Goodbye, MySpace, it's been real

I found MySpace to be a friendly space and for some five years or so it was real. I made a lot of friends, learned a lot from readers and writers, and had many wonderful conversations.

But it's time to say "goodbye." Nothing bad happened. No flame wars, no account hacking, no more SPAM than anywhere else. Changing times is more to the point. Most of my friends there have already moved over to Facebook as have I. (You can find me on Facebook as Malcolm R. Campbell. I also have a Malcolm R. Campbell Author page. Stop by and say "hello.")

New Addiction

Now that the MySpace addiction has been cleared up, I have time to spend over at Wordle creating "beautiful word clouds." It's tempting to paste in various combinations of text from my novel and my blogs to see what shows up.

Here's one for Garden of Heaven:


And here's one for my Malcolm's Round Table blog:


See what I mean? It can be habit forming.

Malcolm

Typo Sends Young Author on Bog Tour

Special Report from Jock Stewart

Quagmire City, MI, July 29, 2010--When Pamela Pumpernickel signed up with Giddy Author Promotions of Junction City, TX, for the Super-Whizbang Platinum PR Book Blitz, she never expected to be running from the Legend of Boggy Creek.

Quagmire City police reported a 911 call from a Mr. Fouke who "talked like he was from Arkansas" reporting that he was chasing a damsel in a short dress at Quaking Bog Park.

Police Detective Jim Thursday said that, "Fouke didn't talk no good English, so the prospective victim may have been in distress. We responded on the off chance there was trouble afoot."

Using the latest in LASER-guided cadaver dogs (called schwingmoor snoopers in bog country) police first went looking for a body because in bog country police assume the worst until proven incorrect.

Ultimately, Pumpernickel extracted herself from the bog by using copies of her new novel to build a set of stairs that ascended "like a badly made staircase" to the top of the valley.

"This whole ordeal wouldn't have happened if the e-mail from Giddy Author Promotions hadn't had a typo in it, making the words 'blog tour' morph into 'bog your,'" said Pumpernickel. "When I reached the bog, I was utterly dismayed to find nobody there to meet me, no book signing table, and no crowds. Then I saw this monster running toward me and I fled into the yucky brown water of the bog with my books."

According to Abraham Giddy, the company proofreader as out with a case of "needing a mental health day," so the error crept into the e-mail.

"The e-mail also included the word 'virtual,'" said Giddy. "Frankly, we expected the author of a novel called Virtually Naked on the Internet to know better than hop on a plane for Quagmire City and get lost in a bog unless it's a big publicity stunt to get the little lady more bread."

Mental health specialists on the scene reported finding a "Legend of Boggy Creek" monster costume tied around the old oak tree where speculation was that it didn't walk there by itself.

By the time Pumpernickel was found, her website had sold 100,000 copies of her debut novel causing publishing outsiders to speculate that bog tours may soon replace blog tours as the default method of selling books.

Worried about the impact of Pumpernickel's heavy use of profanity in such a sensitive area as a bog, upper peninsula environmentalists plan to spend several empathy-filled nights at the bog singing old songs like "I Love You, For Peat's Sake" and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Schwingmoor."

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Jock Stewart is an investigative reporter for the Junction City Star-Gazer.

Writing as a spiritual ritual

“My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.” -- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

When I read this passage from Franny and Zooey as a high school student, a previously badly configured section of my brain booted up and I looked out the window at the yard and the children playing and the great wood behind the house and said, "yes!"

I cannot view the world without feeling that it and everyone in it are divine. Looking past what I see with physical eyes, I see swirls of energy. "Light" is a wonderful word for it. The world of form appears solid and real and I love it for it is beautiful and dear and provides experiences that are all part of the writer's journey--of everyone's journey.

Writing as a spiritual ritual connects me with the world beyond the physical. My sense of this is similar to a close-up view of an old newspaper half-tone where the very solid picture on the page is, at closer inspection, a sea of dots. This is easy to visualize now via the pixels in a digital photograph.

