allanhunter.net Blog

I don’t spend a huge amount of time at the computer (college teachers have so many other claims on our time) but I do spend quite a lot of time writing.  Those of you who read this blog may not know it, however, so I’ve decided to let you all know that this is not the only place I write.  I’m a regular series writer (once a month since last April) for PlanetLightWorker Magazine which you can find on-line. I also write for their sister publication CNE  and for inspired Parenting Magazine, both of which are also on-line.  The articles are about 1800 words each and so rather too long for blog entries, yet you might want to look them up anyway. They deal specifically with writing, Memoir, the six Archetypes, and with knowing more about who we are using archetypes as a lens.

It’s easy for one’s efforts to become fragmented in life and in the blogosphere. The blog I write occasionally for Amazon.com reaches many people who might not know about this blog or about PlanetLightWorker. Unfortunately, though, in England Amazon.co.uk doesn’t have the author blog capability, so there’s little chance of them stumbling across what I write.

Why should I worry?  Well, authors write because we believe we have something valuable to communicate that deserves wider dissemination, so we wonder, often, about how word can get out effectively so the discussions can happen.  And to some extent that depends upon you, dear reader.  To whom do you talk about what you read…? The conversations begin or continue, my friends, with you.

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading just about everything of Penelope Fitzgerald’s I could get my hands on, and finding myself unexpectedly in a new realm of delicious, sharply-observed understatement.  She penetrates so easily the polite evasions we all live by and accept, and can turn a section of dialogue into something extraordinary by the way she delivers the final sentence so that, suddenly, we see with new eyes.

Now I’m all set to begin the memoir of her father and Uncles, “The Knox Brothers”. Since all four brothers achieved eminence it promises to be a splendid read.
In some ways Fitzgerald’s plots matter far less than the marvelous wisdom we see as we move towards their conclusions, which is probably why she never achieved commercial superstar status - despite winning many prizes.  Plots and resolutions are something that readers want, desperately it seems, especially when life rarely provides them, and memoir almost certainly doesn’t.  How else do we account for the perennial allure of mystery and detective fiction, of thrillers, of suspense genres?

Perhaps what Fitzgerald lets us know in her own gentle way is that we can’t expect dramatic denouements in most of life.  Perhaps the best we can hope for is knowing, after the fact, what has happened, and then being able to access the wisdom….

One of the things one notices about Melvyn Bragg’s ‘Remember Me’, which I have just finished, is that the inward journey which both characters attempt destroys one of them and nearly destroys the other - and one can’t help feeling that things didn’t have to be that way.

I’m a great believer in this inward journey.  That’s why I teach Memoir, and write books about the life journey, and teach ‘The Therapeutic uses of Writing’, and counsel people. It can certainly be tricky, and even hard work.  Sometimes it can be dangerous, and it’s usually frightening at some point.  Yet it is not a one-way journey into the abyss unless one fails to ask for help.

Perhaps we all have to meet with our own private ‘Heart of Darkness’ and discover that it is, in fact, our own heart.  Many cultures that we mis-label as primitive know this, and they take great care that this journey should not be left to chance, that there are guides and helpers and forms to follow. This assures that the journey can be taken successfully and that the trip to the underworld allows us to retrieve what has to be re-claimed, and that we leave that space, like Orpheus, without looking back.

Bragg’s book is compelling, haunting, and a heart-breaker.  And to some extent it tells us that we, all of us, have help at hand if we wish to ask for it. The characters in the story, representatives of their time, don’t fully seem to recognize that. It’s not a journey we can take without a few guides, a sword and a shield perhaps, and even a ball of string to allow us to find the way back.

Perhaps I could sell more books if I advertised them as guide-books for the soul’s journey, but that sounds rather pretentious.  My old therapist in England put it this way: “It’s like you’re going on a bus journey to someplace you’ve never been before.  But I’ve made the trip before and so I might be helpful.”

British understatement.

