Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 7

The Hard Light Of Religion, The Shadows Of Art

A long time ago, I loved a sincerely religious woman. "I don't believe," she told me, "I know."

She had also studied mathematics in university, and once told me that she loved equations because "they have a correct answer." For her, a religious concept, like an equation, could be a form of proof.

For me, religious feelings arise from the same mental connections and spontaneous associations that give us art, poetry, music. I tried to convey this to her during one of our long night-time discussions that often lingered after we had made love, hours that I treasured then and hold close in memory now.

I went on to say that many religious "visions" and "insights" are perhaps as real, subjectively, as the connections that give rise to art, and that people who experience these events are faced with a challenge similar to one that artists usually take for granted: mental signals like these are often ambiguous, often more suggestive than definite, often hard to pin down, but all the more powerful because of this elusive nature.

Yet artists and poets have a great advantage: they have no compulsion to "believe" the signals from within their skulls; they feel compelled merely to explore and to convey these things. They can remain at ease with ambiguity, with uncertainty, with not knowing exactly what the signals "mean."

An acceptance of ambiguity, of confusion, might also be found in sincerely religious mystics who try to express what the signals from their heads have told them, but how often is it found in priests, or in church committees, or in televangelists? Unlike artists or poets, church people want mental signals to be real, with implications and consequences in the real world.

I love art, poetry, and music for many reasons, but especially because art, poetry, and music tend to recognize and accept the unreality of their essence. Religions (and those arts associated with religions) want, instead, to be real, and this drives me away from them -- far away.

This woman I loved had been steeped in religious doctrine, but she had no great feeling for poetic writing or poetic methods. She wanted the mental signals of her favoured religious writers to be true; she wanted to "know." She was not at all comfortable with my comfortable acceptance of "not knowing," and perhaps worst of all, of "not caring."

Eventually, she went away and left me on my own. I miss her terribly, but I recognize that not even long discussions in her welcoming bed, in the lingering after-warmth of love, could have reconciled this fundamental difference between us -- a difference between the hard light of religion, and the playful, powerful, poetic shadows of art.

When Does Writing Matter?

For me, the steep challenge of writing is to allow myself to spend effort and time on work that will never be seen by anyone.

Between the end of high school and the approach of my thirties, I wrote invisibly. I was ashamed of my weak skills and determined to get better, even if I had no idea of what better might mean in my circumstances. All I could see was the pallour of my style when compared to the stories and poems of actual writers, and so I kept it all hidden.

Still, I wrote almost every day, if only because I needed maps to roads that I could never see and could hardly define. This drive to improve kept me going.

Since then, I have written stories and even verses that seem good to me. I have learned to enjoy the process of writing and the meticulous fun of revision, yet now something holds me back, something makes me deny myself this pleasure. Is it a lack of confidence in my skill? No. A feeling that I have nothing left to say? Never. Then what is it?

For all of the years that I spent in secret study and practice, I could justify this effort by promising myself the eventual prize of readers. Now that I no longer need to prove my skills to myself, I still have no readers, and I have no hope of gaining them. No matter what I do, no matter how capably I do it, I remain unread.

This condition of crippling invisibility would seem typical for most writers of our illiterate day, and we must all find our own reasons to go on. Yes, I love to write, yes, I still have much to say, but are these, in the hard light of morning, reasons enough?

I can think of only one reply.

Write to explore within your own skull or to step outside of yourself, write for the challenge of new techniques, write for the secret pleasure of words and clauses at play. Discover what you need to keep on working, but remember this:

Writing matters when we make it matter.

We Might As Well Make The Best of Isolation

People who discover, on their own and for themselves, half-concealed pathways of art, often end up isolated by their own passionate pursuits: a fate so unavoidable that life's major question becomes not, "How do I steer away from isolation?" but, "What should I make of isolation?"

Taking isolation as an opportunity for learning and growth might seem a pale comfort, but the alternatives, resentment and bitterness, are no comfort whatsoever.

Dawn of the Digital Warnings

From 1984. Click for a better jpeg.

Do you remember those glorious early days of digital recording, when BIS albums would feature hot red WARNING labels on the front, and, in the back, a long list of hideous medical disasters that could result from unprotected playback? I remember that list:

-- Brain implosion

-- Torrents of blood gushing from ear canals

-- Bursting eyeballs

-- Teeth exploding from the upper jaw and embedding themselves in walls, pets, or other people

-- Disruptions of the space-time continuum and the entry into this world of raging undead abomination monstrosities.

