Artistic Inspiration, When It Happens

There is a novel that has been gestating in my head for many years now, going through many changes and mutations while still on the drawing board (and through occasional attempts at actually writing it). One thing it has lacked until very recently, however, is a profound sense of inspiration, the kind that brings both great clarity and urgent motivation. I am experienced and practical enough as a writer to know that one can't always rely on inspiration to get writing done, but for a major, long-term project like a novel, it certainly helps. Looking back, I'm not sure why I have stuck with this story idea as long as I have. There have in fact been times when I abandoned it altogether, but somehow it always ended up resurfacing after some new spark of an idea cast a fresh light on the material. It is almost as though the story keeps insisting that I write it, even when I don't fully want to.

This novel, though, I am happy to say, has really come together for me both conceptually and emotionally in the last couple of months. In the past, I had a large number of ideas about the characters, their personalities, motivations, stories, and relationships, but there was always some crucial element that was missing. It was as though the story had no real center, but was rather like a fairly formless nebula spinning around in the dark recesses of my imagination.

However, about two months ago, in a way very indirectly related to a major change in my life circumstances (more like a long chain reaction than a direct cause, and by no means about that real life event), I happened upon a simple yet strong central idea for the novel. In one sense, it already had a central idea, but one that was abstract and merely philosophical. What really animated it was a concrete central idea, a new and clear conception both of the main character and of his primary, motivating conflict, in very specific and particular terms, something that made the philosophical premise immediate, human, and real. Suddenly, like a new sun appearing in the midst of the nebula, light was cast on the whole region and the clouds began to form into clearly defined planets and moons, an ordered system brought out of primeval chaos.

So, for the last two months, in between and during many hectic changes in my life, I have been secretly, busily organizing all of my myriad ideas for the story, selecting the best ideas from the many years of imagining and conceptualizing, while continually dreaming up (sometimes literally) new ideas to add to the mix. I have finally come to a place where it feels like the story is more or less there, just waiting for me to write it. I have to stress again that I do not believe this is a necessary condition in order to write a novel or any other major work--but it is of course very welcome and provides great motivation and direction, and might be just the kick I needed to actually get started writing it in earnest.

To top things off, yesterday, on a mundane Monday morning at work, entirely without intending or expecting to, I conceived the final scene of the novel. It simply occurred to me, unbidden, so suddenly and naturally, in a way that made it seem, as artistic inspiration so often does, as though it was given to me from an external source, rather than being the product of my own effort.

This idea was very simple, yet it struck me as quite poignant, and a perfect way to close the novel. Like many of my favorite endings, it is understated, subtle, yet quietly powerful. I know I run the risk of sounding like I am praising my own work, but I speak only of the idea's effect on me as it presented itself to my mind. It genuinely made my heart ache, and that was evidence that I had stumbled upon something good. I just thought, "Yes... that's it." It is so obvious in hindsight, an image that serves as a concise summation of the novel's theme and its very title. Like any artist with inspiration, I only hope I can do it justice in the finished product, which means, if I am successful, that it will make your heart ache too.

I am happy to say that this morning I began the task of setting words to paper (or screen, as the case may be). I normally don't publicly discuss my ongoing writing process, but blogging about a large-scale project such as this may help to keep me accountable to my work. I know it will most likely be a long haul, but the journey has at last begun.

Bird

In the circling dark green bower
...a red flit...
    ...a majestic swoon, an airy rise...
the purple bloom that I sought
    is lost to heaven!

A deep and tragic radiance
lusters from the shadow
    ...my heart is mortified
by your angelic chirps...
    your song of heaven!

The blue rose, in a garden lost to daylight,
exudes an ancient, rich perfume
    ...only the faintest hint
may scorch my tortured flesh...
    oh desolate heaven!

Bright bird, upon your sun-sparkled heights,
you light a moment upon cold earth
    ...then set the bower ablaze...
take flight from aching eyes...
    you’re lost to heaven!


***

Steven Holland
June 26, 2012

The Dreamer

This angel dreamed upon a lake
frozen vast with ice and time
Oblivious to the starry deeps
but those deep within her mind.


Silent wishes flurried about
her forlorn forgotten face
Trembling her bloody lips pronounced
a name of mysterious grace.


Midnight lay upon the snow
spread like a funereal veil
Lit by obscure and ethereal light
her dark vision did not fail.


Night hid her pallid flesh
her visage lost to mortal men
Terrible graces visited upon her
sight of worlds beyond their ken.


Sleep denied the dreamer
the dim stars and blackened skies
Yet gifted dreams blue and bright
to her beauteous occulted eyes.

