Cowboys and aliens and spies

Spent the weekend on the couch reading Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, a fluidly-written, extensively-researched masterpiece of synthesis and even-handedness. But there is just so much weirdness and wrongness to process that half-way through, I realized I was developing an odd immunity. Sailing to Italy to find treasures buried in former lifetimes? Uh huh. Universe four quadrillion years old? Uh huh. Writing so revelatory it will cause the uninitiated to jump out windows or die of pneumonia? Sure, why not.

The Church of Scientology infiltrated government offices around the world? Uh huh. Harassed the IRS into granting it tax-exempt status? OK. Woman with legal complaint against the Church found with slit wrists, two suicide notes, three bullets in chest and one in head, and it’s still not declared a homicide? Hmm. Next?

Defections and disappearances and secret bases? Cowboys and aliens and spies? Yeah. Uh huh. All of it.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality, T.S. Eliot wrote. And some humankind, it would seem, can’t bear any at all.

This book is not for sale in Canada or the U.K. Apparently we have libel laws that would only make it easier for the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology to win a lawsuit against the publisher. But I am full of admiration for Lawrence Wright for having the courage and the skillfulness (in the ordinary and the Buddhist sense) to take this on. I hope he gets another Pulitzer. (And makes a gazillion dollars, in case he has to fight lawyers on billion-year retainers.)

Frankennovels

Yesterday I finished reading a Frankennovel.  An award-winning Frankennovel, no less.

A Frankennovel is stitched together out of good and bad parts and brought to lurching life by an artificial external energy source (usually a jolt called Publication). The good parts are shapely and in working order, the flawed parts uneven or mismatched or bolted together.

But flaws are not the problem; readers will overlook or forgive or forget the flaws of living novels.

Frankennovels feel to me like exercises in novels. Like the author wanted to Write a Novel, and so assembled the parts, and pieced them together with skill. But the story started off dead, and remains dead at heart. 

Then I thought about the award, and wondered if it’s the reader’s job to bring the beating heart. Maybe the failing was mine. While contemplating the question, I came across this line in Peter Schjeldahl's review of an exhibition of abstract art at MOMA:

“The proof of any art’s lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity: it’s something that a person needed to do and which wakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us.”*

Not every novelist can write in the fever dream that Garcia Marquez says produced One Hundred Years of Solitude.  But that compulsion is necessary for lesser novels as well. What Schjeldahl calls a ”comprehensive emotional necessity” never arises from the desire for publication or from the idea of Writing a Novel (or Being a Writer). It’s a love affair with the story. That is the beating heart. 

* Schjeldahl, Peter. "Shapes of Things." The New Yorker: 7 Jan. 2013: 68

Old New Year's Eves and Days

Notes from Old Journals. (With Status Updates.)

December 31, 1985: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

Home for the holidays from university. My dad has given his sister a fat, smiling “Buddha of Happiness” statue and I rub the round belly for luck. (Later, in Bhutan, I will see hundreds of depictions of dozens of Buddhas, but never this one; I will learn this is not the Buddha at all, and the Buddhist way to happiness has nothing to do with luck, but with karma.)

January 1, 1991: Sudbury, Ontario

Home for the holidays after two years of teaching in Bhutan. I am miserable, disoriented, homesick for the mountains. “Time is moving so slowly, at times I feel stuck in one hour forever. If I were home for good, how long would this take? To pass, I mean.” (See Answer, January 1999.)

January 1, 1994: Gomtu, Bhutan 

Visiting my in-laws with my husband, Tshewang, and our son, Pema. “Pema wakes in the morning and escapes the mosquito net. There are the usual necessities – diapers, juice.” (I do not write about the other necessity: a feeling of belonging in this country that I love, that I have married into. I do not know it is necessary. I don’t even know it is missing.)

December 31, 1995: Thimphu, Bhutan 

We have just moved from a tiny, cramped, two-bedroom Bhutanese-style cottage into a spacious three-bedroom Western-style bungalow. I love the house and feel at home. Tshewang does not love the house, he does not feel at home. Our marriage is unravelling and I don't know how to knit it back up. Instead I write. My friend Susan has been pestering me to submit something to some CBC contest I've never heard of, so I begin an essay (that will win a $10,000 award and become a book).

