Lost in the Jungle of Symbolism: Let the Beholder Find His Own Meaning

The Writer in the Jungle of Symbolism: Watch out, you're surrounded!

This picture of me taken by my son while were were on a hike in the wilds of the Florida Keys a few years ago can be milked so nicely for symbolism, I thought I'd use it again. Look at me, smiling in the jungle, but what is the meaning of that smile? And the white shirt? The relaxed pose? All this while the dead palm frond just behind me looks like a threatening hand? And why the jungle? Lots and lots of symbols can be conjured out of a jungle. But the truth is, I just stopped and turned around and he took the picture. No planning, no intended symbolism.

I think there is a truism here: Writer's don't think about symbolism as much as critics and professors of literature do. Hemingway said that a writer should never knowingly put symbols into his/her work but when the work is finished, it should be full of them. For example, in this picture you might think that I'm actually trying to look like Hemingway. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, I have the graying beard, and yes the adventurer's white shirt, and yes, I'm in the jungle and I may even have had drink or two. But no, Hemingway was the last guy on my mind. It just happens to be the way I look and the way I live.

And so it goes with writing. For example, Hemingway's justly famous story, "Hills Like White Elephants" seems to be about an unwanted pregnancy and a possible upcoming abortion, though Hemingway never mentions these things. Literary prospectors, mining the story for symbolic gold, have blasted out all sorts of fools gold ideas. Like the white hills resemble the shape of a pregnant woman's belly or, and here's a good one, the white elephant is, according to the dictionary, a property not worth the effort of owning and so would be the unwanted baby. I've been to white elephant parties and ended up with junk I saved for the next white elephant party, but I never ended up with a baby. 

To my knowledge, Hemingway was never asked about the symbolism in this story and I doubt he would have answered anyway. My take on it is that Hemingway liked elephants, had recently been hunting them in Africa, liked the way the distant hills resembled them, and figured they gave the story the background mood he wanted; so he used them.

Here's what Hemingway actually said about the purported symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea: 

 

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

So we need, I think, to be careful with the symbols, to go easy, not try too hard. If, as Hemingway said,  we make our characters and places real enough and true enough, they can mean different things to different people. That is, the reader will find the symbols that meet his/her needs in the work of the artist. And that, after all, is the real purpose and joy of art.

Writing Down the Winter

Welcoming February 2014 with a glass of wine.

It was a long, cold January, one for the record books and one to be treasured, in that strange way writers cherish the excuse to stay in doors, curled up, tucked away, warm and writing.

The working title of my next novel is Red-winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed. It's set in 1950's-60's rural New England with an important scene on Guam during WWII. It concerns a boy whose father and mother had abandoned him to the care of a nurse-midwife. As of Friday, I was 171 pages into it, or about 47,000 words. If you're lucky when you write a book, the plot, the characters, the setting all fall in together in a glorious and wonderful stew and this has happened now. I, for the first time, I am totally absorbed in and obsessed with writing: I want to do nothing else. I have to pull myself away for a weekend break. I tease myself; it's like foreplay.

Speaking of writing, I was about to send in my February piece to The Prague Revue (an essay on Kurt Vonnegut and the effect that his being in Dresden as a POW during the firebombing in WWII had on his writing). Just before finishing the piece, I happened to visit TPR's website, as I do several times each week. And so, of course, I find that the Universe has conspired against me with a cosmic coincidence. There was a very nice piece, written by the editors, about Kurt Vonnegut and his experiences in surviving the fire bombing of Dresden. Pure bad luck for me. So, I regrouped, dropped back and punted them another piece, this one on the mythologist Joseph Campbell and his impact on 20th century writers, film makers, and thinkers.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday and we are going to a neighbors for the game (Denver-Seattle). Terry flies to Atlanta early tomorrow, so we'll have to be careful tonight. She has six more months in this job. 

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut's Life-Altering Hellscape

This is the young Kurt Vonnegut. Here he is long, hard way from becoming the Kurt Vonnegut we all recognize: the jowly, craggy-faced older man with the big shock of curly hair. This is before he shipped overseas and into the blazing maw of WWII in Germany. Soon after deploying to the front, he was caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, that Christmas-of-1944 horror that was the Third Reich's dying gasp. When American positions were overrun, he was captured, shipped east, starving and cold, on a train with other American prisoners, and ended up in Dresden--the beautiful, ancient, untouched-by-war city of Dresden.