***

Steven Holland
June 20, 2012

Remembering Ray

Ray Bradbury, long known as "the world's greatest living science fiction writer", has left this world at the age of 91. The news of his passing bears a particular poignance for me, as his tremendous literary talents had exerted an incalculable influence on my imagination starting at the age of 7, and ever since he has maintained a consistent place among my favorite and most esteemed authors.

I was first introduced to Ray Bradbury in the fall of 1978, when my father showed me the Heritage Book Club edition of The Martian Chronicles. The magical illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini certainly helped to stoke my fascination, but above all it was Bradbury's words and stories and the strange, wondrous worlds they conjured up that captured my young mind, and that played a large part in inspiring me to become a writer.

Throughout my adolescence and adult life I read many more stories by Bradbury, in addition to revisiting The Martian Chronicles. I came to feel that the well-intended epithet "world's greatest living science fiction writer" did not in fact do him the greatest service. Even though Mr. Bradbury was perhaps more responsible than anyone else both for popularizing science fiction (pushing it beyond the domain of a few SF nerds) and also for making it respectable to devotees of "serious" literary fiction--both feats due to his deeply humane and poetic style that dealt with real human issues and feelings rather than technical details--he was not exclusively, nor even primarily, a science fiction writer. He preferred to think of himself as a fantasist, but in reality his work spans a wide range of genres and subject matters.

In addition to stories about the exploration and colonization of Mars, depicting crassly materialistic Earth people's encounters with a dying race of noble Martians, and other outer space and futuristic tales, Bradbury also wrote a large number of gothic tales (e.g., the stories collected in Dark Carnival and The October Country, as well as the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes), nostalgic and wondrous stories inspired by his childhood in 1920s Illinois (especially Dandelion Wine), stories set in Mexico, and a number of other stories that can only be described as realistic fiction, about ordinary people in the real world. His stories are often punctuated by bitterly ironic humor but also by bittersweet longing, and always by a marvelous sense of wonder at the endlessly amazing, mysterious, and miraculous universe in which we find ourselves.

Most readers agree that Bradbury's greatest and most significant work is his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, named for the temperature at which book paper burns. Although it is widely known as a dystopian work decrying the evils of censorship, I realized upon reading it for the first time that it is more about a society which has become shallow, a world in which the masses lead superficial lives distracted by electronic entertainments and hectic lifestyles. Book burning is almost an afterthought, since very few people in this society bother to read anymore anyway. Nevertheless, the main character, Montag, whose job as a "fireman" is to go around destroying the remaining illegal stashes of books, discovers the existence of an underground subculture made up of people who not only read books, but also take the time to have real, meaningful conversations and to enjoy the simple beauties of the natural world. The ending of Francois Truffaut's 1966 film version makes the ending of Bradbury's novel especially moving when it shows a succession of book lovers, hiding away in the woods, reciting great works of literature that they have committed to memory, in an inspiring and magnificent effort to preserve these cultural treasures for future generations. In the process, each one takes on the identity of the book he/she has memorized... "I am Moby Dick", "I am Great Expectations", etc. It is enough to make any bibliophile choke up.

Many film and television adaptations have been produced of Bradbury's works, but it has become almost a truism to say that it is impossible to capture the full magic of his writing on screen. You have to read his books to really get it. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, paid Bradbury a high compliment by calling him "a poet". Although Bradbury has written actual verse poems, Huxley no doubt meant this to refer to Bradbury's writing as a whole, which of course has been dominated by fiction. Many others have noted and appreciated the poetic style of Bradbury's writing--some dismissing his style as overly florid, while his unnumbered fans admire the evocative beauty and richness and lyricism of his distinctive language. In the larger sense of the term, Bradbury was indeed a poet, a writer of immense imagination and vision, who easily and naturally perceived the magic and wonder of the world we live in and who was blessed with an incredible talent for communicating that vision to the rest of us. So, while it is no insult to call him a science fiction writer (a genre that he, after all, helped to make respectable), it is important to note that he is far more than that.

Or perhaps, since one adjective in the epithet cited at the top of this post no longer applies, perhaps we can now just call him "the world's greatest science fiction writer".

*    *    *    *

So long, Ray, and thank you for sharing with us your wonderful talent and imagination, in themselves miracles as amazing as anything you told us about in your marvelous tales. To paraphrase a line from the Chronicles: "Your bibliography is beautifully complete."

