For years now, the protagonist of my adolescent novel and I have been pacing the streets of our imaginary, historical city (which is also the base of any 'real' city, so perhaps he and I have a chance of Pinocchio-ing it out and finding - what?), wondering what we are doing here. Where we are going. Because a quest isn't complete without a path - a 'from' and a 'to' - right? Let's follow this alleged path, like - you guessed it - like a certain young woman and a rabbit with a pocket watch. There it is - a hole in the ground within which the laws of relativity jump into the quantum realm - without unifying jack.
To confuse the issue, Calim (my protagonist) and I are sitting outside the entrance to the hole (a sudden eruption in the pavement before us, or perhaps the work of municipal workers doing something municipal, or a hole we dug ourselves). We are just sitting there, a convenient place to sit, taking a break, not saying anything, not doing anything but considering these roiling contradictions that don't unify anything, when there is a movement within the hole - we hear it more than see it. (This doesn't make any sense, I know - a movement without the rabbit to-ing and fro-ing, but quantum physics forgives many literary licences.)
It's the plot of That Book, the one that either shook my soul or resonated with a soul that was already shook. Calim hears it too.
This is the book I want to write. A book that unifies nothing and everything and shakes all sorts of shaken souls. That is a little ambitious, so I am content to write a book through which themes creep like the roots of an oak tree trapped in a pavement that was laid around it, like a noose. You know the kind, the thick-as-your-thigh roots that heave up the concrete around it and you imagine the roots as roiling, but so slowly that it would take lifetimes and clever filming to see.
Ok, this too is a little ambitious, but I like the taste of that cliche: go big or go home.
So many post-modern authors (go ahead and call them what else you will; labels are for students - this adjective is merely a placeholder) bury their themes beneath accusations of relativity, as if beating the critics to the punch. Ah, isn't relativity wonderful (I keep typing 'real-' instead of 'rela-', which spell check says is incorrect and which my brain is inclined to agree with but my heart made of spongy hope protests)? No, it really isn't wonderful. It's a plug in a drain; it's a sad replacement for the security of religion.
People's Act of Love pulls no such punches. Life is... awful. Oh no, you yell! I can't bear to write another monologue about how awful life is. Let's compromise: life can be awful and sometimes it can feel... something else. I'm getting to that part.
This novel says what I have been saying, but better. As per my previous post, it offers you alternatives and you are almost giddy with it, with these academic offers, whose academic-ness convince you of their authority. At the same time, the novel asks you to empathise with cannibals and castrates (yes!), because morality is a set of emotional decisions made rational, like it or not. Then it asks you how you can empathise with such creatures, such fundamentally weak creatures, enslaved to an Idea. You take it as a judgement when really it is a question driving you towards the truth that such things exist in all of us and that perhaps we need to pass through each of these moral states to find a way to live.
Life is awful. So grow a pair. Make lemonade. Live within society because the alternative is bleak 'wildness', but find your way to reconcile yourself with it.
I like to believe (look how I've grown!) that somewhere in that reconciliation is... acceptance? Not accepting the awfulness, but accepting that being angry and lashing out is not going to get you or anyone else out of the awful. Hoping (personal projection here) that the way you find might be able to do something, even if only to record the lows and highs.
Richard Pare, Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia. Vladimir Shukhov, 1922. Photograph © Richard Pare 2007.
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