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 Rainbow Report: November 21, 2014

My sophomore effort in the art of writing novels, Rainbow, has, after 17 months, now surpassed 20,000 words in length. That is obviously a very slow rate of expansion (especially compared to the sudden supernova appearance of its predecessor, The Bluebird of Happiness), but is perhaps closer to the norm of novel writing.

One thing I have realized is that I do feel very inspired about Rainbow, but my inspiration is working in a different way than it did with Bluebird. The inspiration this time around is perhaps not quite as dramatic and intense, but is more diffuse and remarkably long-lasting; after all this time, the project is still very exciting to me, I am constantly thinking up new ideas for the story, and (thankfully) have not been suffering from writer's block.

That last situation is perhaps largely due to the fact that, since my last progress report back in May, I created a loose outline for the remainder of the novel. This served the double purpose of giving me a greater sense of direction by helping me to see more clearly the overall shape and flow of the narrative, having put the multitudinous individual scenes I had thought up into some kind of workable order (one that is not completely linear in chronology, but rather a narrative sequence that made sense to me as the author, the order in which I wanted to reveal the various parts of the story), and of providing me a rather thrilling view, from on high, of the entire grand, vast scope of the novel, which further added to my inspiration.

As I have mentioned before, Bluebird and Rainbow are related stories, involving many of the same characters, but neither is a sequel or a prequel to the other. Their relationship is much more ambiguous and complex. One thing that I have found both challenging and fun is to write Rainbow in such a way that, no matter which book someone reads first, there will be surprises in store when they read the other volume. Each book reveals things that the other one conceals. You might say that they keep each other's secrets. So it really does not matter greatly in which order someone reads them. The fact that Rainbow is being written after Bluebird hardly matters if at all; if someone starts with Rainbow, they will still encounter surprises and revelations in Bluebird.

Not only that, they will no doubt also find themselves a little perplexed as to the exact relationship between the two narratives. I am also attempting to write the second novel in such a way that nothing in the narrative creates explicit discontinuity with the first novel, but also in such a way that it may create a vague tension in the reader between the claims of the two narratives. (When, exactly, is this scene in Rainbow happening in relation to that scene in Bluebird? Et cetera.)

In this way, the second novel is independent of the first, yet does not definitively contradict it. So, while a reader may wonder--may feel, if not be able to explain just why, there is a subtle tension between the two stories--it will still be entirely possible to maintain the belief that somehow the two novels provide quite different but non-conflicting accounts of the same fictional universe.

Even within the sprawling, non-linear context of Rainbow, it will probably be challenging to piece together the exact sequence of events (hell, it's even challenging for me, and I'm the one writing the damn thing). The narrative ranges freely throughout the span of Martin Lane's life, at least from his childhood up until middle age, and, unlike Bluebird, there does not seem to be any clearly defined temporal center to the story--in other words, there is no specific time period that feels like the main "present" of the story (other than Martin's entire adult life, or the roughly three decades of it that are covered). I do not know that I did this on purpose, but I think the decentered temporal setting has the effect of making the story feel somewhat uprooted, which is entirely appropriate to its nature.

Just as the relationship between the two novels is ambiguous and complex, so are many of the relationships among the characters, and so is, above all, Martin Lane himself. I like to think that Rainbow is a mystery novel of sorts, only one where the mystery is not a crime to be solved but the main character, who, like a real human being, is never really solvable or completely definable. It is not the nature of my stories to provide tidy endings where all uncertainties and ambiguities are resolved; I rather delight in leaving the reader with a feeling of open-endedness and an even deeper sense of mystery.

I recently took a look at some of my early notes on Rainbow and was happy to be reminded of some of my more playful descriptions of the story: "barbaric, vast, and wild"; "the higher form of decadence"; a "fashion epic". (I only hope I can live up to such visions!) Those are as good descriptions as any of what it is I am attempting to do with this work of fiction. As for what it all means, what it is about... well, I must leave that to my readers to discover for themselves. It would be impossible to explain anyway (or, as I often say, I can only explain by writing the novel itself).

