, but the emotions were downplayed. I've heard stories told of drunken husbands cutting open their wives and the wives going to work because they had to feed the kids told in a matter of fact voices that made them intensely believable.



But the strange thing is, that way, way too much effort is put into "getting along" or exploring how to deal with each others' feelings at work or in situations where one should be working. Like fiction, there is a place for this. I've often been in offices or stores that were crippled by someone's drama when there was work to be done. The work did not get done. We're so keen to blame Asia or Mexico for taking away jobs and ruining our workplaces when there is this huge enemy within that demands that people show their feelings and underlings or co-workers deal with them. Bosses can be broken and workers expected to empathize and commiserate instead of work. Communication about work slows way down so that people can try to untangle their feelings and the feelings of others. Action comes to a standstill. For the workplace, this is death.

I have to wonder if the popular preoccupation with feelings, especially the negative feelings, has made gluttons out of everyone. And what about the sublime? We get to laugh. We get to be excited. Sometimes the music or the scenery is sublime, but what about people? Do people get to indulge in their positive feelings in fiction? The editors say no, that that doesn't make for good fiction. A hero must have a hole in his heart. He must be broken.

I'm going to stand up and say, "I am not broken." If the vessel is a bit cracked, then I want, instead of frantically repairing it, to fill myself with light instead of mud. I desire the sublime. I desire that which elevates the spirit, that which makes me love my fellow man, that which makes me love being alive. I do not like horror because I do not find it cathartic like many do. I find it depressing. I like action stories like that of Hornblower because they make me feel that man can do what has to be done, on his feet, facing the giant, facing the problems, facing what he has to face to DO, to ACT, to live.

We do not need a war to make us struggle to survive. We only need to be like my sister or like fictional characters like Hornblower and say, "yes, that happened. Yes, I am ashamed of it. Yes, I am afraid of it. Yes, I am damaged by it. But so what?" Get real. Deal with it. What an incredibly admirable attitude. And how despised! Certainly, one has to know why one acts the way one does, but that is understanding motive, not living the psychodrama. I'm going on, but I think we need more examples of the sublime, of the brave, and of the path shining before us, so we do not keep looking at our shadows.

Yes, all of us are broken, but all of us are sublime. I know which I prefer to have guide my way.