Message from the Future

Greetings.

My name is Shakshak and I am sending you this message from about 5.6 billion years in the future. Shakshak is not my real name, but it shall be convenient for you to call me by it. Your kind lacks the anatomical capability of using or understanding my language just as surely as a sea worm is unable to use or understand yours.

The information I am about to give you will probably prove of no practical value to you whatsoever. I feel the need to state this as your human race places a bizarrely high value on that which you deem useful. We long ago evolved beyond such lower level concerns. In any case, I merely offer this knowledge for your pleasure, as even your primitive species displays some slight valuation of knowledge for its own sake.

You will not be surprised to know that our science is incomprehensibly more advanced than your own. We have been able to learn far more about the universe and its history (and likely future) than you may have thought possible. In fact, the extent of our knowledge dwarfs your own scientific attainments on the order of something like ten billion to one. In other words, we know about 10,000,000,000 times more than you do.

However, lest you should consider this mere bragging (a behavior which is utterly foreign to us), I should also point out that our knowledge of our own ignorance exceeds your own such knowledge by a far greater magnitude. This is because, as one of your own sayings puts it so well, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. With each tremendous advance in knowledge, there is an even greater increase in the awareness of how much we still don’t understand. You humans really have no idea just how little you know about things. That is not an insult, it is a simple statement of fact. We have a far more extensive awareness of our ignorance, and, according to our best estimates (which we of course cannot know are even remotely accurate), what is left to be known, or perhaps what is never knowable, outnumbers the known by a factor of 125 quadrillion to one.

So, if there is any practical “takeaway” from this missive, it is this: You will never know everything, not even close; in fact, the more you learn, the more depressingly obvious it will become how much there is that you can never know. So get over it. Accept the fact of perpetual ignorance and move on.

However, we now have far more knowledge of cosmic history and can date things with a fair degree of accuracy.

For instance, what you so charmingly call the Big Bang (your understanding of it is still very childish, but the general concept is correct) we now know occurred on a Saturday morning—to be exact, it was September 3rd in what you might call the year 13,846,347,188 B.C. at precisely 8:01 a.m. local time.

It should be noted, however, that there is a margin of error of +/- 2.66 million years.

Be that as it may, the time cited above is generally accepted as the exact moment of Creation. Further, we have been able to determine, via methods that are light years beyond your comprehension, what most likely existed prior to the Big Bang: Nothing.

That’s right. No pre-existent matter, no form of energy, no fluctuating quantum state. Nothing. Not even “empty space”. Just plain nothing. So it appears that somehow, in ways no one may ever understand, at one non-moment (as time did not yet exist) there was absolutely nothing, and then all of a sudden the universe just exploded into being.

One question that vexes our philosophers is that, given the presumed start time of 8:01 a.m., how do you explain that everything, including time itself, began when it was already 8 hours and 1 minute after midnight? And it was already Saturday morning—what happened to the rest of that week?

These are just a few of the quadrillions upon quadrillions of questions we may never be able to answer.

Now, as for the age of the earth, it is difficult to state with precision due to the fact that the earth, unlike the universe, had the courtesy of not just suddenly appearing out of nowhere at some singular moment in time (namely, the very first moment in time). The earth, as you well know, gradually accreted from the materials of the solar nebula, a process which took many millions of years. However, our best guess for the moment at which the earth achieved its full mass is 5:37 p.m. on Thursday, February 30 (the earth’s rotation was different back then and February actually had 32 days), 4,681,355,476 B.C., give or take 1.25 million years or so.

Life first appeared on earth in what is, in your time period, New Jersey, at 6:13 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, May 12, 3,866,554,789 B.C. The first fish to crawl up onto the land—well, it depends. You see, it first happened at 7:57 a.m. on Monday, July 13 in the year 398,512,654 B.C., near your city of London; however, the fish only remained on the surface for a few minutes before retreating back into the water (it was, after all, Monday morning, and even in our time we know how difficult it can be to really get going on a Monday). However, I am glad to report that the following day, Tuesday, July 14, the fish climbed up onto the land once more and decided to stay this time. How it managed to breathe, given that it was a fish who had spent its entire life underwater, we still do not know.

The first human being of your kind—what you so adorably call Homo sapiens—was born at 4:28 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1, 186,244 B.C. in the land you know as Kenya. Her parents did not notice that she was in fact an entirely new species. They just thought her a rather odd-looking child with a few strange yet endearing quirks. Sadly, she got picked on a lot at school; but I am happy to report that she went on to have a brilliant career as a maker of innovative new tools.

So much for your past. Now to enlighten you as to your future.