Sages and philosophers have told us that "all there is, is light." Writing, for me, is a connection to the light even when I'm writing my satirical "Jock Stewart" material or a quasi-mundane weblog post. But when my focus is on what I'm most passionate about, that connection is almost palpable. I am a being composed of photons holding a pen composed of photons pouring streams of photons--"I love you" "The stars filled the night sky" "Bob and Alice made love"--down upon a sheet of paper shimmering on my desk like a subset of the northern lights.

There is no separation here. Dualities and differences disappear. Races and cultures and religions and political viewpoints merge into a swirl of sparkling points of light, and it's all the same. There's nothing here that needs preaching about, no dogmas, no "my religion vs. your religion." Thinking of the world in this way is who I am. This is not to say that the words on the page are a prayer or an inspired gospel or a meditation, for that (to me) makes no sense.

What I feel as the words flow is a rhythm as sure and distinct as a shaman's drum and then the best of my words begin to come from a higher part of myself, the part who sees the light and the connectedness of all things. I write to experience that connection and the "inner knowing" that accompanies it.

As a writer, I live magical realism while I'm putting words on a page. The words may be variously badly organized, silly, pointless, boring, or covered with flaws I can't even see. Within the ritual itself, the words are the least important part of the process.

The process is its own reward.

When another writer tells me he had a wonderful writing session wherein his consciousness and his muse's consciousness were one and the same, I wonder if he felt that he was pure light writing with pure light.

Alchemical Journey: Review of 'The Fire'

Katherine Neville's The Fire (Ballantine Books, 2008) is an adequate, multi-storied sequel to the author's stunning chess-and-alchemy 1988 page-turner The Eight.

The "current day" story focuses on Xie, the daugher of Catherine Velis, the protagonist in The Eight. While Catherine was a take-charge heroine in solving the alchemical mysteries of a chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne in The Eight, Xie--for all her spunk--is swept along by events orchestrated by others. Her best friend Nokomis Key has a much better role and is much more instrumental in keeping the good guys on track through the plot's twists and turns.

The multiple historical time periods in The Eight worked well because the story and its style of presentation were fresh and new. Knowing the history of the chess pieces then actually helped solve the present-day mystery. But, in The Fire, the alternating 1820s story is dangerously close to being a dead weight of backstory, there more for the alchemical symbolism than for the present-day action.

While many fans of The Eight will find much to like in The Fire, it is more like a TV "reunion show" for a beloved old series that can't possibly equal the original work. The Fire tells us where everyone ended up without taking the kinds of storytelling risks that made The Eight such a stunning achievement.

For example, one payoff for readers of The Eight was learning that the secret behind the chess set was the formula for the elixir of life. The alchemical payoff in The Fire, while certainly accurate within the deeper meanings of Great Work, is pale (in the way it's presented) by comparison. The wisdom Xie gains from the "great secret" of the chess set is no more exciting than the common-sense platitudes found in many self-help books.

Had Neville been willing to go out on an alchemical limb, the payoff might have been one worthy enough to justify all the centuries of fighting and intrigue that culminated in The Fire. Among other things, such a limb would have included giving Xie a stronger role, one that not only gave her the lead in winning the temporal game in the plot, but forced her to go through the transformation a seeker on the path experiences when they are renewed by fire.
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NOTE: Because of my long-time interests in the hero's journey, alchemy and related subjects, I enjoyed reading this novel. I am amazed by the depth and scope of Neville's research into alchemy, chess, history, and the historical figures included in the book. Even though I think the novel falls short of The Eight, I came away from it with a lot of interesting ideas.

--Malcolm

Goodreads Book Giveaway

One copy of my novel "Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey" is available in a Goodreads book giveaway that runs until September 15th. You need to be registered with Goodreads to enter. Good luck!

When nineteen-year-old David Ward climbs the sacred mountain Nináistuko seeking a vision, the golden eagle of earth flings him back onto the prairie and the black horse of dreams shows him the future. Though his eyes are opened, fate hides exactly what he needs to know. The spiritual journey that follows leads him through the mountains of Pakistan, the swamps of North Florida, the beaches of Hawaii, the waters of the South China Sea and the ivy-covered halls of an Illinois college as he attempts to sort out the shattered puzzle of his life.

