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As readers may have noticed there has been a lively response to the “Story of Stuff”.  And life has a way of emphasizing these things, too.  So, in sympathy, yesterday we had our water and sewer facilities shut off as the DPW mended a break in the pipes.  The men were courteous and friendly, and the work was completed in a very moderate time-span, given the size of the hole they had to dig.

And, dear readers, there are few things that make one appreciate the ordinary miracles of tap water and flushing toilets more than being deprived of these things for a day.  Since water is one of the resources in short supply on the planet, and clean water is one of the greatest health benefits some in the third world can hope for, it was good to be reminded of it.

Another reminder of resources and pollution came in a different form a few days earlier.  We’ve been thinking of growing some vegetables in our tiny yard.  Sensitive to the existence of lead paint chips around these older houses, we had our soil tested.  The lead levels are far too high to make vegetables safe to eat, as it turns out.  Was it the paint?  No, actually, it wasn’t. The soil labs at Amherst reckon that our soil is saturated with the residues of tetraethyl lead that was in car exhaust fumes (before lead was banned) that were then dissolved by rain and which subsequently made its way to our yard to poison it.

I doubt the oil companies will ever be asked to clear that lot up.  Home-grown tomatoes, anyone?

Usually when I spring clean I find myself gazing at shoes I haven’t used for a while, shirts I can’t stand, and old heaps of unpublished manuscripts - books I have written, sent out, and not had accepted.  These sit with the scripts of those I have managed to get into print, and one way and another I wonder what to do with it all.

But, dear reader, there’s far more than this to think about.

Take a look at this link: http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html

Allow enough time to watch the full video and then think, very carefully, about the stuff in your life….

One of the things that novels do, if they work, is have an engaging opening that then allows them eventually to tie everything into something thought provoking at the end.  The end has to be just that; a sense of having arrived at some place that offers at least a new view on life, if not a tidying up of themes.

Life, and life writing, is different.  The challenge for us as we live and grow is the stuff that happens in the middle, between the exciting opening and the philosophical closure.  That ‘middle stuff’ takes up the majority of our lives, is occasionally demanding in the extreme, and leaves us facing problems that recur.  For example: in a novel one can happily see the heroine set out, face problems, find love, lose her insecurities, and steam ahead triumphantly.  Yet we all know as we read that our own insecurities have a way of returning, often in a slightly different form, so that we have to buckle down and deal with them all over again.  The scars of our childhood (we all have a few) tend to reappear in our children because, when we were arising them, we weren’t fully aware of how those scars affected our child rearing abilities. So even though I may have dealt with my relationship to my father to my satisfaction, the kids will still be working with their upbringing which happened when I was still confused, and they’ll have internalized that.  Consequently I’ll be dealing with that same struggle in a different form as they try to work it all out with me.
Novels have attempted to deal with this kind of thing, and the multi-volume family saga was the extremely prolix result.  The Forsythe Saga, The Dance to the Music of Time series, D. H. Lawrence’s trilogy that starts with Sons and Lovers, and other examples are evidence of this.  But who reads those now?

The novel, in order to sell, has had to deal with snippets, with the edited highlights of life, like a baseball game watched on the TV news round up.  This is a great pity because, as we all must be aware, the real essence of life is not just the high spots but the day to day of being alive.

The parent who wants to be with his children for ‘quality time’ is a symptom of this way of seeing.  Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to have a nice time with others.  It’s just that all time spent with kids, or friends, or parents is quality time, whether the team loses, or Johnny sits on the bench throughout the game, or any imaginable variant of that.

It’s that ‘middle stuff’ that’s so valuable that we tend to forget, ignore and devalue.

Many apologies to those of you who wanted to listen in to Dr Valerie Kirkgaard’s interview of Tony Wilkinson and myself on Waking Up In America today. It turns out that she lost all her data through an internet provider’s (who shall remain nameless) failure. Computers and phones were barely functioning. She wound up having to broadcast a re-run.