The good news is that world peace and social justice will be achieved—at exactly 10:04 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 24, 2380.

The bad news is that it will not last long. World peace and social justice being such inherently fragile things given the nature of your species, this sublime yet passing state of utopia will begin to unravel, alas, as early as the following Monday morning, June 27, when a certain Malko Darson, residing in the suburbs of Cleveland, accidentally spills scalding hot coffee on his hand and then goes on to be in a cranky mood all day. It would be too tedious and depressing to recount the unlikely chain of events that follows which eventually leads to the complete dissolution of world peace and social justice. You’ll find out.

However, for anyone who happens to be alive in 2380—enjoy that weekend.

You may be wondering about my species’ relationship to your own. Well, as we are separated by some five billion years, it is difficult to trace with any degree of certainty. Our scientists tend to assume that we are your descendants. This is because, assuming that your race did not simply die out at some point (the fossil and historical records are unclear on this point and I can assure you it is a source of heated controversy among scholars), then we are more than likely, in fact almost certainly, among your many descendant species. Yes, many. Think of it this way—each person who leaves behind descendants typically ends up having a multitude of them, continually branching out across time. It is similar to how your ancestors become more numerous the further back you go in history.

Species are the same way. If the human race did not go extinct, then a large number of the species alive today are your descendants, from my own highly advanced race to the lowly sea worms of the Martian oceans (which, I am sad to report, are severely endangered at present due to the expansion of the sun).

We are as different from you, however, as you are from the early forms of sea life that populated the earth. In fact, given the far greater distance in time, we are even further removed from you than you are from them. This does not necessarily mean we are better, and if we are more advanced it is not a matter of evolutionary necessity. As I said, the Martian sea worms may very well be your great great infinitely-many-greats grandchildren too.

And as I stated before, we do not even know with certainty that we are descended from you. It seems the most likely scenario, however, because, apart from the theory of human descent, we have the darnedest time trying to figure out just exactly where we came from.

It is no use telling you what we call ourselves, since, as I mentioned at the outset, you lack the anatomical capability of “speaking” our language (we do not really “speak” as you understand the term; it is a mere analogy).

Oh, by the way, I should mention too that the earth was burnt up by the red giant sun some ages ago. I would say it’s been about 300 million years at least. My species dwells in a vast network of thought clouds scattered all over the solar system.

You may be interested to know that intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe. However, don’t get your hopes up. Most of them are either dreadfully boring and unsophisticated or else too pretentious and self-absorbed to bother with. We have tried making friends with many species across the Milky Way but, except for a few other intelligent cosmic outcasts like us with whom we exchange infrequent messages and visits, we remain isolated and lonely. The galactic community isn’t nearly as glitzy and glamorous as you might imagine, and we don’t care about being invited to their parties anyway.

One way in which we are quite different from you is that we do not exactly reproduce. Not being bound to biological forms, we continue via a type of information preservation and recombination. We have something like what you know as love, but unlike you, we do not associate it with reproduction. Ours is a purely intellectual love. Our ancestors evolved beyond sex eons ago and we do not miss it at all. We observe sexual behavior in lesser species and it is a phenomenon that arouses in us almost universal revulsion and horror. I am sorry you still have to deal with that.

Finally, we have been able to calculate the exact moment at which the universe itself will end. What happens after that we do not know, although the best guess is what came before: Nothing. If an observer could somehow travel there (which would of course be impossible as there is literally nothing there to travel to), he would not be able to find a single trace of evidence that the universe ever existed. So it will be just as though the universe never did exist at all. No one will remember you or your life; there will be no one there to remember. Therefore, enjoy it while it lasts.

However, the good news is that we have a very long time left until all of reality disappears without a trace. According to our best estimates, the universe will go poof at precisely 7:55 a.m. on April 24 in the year 10 to the 10^th to the 54^th A.D. (give or take 981 quadrillion years).

It will, of course, be a Monday morning.

The Sehnsucht of the 1980 Strawberry Shortcake Theme Song

My 4-year-old daughter has liked Strawberry Shortcake (in her modern incarnation) for a long time, but recently she has also discovered the classic 1980s version--which I explained to her was "the old Strawberry Shortcake"--and now enjoys watching those cartoons as well. My sister used to watch the original show back in the early '80s, and, although I can still recall a couple of songs from it, the theme song of the original special, The World of Strawberry Shortcake (1980), did not definitely sound familiar to me when I first watched it with my daughter the other day. It did, however, rather charm me, and I have found myself, at times when I am home alone, looking up the song on YouTube:

 

The song initially won me with its simple, bright happiness, which my daughter seemed to enjoy as well. After hearing it a few times, however, I noticed that this little children's ditty began to have quite a different emotional effect upon me. It was not the emotional reaction I would have expected in response to a cheery, bouncy theme song for an old children's TV show. Strange as it may sound, I actually find the song deeply moving. In fact, it can almost bring tears to my eyes.

