Lunatic Writer's Blog

Screwtape on Democracy

7/27/2013

Described as “the most engaging account of temptation—and triumph over it—ever written", C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is one of my very favourite books, from which I read passages again and again.

In it, Screwtape, a senior demon, gives advice to his rather bumbling nephew, a novice demon, on how he may more effectively damn a human soul:

Here’s his deliciously evil advice about corrupting the idea of democracy:

“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether ‘democratic behaviour’ means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated.”

And here’s the diabolical twist of the knife:

“You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings… The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you. The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good solid, resounding lie.”

How delicious to discover The Screwtape Letters has recently been adapted as a stage play. Would love to see it or, better yet, to direct it!
Hmm... Maybe my theatrical life is not over quite yet...

BOOK REVIEW: The Glass Seed

7/25/2013

Pearkes has written a remarkable book. It is moving, lyrical, and always powerful. In it the author has shared her most intimate thoughts about life, death and love, set against the context of her mother’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s and her own search for meaning.

Dementia, in all its forms, is a devastating disease. It leads Pearkes to ask “Is it possible that Alzheimer’s disease has risen as an illness of our time because of something we need to learn? Relinquish the mind. Let go of the hollow husk of material being. Embrace a power beyond human accomplishment. Accept mortality. Then see what happens.”

I will forever remember the scenes Pearkes describes where she sits with her mother, a mother no longer resembling the woman she grew up with, who nurtured her, who was strong and in control, and who now can no longer even mutter an intelligent sentence, nor recognize her own daughter. And still Pearkes holds her, sings a nursery rhyme to her, loves the pre-verbal essence that is still her mother.

It is almost too deep a moment to comment on.

There is a stage in the illness when her mother still manages to speak in short sentences, though many seem nonsensical. On one occasion, Pearkes’s mother reminisces about her husband and says of him “Something was in there. In him. I wished he could get it out. It made him so unhappy.” Then, a moment later, she looks directly at her daughter and, in preternatural wisdom, blurts out, “You are like that too.”

This book challenges us with the question ‘are we more than the sum of our memories’? Clearly Pearkes thinks we are, and her exploration of that question is multifaceted and poignant. “The mind,” she concludes, “for all its potential cannot be depended on the way the heart can.”

I think of St. Exupery’s Little Prince perched on his asteroid, and of his fox and the snake which will help him make his final journey.

Goodnight sweet prince.

The Glass Seed is a book of sweet and sad wonders.

Camera, Cat & Catastrophe

7/25/2013

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,
They kill us for their sport.

KING LEAR

Yesterday, as I was finishing taking pictures of a spider web, my cat, Rico, was rubbing against my legs and whining for attention. He walked in small circles, mewing. Inadvertently, he broke the lower supporting strand of the spider web with his upraised tail. “Oh no!” I cried, as I saw the spider suddenly plummet, clutching to an emergency strand, seeming to gather up as much silk as he could as he fell.

I could only hope for the best, trusting the industrious spider, free of our interference, would be able to repair the destruction we had wrought.

Wanton Cat God

Wanton Croquet Player

Later in the evening, as Judy and I were playing croquet, I noticed the web again. Leaning over and looking closely, I could see the web was still under construction and that the spider was busy completing the last stages as I spoke. Judy was around the corner of the house, attentive to a wicket, when I called out her. This was something she had to see. “Judy! Come and see!” When to my horror, I saw that the force of my exclamation had blown the spider completely off the web.

Well, not a wanton boy exactly, but a galumphing photographer for sure.

Mea culpa.

#1 on my Bucket List--Copernicus Crater

7/22/2013

The latest images of the central peak area of Copernicus Crater are outstanding! Thank you Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and all the Arizona scientists who keep this wonderful mission on track. The photo here has a resolution of 4 m per pixel which is almost good enough (but not quite) to spot a lander on the surface.

In this photo I can see in exquisite detail all the craters, mounds and mountains which make up the principle sites which Wernher von Braun and Alan Bean visit in my novel Lunatics. With these latest pictures, I feel I could jump right into the picture and follow the Lunar Rover’s tracks! Would that I could!

There are no plans for Americans to return to the moon in the foreseeable future, this despite the fact that one of the principal goals of the LRO mission was to prepare maps for future landing sites.

Meanwhile lunar scientist can only ogle in awe at the moonscapes, feeling, as I’m sure they must, that they could almost reach out and touch that piece of pristine olivine bedrock…

Some day… but not any time soon.

Sigh…

More LROC photos on my Lunatics page.

Before Midnight--Movie Review

7/21/2013

Two thumbs up for this one. One thumb for Ethan Hawke and another for Julie Delpy.

I have seen few movies in recent memory that were more clearly and appropriately a duet piece. Imagine: a movie about two people (Jesse and Celine) whose running conversation together make up 90% of the story. What a concept! How foreign to everything screenwriters learn is necessary to make a good movie. Two talking heads going at it non-stop. But such heads, such conversation and, most importantly, such chemistry.