The paperback edition (CreateSpace) of "Garden of Heaven" is available via Amazon. The e-book edition (Vanilla Heart Publishing) is available in a PDF format from OmniLit.

Other Posts, Other Blogs

Writers on the Morning After - The rush of a great story idea trumps everything else

An Interview with David Ward - A satirical interview with my "Garden of Heaven" protagonist

Take a few notes: you might want to write about this place some day - Remembering the details of those places you're passionate about

Hero Path: Change begins with the ashes

“At the beginning of every spiritual realization stands death, in the form of ‘dying to the world’…At the beginning of the work the most precious material which the alchemist produces is the ash.” –Titus Burckhardt

As an author, I’m fascinated with change: what facilitates it and why people resist it. Change is the soul of storytelling. Resistance and delay are the stuff of page turners. If there aren’t any problems or dangers or intrigues, then we don’t have much of a story—or even a joke to tell in the company breakroom.

People seem to leap at change when it is external to themselves. Just witness the Internet buzz on any given day about the latest movie, computer, gadget, book, or car. Shopping is in our blood, or so it seems. Victory in shopping comes from being the first one to have something, and then bragging about it.

Victory in one’s personal life appears to come—insofar as people’s behavior is concerned—in being the last one to change and then bragging about the trials and tribulations of being ill or damaged in some way. Readers can easily identify with ill and damaged people, and even when they can’t, they’re attracted to stories about them like moths to flames.

When it comes to internal changes, people resist them, or so it seems. In so many areas of our lives, we’re rather like the man who goes to AA meetings on Mondays while continuing to meet with his buddies at the neighborhood bar on Saturdays. He says he wants to quit drinking, yet he’s not ready to give up who he is—a man who enjoys tossing down a few at the local watering hole. Somehow, he has bought into the illusion that he can QUIT and NOT QUIT simultaneously. This is a man who's not staring with ashes, that is, the remains of his old life which must die, figuratively speaking, before he can embrace his new life.

Many of us can find instances in our lives where we want to plunge ahead into something new, but we’re just not getting around to it because we keep holding onto the old for dear life. Perhaps we want an iron-glad guarantee that the new is going to work out, that there won’t be any negative side effects to it, that it really will make us happier and/or more wealthy and/or healthier. What a paradox. The man who will buy a $75,000 new car at the drop of a hat without considering the potential negatives about the purchase, will hem and haw for years about getting the sodium out of his diet or giving up his Saturday night beer drinking.

As a human, I see this with despair, but as a writer, I know it’s going to lead to another good story.

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Note: A primary theme in my novel Garden of Heaven, is the alchemists' thesis: "Igne Natura Renovatur Integra," By fire is nature renewed whole. In alchemical texts, you'll see this abbreviated INRI. Christians, of course, have used that abbreviation for "Jesus, King of the Jews," as in "Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum."

Pending Divorce: a 'Garden of Heaven' Excerpt

My protagonist, David Ward, and his wife have finished discussing their pending divorce in this snippet from my hero's journey novel Garden of Heaven.

He stood up and stretched, and when she made no move to stop him, he went upstairs and stepped out on the deck with a glass of red wine to watch the stars. Did he love her when they met ten years ago? Yes yes, otherwise he was a fool then wasn't he, but now the memory sickened him. Of late, he cursed that day, the expressions on their faces, the movements of head and heart, the words spoken, the significant silences, and the positions of the planets that attracted her to him and him to her. With time, the expressions, movements, words, silences, planets, and the subsequent plans that followed, became undone.

He thought of the child. Her world was undone and she did not know it, perhaps would not understand it for years or a lifetime. The child was exquisite. Hair, blond, short, a pixie cut. Eyes, wide, blue, filled with wonder, like a spring sky. Hands, so small, curious, exploring every room and experience like a kitty's nose. Personality, innocent, not such a terrible two, except at night when it was time to sleep, but without condition she trusted him. The trust grew heavy when he was tired; the pure innocence was lighter than air. As the moon perched on the top branch of the oak behind the house, tears filled his eyes, drawn forth like a rip tide. The years would bring a challenge. How to keep the child from casting him out, too. Her mother had stolen his substance slowly until he became a shadow in his own house.