It is difficult to understand this reaction, let alone explain it. It is hard even to define exactly what the deep emotion is that the song arouses in me. I cannot chalk it up to simple nostalgia since, as I mentioned, I do not distinctly remember it from my own childhood. It is true that even items I do not specifically remember may sometimes produce nostalgic feelings in me because they evoke the era of my childhood and bring back a bittersweet taste of that lost world. In this case, however, the nostalgia factor seems relatively small. I must look elsewhere for an explanation of my strangely profound emotional response to what seems such a slight item of children's entertainment.

Though it is not really an explanation, I do at least have a word for it (thanks to German, as there is no real equivalent in English): Sehnsucht. This is an emotion I have discussed on this blog before, and it figures prominently in my literary work, particularly in The Bluebird of Happiness and Rainbow. In my essay on Gen X I defined it this way:

the realm of bittersweetness, of inexpressible longing, ... what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a deep and aching yearning for who knows what--something we can't name or describe, but a longing which we nevertheless feel viscerally and painfully. 

This quite accurately describes how the old Strawberry Shortcake theme song makes me feel, so that is how I identify the emotion as Sehnsucht. It is not sadness, exactly, though it certainly contains sadness within it. In fact, it has a touch of grief. It is almost as though I am longing for a long lost loved one and wishing they could come back just for one day. It is a deep, aching warmth that can easily well up into silent tears.

But it is more than just a sad longing. There is a subtle joy to it as well--an equally warm sensitivity to life, a softening of the heart, a quiet sense of wonder at the world--perhaps even something like gratitude. While listening to the song, and afterward as it replays in my mind, I somehow feel more alive, suddenly more aware of the preciousness and the beauty of things. The emotion even has a moral effect too, for it makes me want (even more than usual) to be a good person and to treat everybody with love and kindness and empathy.

Such effects show, I would think, that this is a healthy emotion. Even grief is healthy and natural, and may be considered a form of celebration (since, by grieving, we acknowledge and proclaim the worth of the lost person or thing). But in this case, as with Sehnsucht in general, what exactly it is for which the heart yearns--that which it grieves, celebrates, and is inspired by--is difficult to discern and remains a mystery.

The things that trigger Sehnsucht are seemingly random, often even trivial. On the surface of it, they may appear to be rather unlikely sources of profound emotion. But Sehnsucht is often a highly personal and subjective phenomenon. While some triggers (such as the sight of the ocean, or a sunset, perhaps) may seem quite understandable to most people, others may appear entirely inexplicable and even slightly absurd as instigators of deep longing (like, say, the Strawberry Shortcake theme song).

In any case, my recent experience of being so profoundly moved by a happy little children's song dovetails with my blog post earlier this week, particularly with respect to the significance of the title Rainbow. I have been coming to see more and more of late how the novel's title is rather perfect, despite the fact that it was originally meant only as a working title. It did not occur to me at first that I might actually call a serious work of literary fiction Rainbow.

But, quite unintentionally on my part, that one-word title, in its childlike simplicity, turned out to be quite well suited to the novel's protagonist, Martin Lane. Martin's art is all about taking things that seem childish, trivial, silly, or kitschy, and, by his own unique creative alchemy, transforming these unpromising ingredients into something quite beautiful, moving, and profound. His art, like mine, is play: as I put it last time, "[t]he kind of serious and sacred play that celebrates the mystery of existence, that joins the significance of the lowest and humblest things to the highest and the greatest."

I don't know if I realized it when I wrote it, but that is actually a pretty good description of what the emotion of Sehnsucht accomplishes as well. It is hard to imagine something much humbler than a children's song; yet equally hard to imagine being more deeply moved by a work of art. Unbelievably, yet wonderfully, the effect the Strawberry Shortcake theme song has upon me is almost akin to the cathartic, rain-washed freshness of feeling, the ennobling sensation of tenderheartedness, that I experience after I have finished writing, reading, or viewing a tragedy: akin, in fact, after the dark storm has passed, to the sight of the rainbow.

Rainbow, 2 Years On

Yesterday marked two years since I began writing a novel called Rainbow. I estimate that I am currently about one-fifth of the way (if even that far) along the arc of this story, so unless my rate of progress increases significantly, it will still be many years before I reach this Rainbow's end.

