The Final Stretch

I have written over 80,000 words and am headed into the final stretch of this novel. As I suspected would happen even when I first started writing, my heart is growing heavier as I near the end of the story. I don't know if the story is a tragedy so much as a story that expresses the tragic sense of life. If it is a tragedy, it is not so because it is about death, but precisely because it is about life.

Also as I suspected, the characters have become very real to me and I am reluctant to part with them. But part with them I must, so that I can let them go and allow other people to know them too. In some strange sense that is surely true for all fiction writers, my characters are almost like my children. I did in fact conceive them and give birth to them. I do not always approve of everything they do or say, but I love them nevertheless. I allow them to suffer, but only for their own good. And in the end, despite their many flaws and mistakes and perhaps incomprehensible choices, I am proud of them.

No matter what becomes of this novel, it has been well worth the writing. It has been something like a catharsis. Even if I never earn a single penny from it, it has been one of the best investments of time and effort I will ever make. As I said earlier, it is like a distillation of my soul, and plenty of my soul and my blood have been poured into it, with much more still to come in the final pages.

Looking back, the way this story idea survived over the many years, and the way it is flowing out of me now, it seems that this story is something I was meant to write. It is not my place to compare it to the works of other artists, but in terms of my own art, it is without doubt the greatest thing I have yet produced. I used to wonder if I had it in me to write a real literary novel, meaning a full-length, serious, deep work of art that has at least the potential to stand the test of time and find readers in future generations and, yes, perhaps even be given to English majors. Only time will tell if these events come to pass, but if nothing else I have learned that I can at least write a novel. I am frankly surprised at how well it has turned out. I don't know if that statement expresses pride or humility, or some mixture of both, but it is in any case true.

One of the strangest and most wonderful things about artistic creation is that it often seems as though the artist is merely the vehicle for some higher reality that is being channeled through him. As I have often said, to a very large degree it feels that this story is just coming to me rather than being something I have to consciously construct. Of course, I still need to take my inspiration and consciously mold it into its actual form, but I am also surprised at how easy it has been to write such a long work.

I have occasionally looked back at passages I wrote well before and been struck by symbolism or foreshadowing or other connections that I did not intend to put there and did not even notice while writing them. The effect of writing this novel has been like being caught in the grip of an ongoing visionary seizure. There is something obsessive and compulsive in the writing of it, even though I undertake it willingly and gladly.

In the end, no matter how many readers or how few my novel may have, what I hope for it the most is that whoever reads it will see the beauty and the truth I am attempting to communicate. You (if you are in fact to be one of my readers) may not fully understand it, at least not at a conscious and rational level. I do not claim to fully understand it on this level myself. But I think that, like all poetry, even though it does speak to the mind, it speaks even more deeply to the heart and the soul. I can't explain in concise terms what it means, or exactly how the ending makes me feel, but I know that it is something very real and meaningful that I wish to share.

The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of literature creating a fusion of horizons between the reader and the author. In other words, the "horizon" or world of the reader can meet the horizon of the author, thus creating a shared understanding. Art is one of the most powerful means we have of bridging the often seemingly unbridgeable gap between the loneliness of our souls, in which we often feel that no one can truly share our experiences and thoughts and feelings. When it is successful, a literary work can create a quiet and marvelous space where, at least for a moment, two souls can touch, even if separated by centuries, and find communion in their shared human experience. If in reading my story you and I can create a shared horizon, a shared understanding of truth and a shared appreciation of beauty, then I have greatly succeeded.

On the Eerie Similarities Between Sex Scenes and Horror Stories

Sometimes it is not what you say, but what you don't say.

We live in vulgar times, an age in which the explicit and graphic depiction of sex and gore is the norm. My problem with graphic depictions of sex and violence is not that they are too strong, at least not in the sense of achieving their intended effects (though they are often too strong in the way that the smell of a garbage heap is, i.e., extremely offensive to good taste). Rather, my problem with them is that they are too weak.

They are weak and ineffectual because they show too much. They represent an unrefined sensibility that works on the assumption that more is always better. Take it from me: sometimes more is less.

