Stone Riley's Blog: Stone Riley's Shoebox - Posts Tagged "greece"

A memoir of making a novel
(Recollections of creating the novel “Dark Of Light”.)
(Link: Dark of Light )
[*See Footnote 1]

In 2004, with motives I do not fully understand, I undertook to write a deeply researched and deeply convincing novel of ancient religion, seeking the kind of careful but intimate familiarity I feel with the religions of our time. Was it just from curiosity? Once the idea was conceived, I felt a passionate hunger for the challenge and conceived a hope that it might do some good. However selfless or self-indulgent it may have been, I am sure that I was acting in a love for wisdom.

Being then more of a painter than a writer, I felt no loyalty to any particular form of novel. In our culture we believe a good painting will make the viewer conscious of the workings of their mind, and we prize that kind of revelation. So I experimented freely as a good painter must. I schemed to use a writing style – plus lots of deeply accurate historical information – to give the reader a conscious experience of an actual religion that would be very spiritually true and very foreign, in hopes that something good for us today would come from it.

But really why? Which may be to say, what did I mean when I boasted to myself of seeking “spiritual truth”? I began with just a vague conception that spiritual truth is something like the psychological truth that a fine painting sometimes gives. And I hoped to finally finesse this hard question by making the thing convincing, thus recruiting the reader into making that judgment while the pages turn in their eyes. But of course the reader (the first of whom would be myself) would judge that question – the nature of spiritual truth – from the moving picture show presented by the novelist.

So I wanted at least a fair sketch of my answer as soon as possible to guide my study, and much more than that when work eventually began to draw the novel's characters, compose their lines and set the props. I felt strongly that the ancient Greek Mysteries of Eleusis could be the setting for a novel such as this but I did not know what universal truth about our soul life could be discovered in that distant place. I must hold that central question – supposed to be my main purpose in the work – clearly in mind as I plunged into the two years of research.

Meanwhile, the thing which gave me hope that such an art work can be done was Shakespeare's comedy “Midsummer Night's Dream”. Most importantly, I'd seen some impressive movie treatments through the years, the first one in a childhood afternoon with a TV show of classic movies. I still see Puck peeping out through forest shrubberies, spying out from the small gray screen in our family's living room, watching my world and me with feral curiosity.

With age and art and adult study I had learned to trust the Bard as a great model, learned to imitate his courage. So when this project was conceived I could take to the script and appreciate that in “Midsummer Night” Shakespeare brought ancient Hellenistic faith – the faith of Eleusis more or less – out of Europe's memories where it lay, up into the intensely conscious presence of a beautiful, moving and insanely confusing stage performance. Perhaps a book full of words developed by a painter could try for similar effects.

I did steal one specific trick from the play, its deliberate bewildering jumble of time and place and the characters' identities. The trick is supposed to bring the audience to the mental state of an intelligent and curious little child, a child in a house full of lively and welcoming adults, at the age when language is almost but not quite grasped.

When you are that child, human instinct impels you to a powerful fascination with learning, with trying and exploring, and you feel a wonderful opportunity. Among the arts, we most often achieve that sensation through music but “Midsummer Night” does it so well with this literary trick that I guessed it might be worth a try.

By some accident of literary history, Shakespeare's old technique began to shape a style of novel that is called “post-modern”. I read a few of those to check and thought it was okay. I also took the science fiction trope of parallel time lines and the familiar sci-fi device where you have a character undergo instruction somewhere, as a means to give the reader information. And lots of the action stuff was “ripped from the headlines” like adverts for crime and spy novels say. And there are cowboys. And definitely there are some juicy bits from romance novels.

From Mary Renault I was not able to take much except a hope to somehow emulate her realism. [*2] Renault's books, in my memory of the ones I've read, throb with glorious deep harmonies of violin and cello, all of one multi-curving piece with gleaming light pooling on their surfaces. To me they make a kind of sleep, a dream demanding to be dreamed again. For me their beauty stops the breath of thought and satisfies instead of leaving curiosity behind.