This is clearly a long-term project, and it is nothing if not an ambitious one. The novel may extend to 500 or 600 pages, perhaps even longer. What makes the writing even more challenging is the fact that the story is not told in strict chronological order, and even though I have an outline for it, that outline serves as a rough guide rather than being carved in stone, and I still have to make many decisions about what scene, exactly, to write next. In addition, the story is a constantly growing and developing organism and I am constantly thinking up new scenes. Therefore any outline I create is, of necessity, provisional.

Now two years into this major project, the biggest of my literary career thus far (and, no matter what else I may write in the future, what will surely remain one of my largest achievements in a lifetime of writing), I am put in the mood to step back and reflect a bit on the meaning and significance, to me personally, of this story.

The development of Rainbow has been particularly fascinating to me ever since the initial spark of an idea first popped into my head in response to a line from the film version of Hello, Dolly!—a rather unlikely origin for a novel, yet strangely fitting in this case—and all the more so as I have watched that small seed of an idea grow into the tremendous tree of a novel it has become.

What is even more wondrous to me about the origin of Rainbow is the way in which, in the first days after that spark appeared in my mind, the story seemed to present itself to my imagination in a way that was as vague as it was suggestive. As I described it at the time, it was as though I had suddenly become aware of a great and terrible storm looming on the horizon, my ears now beginning to attune themselves to the low rumblings of its distant thunder, my flesh sensitized by a strange electricity that intimated some vast and as yet unseen power waiting to be unleashed upon the world, calling me to become the channel of its appearing.

Over the next few months, the seed began attracting to itself, as though by its own irresistible gravity, a myriad of other ideas and experiences from throughout my life, and all of these multitudinous ingredients began to accrete into the grand formation that Rainbow has become and is continuing to become. Despite occasional lulls in inspiration, Rainbow has always had a vigorous life of its own, continually growing and developing into an ever more vast and intricate story.

And then there is that title. Why Rainbow? That wasn't meant to be the title at first; I began by referring to the new story concept as "Rainbow" (in quotation marks) because it was only intended as a working title, a way to refer to it until I came up with its actual title. I chose "Rainbow" by way of reference to The Wizard of Oz, and the way in which the coming storm seemed to promise some wondrous new land to which it would carry me.

So why did I eventually decide to make Rainbow the actual title of the novel? At one level, it sounds silly, perhaps even gauche, as the title of what is intended to be a serious literary novel. It sounds as though it should be embossed in large, glittery letters on the cover, in colors to match its denotation. The word connotes unicorns and the cuteness of cultural objects marketed to and very often enjoyed by little girls. How could this ever be the title of a serious work of High Literature?

Well, as it turns out, there are many reasons (besides simple bravado, which may be part of it too) why I have come to feel that Rainbow is in fact the perfect title for what I intend to be a grand literary novel. One reason is its very simplicity, which lends the title a wide range of possible meanings, connotations, and interpretations. That is entirely appropriate to the nature of the story and of its main character, Mr. Martin Lane. Martin himself may appear at first to be rather nondescript, not the most interesting or exciting person in the crowd. But in the course of the novel he will be revealed to be much more than meets the eye. I hope in these hundreds of pages to acquaint the reader with Martin enough to see, despite first impressions, just how colorful and complex a personality he really is; and yet I also intend to leave him, at the end, a puzzle tantalizingly unsolved, a man who remains forever mysterious.

If my stories are about nothing else, they are about longing, and in particular the longing to know (someone or something). Whereas my first novel largely revolves around Thomas Fairchild's painfully unfulfilled desire to know Alexandra Grey, Rainbow is largely concerned with Martin's desire to know himself (as well as his desire to know other people and their desire to know him). The opening sentence and central question of the novel is "Who is Martin Lane?" By the end, readers will no doubt feel that they have come to know Martin rather well, and yet find themselves unable to really answer that question. As Martin himself says, "How do you define a person anyway?"

I have been aware from the beginning that, even though Martin Lane is not meant to be an autobiographical character, nor Rainbow an autobiographical novel, one of the primary reasons that the story is so powerful and relevant to me is that it is, in part, in addition to many other things, an exploration of who I myself am. That certainly does not mean that Martin is me, and I would never wish my readers to mistake my fictional characters for their author. But there is a very real sense in which imagining Martin and his story is helping me to process and perhaps begin to resolve my own internally felt contradictions, and to help me understand how many seemingly disparate qualities can peacefully coexist in the same person. If my story helps other people do the same, to feel that it is not just okay but actually rather kind of beautiful and amazing to be the crazily complicated person that you are, all the better.