December 31, 1997: Thimphu, Bhutan

Champagne and Auld Lang Syne with friends. Tshewang and I have split up. I have decided to leave Bhutan. I wake up on January 1 and write, “I don’t want to go.” Why am I leaving? Whenever anyone asks, I always have a good five or six reasons on hand, but none of them really answers the question.

January 1, 1999: Lanark, Ontario

With Pema and my best friend, Susan. I have been in Canada for six months. I have left Bhutan, I have left Tshewang, my life story does not make sense to me. I think I am going to feel this grief forever. Susan assures me I will not. I am afraid that I have burned through all my allotted luck and happiness. Susan assures me I have not. But how long will this take to pass? (Answer: a long, long time.)

December 31, 1999: Toronto, Ontario

With Pema and Tshewang, down by Lake Ontario, star-struck equally by fireworks and by the thousands and thousands of people gathered peacefully to watch the skies and celebrate the biggest New Year’s Eve in a thousand years. No planes fall out of the sky; the grid stays up. The only sign of disorder we see is a couple of teenagers throwing a newspaper into the street. A police officer tells them to pick it up. They do. Our eyes go back to the chandeliers in the sky. Tshewang says, “I feel proud to be a human being.”

December 31, 2002: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

Visiting family. I make a list of accomplishments for the year: went to teacher’s college, got a Canada Council grant for a novel about a broken-up family, got shortlisted for a CBC Canadian Literary Award (what?? I don’t even remember what story I sent in), filed three years of late income tax returns. I have been in therapy for two years. I am lucky. I am starting to feel happy.

January 1, 2004: Toronto

Listen to Billie Holliday, eat leftover shrimp risotto, wish for a full-time teaching job. (Note: Wish comes true later that year. Luck? Karma? The fruits of therapy? All of the above? It is a job that gives me great happiness.) 

December 31, 2008: Toronto

I finish my first novel about a broken-up family, two hours before midnight. I mean, "finish." (It's never finished. Even after it is published, to my great delight, in 2011.)

January 1, 2012: Toronto

I go to the gym and am tricked by the sight of the sun into walking home with wet hair. While my scalp thaws, I leaf through old journals and think about luck and karma and happiness. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "a great majority of the European words for 'happy' at first meant 'lucky.' An exception is Welsh, where the word used first meant 'wise'." In Buddhism, there are several words for happiness, but that is a topic for another day. According to the Bhutanese, whatever you do on the first day of the new year sets the pattern for the rest of the year, so I have to work on my second novel.

Bugs in the Brain

Instead of writing, I've been wandering around online. A Simpsons website led to a clip of The Pathological Liar, Jon Lovitz's SNL character (“Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket”), which led to the investigation of the following ailments, none of which, alas, has any place in the novel I am (not) writing.

Pseudologia Fantastica: Uncontrollable lying. Also known as mythomania.  

The afflicted tell fantastical tales signifying their uniqueness, worth and courage (friendship with celebrities, kinship with royalty, gratitude of maidens rescued from railway tracks). They are not seeking any obvious material gain from the listener, so this is not a case of sociopathic manipulation, and they are not otherwise deluded or psychotic (although some experts consider the stories a form of “wish psychosis”).

Is it a case of damage to the membrane that normally keeps daydreams and fantasies inside their heads? A coding problem? Poorly executed fiction, and in the wrong medium to boot? At some level the afflicted know their stories are not true, unlike people suffering from

Morgellons Disorder: Syndrome in which sufferers experience symptoms of a mysterious skin disorder.

The afflicted experience burning, crawling or itching sensations (formication) and skin lesions, and claim that red, black and blue fibres erupt from their skin. Sufferers have identified a range of potential causes, from genetically modified foods and environmental pollutants to aliens. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control have determined that Morgellons is a form of

Delusional Parasitosis: Mistaken belief that one is suffering from parasites such as lice, scabies or worms.

The afflicted experience formication and often present proof of infestation in the form of skin scrapings, lint or other particles, usually carried in a small container  (the “matchbox sign”), but lab tests show no parasites. My sister and I have both suffered this affliction on our travels (she gets delusional scabies, I get delusional lice); our delusions arose after we contracted and treated the real thing. The difference? With the real thing, you know you have it, and that is the end of it. The delusional one doesn't feel like a cold, incontrovertible fact; it is a kind of brain fever. You are convinced you have it, and that is just the beginning.