In any case, Rainbow still is to me a grand vision, just as it was at the beginning when it first emerged from the mists of my imagination, only now it is much more fully developed, and the story continues to grow ever larger in my mind each day. It is actually rather amazing to realize how that small seed of a story, so vague at first yet rumbling with low, distant thunder, has evolved over the months into such a vast, complicated, intricate novel with its multitude of concrete details and subtle meanings. I am aiming to paint a lifelike portrait of one human being and his life, which is something that defies easy or neat summarization. I like to think that Rainbow is a realist novel in the best sense of the term, that is, a grand, elaborate story, completely made up, that shows life for what it is: something enormous, unexplainable, and wondrous.

"The answer, of course, is Martin Lane."
--Rainbow

Why I Write: A Confession

 

When did I first know I wanted to become a writer?

 

For me, the question, upon even a moment's thought, becomes strangely unanswerable. I realize that it is perhaps not even the right question to ask. For in my case, I can say that I have always been a writer. As soon as I learned how to write, it seems, at the age of about six, I began writing my own stories. The activity just seemed to occur naturally to me, as though it were in my blood. I was a born storyteller.

So, for me, writing is not something that I see, first and foremost, as a "career", much less a "profession". It is just something I do, as inextricably bound with my being as the color of my eyes.

Nevertheless, writing is something for which I have long felt a sense of aspiration. I am a writer; I aspire to be a great one. But why? And what does it mean to be a great writer?

Let's start with the second question. For me, being a great writer certainly does not equate to being a financially successful one. Anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with literary history knows that many, perhaps even most, of the world's great writers—which is to say the ones that we still remember today, even though long dead—were not necessarily commercial or popular successes. In some cases, true enough, they may have achieved fame, and perhaps even fortune, but in many other cases, they labored in obscurity, never to enjoy the rewards either of money or of admiration, sometimes having very little of their work published during their lifetime.

It should seem obvious that only a certain type of writer would engage in an arduous, lifelong pursuit of the craft of writing regardless of what worldly rewards may (or may not) come. Many writers, especially in today's world, very much strive for "success", defined in commercial and popular terms. And there is certainly nothing wrong with doing so.

But there are other writers who regard their writing not so much a career as a sacrament, and who see the integrity and creative freedom of their work as sacred, money and popularity be damned. There is nothing wrong with that either.

As I have already indicated, I am the second type of writer. This type of writer cannot be overly concerned about achieving fame and fortune, indeed must be willing to give up all hope or expectation of ever achieving such measures of worldly success.

Then, one may well ask, why be a writer?

Well, as I said at the beginning, for this type of writer, writing is not so much a choice—certainly not a career choice—as it is an innate drive to express oneself, to give form to one's own idiosyncratic ideas and imagination, through the medium of language. (I am certainly not saying that more commercially-minded writers do not also feel this same desire for self-expression, and that that is not an important part of the reason they choose to pursue a writing career; but I would suggest that, as evidenced by the conventional style of most commercially successful fiction, and by the prioritization of values that commercial success itself implies, the drive to achieve an almost sacred purity of unique and unrepeatable expression is not as intense for these writers as it is for the more literary-minded ones.)

So, again, the question is not exactly the right one to ask. Literary writers, in a very real sense, do not have much of a choice about being writers. They may choose to use their talents, or to neglect them; but for them, the neglect of their gifts would be far more tragic and unbearable than would be arriving at the end of their life without ever having sold a single book or having won a single fan.

This is because, in a particularly deep way, writing is intrinsic to their being, and is a fulfillment of their being. I very much feel this way myself. For many years I did not make nearly as much use of my writing talents as I knew I was capable of doing, and this caused me to live with a quiet but profound sense of desperation. No matter how successful I may have appeared in other aspects of life—getting married, earning a graduate degree and embarking on a professional career, buying a house, becoming a parent—somewhere inside I felt deeply unfulfilled because I was not writing.