He was put to work in a slaughter house--Slaughter House 5--making a vitamin enriched syrup for pregnant women. The place where he worked was sixty feet below the ground in a room carved from living rock where it was cool so the meat did not need to be refrigerated. He was down there working when the firebombing of Dresden happened  on February 13, 1945, just three months before the war ended. 135,000 people died that night, some vaporized/incinerated in the fire storm, some suffocated in cellars while they sat up on benches thinking they were safe, some boiled alive in vats of water where they had taken refuge. There was no reason to destroy Dresden. It had no military importance.

After the bombing, Vonnegut's job was to help in the final incineration/cremation of the remains of the citizens of Dresden. They stacked them up in piles and used flame throwers to get it done.

One might imagine these would have an impact on a young man's life. I suggest reading or re-reading Slaughter House 5. It's instructive. And then read the rest of Vonnegut's books. The horrors are all there in one form or another, in the humor and the bitterness and the crazy science fiction.

This Writer's Life

Conducting Research in a Key West Cigar Shop on New Year's Eve Day, 2013-2014

 

 My Writing Day (not including the many distractions):

7:30 a.m.--Slept out, I lay for a while in that state of semi-sleep watching the remnants of dreams intermingle with the sounds of the real world drifting through the bedroom. This is a good trick for a writer to master, this hovering between sleep and wakefulness, because therein often lay the epiphanies an author needs to create. One must be careful to lie still--no moving--lest reality scare off the free-floating and the unfettered.

8:00--Up and shower. I don't linger in my p.j.s, usually, because I like the feeling of the being fresh and ready to go. Breakfast is a breakfast bar or a smoothie made from powerdered egg whites (chocolate flavored) strawberries, blueberries, and unsweetened almond milk. I do like eggs and sausage and toast, but am training myself away from them. While eating, I check my email on my Iphone.

8:30--Into my workroom/cave/study--I don't now what to call it--and into my fat recliner with my laptop on my lap. I put the computer on a special computer tray that has cushions on the bottom that rests comfortably on my lap/legs. I answer any important emails that can't wait, and then settle in to work.

8:30 to 1:00--I write. I'm working on two projects: a new novel and my monthly essay for The Prague Revue. I keep them both up on the bottom of my screen ready to open. I usually work on the novel in the morning and then, later, after my walk in the early evening and with a scotch/bourbon/wine next to me, on the essay.

Writing is not just about sitting there hour after hour. I get up every so often when my butt/legs need a stretch or when I'm hungry, or have to use the head. I might do a load of laundry, wash the dishes, vacuum a bit, or putter around with something. It's not wasted time, this puttering. It's a time when problems with the writing or scenes I've been working on might suddenly become clear or when another epiphany might blossom in my mind.  When I have lunch, I might pick up the really good book or short story I've been reading and poke into it for a few minutes. I find good writing stimulates good writing. And I'm careful, because the opposite is true: reading bad writing leaves a nasty taste in my brain and makes me feel like my writing is bad. 

 

1:00--I'm usually burned out and tired by now.  I can feel it in my head--a certain fatigue sets in and I know I'm finished--for awhile. I either go for a long walk--up to four miles--or I go to the Y and work out.

3:00--I pour myself a drink and settle back into working on my essay. (I know, this sounds like not such a good habit, but I drink slowly and stop early and never get more than a buzz on.) My pieces for TPR are due at the end of each month and I start each one at the beginning of the previous month and work on them for an hour or so every day. This allows time for ideas to develop and keeps a creative distance from the work. It also allows me to enjoy the process of writing. I don't want it to become an exhausting chore, like pulling all-nighters in college to finish a paper.

4:30 or so---Time to think about cooking dinner. My wife is usually about ready to wrap up her work for the day (she works at home, in her office upstairs at the other end of the house), and we meet for a glass of wine and hors d'oeuvres and plan supper.

6:00 to 8:00--I might watch the news and those comedy/satirical news shows I enjoy because I'm a humor junky, and particularly like satire that punctures idiots and their ideas. Or I might just sit and talk to my wife.

8:30--Read in bed until my eyes burn shut. I go through books very slowly this way, but, at the end of the year, I find I've managed to read five or six. My goal is to read those difficult classics I should have read or did read long ago. Last year, I read Moby Dick, Melville's Lord Jim, a thick book of Chekov's plays and short stories, Dickens A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, and Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

I read during the day, too--a lot. I keep books and magazine scattered about the house. I last summer I read Arundhati Roy's wonderful Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. I read every New Yorker magazine and I now subscribe to New Scientist. I get The New York Times and Skeptic Magazine on my Iphone. Now I'm reading two volumes of newly-minted Nobel laureate Alice Munroe's short stories.