As my dear computer-savvy friend Andrew says: there are two types of people, those who have had a computer failure and those who are about to have one.

I think that places me firmly in the first category, several times over.

The good news is that the interview will go ahead, probably in two weeks. Watch this space for the updates. Dr. Val is an unusual person and great fun on the air (and surely in the rest of her life, too) so it’ll be a real pleasure to speak with her again. As she puts it ‘Powerful conversations transform’, and I agree entirely. So check out her website at wakingupinamerica.com, and have a look at Tony Wilkinson’s site too. His book is The Lost Art of Being Happy (what a great title!) and there’s a page on the Findhorn site, www.findhornpress.com with a link to his personal site.

Good news - the new book is in galleys.  That translates these days as a bound pre-release book that looks about ready to market.  In the old days it meant a big sheaf of printed pages loosely stitched together, and with huge margins so that one could note printer’s errors and so on. The item that sits on my desk right now looks like an actual book, and very handsome it is too.

The book’s title should say it all, but it’s worth noting that if we are invited to go on a personal journey towards personal authenticity, and if that journey will take us through the six stages, then we have to ask what the overall lesson is that we’re expected to learn along the way. The answer, I suspect, is as simple as it is demanding.  We’re here on earth to learn about how to love each other.

It’s a lesson we need now more than ever, as war seems in no danger of going out of fashion.

It’s only 158 pages and has pictures as well, so it’ll be an easy read.  The pictures?  They’re of the Tarot pack, which mirrors the six archetypes about as precisely as anyone could wish. As I was researching the book I kept finding more and more examples of those same six archetypes in our cultural history, to the extent that it became overwhelming.  Try going into any art gallery with pre 1900 art in it and you’ll be falling over the archetypes at almost every step.  Of course, once abstract art appeared on the scene it got harder to identify the archetypes because the painters and scupltors transferred the emphasis from outer rendition into an inner feeling about the archetype - and that gets more complicated.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.  I’d recommend that way of buying it as the pre-order price is $10 and a few cents, and Amazon doesn’t keep that sort of discount going for very long.  You’ll have to wait for Fall for the release date, though.

And as Grandma says, all good things are worth waiting for.

I’ve just finished this Pulitzer prize winning novel.  It wasn’t hard to read - the type is large and even at 297 pages I suspect that there are barely 200 words on a page.

It’s a tale about a father and son in a post-nuclear winter world, going south towards a hope of salvation (perhaps) while the few other people left alive seem mostly interested in cannibalism.  It’s a fable, I think; it’s a story of family love and protectiveness in a time of extremity.  It has plenty of interesting observations about how and when people give up, too.

I couldn’t help noticing, though, that the structure of the tale is very similar to McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses”.  In each case there’s a journey towards a shadowy goal, the constant threat of pursuit, the tentative and fear-laden encounters.  There is a similar care of dwindling resources, and an assertion of what is personal possession, even when threatened by violence.  There is even the same wound suffered (a bad gunshot/arrow wound to the leg, and the detailed discussion of the makeshift medical treatment involved, all rather ghastly) .  In each case the plot is ‘resolved’ by a meeting with an avuncular figure of power, who takes over and makes things right to some extent.

In their architecture these tales are essentially the same.

In terms of character development we have to work harder to find something to take away with us, as the father is a man with only one idea - to reach the south - and the son seems to be an Orphan figure most of the time. The fact that they are on a sort of Pilgrimage doesn’t seem to register because they don’t seem to grow.  They hang on, Orphans both, to a fixed idea.

Perhaps the world McCarthy sees is one in which none of us can really be more than Orphans, clinging together for what shelter we can gain?