In any case, aesthete that I am, I do not write my stories or my poems in order to achieve any sort of useful purpose, either in society or in the individual reader. I write primarily just because it is enjoyable, a form of play, and I hope in the process to provide my readers, whoever they may be, with some of the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic treasures of literature. My faith in the aesthetic approach to literature is that such pleasures as novels and poetry have to offer do not only constitute an inherent good, but will by their very nature lead on to other benefits without the author having to try too hard to teach a valuable life lesson or make some important political statement. I believe in the intrinsic worth of beauty, its vital relation to truth and to the good, and indeed its necessity to a fully lived human existence. I resist the puritanical impulse to employ my art in the service of moral or political propaganda (or, to put it a little less bluntly, "messaging").

The upshot, with respect to Rainbow, is that the ultimate worth of this story, to which I have already devoted two years of my life and to which I may end up devoting many more, is not something reducible to a message or a formula. It is not something I can say in another (nonfictional) form, such as the currently trendy memoir. I cannot condense its meaning down to a few bullet points. As I have said before, I can only express what it is I want to say, I can only communicate the vision I am seeing, in the exact form that Rainbow finally takes. Otherwise there would be no need to spend years working on a novel of epic proportions that most likely will never pay off in monetary terms.

Art seems to have had its origins in celebration—in particular, the celebration of religious rituals, the symbolic expression of humanity's relationship to the world in which we live and to ultimate reality, however we may conceptualize it (just as our conception of the observable world can only occur via the symbolism of thought and language, all the more so any conception of the ultimate nature of reality). My aim for my own art is to celebrate in this ancient and timeless sense.

Rainbow is not a self-help book; it is not a political treatise; nor is it a light, entertaining, and ultimately forgettable beach read. It is meant to be something far more profound than any of those things: it is meant to be play. The kind of serious and sacred play that celebrates the mystery of existence, that joins the significance of the lowest and humblest things to the highest and the greatest.

Rainbow—a childish title, really. And that is what makes it perfect.

My Bohemian Summer: or, Current and Upcoming Projects in World-Romanticizing

The world must be romanticized. -- Novalis

Well, the summer of 2015 is shaping up to be an artistically productive one for me. As I described in my last post, in addition to continuing the production of Rainbow, I am now also planning to do a bit of rewriting and even to write an entirely new scene for The Bluebird of Happiness, the draft of which I wrote three summers ago. In the month that has elapsed since that post, however, I have begun to see in my mind's eye an increasing number of other new scenes and images for Bluebird, and I suddenly find myself feeling a renewed inspiration for my earlier story, while not losing any of the inspiration for my follow-up novel, Rainbow.

The upshot is that I am now planning to work on two novels simultaneously. Oh, did I mention that I am also beginning to get back in the mood to write poetry?

Okay, before I get too far ahead of myself, let's take these projects one at a time. First of all, Rainbow. On April 28 the manuscript reached the milestone of 30,000 words. Keep in mind that I began writing in June 2013, almost two years ago now, so the production of my second novel has been proceeding at, let's just say, a leisurely pace. That is actually rather appropriate considering the nature of both the main character, the nonchalant and drifting artist Martin Lane, and the story itself, which could be described as a seemingly plotless wandering back and forth all over the span of Martin's life, not propelled by narrative thrust so much as reverie-like free association.



I should note, however, that the pace of writing has picked up this year. In the last 7 months of 2013, I managed to write just 10,000 words; in all of 2014, only 11,000 words; in the first four months of 2015, I have already written 9,000. I also did a very rough estimate of how much writing I have left to do, based on the number of discrete scenes in my outline, and concluded that the novel may very well extend to 150,000 or more words (in a printed book, this would likely come to 500 or 600 pages). That actually sounds about right judging by where I am at in the story. In any case, I know that I have much more writing ahead of me than behind me, and I hope to really dive in and make much further progress on the story this summer.

***

Now for Bluebird. This development truly surprises me, but then so did Rainbow when the idea first began to develop in my mind two years ago. As I recounted last time, my quiet but nagging misgivings about (and therefore delay in seeking publication of) the Bluebird manuscript finally led me to the decision to rewrite one section of the story, consisting of a very long letter from the novel's protagonist, the poet Thomas Fairchild, to the object of his hopeless love, Alexandra Grey.

However, in March of this year I conceived of a scene that I liked so well that I decided I wanted to add it to the story. This was a fairly radical decision for me to make, considering that I had considered the story pretty much completed (except for editing and revision of the existing text) as of August 2012, when I finished the initial draft.