This was of course no one's fault but my own. Two years ago, after my marriage fell apart (but in a way that was only indirectly related to that event), I experienced a renaissance of my literary talents, and began composing poetry and fiction in a way that was more intense and inspired than I ever had before. I found that an idea for a novel which had been lingering in my head for 13 years suddenly exploded into brilliant life, and I was amazed to watch it flow through my fingers and onto the screen, complete, in just six weeks.

The moment after I typed the last sentence of my first novel, I felt myself overcome by a rare sense of breathless euphoria. It was not simply that I had at last written a "real" novel; it had nothing to do with feeling myself that much nearer to literary fame, much less fortune. It was not even the fact that I suddenly felt, for the first time in a lifetime of writing, like a real writer, proving at least to my own satisfaction that I had some genuine literary potential. It was, rather, the fact that I had given concrete form to my highest and truest personal vision—that I had just told a story that felt, to me anyway, powerful and beautiful and original, a story that only I could have told. The emotion was uncannily similar to what I felt when my daughter was born—and indeed, in some sense, I had just given birth—I had brought into existence something that was, in fact, unique and unrepeatable, just like a human being, and that had the potential (in whatever large or small way) to change the world into which I had brought it.

In a very real sense, the writing of the novel was its own reward. Of course, novels exist to be read; if not read, they might as well not exist. And this points to what is perhaps one of the defining features of literary writing—it is, above all else, not a commercial product, but a deeply meaningful and significant communication. I write because I wish to communicate, and because I wish to communicate something important. I am much better at expressing myself in writing than in speech, but that is not why I write. As I keep saying, I cannot help but write. It just so happens that writing is the vehicle through which I can most effectively express what I think and what I feel, and to show other people who I really am inside.

And I think part of my elation over completing The Bluebird of Happiness in the summer of 2012 was that I had at last given voice, in a much more powerful way than I ever had, to who I really am. That certainly does not mean that the novel is autobiographical. It just means that, no matter how fictional and imaginative it may be, it expresses something deeply real and vital about who I am. My goal was not to write a bestseller but simply to express myself in the truest and most powerful way I knew how. And when I reached the end, I knew beyond any doubt that I had done just that; and, for that reason, I felt immensely successful, and I exulted in my success. I had done what I had always dreamed of doing.

*

Almost two years have passed now since that glorious day, and the novel remains unpublished. This is largely because I have made hardly any effort at all to submit it to publishers. A small number of people have read the manuscript, and I know that at least one or two of them have been sincerely, strongly affected by it. I do not think it is a matter of pride as much as a sense of responsibility to my talents that makes me feel it is vitally important for me to have the novel published, to get it out there in a place where as many people as possible can have the opportunity to read it.

I am aware, perhaps too aware, of the novel's flaws (or at least what some may regard as flaws—I suppose it is a matter of artistic judgment and taste), but at this point I do not wish to attempt to change them, even if they are flaws. I do not mind having certain types of flaws in my novels to the extent that they may be seen as revealing flaws in the characters themselves, who I allow to tell most of the story in their own words, in their own way. Or, to the extent that the flaws in the novel can be regarded as my own, I do not entirely mind letting them be—as someone who has battled the crippling disease of perfectionism his whole life, I have become something of a champion of the strange beauty and power of imperfection in art.

But, while I cannot discount the fear of criticism and rejection (even as proud and cocky as I can sometimes, half-jokingly, be about my own talents), I do not think that is the fundamental reason for my procrastination. I think that, more to the point, I have a deep lack of faith in the publishing industry as it exists today. It is not even a matter of doubting that I will ever be able to make a living as a writer—no matter how talented I may be, no matter how well received by critics and reviewers. It has more to do with feeling that I, and my work, do not fit in anywhere in the current publishing system (other than, possibly, the relatively underground exposure of an indie publisher, or the oblivion of self-publishing).