Today brought news that Michael Stone - the Irish loyalist who had been convicted of murdering three funeral mourners, then released in a political prisoner swap, and who was in 2006 wrestled to the ground after he entered the Irish Parliament carrying bombs and a gun - had been found guilty of attempted murder. Stone had rushed into the building while the assembled politicians were attempting to work out a peace deal. The gun, the knife, and the bombs he carried were anything but peaceful in intent.

In the Guardian on-line’s report there was a picture that summed up so much. A gray-haired gent of middle years, neat in blazer and tie, has Stone’s right arm in an expert hold.  Stone, his other hand grabbing a railing, seems to be bellowing in rage or fear or perhaps both. Moments later I imagine them both on the floor, as Stone was subdued and handcuffed.

That the photographer was able to get the picture at all seems to suggest that Stone was, at that point, effectively unable to do much.

And there is that dear, fearless, no non-sense gent in the blue blazer, hardly a hair out of place, his lips set firm, forcing the madman to the ground. I don’t usually care much for violence, which is why when I see a man who looks like James Bond’s father doing a supremely efficient job of bringing down an adversary I take it to be inspiring. There was no shoot-out, such as one might have had in the US. Just cool courage, decisive action, and ultimately a respect for all human life.

A Warrior-Lover if ever there was one; a symbol of the basic decency that won’t allow bullies and terrorists any chance to throw their weight around; a public employee, a security guard….  People everywhere can be heartened to know that some of us, at least, refuse to be victims.

Here’s a toast to the everyday hero.

Thanks to Mary Lou, who sent me Melvyn Bragg’s novel ‘Remember Me’, I have been reassessing the overlap between Memoir and novel.  Bragg, who is a household name in England but less well known here, has given us a portrait of a marriage in which he freely moves into the consciousness of both the lovers, of their parents, and of their friends, which of course breaks all the so-called rules of what Memoir is supposed to do.

After all, in memoir as in life one can only guess at the inner thoughts of others, and speculation is sometimes the best one can manage at times about even one’s own thoughts.  So to see Bragg assert, so convincingly, that such a person felt this on such a day and that his counterpart felt that, well, it feels almost miraculous.

Bragg has been quite clear in various interviews that he was drawing from his own life directly at times, so that he could come to understanding in a new way.

The danger, as I’m sure you can see, is that any novel has to do several things to  make its claim to be a novel.  It has to have a structure that is recognizable; it has to have a sense of closure that is satisfying to the reading public.  It has to be shaped in ways that Memoir can avoid, and it has to be told in certain ways.  And it has to be more definite than Memoir.  This can lead us to tricky ground, since any writer, in the pursuit of a viable story, will feel free to write what works rather than what was.  Novels can lead to contrivances such that they soothe the writer (and the reader) rather than telling the truth.

Only the finest of novelists can tell a fictional tale and still reach the essentials - and at that point it doesn’t matter that we have a novel, because we know we’re in the hands of a Magician.  Bragg is just such a magician.

I’m the son of a veteran, and almost everyone I know of my age is a child of the generation that was impacted by World War Two, so to that extent they are all Veterans.  Certainly even my aged aunts and relatives in England were part of the fray. Aunt Betty lost a brother, had another as a POW, and spent night after night crouched in her Anderson shelter in the garden hoping it would actually be safer than the house when the German bombs fell.  As it turned out an unexploded bomb lodged in the foundation of their home, which was built on a hillside, and even though the house wasn’t blown apart by the time the device had been made safe and hauled away the place was a bit of a shambles. A home invasion by any description.

My great Uncle Steve, who’d been in WW1, used to watch my parents and friends as they talked about their war. I know now what he was thinking - that this sort of scarring is handed on from generation to generation.  He’d hoped that ‘his’ war would be the last, and that in a couple of generations people would be healed.  But we’ve had a tough time getting that much peace back into the world.

Now, of course, we have wars on drugs, the War on Want, wars on ignorance, wars on poverty…  As if war were actually a good thing.