See, the problem is that explicit depictions of sex and violence work against the full power of eroticism and horror. Both of these qualities relate to some of the deepest and most powerful of all human feelings, those connected with sexual love and the continuation of life, in the case of eroticism, and in the case of horror, those connected with fear, particularly fear of death and the unknown.

H. P. Lovecraft, one of the greatest horror writers of all time, famously said that "the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown". Old horror movies were far less gory and violent than today's, but they tended to be more mysterious, atmospheric, and moody. Classic horror (as opposed to modern horror) aimed to suggest rather than to show, and this is precisely where its power resided. The more you leave to the imagination, the more room is given to genuine psychological horror--those creepy feelings that something dark and fearsome and possibly evil is lurking out there, or perhaps very close at hand. This type of horror--which I consider to be true horror--is more often than not caused by the presence of unknown and unknowable supernatural entities or forces, rather than by bland and banal human murderers. True horror suggests that there is more to reality than our modern scientistic worldview affords, and therein lies its truly subversive power: it challenges our very concept of reality, our philosophical assumptions, the very ground beneath our feet.

The depiction of sex works very much the same way. Pornography, whether written or visual, leaves little or nothing to the imagination. It is focused on the physical body to a degree that could be considered clinical and therefore the very opposite of sexy. Truly erotic art, however, like true horror, focuses more on the psychological aspects of the experience, and suggests more than it shows. Its power lies in allowing the reader to fill in his or her own blanks, just as classic horror does. As the Symbolists said, "To name is to destroy; to suggest is to create." The power of suggestion is very powerful indeed, and is a potent artistic weapon that is too often neglected in our age of vulgar--and totally unexciting--excess. Trying too hard often results in failure; my advice to writers and filmmakers is to kick it up a notch by taking it down a thousand.

From Beyond

We felt it first, faint as raindrops on the world,

but distinct, as animals sense distant tremors.
Something enormous and impossible had risen
and was nearing from out the tremendous black,
from the fathomless depths of the night ocean,
approaching our sleeping city by the sea.
The bay had been shrouded by an eerie fog,
a voiceless harbinger of the terrible visitation.
Its waters moved, displaced by the unknown,
by unseen forms and forces, unexpected presences.
 
The weight of unimaginable hooves fell upon the crust,
the low, thunderous beat of titanotheric tympani.
The waters rippled, the earth gently trembled,
the scent of prehistoric mists filled the gloom.
Then we beheld the wondrous, awful sight,
as the gigantic green-gray shapes emerged
from the abyss of night and time:
   the towering Brachiosaurus,
   the neverending Diplodocus,
   the colossal Brontosaur.
 
The titanic beasts waded up from the deep,
unsummoned yet dreadfully arrived,
shaking the earth beneath their fantastic feet
and all our earthly certainties.

***

Steven Holland
October 6, 2006

What This Story Is Not About

As I progress through the writing of this novel, its meaning becomes more and more clear. However, I am certain that even when I have written the last word, the meaning of my story will remain somewhat mysterious, even for myself. It is not meant to be a political or religious tract, nor a scientific or philosophical treatise. It is poetry, in the broader sense of that term (which, by Aristotle's definition, can be taken to include all fiction). Because of that, its meaning will always be indeterminate and ambiguous, open to a range of interpretations.

I have no doubt that it will make you feel something. What that something is may vary from reader to reader, and, as with many works of literature or film or music, it may be something you can't fully describe or explain or put your finger on. But it may, if I am as skilled of a writer as I hope to be and am capable of conveying my vision effectively, still be powerful and deeply affecting (as the story is for me). Many of my favorite works of literature, film, and music leave me with profound feelings that I can't ever fully understand or analyze. I may not know what I am feeling, exactly, but I definitely know it is something real and important, something much bigger and deeper than ordinary everyday emotions and thoughts. That is the effect of great poetry and art, and it is the effect I hope to achieve.

I don't mean to sound melodramatic in saying this, and this is something that is true for many, many artists and their works, but an important aspect of this work in particular, perhaps more than any other work I have produced, is that it is born out of suffering. This concept is very important to the story itself, as it has much to do with suffering producing beauty.