On the one hand, I feel that Bluebird is perhaps just a little too strange and idiosyncratic to be truly popular (and therefore to seem like a good bet for a major publisher to take a chance on in today's bestseller-driven publishing climate). On the other hand, the story may seem perhaps just a little too narrative and emotional to satisfy many in the literary avant-garde. At least that is my own perception. I did not write to satisfy any particular audience, only to be true to my own vision. I expect that each of my succeeding novels may very well appear a bit more outré than the last; Rainbow, my second novel which is currently in production, is already a shade or two stranger (even to me) than its predecessor, and I feel that many of the other ideas I have for novels may very well prove, once written, to be outright bizarre, perhaps even incomprehensible, to most readers. I am not trying to be weird just for the sake of being weird; it is just that writing the kinds of stories I really want to write, and being true to the stories as they develop in my mind, turns out to be quite unlike most other stories that are being written, and certainly unlike the ones that are popular.

For this reason, I do not expect ever to become a popular (and therefore not a commercially successful) writer. But that has never been my goal. As I stated above, my goal is to be a great writer. And the fact is that great writers, though they may seem conventional to us (but only because we are familiar with their names and are taught them, sometimes, in school—not because we have actually read their works, which would no doubt shake us out of our complacency), are great in large part because they are strange. "Strange", of course, simply means that which is not familiar to us. And great writers are great because they write something new, something that no one else has ever written, something that no one else ever could write. So, for that reason, although I would never be so unseemly as to pronounce myself a great writer (I only said that I aspire to be one), I do feel that I at least have the potential to become one, if I continue to develop my talents and remain faithful to my gifts (and true to my vision). If nothing else, I feel that I am far more likely to become a great writer (meaning one who is read long after I am gone) than a "successful" one, if successful means selling a lot of books and having a large fan base.

In one of my blog posts from 2012, as I neared the end of Bluebird, I mentioned a certain philosopher named Gadamer who spoke of reading as producing a "fusion of horizons" between the author and the reader. That idea really speaks to me because, as I said, for me writing is primarily my way of communicating with the world. (As Emily Dickinson so beautifully put it, "This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me.")

According to Gadamer's view, when I read, say, "Ode on Melancholy", a fusion is created between my "horizon" (or experience) and that of a certain Englishman named John Keats. In other words, despite the fact that we are separated by 200 years, Mr. Keats and I, in that moment, arrive at some shared experience, some shared understanding, of the world, and of life. To put it in (quite properly, in this case) poetic and romantic language, you might say that John's soul meets mine, and we have a moment of shared humanity, of brotherhood, of friendship in the dark world. That is indeed the true magic of literature. Writers you love are not just distant celebrities; they are friends—which is true even if they can never know you.

I often think, more than I do about any fantasy of having an ardent but small group of fans in the present day (as I have always imagined myself becoming a cult writer more than a literary superstar), those who may read my stories in future centuries. I imagine some other solitary soul, perhaps feeling lost in the world, coming across an old beat-up copy of The Bluebird of Happiness (or, perhaps more likely—though who really knows?—an electronic edition), and setting out to read it.

I imagine that she (I say she because, if the future is anything like the present, the majority of fiction readers will be women), this lone reader, as she quietly but raptly listens to the story I am telling her, will come to see something of the truth, and the goodness, and the beauty, that I, this man long since vanished from the earth, like a ghost bearing a message from the mists of time, am attempting to communicate to her. She will no doubt find the story a little strange, perhaps even more than my contemporaries did; but that is part of the experience of reading true literature. It expands you, startles you, makes you see things in a new and fresh way. I imagine that she might, at moments, and despite the distance in time and culture, laugh, and at other moments cry—both responses evidence of our common humanity, despite whatever separates us.