The child, Nancy Margaret Ward--how carefully they had chosen the name, Nancy for Jill's mother and Margaret for David's mother--was two years, three months, and fourteen days old. He had been excluded from most of it. Using one of Jill's flip charts for the presentation, David could, if called upon, show that it took only 120 days of Nancy Margaret Ward's innocent 840-day life for her to become a fatherless child. Doing the numbers, one found that 14.3% of her life included an optimum father-daughter relationship while 85.7% did not. Projecting the current rate of stagnation over the next five years produced charts and graphs that strongly indicated a declining interaction, a reduction of trust, and a loss of innocence.

The night wind was cold, like a kitty's nose or the hand of a child; it tickled the back of his neck and explored the eaves, the shutters and the neatly-raked piles of leaves along the side of the house. He lay in the chaise longue and listened to the season changing from autumn to winter.

Was there any point in assigning fault here? Where is it--Geneva or The Hague?--where old men wearing black robes convene Marriage Crimes Tribunals, to hear the complaints and the arguments and the evidence, to hear the witnesses, expert, material, hostile, and otherwise, and after due deliberation issue an order, to wit, 'Jill Martin shall forthwith wash that man right out of her hair.'

He inferred, on that November night when Jill wore red and he wore green, when there was no moon and her mood was stiffer than starched cuffs, that he was by no means faultless. If there was a flaw in their togetherness, it was that they unknowingly began their marriage imprisoned by separate dreams.
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Copyright (c) 2010 by Malcolm R. Campbell


The e-book edition of "Garden of Heaven," from Vanilla Heart Publishing, is available on OmniLit for $5.99.

Knowing what one does not know

Writing is a journey, some say, and/or a process of discovery, others say.

During this journey, we intend certain things. We decide to write a novel about a young man in the mountains. Then we ponder what he might do there, whom he will meet, and what the terrain looks like.

Hemingway advised writeers not to talk their stories away. I take that to mean that in the planning stages--and during the first moments of creation, the story is rather like an innocent child who is not quite formed, not quite more than atoms that have yet to coalesce and become independent of the environment of birth.

For this reason, I avoid talking about works almost in progress with friends and writers' groups. I'm not ready for outside input, for ideas that might change the personality or destiny of this child not yet out of the womb.

When I start writing about the story--this child of mine--he or she takes form, begins to have needs and goals and a place s/he must go. I learn this as I write. While I may well include details I've learnt from experience or that I find in books or the Internet, the end result includes much more than what I planned and much more than such facts as I found through research.

The resulting story comes together more out of what I did not previously know than from a conscious outline or outlined plot. You might say the muse is speaking. Or you might say the universe is speaking--or even a writer's subconscious mind. Perhaps there's more logic to this process than I suspect. But I prefer to think there's more magic here than I can fathom.

At any rate, I know the story, and what the story means, after I write it.

Yahoo News Department: You Need an Editor

Quite often, I see major Yahoo stories quoting random bloggers as news and opinion sources. But what really stands out, though, is the lack of headline editing.

This headline was on my Yahoo home page today:

VATICAN ISSUES SEX ABUSE GUIDELINES

OMG, the headline says the opposite of what was done. As written, the headline implies that the church issued guidelines for conducting sex abuse rather than for investigating it.

A good copy editor would never let a headline like that slip into a newspaper or website.

Other Posts on Other Blogs

On Almanac, my post "Sailor Town" looks at a liberty port I saw when I was in the navy and have now used as a setting in my novel Garden of Heaven. The town made an impression on me and on my protagonist as well.

In my Myth Rider blog, I admit in "Low Mileage, High Speed Books," that there are some kinds of novels out there that I zoom through at flank speed. Case in point: "The Eight," Katherine Neville.

Do you know any children or teens who appreciate nature and enjoying writing about it in prose an poetry? If so, take a look at this writing opportunity on Writer's Notebook in Call for Submissions for 'Wild Child Anthology'
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Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of "Garden of Heaven," "The Sun Singer" and "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire."