There are occasional annoyances in this tale, too.  The boy was born at the time of the nuclear attacks (at least I think he was; It’s hard to tell) but he now seems to be about 7.  So did the father wait seven years before going on his road trip? And how long has everyone been in this odd world?  We have references to ‘cults’ having come and gone amid the survivors, which indicates a long time having passed, and there is considerable thought put into whether or not rusted cans of food are safe to eat.  Then the father doesn’t want the son to look at the bodies, but it seems almost inconceivable that they haven’t seen thousands of corpses by this time. It’s all a bit puzzling. This wouldn’t matter in a folk tale where all sorts of unlikely things can happen, and for which there is usually a symbolic reason to be found.  Yet this tale relishes the physical details of an emiserated life, dwells on them, makes them a part of the fabric of the tale for no reason I can as yet fathom.
Other annoyances include a vocabulary that is often barely more than 8th grade, which is fine until McCarthy decides he wants to put in a few smart technical terms to let us know he has read a book or two.  I wouldn’t mind this except it sticks out obviously, is unnecessary, and breaks the tone.  Who, for instance, refers to winds as ’secular’? Who cares whether a cupboard is closed with ‘a notary lock’ (I think he got confused with that one since his description does not add up).  At one point he describes a piece of ironwork as ’smeltered in Lisbon or Bristol’.  Iron is not smeltered.  It is smelted, or wrought, or tempered - at least it is in Bristol because I’ve spoken with iron workers there.  In Lisbon it may well have a different term. Indeed the father carries a ‘pistol’ but since it is also a ‘revolver’, and the description of the moving parts (Hammer, frame, double-action, etc.,) confirms this one wonders why McCarthy doesn’t know the difference between a pistol and a revolver. He seemed clear enough on that with “All the Pretty Horses”.  These are specific terms, and not interchangable, so we have a right to ask.

A writer uses words, and either knows what they mean or doesn’t.  When a writer gives evidence of using words wrongly it’s hard not to question the whole narrative.

Behind this, however, there is a tale of great, even vital, interest.  The father needs the son as a reason to keep living every bit as much as the son can’t physically survive without his father’s skills and love. Together they can survive because their spirits have somewhere to grow. And that’s worth knowing. In an age of crass individualism such as our can sometimes be, this is a worthy message. When the resources run out, what, actually, is it that makes us human?  McCarthy has asked an important question and his answer is very basic:  it’s love.

It’s time to come out of my corner again and talk about writing as a vital component of self exploration. I’ve been doing this particular practice with individuals and groups for over 25 years years, all told, so I think that I can say a word or two about it.

Human beings are the only creatures we know about who write. This gives us the chance to re-examine experiences and to come into a different relationship with them in a particularly personal way. It allows us to reframe what we see and to know that we’re reframing as we do so, and that way we have multiple perspectives on the same event. From multiple perspectives we can develop choices. It allows us to ask: Did I have to respond that way? Could I have done things another way? And what might that have been?

In its bare outlines this is what writing can do. Memoir can do far more although the basic sequence is still the same.

Most mental distress comes from the individual not being able to stand outside the experience, and like a panicking person who has fallen into the ocean, the resultant flapping and terror cause most of the damage and exhaust the swimmer earlier than necessary.

Writing is a powerful tool for developing a sense of the Observer Self - that part of the ego that is able to step back and say, now what’s going on here? When the Observer Self appears we have the start of wisdom, the first dawning of freedom of action and thought, and a farewell to mere reactivity.

The reactive individual is no more than an automaton, at times, and automatons don’t change much. They can be made to do anything if the stimuli are controlled appropriately. Think of the difference between dogs and cats. Dogs are pretty predictable and can be trained easily. Cats (as any experimental Psyche researcher knows) tend to be far less predictable and they tend to be able to work out when humans want them to do something, whereupon they may, or may not, decide to comply. Perhaps they’ll just sit and have a wash for a moment rather than doing the experiment.

When I worked with prisoners at Walpole one of the older guys, a lifer, used to tell the younger guys that the guards wanted certain reactions from the men (compliance, fear) and so inflicted certain actions (usually terrorizing). The prisoners would either react in fear and thus be ‘tamed’ or react in rage and get locked up in solitary confinement where they’d be abused and beaten until they became fearful and compliant. The old guy’s advice was simple: Don’t play their game. Don’t get sucked in. That’s the Observer Self - - and it gave many more options for peace without loss of dignity. The old guy didn’t know he was teaching his young colleagues to develop an Observer Self. He just knew that thoughtful prisoners tended to screw up the prison system’s strategy of brutality, and it made the administration have to try out other, more humane tactics.