And now, in late April and early May, I have found the new ideas for Bluebird continuing to present themselves to my imagination. And not only new ideas, but renewed passion for the story. This is very welcome indeed, especially since I had been putting off and somewhat dreading the rewrite of the letter due to perceiving it as a necessary chore more than an act of inspired writing.

Now, I am actually feeling an excitement similar to what I felt in the summer of 2012—in other words, the passion that drove me to write The Bluebird of Happiness in the first place and that also brought my poetry writing to renewed life at that time. Three years ago, both my fiction and my poetry rose to new heights of inspiration and accomplishment. Essentially, that summer of splendor and suffering, as I call it, proved to be a literary renaissance for me.

Of course, that does not mean that my current enthusiasm is exactly the same feeling as what I felt then. Moments in life can never be fully repeated, nor should they, and one important difference between then and now is that this time my inspiration is much less painful. I noted three years ago that the sometimes tormenting, sometimes ecstatic passion I was experiencing was being caused by private emotional upheavals not directly related to the breakup of my marriage which had occurred that spring, but seeming to be precipitated by that event.

It is not entirely clear to me, however, exactly what the source of my renewed passion might be this time. In a sense it does feel like a partial recovery, or perhaps a revival in a slightly different form, of the strange but powerful inspiration that enabled me to finally blossom as both a poet and a novelist three summers ago. And, as always, it would be difficult to explain what this sublime and inspiring vision is in any words other than the stories and poems themselves. Indeed, the vision propels me to write the things I do because these literary works are the only ways by which to communicate it.

So my plan for Bluebird right now is not only to rewrite Thomas's letter to Alexandra but also to write a number of entirely new scenes. More than that, I intend to read through the entire manuscript again (I have only done so once before, in May 2013, when I edited the initial draft) and further edit or revise wherever I may see fit, rewriting the letter (which is near the end) when I come to it and adding the new sections wherever it seems best to place them.

In this way I hope to complete what will essentially be a second draft of the novel, one that brings the work even closer to fulfilling my vision of the story and that helps my first novel to become as powerful and haunting a work for the reader as it has been for me. Whatever else it may be, The Bluebird of Happiness is a story of infinite longing.

Despite their differences, the two novels are informed by the same dreamy Romanticism shared by their respective protagonists, Thomas and Martin, as well as by the two young men's similarly bohemian values, attitudes, and lifestyles. Each expresses this bohemian Romanticism in his own distinctive way, but it forms a common intellectual background to the two novels.

Both stories are quests of a sort. I sometimes think of the two novels as being my own personal Iliad and Odyssey. The Bluebird of Happiness is a conflict (emotional rather than physical) of tragic grandeur and seemingly cosmic proportions, while Rainbow is, as I alluded to above, an apparently never-ending wandering in search of some place (or person or thing) to call home.

Both Thomas and Martin, ever since becoming intimate friends in college, are inspired by Novalis's myth of the Blue Flower. Novalis was a German Romantic poet who created the Blue Flower as a symbol of "some kind of infinite longing, or longing for the infinite, or something to that effect", as Martin expresses it in Rainbow. The symbol comes to have deep personal meaning for both young men for different reasons.

Novalis asserted that "the world must be romanticized". He explained that "to romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery, and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite". Novalis also stated that "philosophy is properly homesickness; the wish to be everywhere at home". In my understanding, philosophy (i.e., the search for wisdom or understanding) is, in Novalis's view, part of the attempt to romanticize the world: which is to say, to see it as a place where one may feel at home.

Both stories, as well as my poems, are, among other things, my own attempts at "romanticizing the world". However, this romanticizing, this striving to see the ideal within the real, is accompanied in my novels and poetry by an unmistakable strain of melancholy, if not pessimism, and an aching sense of perpetual lostness in the world. This tension is perhaps born of my attunement to both the wonder and the sadness of the world, and of my attempt to arrive, through literature, at some deep understanding, if not intellectual then at least emotional, in realms where not philosophy but only poetry can reach.

In any case, I feel that I am about to embark upon my own quest, my own bohemian wandering and Blue Flower seeking, this summer. It will not be an outward journey but one that is inward, across the uncharted wilderness of imagination, intellect, and emotion. Like my fellow poets Thomas and Martin, I may not know exactly what it is that my heart seeks, nor that I will ever find it in this life. But, like them, I have no choice but to undertake the journey, "seeking what truth and beauty may yet be found", one word at a time.