Raymond Douglas Bradbury

American author

1920 - 2012

2 Years of Aurora Array: or, Why I Am A Bad Blogger

I launched this blog two years ago today, so today seems as good a day as any to get it going again after a long hiatus. I have been blogging on and off since 2006, and from the beginning I have struggled with the question: "Why blog?"

At some level I am not a fan of blogs, in the same way that I am not a fan of the Internet in general. Of course, I use the Internet all the time, but only because, as with so many other aspects of modern existence, to do without would mean to live a much harder life. I drive a car for similar reasons. But if I lived, say, in Paris, where one can easily live without a car, I would gladly do so.

The same goes for the Internet. The 21st century makes life extremely difficult--and socially marginalizing--for people who would choose to forego the Internet, electronic gadgets, social media, and the like. If I were offered the chance to live in a world resembling, say, the 1970s, when the World Wide Web did not exist and nobody but a few nerds owned a personal computer, I might be tempted to give up the Information Age and its dubious merits. (Well, I actually did live in the 1970s, long ago, but there's no going back at this point.)

As a lifelong writer and reader, I have found that the Internet has made reading seem curiously flat. Perhaps it is, in part, because everything comes to you through the same screen, filtered through the same cold, sterile window, unlike the warm sensuality of books. Some dismiss such bibliophilia as "nostalgic" or "aesthetic", but to me this only shows their pitiful failure to value nostalgia and aesthetics, both of which are deeply significant, rather than superfluous, to human life.

Those are topics that would need to be explored more in depth in later posts--which indicates part of my problem with online reading in general and blogs in particular. That is, the small space (reflecting our stunted attention spans) allowed by blogging does not give adequate room to the full wanderings of thought that are allowed by the printed word. Blogging is fine for certain types of writing... journalism or reportage, for instance, which is essentially what the word "[We]blog" means... but it is antithetical to the type of unhurried, deeply focused thought to which books are eminently hospitable.

It is not just the short space provided by the blog medium, but the immediacy of blog publishing that is part of the problem. To publish now... that is the imperative of blogging. Again, this may be perfect for journalism, but hardly conducive to the extended reflection, careful crafting, and private evolution that great literature has always required. A blog is like exposing one's notes, one's random jottings and tentative thoughts, to the whole world. This may be just fine and dandy for some people... apparently for many in our exhibitionist, social media-obsessed society... but not the most comfortable zone for a traditional writer who guards his slowly-evolving work until it is ready for the light of day, fully thought out and refined into a work that is meant to be permanent and settled, with the notes only exposed much later, often posthumously.

So I have struggled with understanding what my particular purpose in blogging is, or ought to be. By nature I am not a journalist, interested primarily in chronicling and/or commenting on the specifics of day-to-day events, whether they be in the global, national, local, or personal sphere. I am instead of a more philosophical and poetic bent, which means that I focus on the big picture, reflecting on the universals and generalities of life and the world, rather than obsessing over the particulars and details of What's Happening Now. And this type of deeply reflective thinking and writing makes an awkward fit for the medium of blogging, or indeed for the Internet in general. It is a style that is much more at home in books.

Some say that extended prose (to say nothing of poetry) is going the way of the dodo, a victim of our hyperactive, information-saturated, attention-deficient times. If that is true, then real culture, too, is endangered, for culture requires leisure, which involves the ability to be still and silent and to have space for reflection and deeper, fuller kinds of perception and experience. The blog, and electronic communications in general, may have their place in our current intellectual ecology, as we speak in brief snatches to hurried passersby--but hopefully, for the sake of culture, these energetic new colonizers will not crowd out and destroy the older, more slow-moving species.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life, the magnum opus of director Terrence Malick (this being only his 5th feature film in his 40-year career), like many groundbreaking works of art, seems to polarize its audience. On the one side, there are those who view its slow, often abstract 2 1/2 hour running time, filled with far more philosophical musing than coherent plot, as either incredibly boring or rather pretentious (or both). On the other side (the majority, I think, of people who view this amazing picture), there are those filmgoers and critics who sit spellbound and leave the theater feeling as though they have just had something very closely resembling a religious experience.

As a number of critics have pointed out, The Tree of Life is in fact, in the best possible sense, a religious work of art. Despite the decidedly Judeo-Christian references throughout the film, it is not heavy-handed or preachy. It is instead something like an extended hymn, a meditation, a poem or symphony, in celebration of life, and in fact of all creation. If approached with the right frame of mind, it is indeed as profoundly moving and wondrously beautiful a movie as one is likely to see, raising the motion picture medium to the level of high art to a degree that films rarely do.