I won't get into further details today, but, just to clear the idea out of everyone's mind, I wish to make one point clear. Many who know me know that my marriage ended recently. This story has nothing whatsoever to do with that. The only relationship between that event and this tale is a very indirect one. Simply put, the dissolution of my marriage opened up a space for another, quite unrelated phenomenon to surface within my soul, something that was simultaneously beautiful and painful. That mixture of beauty and pain gave a whole new inspiration and new life to a story idea that had been sitting around for many years. I consider it a gift, and I wouldn't trade the pain for the world, because, together with the beauty from which it is inseparable, it inspires me and enables me to use my talents more fully and powerfully than I ever have. I feel that it is a flame, causing both suffering and illumination, that is driving me to reach my full potential as a writer.

The nature of this beauty/pain/inspiration is something deeply personal and in any case would be hard to explain or describe in a short space with full justice and without the potential of great misunderstanding. The novel, among many other things that it is, is my way of explaining it. Although the details of characters and events are purely fictitious, the underlying heart of the story, its themes and meanings, its emotions and ideas, are all very real. I am telling you about something that actually happened and continues to happen to me, but not with the literal facts of my autobiography. I am telling it through another person's story--a fictional person who is not me, and does not in any simple or direct way "represent" me, but who nevertheless experiences things very similar (though by no means identical) to what his author has experienced.

By telling it in this fictional form, I hope to tell my own story to its fullest effect, free from the nitty gritty details of true history. I am turning it into poetry, which as Aristotle said is more philosophical than history because it shows us universals rather than particulars.

My recent inspiration and the art it is producing have given birth to a strange new vision, a vision which forms the philosophical core of this tale. To me, it is strange in a good and beautiful way. I know and expect that some readers will simply find it strange, or perhaps not understand it at all and so not know what to think. The ending, though I find it to be powerful and profound, is also ambiguous and open. I wish to leave the reader, not with tidy conclusions (in terms of either plot or philosophy), but with a sense of wonder and possibility, an aching sense of the deep importance of human life and love, and a desire to know more. Not that there will be a sequel... the unfulfillment that drives us perpetually toward truth and beauty is part of the point.

Let Me Preface This By Saying...

I am writing this note mainly for family and friends who may read the opus currently under production in my secret laboratory:

"The following is a work of fiction -- not autobiography, not biography, not history, not a personal journal or diary -- but fiction, plain and simple."

For those who have forgotten, fiction means that it is completely made up.

The reason I feel the need to stress this is that, like any writer, I am drawing upon real life to find the ingredients for this concoction. People who know me will notice specific autobiographical details in the two main male characters, but this in no way means that either of them is "really" me. They are not me; they are fictional characters. I have put something of myself in them to make them more real, more believable, and therefore more powerful as characters. But that just means that they have some of their creator's DNA. Each is his own unique and independent person.

Also, perhaps even more troubling, certain of my family and friends may be quite surprised to notice little bits of themselves in a given character, or perhaps a certain situation or event will seem remarkably similar to some real situation or event involving you and me.

If this happens, don't be alarmed. None of the characters is "really" you, and none of the situations or events in the book are meant to be dramatized re-creations of anything that happened in real life. To be completely accurate, I should say that the events in the book are not directly about events in real life; that is, it is not fictionalized autobiography. But the entire story is certainly about real life, and it is in some sense specifically about my life.

What I mean is that I am taking my entire life experience, my philosophy and my feelings, and am transforming them into art. It is about real life in the way that any novel is, and it is about my own life in the way that any writer's work is. The characters, situations, and events are not real, but they naturally bear some resemblance to real life, and naturally they even bear some resemblance to the real life that this author has lived. And yes, in some cases, I even take specific details from real life and real people and turn them into details of fictional life and fictional people. That is what writers do. The reasons for what details get included may not always be clear, even to the author. But inspiration leads where it may. So, if you see some tiny fragment of yourself or your life in my story, don't read too much into it; just feel flattered (I hope) that some exceedingly small part of you or your life ended up in a classic work of literature (well, a boy can dream, can't he?).