But most importantly, in the process of reading my long and complicated story about a group of imaginary people (who will nevertheless come to seem very real to her), her soul will be moved, and ultimately transformed. And when she reaches the end—perhaps finding herself emotionally devastated, or perhaps only quietly but deeply touched—she will feel that she has known me, and that I have told her something that is of vital and profound importance just for her. And, even more than knowing me—this stranger from the 21st century who has somehow, mysteriously, become her intimate friend—she will know herself just a little better; and she will feel just a little bit closer to understanding the strange, fearsome, but beautiful world we have the privilege of sharing; and she will feel, wonderfully, not quite so lost in it.

It is for her that I write.

The Summer of Martin

On Memorial Day last year I finished editing the manuscript of my first novel, The Bluebird of Happiness. My intention at the start of last summer was to write (or at least to begin writing) my follow-up novel, Rainbow. I did indeed make a brilliant start, but, due to struggles with depression, my progress was sporadic. I have done some occasional work on the story since then, having amassed 13,000 words so far, and, as the summer of 2014 arrives, I hope to catch a wave of renewed inspiration and vision and to ride it as far as I can go--perhaps all the way to Rainbow's end, or at least much further along the arc.

I sometimes feel rather like an actor when I write my stories, inhabiting and identifying with my characters, in some sense "becoming" them in my mind. Since my fiction is primarily written in the first person, it perhaps has a greater affinity for dramatic forms than it does the objective style of the omniscient third-person narrator. For the most part, I do not report what he or she did or said as much as I pretend to be him or her, and to speak in their voice. So, in a very real sense, I am acting when I write, although my performance is expressed through the written rather than the spoken word.

I am starting to feel that with my second novel, I will perhaps take my "acting" beyond its usual level, that level where it exists entirely within my head and so is not visible to the outside world. In other words, in order to understand and therefore communicate who Martin is, I will perhaps, to some degree, attempt to "play" him in real life. Call it "method writing".

Of course, just as with any acting, this should not be interpreted to mean that Martin is me (i.e., merely a fictionalized version of his author). Martin is his own person, and even I do not fully know who he is. Rainbow is, in fact, as I have often stated, an attempt to explore (though not definitively answer) that very question. Any impersonation I may do of Martin Lane is a part of my investigation of this singular and compelling character that, for reasons I do not yet fully comprehend, I feel driven to show forth into bodily existence through the magic art of writing.

One thing I cannot readily imitate about Martin at this point is to inhabit his physical environment, which is in my home state of Florida. But lately I have begun asking myself "What would Martin do?" if he were, say, in Missouri? The question has opened up avenues by which I might more closely connect life and art, by thinking creatively about how I might parallel some of Martin's ways in a different regional environment.

In any case, Rainbow is not a regional novel, but an American one, and thinking about all this is helping me to see all the more clearly the common experiences Martin and I may share by virtue of the fact that we both live in the U.S., which in turn helps me to perceive the qualities that make this an American novel and an American story, despite its strong regional flavor.

The theme of home, always central to the story, is becoming ever further developed and elaborated in my mind. I am beginning to understand more fully the philosophical reasons for Martin's strange lifestyle, and to see how it is a physical manifestation of his metaphysical lostness.

The dreamy Aurora Nightingale, already a character of primary importance in Bluebird, is lately growing into an ever fuller and richer personality in my imagination, perhaps not so much a further development of her self in the first book as an entirely different iteration (which is also true of the other major characters that carry over from the first novel, none more so than Martin himself). Intimately linked to the evolution of her character, Martin's ambiguous yet deep relationship with Aurora is becoming all the more compelling, intriguing, and richly suggestive to me.

Lastly, I must confess that, in the year and more that Rainbow has been developing in my mind, I have sometimes "feared" that it might come to surpass Bluebird, in terms of either its actual quality or its reception, or both. I am no longer afraid of that. Not because I doubt the quality of Rainbow, but because of the opposite, as I feel more and more that Rainbow may in fact be, on average, the better novel (just as Huckleberry Finn is widely considered superior to the still classic Tom Sawyer).

But now, instead of fearing that my sophomore novel might overshadow its predecessor, I am beginning to feel that Rainbow will only more greatly illuminate its point of origin. 

