Erich Eipert's Blog, page 5
November 5, 2011
A young fictional hero from Payback at Morning Peak by Gene Hackman
October 26, 2011
Two Death Valley heroes
October 17, 2011
Just what is a hero?
August 15, 2011
Iowa, farmers and jeans
First of all, a small confession to readers who might have thought otherwise. I don't live in Iowa anymore. Haven't for decades, actually. But it's not because I set out to put Iowa behind me, for I didn't. Just look at my Iowana section for proof. My egress was just simply life happening, which took me to Washington state a long time ago. And that's where I got anchored. But Iowa still lives in my psyche and I've probably made over a hundred trips back since leaving.
Why, you might ask? Well, most members of my extended family still live there, for one thing. So do my oldest friends. But Iowa is also where I'm grounded. Maybe it's a little bit like the biological imprinting of salmon that everyone out here in the Northwest knows about. Nature has programmed the fish to return to the stream where they were reared. [We'll just forget all that other nonsense that doesn't fit, the spawning and dying part.] It must have helped my programming that I have pleasant memories of my parents, my friends, my childhood on the farm, and the way things were in that simpler time. Then again, maybe those times only seemed simpler because I was a child locked within a smaller, more understandable child's world. But enough of that too.
What I'm getting around to is that for me Iowa is also somewhat of a fictional place I've built in my mind—a state of mind, if you will excuse the cliche. In this place things function and work like nowhere else, people are mostly reasonable, and problems sometimes actually get solved. I know exactly where this idea comes from because I can still pull together a kind of an ideal for a piece of fiction I once contemplated writing. It was to be a rural and eminently practical place where farmers ruled and made it function with same reliability and precision as as the force of gravity. Yes, farmers!
See, I worked a lot with my dad and that meant knowing and being around lots of farmers. Farmers worked with their hands, understood basic economics and management, and brooked little bureaucratic nonsense. They were a mixed lot of characters but for the most part they were no nonsense practical men who could erect a fence that would keep in a bull, weld things that broke, and cuss when they couldn't weld things that broke. They could birth stuck calves in the middle of the night, squirt milk from a teat into the mouth of a kitten one minute and blast marauding raccoons in the chicken coop the next. They could dehorn calves or casually castrate pigs (which might give many an onlooker the willies in this age of sensitivity). I watched farmers sweat through ungodly heat or disaster and then still be able to joke about the corrupt politicians in Illinois or hillbillies in Missouri (yes, those Iowans always thought their state a tad superior). And perhaps most admirable of all, a few of them even knew not to try for perfection out on the farm because there, almost always, good enough would do.
Okay, I realize there's a fair bit of butterfly powder (to use the metaphor from my novel) in all this, even for "the good old days." I know that through the decades Iowa has changed along with the rest of the nation. Many of its people still prefer to wear jeans, as I did on the farm and still do today, but fewer of them are farmers now and those farmers don't sweat as much anymore given the modern convenience of air conditioned cabs on their tractors and crop insurance policies in their desks. I know eBay, Craigslist, social networking, and a safe water supply have also come to the state. Neither has it escaped my attention that the same problems of crime, drugs, sex offenders, budget shortfalls, self serving lawyers, and ambitious politicians with an eye out for their next office are a fixed part of the landscape now. But I also appreciate that the state is still progressive and the people, for the most part, genuine. At least for me, that's good enough to sustain a state of mind!
I still have lots more to say about Iowa, but that will have to wait for another time.
There it is!
EE
Tagged: agriculture, farm life, farmers, Iowa, rural America
July 25, 2011
What is butterfly powder?
Just what is butterfly powder? And why the "Redux?"
Taken literally, the "powder" refers to the colorful dust that stuck to your fingers if you ever came to hold a butterfly by its wings (and I hope you haven't). What you'd have done, had you done so, is rubbed off thousands of tiny scales and left the creature permanently grounded. However, my use of the term is metaphorical and comes from my novel's protagonist, a boy whose active imagination led to a discovery when he was small. Gilbert Perles, after logically enough concluding it was butterfly powder that allowed butterflies to fly, then took this idea one step too far by reasoning that if he collected enough of the stuff and dusted himself with it, he too could fly! In his teens, Gilbert painfully realized his error had come about because he was too ready to see what wasn't there and to believe what wanted believing. He also recognized that his wishful thinking still often led to self delusion just as it had back when he believed he'd be able to fly. So butterfly powder became his metaphor for this phenomenon.
Whereas Gilbert is a fictional character, his butterfly powder metaphor for self delusion is real and applies just as readily to us nonfictional characters because most of us are likewise beset with an amazing ability to believe the most improbable things. Given the murky mental processing unit within which human ideas incubate, everyone's beliefs could probably stand some scrutiny now and then for signs of butterfly powder. Unfortunately, there is no indication that much of the populace is in any rush to begin. Another big disappointment to many, and me in particular, is that clearer thinking did not seem to accompany the arrival of the digital age. Even a casual glance tells me that there is no shortage of "seeing what isn't there" or "believing what wants believing" looming on the Internet horizon. If anything, a general dumbing down has occurred and is threatening to boost delusion into a new golden age. Given all the above, I've decided it's time to stop confining my butterfly powder construct to just one character and to apply it where some of the action is. That's the why of these musings. And it's also the reason for the "Redux" in the title above. Now, having said all that, it would be hypocritical of me not to disclose that although the risk is surely very slight, there is always a tiny chance that my own commentary and perception might be butterfly powder.
Tagged: butterfly powder, coming of age novel, self delusion, wishful thinking