Writers are always told to "write what you know". In one sense this is unavoidable; in another sense it is impossible. It is unavoidable if you take "what you know" to include literally all of your experience, which most emphatically does not mean only what you have personally, directly experienced. I wouldn't want family and friends to think that I have done everything my characters have done, or that I share all of their views and sentiments. They are all other people to me, and I am reporting what they have done and said and thought, not what I have done and said and thought.

The mantra "write what you know" is impossible in the sense that you will be severely limited in what you can write if this is taken to mean only what you have directly experienced. Writers rarely actually do that; they research, they observe, they imagine, whatever it takes to fill in the blanks that are not supplied, and in some cases, cannot be supplied, by their actual lived experience.

While we're on that topic, I should also warn my more sensitive readers that this is not a G-rated novel. If it were a movie it would very definitely be R-rated. Any serious writer writing about real life in a serious way cannot sugarcoat reality; it must be shown as it is. That is the only way to make it real and effective and powerful -- that is, if one is writing a serious realistic novel with any aspiration toward literary quality and significance. My characters use the "f word", they drink too much, they take drugs, they engage in sexual practices that some would consider perverse, they condemn traditional religion. All of this is not there to be sensational or shocking. The Bible, after all, contains descriptions of behavior that would be considered quite shocking and repulsive by anyone's standards. All of these behaviors on the part of my characters are part and parcel of the story and its philosophical and moral meaning. Every word is there for a reason, even every "f word". As Martin Luther said, the devil is God's devil.

In comparison to a lot of what is out there, my book is actually quite tame in terms of behavior. Like I said, I am not in it for shock value or cheap sensationalism. I only put in what needs to be there in order to tell the story to its fullest power. But I do feel that, to many readers (not necessarily the more "sensitive" ones mentioned above, but perhaps especially to the most worldly among us) my book might be considered rather shocking in a way quite different from what people usually think of when they think of something shocking.

It would be very difficult, as well as undesirable, to attempt to explain what I mean without having you read the story itself. But suffice it to say that the shock I foresee, for at least some readers, lies not in superficial details of the story but in its underlying philosophy, and the hopefully powerful way in which that philosophy is expressed, which will make it all the more troubling for those who do not understand it. It is neither left nor right, far from conventional yet equally distant from what is commonly regarded as countercultural, and will no doubt seem strange and incomprehensible to many. I only barely understand it myself. It is a powerful new vision for me, and, like much else about this story, is not something I planned or even imagined prior to writing. It is something I am discovering as I continue to unravel the story and gradually realize where it's taking me.

The more I write this story, the more I feel that I have been blessed with something original and profound. It is something which only began fully revealing itself once I started writing the story earlier this month, rather than during the previous 13 years of imagining and planning, and feels more like a gift than an invention. I look forward to the remainder of this journey and the treasures I will continue to discover along the way, and I look forward all the more to sharing those treasures with you.

Explorations

In setting out to explore the unknown and the strange, I did not seek to abandon my homeland.

I had already been exiled from my homeland; it had become a place no longer to be found except on old maps of consciousness.

Far from an abandonment, my searching is a quest to return to my homeland, to discover it still miraculously existing somewhere among the million stars.

Why Symbolist Poetry?

In attempting to give an answer to the above question, I am actually attempting to answer two distinct but related questions: "Why write symbolist poetry?" and "Why read symbolist poetry?".

I first want to make clear that I in no way look down on poetry that is more straightforward and easier to digest. Much, if not most, of the greatest poetry ever written has taken a form that, while often dense and challenging, is at least more or less clear in its meaning. Symbolism, in the sense I am using the word, is a modern development that arose in the 19th century, and which has been criticized, then and now, as obscurantist, elitist, or, worst of all, gibberish with no real meaning, only a flashy show of words.