Having spent two hours on fictional bugs, I now pledge to spend an equal amount of time on fiction. Cold, incontrovertible fact: writing fiction is hard work. A little brain fever would help.

Twelve of '12 in Twelve or Less

Twelve books I loved in 2012, in the order that I read them, and why I loved them in twelve words or less:

1. The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje. The old story-telling Ondaatje returns.  
2. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Every time I thought I knew where it was going, I didn’t.
3. Galore by Michael Crummey. One Hundred Years of Solitude in Newfoundland.
4. Just Kids by Patti Smith. Love, create, lose, create, love. Repeat.
5. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeannette Winterson. How literature can save your life.
6. Open City by Teju Cole. Long walks with unusually perceptive but ultimately unreliable narrator unnerve reader.
7. Ninety Days by Bill Clegg. Memoir of relapse and recovery, and what makes the difference.
8. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Waters. You'll need a Do Not Disturb sign: “I’m readin’ here.”
9. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. This is how you win a MacArthur Genius Grant.
10. The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg. A different kind of addiction: can a person eat themselves to death?
11. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Marie Semple. "I'm still readin' here."
12. Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt. Great antidote to all the nonsense about world's demise on 21/12/2012.

Elsewhere

As a child I was always scheming to leave home. I read constantly (the first escape), and fantasized frequently about living elsewhere. The where didn’t matter, only the else (else, from the Old English elles: other, otherwise, different).

I even begged to be sent to boarding school, imagining a long journey by train, an old stone residence, cold rain falling against narrow windows lit against the coming dark.

In our fantasies of away, even the rainfall is otherwise. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

But my grandparents were not keen ( “I’ll ‘boarding school’ you in a minute”), and so I began to lobby for the next best thing, and at last, at age 11, I was finally allowed to leave home. It was only an hour and a half to Camp McDougall in Thessalon, but it was away, it was elsewhere (other, otherwise, different).

Eventually my idea of away began to assume the shape of a big city. Cities had bookstores, literary festivals, publishers. Cities were where stories got told. You moved to a city and you found your community and it was different (other, elsewhere), and this was how (I thought) you became otherwise (a writer).

I left Northern Ontario almost thirty years ago, and have lived away ever since. But I went back to Thessalon last weekend as part of Stories in the North Literary Festival and when we passed the entrance to the summer camp, I felt a surge of excitement, not at the idea of leaving home, but at the idea of returning. The northern landscape, after so many years in a city, now seems like elsewhere: the long lines of hills, old stones emerging out of cold water, narrow farms, white pines against a dark sky.

Stories in the North was created four or five years ago by serious writers and readers.  A serious writer is someone who writes. These people write. They meet to share what they've written; they reach out to writing groups in other communities; they publish and host open mike nights. Their schedule for National Novel Writing Month is full (go to the cafe, the funeral home, the library, write for three hours, six hours, twelve hours). And of course, they created this literary festival, and found funding (through the Ontario Arts Council), and it runs smoothly and beautifully.

Writers with a connection to the north are invited (and paid) to lead workshops and to read, and the writer who accepts this invitation is rewarded by serious enthusiasm (along with music and home baking). This is a place where stories get told. Disappearing lakewater, pioneer grandparents, a woman on fire, a ghost sheep in the middle of the road. Stories that light up the windows against the coming dark.

Yes, you can leave home and seek out a community of writers elsewhere, or you can make one where you are. Elsewhere, like home, is a state of mind. The physical journey is not necessary. But community? Writers write to be read. Community is essential. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

Moving Out

I am in the hall by the elevator, surrounded by boxes, a hockey bag, one of those pull-up bars that hasn't fit in the doorway of any of the places we've ever lived.

My son is moving out. His friends are waiting downstairs with the truck. The elevator door opens and I hand him the last box. “Thanks,” he says. “I’ll call you. Bye Mom.”

"We didn't even take a picture to document this," I say. My son is moving out! The whole process took less than twenty minutes. And nineteen years. "I should have taken a picture."

"It was too fast," he says. The elevator door closes.

Yes, it was.