Bluebird Briefing: April 2015

First, a preface about my second novel, Rainbow, which has been in production for about two years now (concept development started in February 2013, the actual writing that June). The manuscript currently stands at 28,000 words. That's about half the length of a short novel, but I have much more writing ahead of me than behind me, and Rainbow will not be, never could have been, a short novel. Like our protagonist Martin Lane, whom one character emphatically declares cannot be contained, the novel that tells his story seems boundlessly expansive and is not readily delimited.

The writing has been progressing slowly but steadily (isn't that the kind that wins the race?), propelled by a relatively low-key yet sustained stream of inspiration. Unlike the interior cosmic drama that drove me to create Bluebird in a six-week fever (or perhaps something more like a visionary trance), the fire which fuels Rainbow is not usually quite as blindingly bright, but has proven remarkably durable, and the project is still deeply, if a bit more quietly, exciting.

*

Meanwhile, developments have been occurring with my first effort in novelistic art, The Bluebird of Happiness. One thing I have realized of late is that, even though the novel was written during that aforementioned six weeks almost three years ago, it is, even today, not really finished, and indeed the production of the novel has been a process far greater than those six glorious weeks. Yes, the novel was essentially written during that time period, but it had a long history prior to that, and, despite having felt that the manuscript was polished and ready for prime time two years ago, I have come to feel that there is more work yet to be done before my debut novel is all that it can be and is, well, ready for its debut.

For background, here is a brief outline of the history of Bluebird:

1999: I first conceive the idea for the novel, at the time titled The Terrible Blue, set in a decadent near-future America and centering on the character of Thomas Fairchild.

2003: I reimagine the story as set in the present day and revolving around the lives of three characters: Thomas, Martin Lane, and Aurora Nightingale. Martin, who was actually first imagined back in 1997, becomes the lead character.

2004: I write several pages of the story, some material from which ends up in the eventual novel.

2007: After setting the project aside for a time, a viewing of the movie Velvet Goldmine provides me with fresh inspiration for the story.

2009: Early in the year, I decide to abandon the novel altogether. By the summer, however, I have taken up the idea once more. I change the title to The Bluebird of Happiness.

2010: I make yet another start on the manuscript, writing the first few pages.

2011: Late in the year, I decide to make Thomas the main character once more.

2012: In early May I receive a powerful new inspiration for the story, which now centers on the seemingly impossible love of Thomas for Alexandra Grey (with Martin and Aurora as important supporting characters). On July 3rd I begin writing; on August 17th I complete the 100,000+ word initial draft of the manuscript.

2013: In May I edit the manuscript, believing it at the time to be ready for submission to agents and publishers.

2014: I decide that I wish to rewrite one section of the novel, consisting of a long letter from Thomas to Alexandra.

This last development was significant for me because it entailed reversing my decision of the preceding year that the novel was in fact finished. It has been a bit difficult to deal with too because it means that the novel is taking much longer to complete than I had previously thought. However, I have also come to realize that this is normal and good; however inspired, however wondrous, however powerful that blaze of literary creation in the summer of 2012 might have been, however important and central a part of the creative process that is producing The Bluebird of Happiness, it is still only a part of that process. The above timeline amply illustrates this fact. The writing of any novel must be a combination of passionate inspiration and arduous toil.

I have also, in recent days, come to a greater acceptance of the need for diligent and careful revision, editing, polishing, and not to be afraid that this will tamper with the purity of the initial inspiration. The two processes are complementary aspects of the same greater process of artistic creation. I know that other authors have put years of effort and work into their novels too, and that this is okay. It is crucially important that I do not release my Bluebird into the world until it is fully ready for flight, until I feel no nagging reservations about any part of the manuscript. Of course it will never be perfect (it is questionable whether any literary work, particularly a novel, can ever truly be "perfect", even more questionable what "perfect" might mean), but part of my hesitation about marketing the manuscript has been due to misgivings about certain parts, especially the letter to Alexandra, which I feel could (should, considering its fictional author and the nature of the novel) be much more poetic. As it stands now, it feels too prosaic and explanatory whereas I feel it could and should be a more mysterious and sublime expression of mysterious and sublime emotions. In short, I didn't write that part quite as well as I could have, and that needs to be fixed, I think, before the novel is everything it was meant to be, before it becomes the one true Bluebird.

Sometimes I feel a bit of trepidation about undertaking such a task of rewriting (which I have yet to begin, though I have been developing ideas for it). The major reason is that the fiery inspiration that produced the initial manuscript was a passing phenomenon. I suppose it is possible that the muse may seize me again as I begin to rewrite Thomas's epistle to the object of his undying love, but no author can completely control things like that. The muse may aid the poet, but the poet serves the muse. However, if the task must be done, then it must, and I can only trust the muse to guide me as she has so faithfully done before. (I realize that for non-writers all this talk of muses may sound a bit mystical, but it must also be understood, as it is by poets, that some things can only be expressed poetically.)