I did not always write this type of poetry. In fact, when I first started writing poetry, at the age of 18 (1989, if you're keeping track), it was as far from symbolism as one could imagine. The verse I wrote at that time was mainly in the form of song lyrics, and tended to be very straightforward, obvious, and deliberately simple, even at times childlike in its simplicity. Song lyrics by nature tend to be simpler and more direct than poetry that is written primarily to be read. Reading allows more mental space for dense, complex, difficult writing that the reader may take time and effort to interpret and experience deeply, far more so than the quickly passing words to a song. This is exactly a large part of the pleasure that many readers take in reading challenging poetry and prose, and nowhere is this pleasure greater than in poetry, which is the most intense form of language out there.

My verse writing began to evolve in 1997, when, under new inspirations and influences, and in a dawning awareness of my vocation as a poet, I began to more finely craft my poems and create lines that were denser and more complex in syntax and imagery, and poems that were more nuanced and subtle in meaning. My move toward all-out symbolism, however, began in 2008, based upon new readings that helped me more fully understand what symbolism is about.

All language is symbolic; words symbolize ideas, which themselves symbolize things, whether those things are concrete objects or abstract entities (whether abstract entities actually exist outside of our ideas has been a matter of philosophical debate for centuries, and a topic too large to get into here; suffice it to say that they at least exist in the human mind).

Since language is symbolic by nature, poetry is of course symbolic too. One thing that poetry does is take the inherent symbolism of language and use it to its fullest potential. It does this in large part by taking full advantage of the inherent ambiguity of words. It has been said by many philosophers that words cannot fully capture reality. This turns out to be not only a weakness but also a strength of language. It allows words to be imprecise, which in turn allows them to be ambiguous. And ambiguity, though often seen as a disadvantage (especially in practical situations where maximum clarity is needed), can be a very powerful tool. It allows language to be more flexible. It also allows words to resonate with unspoken and often only dimly understood, yet deeply affecting, meanings.

This last quality is the power of suggestion, which simply means that words often say more than they say. This suggestive quality of language has many uses, from flirting to literature. One thing symbolist poets try to do is to bring out the full suggestiveness of words, so that the poem will have many possible layers of meaning. These layers of meaning are not randomly juxtaposed but intricately interrelated, and are discovered by means of intuition rather than logic. Some would say that poetry of this type accesses a logic that is deeper than logic, the sort of logic that we experience in our dreams. It doesn't make sense, and yet, deep down, it does.

The way to access this deeper logic is by not only transcending conventional waking logic, but also transcending empirical waking observation. In other words, symbolist poetry attempts to see reality the way we see it in dreams. Dreams often seem confused and confusing, but they access deep, hidden truths that cannot be expressed in the simplified language of logical thought or seen in the clear light of day. In order to see the stars, the sun must first go down, and this is what happens when we dream. The bright light of conscious, rational thought, imposing its own valid but limited understanding on the world, has set, our minds are overtaken by the dark night of sleep and unconsciousness, and the celestial lights that are known as dreams appear.

Symbolist poetry attempts to speak to us in the language of dreams, which is the language of the unconscious mind, following strange and mysterious logics that we only barely understand, if at all. When reading a symbolist poem, it is almost beside the point to focus too hard on trying to interpret it, as though it were a puzzle that needed to be (or could be) solved. The symbolist poet wishes his poem to remain a mystery, although one that still provides knowledge and truth. The truth contained in the poem can be best accessed by not making too much of an effort to find it, but instead allowing glimpses of it to appear, unbidden, as you read and take in the images and words. Just as attempting to see the stars by turning on bright lights is self-defeating, so too is attempting to understand a symbolist poem by working out a rational system of definite interpretations. The meaning of a symbolist poem, like that of a dream, is like a faint star that you can only see obliquely out of the corner of your eye, which seems to disappear when you look directly at it.

Symbolist poets work on the assumption that ultimate truth lies beyond our capability to fully capture in words and rational thought, and that this ultimate truth of things can only be suggested. We get, not a full and clear picture of it, but only fleeting impressions, those brief snatches of otherworldly music and dim traces of ethereal light that haunt the deepest, darkest recesses of the mind, hinting at something marvelous and wonderful which we can never fully perceive in this earthly life. The symbolist poem is an assertion, and a reminder, that there is far more to reality than meets the eye.