Nonsense, most of it. No, my brain hardly ever imploded, and even if I ruined a few pairs of headphones with gore spills, had to pry a few molars out of brickwork, and fought off, with a woodshed axe, weirdly shrieking non-human intruders, you never heard me complain -- because you never heard me. The music drowned out everything.

Hitchcock faces THE BIRDS

Click for a better jpeg.

THE BIRDS. A few observations....

-- I have never been a fan of Hitchcock. I see him as a technician who sometimes focused on superb set-pieces at the expense of the film as a whole (FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT), or as a director who often shied away from the implications of his films and sabotaged their endings (VERTIGO). Something must have changed by the 1960s; I consider PSYCHO and THE BIRDS easily the best of his films, and ones that embrace their implications with courage.

-- THE BIRDS also vindicates the slow and methodical approach of Hitchcock's technique. By the time of the first bird attack at 25 minutes into the film, we have a good preliminary sense of the characters, of their circumstances, of the setting and its layout, of how one place connects (by road or by sea) to another. As the escalation occurs, the film can speed up transitions without our losing any sense of where we stand.

-- Jessica Tandy had the perfect eyes for a horror film. Alert, searching faces and skies, always glistening with anxiety to the point of near panic, they tell us almost everything we need to know about her character. I wish the horror field had recognized this quality and used her more often.

What Do I Want?

As I sit here to stare at the blank page and to worry about the upcoming book, I ask myself: What do I want?

What do I really want?

I want to show different ways to write horror fiction. These ways are not better than approaches used by other people, and -- I hope! -- not worse, but they are my ways, and they do the work I ask of them.

Along with methods, I want to show an imagery that is mine, based on dreams, on hillside wanderings near midnight, on things half-seen beyond the pines and aspens but felt right down the spinal chord. I trust my obsessions, even as they force me to question my competence in describing them.

I want to satisfy readers impatient with easy tricks and cliched concepts, readers with no tolerance for show-offs, bores, and fakes. Readers who toss books aside in disgust at such things are the people I respect as my friends and allies.

Above all, I want to be known as a writer who did his best even if the odds were against him, even if he had no patience for the postmodern smog or the zeitgeist of corporate consumerist fairy tales that guarantee public acceptance. I want to make other people with similar allergies and doubts feel less odd, less isolated, less alone. You are not the only ones who feel this way.

De Heredia versus Dr. Seuss

Click for a better jpeg, but don't expect a better parody.

"Quelle est l'ombre qui rend plus sombre encor mon antre?"
-- From LES TROPHEÉS, 1893.

As much as I respect the sonnets of José-Maria de Heredia, I do find some of his lines (unintentionally?) funny. That question from "Sphinx" would fit right into a translated book by Dr. Seuss.

I can admire his economy of means, his control of language, his refusal to pad the sonnets with images or metaphors that do not contribute to his planned effect, but at the same time, I don't sense any person behind the words, and I feel as if his focus on classical topics were an evasion of modern life.

In contrast, when Leconte de Lisle writes about distant cultures and distant places, I do get a sense of who he is, and this impression is reinforced whenever he denounces the modernity of his time, or stares into the future and sees a world without human beings. For all of the distance and objectivity that he shows in his work, Leconte de Lisle is there in his poems, while de Heredia seems absent in the sonnets

Am I being unfair? Am I missing a nuance of personality in the work? Perhaps I am... but I can't shake this feeling of concealment, of refusal to stand forward and to be himself.

Never Put Yourself Down

A friend of mine once told me, "Mark, you should never put yourself down, because there is a long line of people ready and waiting to do it for you."

If There is Any Reward at all to Writing....

For me, there is no challenge to understanding why a story falls apart; the mystery is to understand how a story moves beyond competence (in itself, easy to explain by technical terms) into the mysterious realms of truth and beauty that mean so much to the individual reader.

Anyone can learn to write with an acceptable degree of clarity, as long as that person understands the value of clarity. A few other people can learn the tricks of construction, pacing, euphony, tonal consistency, economy of means, all of the methods that bring fire to clarity, that make a story worth reading to the final page. Again, these techniques can be recognized, studied, and learned, but only if a writer wants to learn. Many, it seems, have no desire to gain this competence.