I have also been troubled by the thought that any addition or substantial revision I make now to the Bluebird MS seems, inevitably, like a later interpolation to the "real" text that I produced under such effulgent inspiration three years ago. After all, it was written at a particular moment in my life, and as the philosopher Heraclitus says, one cannot step in the same river twice. But if anything is mystical, it might be the belief that only what I wrote during those six weeks can possibly count as the "real" Bluebird. No matter how romantic I might be in some ways, I am also worldly enough to understand, as I alluded to above, that literary creation is always a cooperative effort between the heart, the head, and the hands.

So, while it is true that I might never be able to recapture the full power of the vision that so ravished me during that summer of suffering and splendor, it is also true that I am still, in a deeper sense, the same person, and it is also true that any literary work is produced over a period of time, whether it be a single day to write a lyric poem or very short story, or many years to write a great novel. As I mentioned at the outset, Rainbow has already been in production for two years, and I am not precisely the same as I was when I began its composition--and I will surely be different still by the time I finish it. And of course Bluebird itself existed as a concept for 13 years prior to its writing, so it is not as though it sprang fully formed from the ether, however much it may have felt that way at the time. (As I mentioned in the timeline, a small part of the text was actually written several years before. So why not some of the text written a few years after the main event?)

On February 5th of this year, I actually did make a small but significant revision to one passage in Bluebird (not the letter), because I wanted to leave certain things about Thomas a bit more mysterious and ambiguous than they otherwise might have been. This was the first time since the edit of the manuscript in May 2013 that I made any changes at all to the text. I am thinking now that I would like to reread and re-edit the entire manuscript, in addition to rewriting the letter. For a novel that I have always intended and hoped to be an enduring work of art, it is well worth the time and the effort to make it as close to perfect, as close to my highest vision, as I can possibly make it.

On a final note, only yesterday I thought up an entirely new scene for Bluebird. This scene, once written, would constitute the first substantial new addition to the story since 2012 (I have hardly entertained the notion of making any actual additions to the text, as opposed to revising or rewriting existing parts of it, until now). Thomas, Martin, and Aurora, as well as a number of other characters from Bluebird, reappear in Rainbow, and some of them may possibly appear further in other shorter works of fiction, but this particular scene that occurred to me yesterday struck me as being especially suitable for Bluebird itself.

It is a scene that I believe would fit the tone and spirit of the first novel perfectly, while also standing out in a rather striking and bold sort of way, and thereby adding a single but important note to the entire symphony. I am quite excited by this, as this development has made me feel more than anything else that my first novel is not yet complete, and that its final completion need not be entirely tedious, but rather may involve fresh inspiration. One of my hesitations about rewriting the letter is that it seemed more an act of obligation, a chore, than the act of passionate eros that the initial writing of the novel was; but that task, too, as time goes on, is being fueled more and more by new ideas, increasingly more by desire than by duty.

The new scene for Bluebird, incidentally, involves a certain piece of music by Purcell which was referenced in my 2013 novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. That novella is set a hundred years in the future but the three main characters share a passion for the poetry of Thomas Fairchild, making it not so much a sequel to Bluebird as a story set in the same fictional universe. The new scene in Bluebird will provide a further connection between the two tales. It occurs to me that future readers may see the scene in Angels involving the Purcell piece as making reference to the scene in Bluebird, even though in reality the passage in Bluebird was not written (or even thought up) until two years after Angels was written. Thus do I weave a complicated web among the various works of my literary oeuvre.

I read somewhere the other day that poetry is an act of daydreaming. And so it is. The worlds I see in my head, those worlds that seek realization in works of fiction or of poetry (literary fiction being, ultimately, a form of poetry... you might say, poetry by other means), are essentially dream worlds. That does not mean they are not real. They are of course not real in the same sense that the empirical world is, but they are realities of the mind, of my mind, and, through the concrete expression of art, may also become realities of other people's minds as well. And, like all art, these constructions, these made-up things, help us to see reality more deeply and more fully. Art may not be life, but art helps us live.

The Library of Tomorrow

To start the new year of 2015, here are two midcentury visions of the library of tomorrow (click on images for larger view). First is the "Library of the Future" exhibit at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962; below that is an artist's depiction of the "electronic home library" of the future as seen in a Chicago newspaper from 1959.