If The Tree of Life is a hymn, it is one that is both glorious and somber, celebratory and elegiac. It is this interplay between the sadness and the joy of life that gives the movie its subtle but intense emotional power.

The movie begins with a quotation from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? ...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" We are then introduced to the O'Brien family at a tragic moment: the mother receives news of the death of her 19-year-old son. Distraught, she calls the father at work, who listens to the terrible news in silent shock.

Switching to the modern day, we follow the morose middle-aged narrator, Jack (he is not exactly a narrator, but that is as good a term as any), on the anniversary of his brother's death. He spends the day in a pensive state, and most of the film from this point seems to be an extended meditation of philosophical questioning, spiritual wrestling, and bittersweet memory that takes place in Jack's mind.

The first part of this meditation consists of utterly majestic scenes of cosmic creation. Through the magic of the largely old-school (non-CGI) special effects of Douglas Trumbull (the man responsible for the far-out effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey), combined with the equally powerful magic of classical music, we are witness to the birth of the universe, then of the planet earth, and finally of life itself. These scenes are magnificent and sublime, and in a strange way, deeply moving.

When we finally arrive in the 20th century, it is through the birth of Jack, the eldest of three sons in the O'Brien family of Waco, Texas in the 1950s (this part of the movie is obviously autobiographical on Malick's part). The majority of the movie follows the course of Jack's early life through the eyes of his childhood memory, from infancy and toddlerhood up to early adolescence. This part of the film is just as magnificent and sublime in its own way as the creation of the universe sequences, as it shows us the wondrous array of sensory experiences and emotional highs and lows of life through a child's eyes, in all the vivid detail and luminous intensity which that viewpoint implies.

Rather than telling a conventional story, Malick chooses to show us a series of memories, which we move through by way of association and intuition rather than via a neatly constructed plot--in other words, closer to the way we actually remember our lives. This realism of memory makes the story of Jack's life much fuller and richer, both visually and emotionally, than it would have been if the story had been told more prosaically and linearly. If The Tree of Life is nothing else, it is a work of poetry. In addition to scenes that dramatize the O'Briens' complex family life, from the tenderness of parental love to the ugliness of family conflict, we are shown many seemingly random memories, for instance of a young child observing the patterns on a plate, a group of children looking at cows up close in a field, etc. The movie seems to be telling us that each of these memories has meaning and significance, because each one is a unique experience of the miracle that is the world, a communication of something marvelous and divine.

If one were to pin down the meaning of this movie to a central theme, this may very well be it... that the world, and especially life, is a miracle. Even after the gradual loss of innocence or the sudden loss of loved ones, this film seems to be telling us, it is possible to regain the joyous wonderment and awe at the world that we possessed naturally as children, if only we remember to open our eyes and see it once again for what it is.

If you want a conventional summer movie full of action or dialogue or a tidy plot, by all means do not go out and spend your money and time on The Tree of Life. However, if you are open to sitting back for a couple of hours and experiencing a work of stunning visual and emotional beauty and grandeur, or witnessing a majestic yet intimately human story that can't be summed up neatly, yet remains powerful and profound; or if you seek to be told a magnificent story through images and music as much as through words, in the language of memory and love rather than strict logic.... a story that may leave you both shaken and haunted in the most tender way, perhaps even touched by joy and hope, wonder and beauty, that glow with a strange otherworldly grace and ache like sadness... then The Tree of Life may be just the movie you've been waiting for.

****

Here is one of the beautiful music pieces from the film, Couperin's Les Barricades Mysterieuses.

T+50: The Last Shuttle

On the early morning of Sunday, April 12, 1981, I watched with eager anticipation as the countdown for the first space shuttle launch drew to a close. As Columbia's engines lit up and it finally, amazingly, lifted off the launch pad, I exclaimed, with a dorky bit of 10-year-old boy enthusiasm, "America, you've done it!"

And why not? After the national disillusionment and malaise of the 70s--Watergate, Vietnam, gas lines, hostages in Iran--the space shuttle was one of the things that began to lift American spirits in the brave new decade of the 1980s. To a child in the 70s, the space shuttle had been the shining promise of the future of space flight, the sleek, winged spaceship that would take us straight to 2001, and now it had finally become a reality.

A 1970s vision of the space shuttle.

After my exclamation, I ran outside of our Florida trailer and looked eastward, where I saw the white column of Columbia's exhaust rising into the bright morning sky.

22 years later, on a far different morning, I awoke to the alarming news that the space shuttle was "breaking up". The burning fragments of Columbia fell down the blue sky throughout the morning on TV, seeming never to reach the earth, like its ill-fated crew.