The Rainbow Report: May 12, 2014

 

 

It's mid-May now, so that must mean it's time once again for my mid-May Martinmania. And surely enough, just like this time last year, my inspiration for the novel known as Rainbow is in the ascendant. Why else would I be experimenting with designing book covers for a novel of which I have so far written only 13,000 words?

 

One thing I know is that I am determined to write this thing, one way or the other--whether it needs to be written, slowly and tortuously, in the erratic fits and starts which have seemed to characterize its progress thus far, or, more hopefully, in a steady drive of inspiration that will carry the novel through to its completion this summer.

 

Of course, that is what I hoped for when I started writing the story at the beginning of last summer, but in any case, I am not set on that timeframe of completion as a definite goal. As I have stated before, this is my art, and it must be given the time it needs to grow and develop and evolve in an organic and natural way. I must have faith in Rainbow that it will continue to reveal itself and, through my hands, realize itself in its own good time.

 

Lately the story has in fact been doing just that, continuing its wondrous unfolding in my mind "like some kind of crazy, beautiful, glorious flower" (as one character describes Martin).

 

One quality of the story that helps me to maintain faith in it and in the value of writing it--no matter the difficulty, the daunting grandeur of the ambition, and the occasional loss of vision and inspiration--is what I might call its "untranslatability". One of the texts that inspires and underlies the novel is Whitman's line "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable." 

 

I see this line as being pertinent both to Martin as a character, in the sense that he is a mystery who cannot be contained by any simple definition of who he is as a person, and also to the novel itself, in the sense that Rainbow cannot be contained by any simple definition of what it is as a story.

 

I think that this quality is something it shares with many other literary works that rise above formula and conventional expectations and standard categorizations, and this is what I mean when I say that the quality of "untranslatability" helps me to maintain faith in the novel. I mean that it helps to remind me that this is one of the best ideas I have ever had, that I have here something original and fresh and new, something that might even be (as it indeed feels to me) powerful and grand (or, as a friend put it, "monstrous and majestic"), and that this story is a living thing, i.e., a story with a sparkling, vigorous life of its own, as Bluebird was (and still is... literary works always live as long as they have readers who bring them back to life, in an endless variety of iterations, with each individual reading).

 

I myself cannot explain or define this novel Rainbow. I can scarcely understand, at an intellectual level, what the story is about, why it is such a powerful vision for me, or why I feel so compelled to write it. That inability to adequately articulate the concept is not because it is devoid of substance, but indeed the very opposite: its substance (speaking here only of the idea that presents itself to my mind, not of my actual work) is, on the contrary, so full, so rich, and so deep, that it does not permit itself to be reduced to any simple explanation or summarization.

 

The closest thing I can compare it to is a fairy tale, or, perhaps even better, a myth. It centers on the character of Martin Lane, an artist and poet, and, to the extent that one may summarize what Rainbow is "about", it is largely about who Martin is, and the way in which he gradually discovers and expresses who he is. It is like a fairy tale in that Martin seems to transform, or rather to realize (both in the sense of "become aware" and in the sense of "make real"), himself, from something apparently ordinary and plain into a wondrous and magical being.

 

I do not mean that the story is a fantasy; I use the term "fairy tale" metaphorically. As I said, however, I think the word "myth" might be a better instrument to capture the nature of this tale. Martin Lane is a mythic figure, and his story is of mythic proportions. Despite his uniqueness, mysteriousness, and strangeness, I believe that Martin can also stand for human beings in general, a symbol of the uniqueness, mysteriousness, and strangeness of each one of us.

 

There is far more to the story, and far more to its mythic nature, than this one aspect can possibly suggest. The novel is "about" a multitude of things, and is also, above and beyond and encompassing all of those things, about one thing. That one thing I can only explain by writing the novel itself. I cannot give words to that one thing other than the words (every last one of them) of Rainbow.

 

In other words, Rainbow is, like Martin Lane, untranslatable.