True “chemistry” between actors is an overly-used adjective and, to my mind, a much rarer phenomenon than some critics would have us believe. In a movie like Before Midnight, the chemistry threatens to boil over.

Fans of this trilogy of movies: first, Before Sunrise, then Before Sunset, and now Before Midnight, will know that the chemistry between Hawke and Delpy seems to have been present from their first moments together on film. But now it has reached an even higher level. Perhaps a more ‘mature’ level would be a better way of expressing it. For now, instead of young starry-eyed lovers meeting on a train, and impulsively deciding to get off together in Vienna, we meet a middle-aged couple, driving home from a Greek regional airport with two blond-haired daughters sleeping in the back seat of their car.

Should they wake the kids, they wonder? They had promised to stop at a nearby archaeological ruin, but it would be a shame to wake them. They could always tell them it was closed, but that they’ll stop on the way back instead. Anybody out there had a conversation like this before?

If there is a theme to Before Midnight, it has to do with exploring the nature of marriage and long-term relationships. Is a long-term relationship even possible? Three different couples, varying in age, give interesting answers to this question and the question, as posed, begins to haunt our protagonists as well. As they walk together down the road to a hotel, Celine asks, “if you were to meet me on that train today, for the first time, would you ask me get off with you?” It’s not a question Jesse is keen to answer but, when pushed, he answers in the affirmative. Delpy’s character is skeptical, and her fiery French temper flares. What should have been a very romantic evening together quickly turns into a no-holds-barred fight.

Without wanting to give away too much, I am happy to report, that under the influence of the Greek seaside, a glass of wine, and a deep commitment to the "chemistry" that has always defined their relationship, a warm light shines at the end of the tunnel.

Many viewers must be wondering if they can expect yet another movie in the series, nine of ten years down the road. What would this one be called? Before Hip Replacement?

Big Ledge Update

7/12/2013

First official rejection from an agent...

Hard not to take it personally. Especially considering the etymology of the word which literally means to "throw back".
Ah well... I fall into deeper solidarity with Sproule who knew his fair share of rejection, didn't he?

Maybe my bonanza's just around the corner, right?

Transplants and Novel Pitches

7/10/2013

A few weeks ago, I biked along the BNR trail above Nelson and stopped to collect a few queencup plants and one False Solomon’s Seal. I dug as deeply as I could into the rocky banks, hoping to gather as much of the original root structure as possible, then placed the unsuspecting abductees into my pack and biked home.

I found a nice shady spot for the plants, beneath a huge spruce tree. I packed them in good soil, doing my best to create an environment that would seem homey for them. I am cursed by this romantic notion that nothing could more enchanting in one’s backyard than “wildflowers.”

Now, a few weeks later, five of the eight queencups have clearly bit the dust, as well as the False Solomon’s Seal. Three queencups seem to be hanging on. Their leaves, though not bright and shiny, still are more green than brown, and a single green bead tops a single stem on each plant. If all goes well, when summer ends, these green beads will transform into one of nature’s most attractive shades of blue and become known as blue bead lilies.

On the other hand... perhaps none will survive. Too early to tell… Nine transplants, nine failures. Much sadness…

Tomorrow I sit down for fifteen minutes with a literary agent to pitch my novel Lunatics. It’s a great opportunity. A chance, at least, to get my foot in the door. To create some interest. To have someone in the biz actually read the manuscript and, from there, who knows?

Strangely, I’m quite nervous about this meeting. I’ve been rehearsing my pitch for the last several days, working on it intently, just as I would for learning lines to King Lear.

Yet it’s not the same thing exactly. On stage, I become someone else. If you choose to be critical, you will be being critical of someone else. Tomorrow, however, it is only naked me, my naked ideas, my eloquence (or lack of it), attempting to impress a stranger behind a table. A little different. And no fellow actors to bounce off of. So, yes, I’m a little nervous.

Nevertheless, into the breach we go! Like a flaming lunatic!

Which, I wonder, is more likely to bear fruit? My pitch or my queencups?

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY

7/8/2013

Recovering Stories of a Landscape’s First People

By Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

Some books have a narrow focus and this would be one. Its appeal is largely to people who presently live in, or have at least experienced, the magical landscape of the West Kootenays in the southeast corner of British Columbia.

Pearkes’s descriptions of the pre-European landscape are vivid, often poetic. She paints a picture of unspoiled forests, before mine sites had been established, and of untamed waters, yet to succumb to the constrictive work of dams. With equal vividness, and much love, she tells the tales of the people who first lived here, the Sinixt or Lakes people, focusing particularly on the lives of aboriginal women. She describes their way of life, their deep dependence on the land, and insists throughout the book how all of us, even 21st century white people, are inextricably tied to the landscape we live in.