Hero's Journey: Belly of the Whale

"Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." -- Book of Jonah 1:17


Belly of the Whale is one of the stages of the classic hero's journey, or heropath, popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Some refer to this stage as the hero's lowest point, a view that one might easily take of Jonah while he pondered and prayed for three days in the stomach of the giant fish. Others describe it as a period of introspection and regrouping after the hero has crossed the threshold into the world where his adventure will unfold. To those not accompanying the hero, s/he appears to have been swallowed up by the unknown itself.

While the belly motif often occurs in an enclosed space--a cave, a coffin, a small room, or, as in the Star Wars film, a giant trash compactor--it might occur within a wide open space. The stage can be both literal and figurative.

Death and Rebirth

When you use this stage within a story, the idea of a womb (where the hero will be reborn) a coffin (where the old self dies) or a stomach (where the hero is digested and changed into something else) can be supported by your design of the physical setting there the action occurs. The Death Star's trash compactor serves this purpose well in Star Wars: at first it appears to be a refuge, but as the walls begin closing in on Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princes Leia it becomes a potential trap.

Harry Potter

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry, Ron and Hermione jump through the trapdoor guarded by the three-headed dog and fall into a small space filled with a plant called Devil's Snare. As long as they resist it, it grips them firmly. When they relax, they'll slide through the vines. The plant serves the same purpose here as the walls of that trash compactor. It's a good visual: the setting reinforces the hero's inner journey.

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and two others fall into a dungeon-like space in the chamber filled with the bones of rats, the implication being that this will be their fate if they don't escape.

In my hero's journey novel "The Sun Singer," I use a dark, claustrophobic forest for my protagonist Robert Adams' belly-of-the-whale experience.

Real or Imagined Danger

However you design the setting, the danger there may be imminent and obvious, unknown or perhaps long term, or even a benign place where the journey takes place inside the hero's head as he gets his bearings and decides how to move forward. If you deconstruct books, films and classic myths, you will find this stage of the hero's journey rendered in countless ways in countless physical settings.

The crucial point here is that once the hero crosses the threshold, a point of no easy return, he will figuratively die and be reborn one way or another.

Many Worlds, Many Symbols

Throughout mythology, we find references to heroes who died and who were subsequently reborn in three days. While viewpoints differ, this number is usually not considered to be literal. Instead, the number is related to the “dark of the moon,” traditionally the last three days of a lunar cycle prior to the new moon when none of its light is visible in the sky. The appearance of the slim crescent of the new moon is, in mythology, considered symbolic of the moon’s rebirth and—in a hero myth—to the hero’s rebirth as well.

The seasons of the sun and the stages of the moon have been used repeatedly to illustrate symbolic death and rebirth in myths. Fairy tales with this theme--such as “Little Red Riding Hood” (swallowed by a wolf, rescued by a hunter)--also point symbolically to rebirth, echoing the swallowing of the day (by one kind of monster or another) at nighttime and its subsequent transformation into a new day at dawn.

Joseph Campbell compares the hero’s swallowing by a whale with a worshiper's passage into a church or a temple where he "is to be quickened by recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal. The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above and below the confines of the world, are one and the same."

The journey is a fascinating and, I suppose, everyone has a slightly different take on it. When it comes to the Belly of the Whale stage of the journey, the inventive author can symbolize "being swallowed" by someone or something in an infinite number of ways. There's a structure here, to be sure, but there are many variations on the theme, and they tend to support each other as the reader's frame of reference and knowledge of myths, books, films and symbols expands.

Image from Wikipedia: Jonah Cast Forth By The Whale, by Gustave Doré.

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--Malcolm

NOTE: Both of my hero's journey novels are available in electronic editions. You can find The Sun Singer on Kindle and in multiple formats on Smashwords. The e-book edition of Garden of Heaven is available on OmniLit in a PDF format.

Books = Christmas in July

The postal delivery carrier rang the doorbell today with a stack of boxes taller than she is. (In a small town, they don't sling them on the front porch and run).

Here's what I found:

An review copy of John Atkinson's Timekeeper II, due out this fall from il piccolo editions. I enjoyed Atkinson's Timekeeper and Dark Shadows Red Bayou and am really looking forward to this one.