Perhaps a single chapter in my book approaches Renault, one in which I especially loved the people. [*3] But I thought, her fully opened breathless heart is only one mode of humanity's religions. Her artistic achievement gives me hope but I need some other kind of realism. And anyway, for Eleusis we do not possess the mass of straightforward detailed historical information from which Renault wove her gleaming fabrics.

I did misappropriate “cultural equivalence” from Mary Renault's tool kit. That merciful principle says you are allowed to just say “bucket” when your story needs a bucket, not required to pause the action and describe an oak or horsehide object, allowed to let your reader blithely and half-consciously picture the plastic bucket which they are familiar with, if your story simply needs a functioning bucket.

That principle of cultural equivalence did not properly fit. Instead, I wanted the reader to be very conscious of their inner mental doings while taking part in ancient scenes that I accurately depicted somehow, without me tiresomely insisting that the objects there are oak and horsehide. But post-modernism provided adaptations. The cowboys are there, for example, by way of their real historical equivalents in ancient Greece.

There was one failure of that technique which I regret. At the time I was writing, our society's rulers had outlawed psychoactive drugs in a war against the people, as a punishment for nonconformance. Meanwhile, of course the ancient Mysteries of Eleusis used a careful dose of a psychoactive at a crucial moment in their sacred soul-opening ritual, probably an extract of ergot or agaric. I tried to join these broken pieces with my novel's version of cultural equivalence but had incomplete results.

Of course the key to all of this stylistic puzzle must be the same as any good novel. The characters must behave and think and feel like people actually do. They must be strongly motivated, complex and familiar. The novelist must love them. I felt well equipped for that part of the challenge. Besides the wide variety of people whom I'd met in the rather wandering life I'd led, there were my many years of work experience in fortune telling.

Try using Tarot cards, or any one of humanity's similar genius tools, to counsel your fellow human beings in their troubles. Accept this employment from anyone who brings their life to you in earnest sincerity. Try doing that for years. Nothing else can teach so much about human life. You may find yourself in love with them. Then write a novel. I expect its characters will show themselves to you as quickly as mine did.

But here I've skipped right past the months of study in the ancient Mysteries of Eleusis. Fortunately I had sufficient income as an engineer to buy obscure books which I was therefore free to scribble full of notes. And fortunately the accidents of history provided Karl Kerenyi, the perfect source for me, who did a big solid block of intensive marvelous scholarship just before my time.

Karl Kerenyi was an anti-Nazi European intellectual, swimming in the same current of meticulously careful pro-human thinking as Carl Jung and all that crowd, but an eloquent writer and a historian who specialized in the ancient mysticism that I wished to understand. I bought and read most of Kerenyi's books that were available in English in 2004 - 2005. There is one in particular I really scribbled full of notes, his book specifically on Eleusis. [*4] It is the central basis of my book.

Perhaps there is my motivation. As I and many others will tell you, creative ideas sometimes have a real life of their own, somehow flying through the psychic atmosphere, offering themselves to artists here and there, until their offer is accepted. Many artists will swear to this from personal experience if asked. Perhaps that book by Kerenyi whispered in my ear before I even knew that it existed. Or perhaps the goddesses whom it tells of did. They do portray forces of creation.

The history of ideas in our modern age is a history of Destruction devouring Creation while Creation struggles to give birth. Brutal proto-Nazi fantasies brewed in imperial Europe for a hundred years before World War Two, even while the humane kind of thinking embodied in people like Kerenyi flourished into new vibrant beautiful living shapes. Hitler and Van Gogh were both modern Europeans. Van Gogh made beauty; Hitler ate it.

Something comparable but very different can be said of the old Greek world where the Mysteries of Eleusis flourished. There the Female spoke for itself. In that culture men customarily succumbed to fits of cruel passion, abandoned all and ran away to piracy or war. But Eleusis stood as an inviolable place of sacred home and hearth fire. There girls and women led the search for wisdom for many hundred years. Their spiritual truth, whatever it may be exactly, demanded peace and acceptance of our common rootedness in fire and earth.

When Kerenyi found that very foreign and beautiful place, that very different arrangement of the Sacred, he had a duty. As a pro-human modern European, his duty was to clearly show with facts, proofs, evidence, and grace that Eleusis was made and kept by ordinary human beings for ordinary human reasons, as mysterious and beautiful as that may be. The sacred mysteries of ancient times were not made by fantastical racial supermen in a fantastical golden age like some people do claim.