And now, 30 years since the first shuttle, NASA prepares to launch the 135th and last shuttle. For those with any interest in humanity's journey into space, it is a time for reflection. How do we evaluate the space shuttle program? Was it a success? A failure? Or some mixture of both? How will its place in history be regarded by future historians? Did it truly progress mankind's venture beyond the earth, or did it largely just tread water, unnecessarily keeping us in low earth orbit for decades after the moon landings?

It is true that the space shuttle did not deliver on much of its promise. It did not make space flight routine, nor particularly economical. And even though shuttle missions never actually became routine, the romance wore off after awhile and the shuttle began to seem as everyday and prosaic as an airliner rather than exciting and futuristic. People stopped paying attention, the media stopped broadcasting launches and landings or even mentioning it on the nightly news. Only when disaster struck, in 1986 with the Challenger explosion and in 2003 with the disintegration of Columbia, did most people remember that the space shuttle even existed. Even so, few seemed to understand or care about what the space shuttle did.

So what did the space shuttle do? In the 1980s, pre-Challenger, it launched a number of commercial satellites--a goal which came to be seen as not quite worthy of risking human lives post-Challenger--and it also carried a number of science missions, including Spacelab. A Buck Rogers-type rocket pack was tested in space. There were a few top secret military missions. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched, then repaired, and gave us the most awe-inspiring views of the universe we had ever seen. Space probes were launched across the solar system. In the post-Cold War 1990s, the shuttle docked with the Russian space station Mir. Perhaps most importantly of all in the long-term history of space exploration, the International Space Station was constructed... and, if not quite as stylishly and elegantly as what Stanley Kubrick envisioned, the space shuttle did ferry crews back and forth to this large orbiting space station, just in time for the actual year 2001.

The space shuttle did not deliver either on the promise of opening up space flight to the masses, but it did open it up to a wider variety of people. Not only did it carry America's first female and non-white astronauts--a fact due more to changing social attitudes than to the technology--but it also enabled non-astronauts to journey into space: a schoolteacher (who tragically did not make it), sitting members of Congress, and even aging Mercury astronauts (well, one, anyway).

Speaking of the Mercury program, this first U.S. manned space flight program, the one that put the first American in orbit, was followed a few years later by Project Apollo, which put the first man on the moon. In between the exciting beginning and the majestic culmination of the race to the moon, there was Project Gemini. Gemini did not go anywhere new. It went into near-earth orbit just as Mercury had done. But it tested many new techniques and technologies that were essential to the success of the moon landings, including orbital rendezvous and docking and extravehicular activities (that would be "spacewalks" for all you laymen). In other words, Gemini served as a bridge. The middle is usually not the most exciting part of the journey, but it's hard to get to the destination without passing through it.

In a larger context, the early space program leading up to the moon landings was the exciting beginning of the journey, and our next ventures into space--back to the moon, on to Mars--will represent a new pinnacle of human space exploration.

In between, there was the space shuttle. With the vastly increased toolbox that the shuttle program developed, humanity is now more prepared to extend its reach across the solar system. Like Gemini, the shuttle itself did not go there, but it made the next giant step much more possible.

Back in the shuttle's halcyon days of the early 1980s, I read a short story by Isaac Asimov called "The Last Shuttle". As the story progressed, various surprising clues were dropped which made it evident that the launch of the titular craft was taking place further and further into the future than the reader might originally have imagined. Finally, at the end, it is revealed that "the last shuttle" is lifting the last human beings who remain on earth into space, the rest of humanity having already moved off-world. Once the last shuttle roars off into the blue sky, earth is left abandoned--a peaceful, humanless paradise.

I remember that story now, on the eve of the real-life last shuttle. But the story is enough to make me wonder if this is really the last shuttle after all. I doubt that humanity will ever actually move en masse off the earth, doubt even more that it would be in any way desirable to do so, but perhaps the larger point conveyed by the story was that the shuttle was the beginning of some distant, as yet unforeseeable end. The shock of the story is that this--the first launch of the space shuttle in 1981, for which occasion the story was written--might culminate in something as ultimate as that.

It is surely too grandiose to imagine that the space shuttle will be seen historically as the beginning of the end of humanity's residence on planet Earth. Space shuttle romanticism, even of the less grandiose type, is as quaint now as being amazed by PCs and Atari video games. So we will not think of the space shuttle as having been the beginning of the end.

When the last shuttle rises from the launch pad this Friday, it will only be the end of the beginning.