Charmaine Gordon's To Be Continued. Charmaine's another Vanilla Heart Publishing author. I've been hearing about this book and NEED to read it.

This summer I'm reading some books I should have read before, including Nabokov's Pale Fire which has proven to be very interesting, but not what I'd call a pleasure read like the two Katherine Neville books that arrived today: The Eight and The Fire.

Two copies of my own Garden of Heaven. They are going out to a review publication. Goodness knows, when I review books, I don't need two copies, but others seem to have to have them. Holy Postage Costs, Batman, and this is even before the new rates go into effect. (Yes, I already sent them back out and will cross my fingers.)

Baggies. Yes, Baggies. That's right, for some things, I think they work a lot better than the more expensive, non-collapsible ZIP LOCK bags, but apparently I'm in a minority of people. I haven't seen them in a grocery store for ages, but one can still order them.

So, I do believe I have enough reading material for the weekend. It's going to be another hot one, so I think I'll stay inside with a good book.

Malcolm

Are you signed up for THE INFLUENCE PROJECT?

FastCompany Magazine is using social networking to learn more about Influence. (Story is here).

Once you sign up, you get a unique URL and you send that around in blogs, tweets and facebook status updates to see how many people will click on it and also sign up. Obviously, the more people who click on your link to the project, the more influential you are. Participants might just end up with their photo (I have a feeling it will be part of a collage) in FastCompany Magazine this fall.

So, are you tempted? If so, I hope you'll click HERE to get started.

About 6,000 people have signed up so far--in about 24 hours. I wonder what it will be by the end of the week.

Wednesday Miscellany

Thank you to Dianne Salerni ("We Hear the Dead") for her Had-Me-Laughing-on-First-Page Amazon book review of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire." Her review also appears on GoodReads.

For more Jock Stewart hi-jinks, see my satirical post Weight Loss Club Uses Novel as Diet Aid.

Amazon has activated the search inside feature for the print edition of "Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey." Now you can sample the book before buying 100 copies for your top friends on Facebook. :-)

Readers and authors with a fascination for the hero's journey will enjoy Jodi Lorimer's exploration of the origins and meanings of the labyrinth in "Dancing on the Edge of Death." At the outset, she asks how this one symbol--around since Paleolithic times--can have survived so long in so many cultures as the perfect paradox, one that brings to mind both order and chaos.

When my brothers and I were growing up, we played a construct-it-yourself game called Colonies on the reverse side of mimeographed lesson plans and memos. It was a great imagination builder as opposed to today's electronic toys. Curious? See my post about it on Xanga: Afternoon fun: several sheets of paper and a pencil

"Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio began serialization on this day in 1881. The original Pinocchio is a different and darker tale than most subsequent versions." -- Today in Literature

Malcolm

Hero Path: damn the facts, full speed ahead

"Our Fortunes and Lives seem Chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older wiser time of the world when things were less well known and better understood." -- Roderick MacLeish

Facts are those aspects of the overall illusion we have chosen to believe in and fold as rock-solid truths in the ever-shifting fog of reality.

We've been brainwashed to think this way.

Most of us--when we were young and not yet changed by the prevailing belief in the divinity of the five senses--dreamt of worlds where facts held less sway. Stars spoke to us, birds flew with us, and the deep standing water cradled us in its arms.

When we described these dreamtime travels to adults, we were told "that's just your imagination." For most of us, our imaginations lie buried in convenient cemeteries beneath stones with fading epitaphs such as "the truth shall make you free."

Unfortunately, we haven't been free since that funeral, though we've felt an ever-present yearning for those halcyon days when we spoke to trees and flew with storms. Often, we try to re-create those old experiences with long summer vacations and short walks in the woods.

As wonderful as these experiences are, they seldom bring back the freedom of childhood. Search as we might, we're usually looking in all the wrong places.

"Seeing into the other world, using our imagination, requires a different kind of seeing--with the inner eye, the mind's eye--what we have almost, it seems, forgotten how to do. And that is why, as the legends tell us, the other world is 'the bright world,'" writes Stephen Larsen in The Mythic Imagination. "Its images, the myth forms, are lit from within, 'self-luminous.' Simply to contemplate them kindles the imagination, and they are contagious, they may illumine other human minds."