For me, when Kerenyi's book led me to Eleusis, I was a modern American Pagan. By that time our movement had sorted through its intellectual inheritance and firmly chosen a pro-human pro-Earth anarchism. We had given up old claims to be a corps of elite initiates. We decided each person should follow their own loving heart toward Wisdom of Nature. And this is a revolutionary doctrine in our country, a claim that radical spiritual freedom is a fact of human nature, that the human soul in fact is free to be itself. But our claim was lacking clear support from ancient sources despite our long and earnest searches for it there. [*5]

So suddenly, when the gate of Eleusis opened for me in Kerenyi's vision, my vague concept of spiritual truth found a usable shape. It took the same shape as our human soul, perhaps as through a mirror. I mean to say, Karl Kerenyi's urgent proof that ordinary human beings with ordinary human reasons made and kept the Mysteries of Eleusis, this pointed toward a source that was very ancient in their time yet with them there and still with us today, and filled my need for a valid perennial anarchistic mysticism.

I mean that human nature is, for us human beings, a shadow image of the Sacred. I mean that Living Earth, who evolves us in her mirrored image, is for us the Sacred. Among much else, I mean that the sensation of awe and reverence and revelation that we feel toward Living Earth is fundamental and central in our consciousness, bred in our bones and neurons. And our lives are threads of Living Earth. So we must know ourselves, and know ourselves quite well, and have respectful courage, and through our true sensations in this life we find the Sacred. It is so here today and in Eleusis.

I must explain that our modern Pagan movement is very mystical, very much a thing of opening your natural soul. We rely on mysticism for quite practical purposes in daily life, believing that Infinity's subtle touch is as normal and natural as a bite of food or breath of air.

And it's no good telling me we are mistaken just because you don't know how to think it. For an intimate example, me being one of our countless psychic counselors, mystic experiences are so ordinary in my life I cannot possibly regard them as incomprehensible or fantasy. It is a standard part of counseling for me to talk with dead people when required, to glance into the client's mind or glimpse their past and future. These are skills evolved in human beings by our life on Earth as much as following a rabbit trail or throwing rocks or making love.

And now Kerenyi, this most excellent scholar, was telling me that my mysticism is basically the same which shaped the Mysteries of Eleusis and kept that religion going as a useful institution for many hundred years. He made me feel that I, a wanderer, had found grandmothers in my faith.

Of course it's true that I do not entirely understand our religion in our time – how could I possibly? – but probably it would be possible to find post-modernistic ways to write about it well, woven in with the realistic cowboys and juicy romance bits and all. And this echoing of mysticism across the ages might add deep dimension to the weave, deepening the psychological realism – which I began by hoping for – perhaps into a kind of mental symphony. Perhaps.

So a convincing show of the infinity in our ordinary lives might be offered. And I could hope the novel's reader finds some spiritual truth.

Footnotes
[*1] “Dark Of Light: a post-modern historical romance novel of the ancient mysteries” by Stone Riley, first edition 2006.
Link: Dark of Light
The title refers to the transcendent act of looking directly at the Sun, in which its center appears to be a kind of shifting darkness, proof that reality goes far outside our knowing.

[*2] Mary Renault wrote 8 novels set in ancient Greece, all famous for their exquisite romantic realism. None of them focus centrally on religion.

[*3] That chapter is titled “Also The Dancing Ground Again”. It first appeared in “Dark Of Light” then was included in “Tales Of Men And Women Edition 7” in 2017.
Link: Free Pdf File

[*4] “Eleusis: archetypal image of mother and daughter” by Karl Kerenyi, first English language edition 1967. This fine history book was a central basis for “Dark Of Light”.

[*5] Modern Pagans have deeply researched the ancient magics of Celtic Europe, Buddhist / Hindu Asia and shamanism worldwide. In this author's opinion the understandings produced by that work are extremely valuable but do not entirely fit the mysticism that is most needed in our time and place, this sharpening the author's interest in the Greeks.