What we haven’t got is a coherent plan on saving the planet.  For that the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day may be past already. It’s a couple of minutes before midnight, perhaps.

Last night’s news told us about GM, Ford and others being on the brink of collapse, and going, hands out, to ask for money.  Lots of money.

The thinking is that these companies, like the Banks, are ‘too big’ to be allowed to go under.  If they do … and dreadful mumbles of impending disaster are muttered, amid gloomy growls.

So let’s be clear about this.  I don’t want anyone put out of work.

Yet, for decades the US car industry has produced uncompetitive junk. Foreign cars that get twice the gas mileage are excluded because of ’safety considerations’ that are, in fact, thinly veiled protectionism of the markets.  That’s why a European Smart Car gets 65 mpg there, but has to be re-engineered for the US so it gets barely 45 mpg - or about the same as a hybrid.  Result, our domestic products are protected and there is little incentive to make a truly excellent product.

US vehicles are no longer competitive and no longer well made.

Like the dinosaurs, their time has gone.  Now, if you want to create a park to have dinosaurs preserved for posterity that’s fine, but let’s not pretend that it’s the same as a functioning economy.

I’ll just pop out now to do some errands in my old Buick.

That was Miranda from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, when first looking upon the court of Milan, washed up on her island.  As a good Innocent she was able to see only the excellent qualities of the people before her, and so she was thrilled to meet them.  She looked right past their somewhat shaky history of Palace intrigues.  Prospero, her father and an actual sorcerer, becomes a Magician when he decides to learn from her, and trust that people will do the right thing if we give them a chance.

Why do we need to know this?  Because this is now our new world.

Obama’s election is our chance to do things better, and it’ll take trust, cooperation, and forgiveness of others. We could revel in looking backwards at eight years of misrule but, actually, we don’t have time.  The world needs some decisive action and some real commitment from all of us.  Now is the time for change, not for finger-pointing. Let us all remember that.

I feel as if I’ve been released from jail because of this election.  Suddenly all those things that seemed inevitable, such as the continued polluting of the planet, the ghastly arrogance of our foreign policy actions, the wholesale looting of public funds by Wall Street, the blatant contempt of low income workers, immigrants, those without health care, and the growing ranks of the homeless - suddenly all this does not seem inevitable any more.  Now we have a chance.  We also have a lot of work to do, but we have a real chance, now.  Let us not lose it.

And as I walked down the street I wondered what the African Americans with whom I shared the pavement were thinking. I know what I was thinking.  It was that until now I’ve been part of a cosy lie in which I’ve said that all Americans are equal, and that color does not matter - - even though I knew in my heart that this is not the way people of color were actually treated.  Now I know that equality can, for the first time, actually become the daily truth. I don’t have to tell my students anymore that African Americans are our equals, while at the same time I see the way they are treated and feel shame for the racism that still pervades some parts of our country.  Obama has shown that, before God and Man, we are all equal if we work on it and insist that we are.

Living an inauthentic life can be exhausting, especially in such matters. We don’t have to do that anymore.  What a relief….

You’ll perhaps have noticed that I’ve tried to keep this blog non-political in the sense that I don’t comment extensively on the single huge issue that’s been hanging over us for the last several months.

Or, in my case, for eight years.

Last night Obama was elected and today the hugeness of my emotions are almost too large to allow me to write.  I keep having to wipe away the tears of sheer relief.

We have all been in hiding during the Bush years.  Personally I had reconciled myself to being a lonely voice urging thought, compassion, intelligence, and so on, one who expected to have no recognizable say in anything.  An outsider.  It turns out a bunch of us felt the same way.

Today I awoke and Dylan’s ‘The Times Are A-Changing’  came to my lips. I’m not much of a singer at the best of times, let alone when I’m weeping with hope. We’ve pulled ourselves back from the brink.  Let us be grateful.  Very grateful.
Come senators, congressmen throughout the land,

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly aging

So get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand

 – For the times they are a-changing.