In a similar fashion the business of writing is not just about comma splices and run on sentences. It’s not about orderly paragraphs doing what they’re supposed to. It’s about souls. It’s about the way people can, through writing about their experiences, become aware that they have more choices in life than they think. In a world that wants to reduce everything to simple choices (Pepsi or Coke? Republican or Democrat? War or cut-and-run?) this is a step in a healthier direction.

The pen, if used, can be mightier than almost anything else.

For those of you who have access to the Globe, today’s “Ideas” section has as its front page article a piece by Jonathan Gottschall suggesting that (1) literary criticism is dying, and (2) the way to revive it is to make it a science.

While I’m not opposed to some decent inquiry into the way literature works, Gottschall’s suggestions were uniformly disappointing.

So I’ll stick my neck out here: The reason modern ‘literary’ literature is losing so much ground to just about everything else is that it so seldom has anything to tell us that we actually want to know. Memoir, by comparison, tells us about actual lives, lived, and struggled through. There is often wisdom in Memoir. There is often only self-indulgence in other literary modes. Detective fiction, for example, is so frequently just indulgent and formulaic. And it is a genre that continues to grow.

So here’s a parallel. People stopped reading the Bible because so much of it was incomprehensible, especially in the Old Testament. The New Testament is a definite improvement because it speaks directly about questions of how to live and what it means (and what the cost of actions might be). We read whatever it is we read because we want to be wiser at the end of it. The possible exception is the back of cereal packages and some newspapers, which we read just to decode before we’re fully awake each day. That’s not reading. That’s eye exercise.

Fine writing, such as we see in literary fiction, is all very well. But it is not a substitute for having something important to say. The Bible in its English version became fine writing because scholars who were artists felt strongly enough about the content that they labored to make it beautiful, to get the right word and cadence. Content FIRST; polish later. If only some modern writers would adhere to that they’d write less but they’d do us all a favor.

Part of my own writing about the Six Archetypes that are present, in a thousand variations, in all literature is because it seems that the concept relays to us the start of some real wisdom. We can read, with this way of thinking in mind, and discover more about what it means to be alive at the highest level.

If literary criticism dared to tread a bolder path, if it could be bold enough to say there is a pay off for reading and thinking - and then spell out what that pay off might be - then we might get somewhere. There are lives out there that truly need change, and they’re expiring in the wilderness for want of direction. Literature used to provide some of that direction….

But like all maps, we sometimes need a little help to decode the symbols.

When I was talking with Michael Toms at New Dimensions radio in California he made several mentions of Joseph Campbell, whom he’d known very well, and kindly inscribed a copy of his book of conversations with Campbell. I’ve been reading it.

Now I’m reading it again, it’s so exciting. In his conversations Campbell was so much more accessible than I’ve ever found him before - perhaps because Michael knew what questions to ask, as few had done before. And it’s delicious stuff, because Campbell, with all his deep knowledge of world cultures, is saying some very similar things to those that I explore in “Stories”. Campbell’s reach is greater, of course, yet he doesn’t seem to particularly focus on the evidence of six archetypes as relayed to us in the Western Canon’s literature. Perhaps he felt it was too prescriptive. Yet again and again he points out that the role of the poet is to articulate the myths that we live, even if we can’t quite spell them out, and thus to keep us in touch with the mythic structures of our lives. The poets are, therefore, one of the primary sources of valuable mythic material.

It’s a hard task trying to talk about this when everyone else seems to be worried about the price of gasoline, to the exclusion of any thoughts about their own souls.

I’m thrilled, though, to find such validation (even if indirect) for the work I’m doing. I wish Campbell were still alive so I could try out my ideas on him. I’m sure he’d have plenty of good things to add.