Watching the Wheels Go Round

Last time I wrote about the need for an author to have faith in his reader’s intelligence. I also touched a bit on the touchy area that separates religious faith from organized religion. Predictably, I tread on a few dogmatic digits. The responses I get from entries like that make it tempting to yank a couple of chains every time I write; the nuts come out of the trees and it’s fun to watch them fall.

But I’m not doing this simply to entertain myself or to piss people off; although that is a little side of gravy. Those who read rather than simply react will note the premise that I set forth early on in that particular essay; that dogma is very different from faith. Faith is the fundamental belief that there is something greater than all of us pulling the big strings of the universe. Dogma is the mindless observation of established routine, in spite of common sense or personal observation. Faith is metaphysical; whether it’s founded on unjustified hope, fear, or a primal response to things intuited but unknowable is a matter for debate. Dogmatic adherence to tradition and convention, on the other hand, is just plain silly.

Faith is a big part of any writer’s life. First of all you have to have faith in yourself. You have to truly believe that, out of all the other writers in the world – secreted away, pecking at their keyboards – you have the right combination of talent, ambition, instinct and luck to stand out. If that’s not a leap of faith, I don’t know what is.

You can get all mystical about the journey involved – pursuing a dream or tapping into the collective conscience or the synchronicity of effort meeting expectation, but the fact is that most writer’s have to write, a lot, before they get to the point where they’re adept enough at the craft to be worthy of publication. That you can invest all that time without any tangible reward along the way simply reeks of faith. Or insanity, but the line between art and the insane is notoriously fragile.

It’s been raining here. I have a home in Northwest Indiana, near the Michigan border. Most weekends, on Saturday evening or early Sunday morning I make the transition from Chicago to the country. It’s a good place to write. On my secluded five acres, hidden on a hill in the midst of the northern woods, is an explosion of creeping, crawling, scampering, bounding life. Turkey, deer, fox, badger, squirrel, chipmunk, cormorant and vulture – every imaginable song bird, scavenger and rural critter, all going about their seemingly mindless ways. Coyotes stalk rabbits and hawk glide on the thermal breezes, watching for the quaking leaf that betrays their prey. For the last three days rain has come in unending buckets and barrels, forcing everything to the surface; burrows overflowing and marshy deer beds turned to teeming ponds. The entire land is on the move, displaced and wandering.

In the city we see life in big, hulking masses. There are people, of course, millions of people and all of their machines and constructions. And aside from people and the pets they gather, the city has a profusion of adapted wild life; squirrels and pigeons, the furtive, contemptible rat. Among all that the great host of little creatures are lost or ignored. Either driven from an inhospitable environment or unable to reconcile themselves to the constant and overwhelming din, they disappear and the ponderous, large things take over.

Here the small things roam. And especially now, when after the rain they are all on the move, I am amazed at the sheer volume of their numbers. I keep a bird and a small mammal guide on my desk and the pages are crammed with scraps of paper, noting all the species I’ve identified.

One of the things I wonder, watching them all through the tall glass windows that separate my office from their meanderings, is where are they all going? Is there some sort of plan or is it totally random motion; were ancient wheels of fate set in some utterly complex arrangement so that the meeting of the vole and the garter snake was preordained? Are the patterns larger but more random, so that a certain overall destination is inevitable but the course is happenstance? Or is it completely a directionless frenzy, put into motion at some unknown point long ago and raveling down to some distant unknowable, ungoverned end?

In the city we are too close to each other to appreciate the mystery of our own patterns. And we are too occupied by our own hubris and assumptions of autonomy to imagine that our impulse and effort are inspired by anything other than personal design. But here, watching the small creatures outside my door, I wonder what we look like from a similar vantage point, and if our machinations are any less unfathomable and mysterious to an independent observer.

Writing is about trying to assemble pattern from chaos. We select words that convey a certain image and we string them together to tell a story and then we share that collection of images with our readers. The best writers do this in a way that resonates with some universal chord and makes the common journey of our lives less solitary. Through it all, we carry inside us some notion of destination, of purpose. We believe that we know where we’re going. Watching the haphazard parade that careens past my windows, I wonder if that’s the case.

Fitzgerald said it best: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. If there was ever a perfect ending to a novel, Gatsby’s got to be at the top of the pack. We don’t know the future, the past is a memory and what we’re left with is a moment that forever eludes us, trying to assemble coherence from chaos. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies, and the big questions are the same for writers today as they were when John Donne was scratching about men and islands with his quill pen.

We survive by faith – in our abilities, in the perseverance of good over evil, in the illusion of the dollar – in something. But of course, there’s always the chance that there is no point, that it’s all totally random and the whole ashes to ashes thing is quite literally the end of the ride

When I write a story, convention has it that I must construct a beginning, a middle and an end. That the characters must experience transitional arcs that please the reader and offer a symmetry that they respond to.

And as beginning writers we are told to tell our stories in that manner because we assume that that style reflects reality, that good fiction is a snapshot of the order we impose on our lives. But could it be that we just pick out the parts that fit the illusion and ignore the rest? Sometimes I watch the menagerie cascading past the glass and I wonder.

— Ric Hess, Sep 15, 06:46 AM

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