And then I also have to work on book promotion. This takes a lot of time because I have to keep a high profile on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, too, and keep this blog going and keep my website updated and traveling about talking to book store owners and libraries. I do a presentation on the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators to promote my latest novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, and have taken that on the road as far as Guam where I was a keynote speaker at a meeting of the Guam chapter of the International Reading Association and where I was a visiting author in the public and military schools.

We also have lots of family and spend as much time as  we can with children/grandchildren/aging parents (we have one left), walking on beaches, and a sailboat and a small power boat, and now two stand-up paddle boards (SUPs). On weekends, we often meet with friends for dinner/drinks.

That's my writer's life as of now. The schedule is not hard and fast and distractions/interruptions are a real problem.

Alice Munro and Peter Higgs: Nobel Laureates and Damned Fine People

In these, the darkest days of December, I give a vigorous nod to two luminaries of our time. I'm a writer of short stories, novels, and essays and have always favored the work of the Canadian writer, Alice Munro, who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such a thing. And, judging from the Nobel interview with her (she was too frail to travel to Sweden to accept the prize in person), she is filled to brimming with the finest karma.  Modest, smiling, genuinely thrilled at her winning, and still beautiful at eighty-two, she dishes out wisdom by the shovelful without even noticing. He message: She won the prize because she loves to write and did not give up despite early failure and discouragement, nor did raising a family interfere with her determination. She knew she was a writer from the beginning and and she wrote until the end. Her fiction is simple, profound, earthy, and accessible.

Peter Higgs, on the other hand, won the prize for work that is unimaginably complex and inaccessible. He, with help from brilliant colleagues, figured out why the Universe has mass. His theory was proven beyond much doubt by the workings of the large hadron collider, that produced the particle, and will allow further investigations that may launch an entirely new field of physics. 

In the end, though, I think both of these brilliant thinkers--geniuses in the real sense of the word--travel in their minds to places the rest of us can't imagine.

Book Awards, Albuquerque, and the Unfettered Mind

The Great Physicist Richard Feynman: He claimed his I.Q. was 125

 

 

I'm in a hotel room in Albuquerque, seeking the illusive freedom of an unfettered mind. It is a struggle to get unfettered with all the buzz and hubbub and guilt and remorse, not to mention joyful stuff, too, all this detritus we have sticking to us after nearly sixty-seven years of living.

 

I seek freedom by writing, and I'm researching/thinking about my next piece for The Prague Revue which will be about the unfettered nature of geniuses like this wonderful genius pictured above. Meanwhile, I flew out west here for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards banquet which is this evening down in a meeting room at this hotel (the charmingly quaint Spanish-Pueblo Hotel Albuquerque).

 

Brothers of the Fire Star is a finalist in three categories--historical fiction, adventure fiction, and young adult fiction, and could, I suppose, actually win something, although being a finalist is actually winning because you get to put that big Finalist sticker on your book's cover, which I have done, and now I don't know where I'll put anymore stickers because there has got to be room on the cover so you can read the title and see the author's name.

 

In any event, I'm playing here with words and sentences and it feels good to trample on the rules of grammar once in a while. Writing a run on sentence can be an exhilarating experience, like shooshing down a steep ski slope without concern for consequences.

 

Today, after working a while, I'll take a long walk around town and breathe in the cool desert air and have a real Mexican lunch. Albuquerque is wonderful to me because it is a town in the desert and deserts are so very different than the wet and green I am used to.

 

The Pond in Autumn

 

 

Flew to New England yesterday to connect with family. Got here a little late for the foliage but there is still some left. Cold and clear this morning, mist rising up from the water, ducks and two Canada geese out there swimming, church bells in the distance. Built a fire, made coffee, took a short walk.

 

Eli and Bailey and baby Anders (he with the croup) are here for a week and I'll see Dad as often as possible. Last night wine and laughter and getting reacquainted, pulling together again.

 

This is the setting for my next book: Red-Winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed and it will be good to pick up details of New England that I have forgotten, like the feel of the cold on the forest and the smell of the air and the sound of walking on dried leaves and the fine and rich sadness of it all.