Especially poignant to me are her recollections of walking over exposed river beds along the Arrow Lakes where the Sinixt had once flourished, and learning how, buried beneath the dark silt, arrowheads can still be found, but also to be reminded that this landscape can be walked upon only for a short time each year, bowing finally to the demands of dowstream dams. Or another time, her imagining the Pacific Salmon—the very lifeblood of the Sinixt people for centuries—jumping over the turbulent waters at Kettle Falls, on their way to their prehistoric spawning beds, except that now they no longer can. In place of the Falls there is now a mighty dam. And how the memory of catching leaping salmon has become no more than a fleeting memory for many of the Sinixt.

Pearkes does us a great service by “recovering” the stories of a people almost forgotten. After reading “The Geography of Memory,” it is as if the valleys I have walked in and mountains I have peered up at, for decades, have taken on an added dimension. Now I can “see” the people who lived here, who trod lightly, but significantly. Both they and I have scrambled across scree to look at the shaggy mountain goat, both collected the same huckleberries (‘sweet’ berries), have dived into the same water on a summer’s day thinking, ‘my God, that’s cold!’ each of us shaped, to different degrees, by the magical landscape surrounding us.

Pearkes’s book has helped connect me to a landscape and past I knew but dimly, and that is a great gift. Such a feat lifts the work beyond the narrow into something quite big.

Thank You.

7/8/2013

Yesterday 167 different people visited my website. I have no idea if this number is good, middling or laughable but I am appreciative all the same. It is a strange new world in which one can so regularly share one's thoughts with strangers scattered across the planet. I sometimes wish I would receive more comments about my postings but "no comment" is a legitimate response too, isn't it?
I'm very glad that at least 167 people didn't spend their entire day in a shopping mall... if I contributed to this trend in even a miniscule way, I am encouraged. Again, thank you for visiting my site and for reaching out. A new world consciousness is emerging--sometimes I truly believe it!

BOOK REVIEW Proof of Heaven

7/7/2013

What do you know? I have finally read a best-seller... maybe a first for me...
There have been many books and accounts of people’s Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in recent years. What distinguishes this one is that is was written by a skeptic and a skeptic supremely qualified to speak about the workings of the human brain.

Alexander talks about how dismissive he had previously been of patients’ claims of e.g. walking down a long tunnel, of meeting dead family members and friends, and all the other claims so common to NDEs.

He had put down such claims to a deprivation of oxygen to the brain, or an abnormal jolt of hormones as body systems began to shut down and so forth, all pat explanations which he and his colleagues regularly provided when confronted with such accounts.

Everything changed, however, when Alexander himself experienced an NDE in 2008 as the result of a very rare attack of a bacterial meningitis which doctors fully expected would kill him. Alexander was put into a medically-induced coma. According to Alexander, the virulent e coli bacteria, which was attacking his neocortex at this time, completely shut down his higher brain functions. This process should have made any kind of hallucinations impossible. In fact, Alexander’s consciousness should have been completely disabled.

And yet Alexander had a very rich sensory experience during his week- long coma. This is proof, Alexander argues, that consciousness exists independent of the brain and body.

Some aspects of Alexander’s heavenly vision were common to most NDEs. Many were unique, including a long period where he seemed to have no awareness of himself as a separate individual. He seemed to have no memories of his Earthly life nor did he meet any figures he recognized.

Only a relatively small portion of the book is devoted to what Alexander experienced during his vision. But overwhelmingly he was left with the positive assurance that he was loved. That love was the key to everything in the universe. And that he could do no wrong.

Most of the book is devoted to describing Alexander’s illness in detail and the reactions of his family and friends while he was ill, and to an examination of the medical implications of what had happened.

I doubt this book will change the mind of a firm atheist who allows no possibility for an afterlife. For, as many have argued, it is impossible to change the mind of anyone based on sensory experience, for every sensory experience (even the sensation of being skeptical about sensory experiences) is open to question, and its validity cannot be proved or disproved by logic.

Alexander’s account may, however, be a comfort to ‘believers’, providing another anecdotal report—and from a markedly unexpected source—that a loving God is ready to welcome them at the end of their Earthly lives.

It is worth noting that Proof of Heaven has come under attack by many of Alexander’s peers who claim the book is completely unscientific. Most take great issue with Alexander’s assertion that his neo-cortex had completely shut down during his illness. I, for one, am not qualified to choose between the opinions of competing neurosurgeons, but it seems only natural to me that there should be such a dispute.

All this being said, I did find this book an interesting read. It was written in a slow, clear style—clarity of presentation seeming to be uppermost in the mind of the author. The world is full of skeptics, I know, and some would claim Eben Alexander, M.D., had profit in mind when he published this book, but I find that hard to believe. With this publication Alexander opened himself up to ridicule on the highest level and professional shunning. All in a quest for fame? Wealth? It doesn’t wash for me. In my mind, this is the account of a sincere and “surprised” believer.

7/10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Alexander_%28author%29