We can remember how to do this, I think, if we spend time contemplating how the purportedly "outer" physical world we experience seems to present itself in concurrence with our attitudes. We can remember alternatives to fate and facts, I think, by looking within for self-illumined ideas and experiences.

This doesn't mean we ignore the facts and the other workings of physical life. It means that we consider the probability that the physical world is not solid and that the facts pertaining to it are a small subset of a larger order of truth.

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Such ideas as these form one of the over-arching themes of my novel Garden of Heaven. In the prologue, David's grandmother tells him: When you set out to accomplish the greater tasks of the world you must remember that little facts are little lies and large facts are large lies.

Malcolm

P.S. The e-book edition of "Garden of Heaven" is on sale today at OmniLit.

Are we doing magic when we use words?

"Lifting a rush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw." -- Gary Snyder

When you send an e-mail that says, "I love you," do you think the recipient shrugs it off as just so much talk, or does she feel a tingle up and down her spine?

Your words, that tingle, cause and effect?

On a dark and stormy night, you're reading a gruesome novel about a person all alone of a dark and stormy night who seems completely unaware of the fact that zombies are walking out of a nearby graveyard. The reader hears and odd sound beneath the whine of the wind and imagines zombies breaking into the house.

Author's words, fearful imagination, cause and effect?

In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes, "Perhaps the most succinct evidence for the potent magic of written letters is the ambiguous meaning of our common English word 'spell.' As the roman alphabet spread through oral English, the Old English word 'spell,' which had meant simply to write a story or a tale, took on the new double meaning: on one hand, it now meant to arrange, in the proper order, the written letters that constitute the name of a thing or a person; on the other, it signified a magic formula or a charm. Yet these two meanings were not clearly as distinct as the have come to seem to us today. For to assemble the letters that made up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity and summon it forth."

Sometimes, when friends are talking, one will bring up a horrible event or embarrassing moment that occurred years ago. Before they can say much about it, their friend stops them, saying something like, "I don't want to hear that."

Why? The words summon forth memories the listener doesn't want to recall.

Is this magic? Is writing casting a spell?

I wonder.

Best wishes for a magical weekend.

Malcolm

The Soul of the Night

I have old favorites on my book shelves that I turn to often, some for facts, others for inspiration. I'll bet you do, too. Some of these will be appearing on my web site's book review page along with my current reviews of self-published and small press books. The first old favorite is Chet Raymo's "The Soul of the Night."

To know is only half, as the naturalist John Burroughs said; to love is the other half. The pages that follow are an example of knowing and loving, a personal pilgrimage into the darkness and the silence of the night sky in quest of a human meaning. It's a quest rewarded with fleeting revelations, intimations of grace, and brief encounters with something greater than ourselves, a force, a beauty, and a grandeur that draw us into rapturous contemplation of the most distant celestial objects...It's a pilgrimage in quest of the soul of the night.

If you love the night sky, you will love this book. Chet Raymo looks up at the stars with the knowledge of a scientist, the eye of a mystic, and the heart of a poet.

Originally published in 1985 by the author of "365 Starry Nights," this book has been an ever-presence source of wisdom on my desktop, Still available in paperback, it's has obviously appealed to others as well.

According to author Stuart Litvak, "Chet Raymo has made astronomy understandable and appealing to those who have little knowledge of the science." Of Mr. Raymo’s writing, Stephen Jay Gould said, “These confessions of a wise religious humanist who also loves, practices, understands, and lives by the ideals and findings of science show us how to heal the false and unnecessary rifts in our intellectual cultures, and to bridge the gap between knowledge and morality.”

The book appeals to me because it's more than simply "good science." It is, rather, a gospel to the night.

"There's a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence and the wild dark, to pack up our gods and hunker down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols, to kowtow before them and approach them and approach their precincts only in the official robes of office," writes Raymo. "And then we are in the temples, who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness? Who will hear the reed shaken by the wind? Who will watch the Galaxy rise above the eastern hedge and see a river infinitely deep and crystal clear, a river flowing from the spring that is Creation to the ocean that is Time?"

--Malcolm