Beyond competence lies the realm of personal resonance, and writers have no control over their choice of readers. Even the best writers and the most attentive, thoughtful readers can fail to connect, because they simply do not share the same emotional tonality, because their sensibilities are not quite aligned, because they have lived utterly different lives with different experiences.

Given the troubled circumstances, what can competent writers do?

They can study themselves, know themselves. They can remain faithful to their memories, their moods, their tastes, obsessions, and outlooks. They can speak to themselves while writing as clearly and as engagingly as they can for strangers. They can pull up dreams and threads of their lives, while adding a narrative context that might help readers to see and think and feel in similar ways.

The odds are against them. Sometimes very good writers can fail to gain readers, and this might sour their efforts; it might even compel them to stop writing. But even as they strive and fail, writers can meet the challenge of being themselves. If there is any reward at all to writing, it might be this.

Lessons From Garbage: Pour It On, La Spina!

Click for a better jpeg.
Illustration by Boris Dolgov, who deserved a better story.

Things I have learned by reading garbage in WEIRD TALES, Lesson Three.

Never hunt for the single right verb or noun. Instead, bloat entire paragraphs with fumbling abstractions and needless qualifications:

"Being older than either of my two guests, I had, possibly, learned to be diplomatic; sufficiently so, at least, not to have thrust myself unnecessarily into a situation à deux where my tactful absence would have been better appreciated than my presence. I had seen nothing, after all, but Peter's restraining hand on Hank's restive shoulder, and the disappearing swirl of a girl's abbreviated skirts and long cloak into a part of the woods where the low undergrowth was not yet entirely denuded of foliage. All I had heard had been Hank's exclamation, coming almost directly upon the girl's scream. Peter must have been quick in his reaction.

"'Take your hand off me, you damned young cub!' had shouted Hank, with uncontrolled passion for which I did not at the moment entirely blame him. No man relishes the admonishing restraint of a youngster, in front of a woman particularly, no matter how much he may have deserved it."

You can darken this narrative smog by avoiding the simple past tense or even useful infinitives, and by gumming up the prose with present participles:

"We three men were hugging the open fire closely. The raw chill of that November night had closed in around us and the blazing logs yielded grateful warmth.

"Peter Murray was leaning forward in his chair, looking absent-mindedly into the leaping flames that sent flickering shadows to dancing on the walls behind us. Hank Walters was staring at Peter and I was watching both my guests with curious speculation that had risen in me since that afternoon’s encounter."

Never use a clear, simple verb like "to say," when you can type anything else along with an adverb:

"'She's done it! I knew she would!' cried out Peter frantically, and that gripping hand of his began to draw me forward through the woods recklessly."

. . .

"'Poppycock!' I retorted tartly."

. . .

"'You know perfectly well he didn't mean it,' I objected lamely."

Lamely, yes, but remember -- if one adverb is good, then two or even more can be just dandy:

"That reddish luminosity was bobbing unevenly up and down, as if it came from a lamp borne upon the head of a person walking rapidly, swimmingly, across uneven ground."

Did you notice that awkward repetition, that almost-end-rhyme? Stylistic gold!

Above all, avoid any straightforward account of a story's narrative. Complicate, complexify, discombobulate:

"Knowing Hank's proclivities, I could reconstruct the scene fairly well. He must have come upon the girl before she realized his proximity, and mischievously pulled off her pointed cap with the tassel that hung to her shoulder, confidently relying upon his vaunted masculine charm to smooth over the situation if it should unexpectedly tend toward the unpleasant.

"The girl had sprung to her feet, snatched for her cap, which Hank had thrust tormentingly behind him. Whereupon she had let out that eldritch scream. And the scream brought Knight-Errant Peter tearing out of the woods behind them, to remonstrate with Hank, who had naturally resented the interference. The girl had taken advantage of Hank’s momentary unguardedness to snatch, vainly, for her pointed cap, then had fled incontinently without it.

"With dismayed astonishment I had heard her scream, for it was not a scream of surprise; it was a cry of pure anger, of such depth and intensity that it started shivers running up and down my backbone. It was almost un-human in its expression of thwarted fury; arousing in me a powerful curiosity to see this girl who was so capable of such a strength of emotion. At the same time, I felt a dread of seeing her, as if she might prove to be more than my old eyes would care to take in."

Be your eyes old or be they young, may they soak up our lesson of WEIRD TALES garbage to the dregs.

-- Quotations from
"Death Has Red Hair," by Greye La Spina.
WEIRD TALES, September 1942.