The Grasshopper #69: Things Unknown

There are certain mysteries in this life we will never understand

Aug 13, 2023

brown wooden staircase in forest — Photo by Sébastien Goldberg on Unsplash

Death for one. No matter what religion or personal spirituality will tell you, no one knows what happens after this. No one.

As a writer, the fact that we have a great mystery like that to contemplate is a source of creative power. Or call it personal power if you like. As a Buddhist, I read about the subject of rebirth, aka reincarnation. The model is pretty simple. Karma, which means your intent behind your actions during this life, determines the nature of your next experience. It is a teacher, not an instrument of vengeance.

Unfortunately karma and rebirth are often seen as retribution. If you’re Vladimir Putin, for example, that would mean a million years in the fires of hell or something similar. But I think if he were to reincarnate it might be as an extremely humble creature.

It is important to be clear that reincarnation is not a universal Buddhist belief because, as I noted above, we will never know. The Tibetan school generally accepts the concept and goes so far as to recognize individuals who have returned. Zen, on the other hand, is much more abstract about it, being chiefly focused on living in the eternal present.

My own experience leans me towards the Zen approach, but I have had at least one interesting experience that keeps me from shutting the door on the concept. When I was younger I had an extremely vivid dream, more than once, where I was on a beach. It was quiet, but the water was filled with ships, warships, hundreds of them. This stood out from my typical dreams in its clarity.

Only when I saw film and photos of the beaches on D-Day did that vivid image suddenly flare into the possibility of my having been there, possibly even being killed on the beach. I attributed the silence to that.

Was that a vision of a past life? Who knows, but it gave me a powerful image I used in a novel where my character finds himself in a kind of purgatory with amnesia. His fellow travelers are trying to send him a message on how to return to life but it takes a turning point for it to get through.

I was particularly happy with my picture of this inbetween place, my own version of the Bardo. It gave me a path to ending the story with a great mystery that may or may not be resolved.

A lot of writing concerns itself with the subject of death and its mysteries. The best death scene I’ve ever read was in War and Peace with the dying of Prince Andrei, a main character, from war wounds. We see the experience from his point of view as his world gradually fades and he moves on.

It is a deeply moving experience from a great writer to imagine that transition and make the reader feel the power and strangeness of it. When you use death as a plot device, you take great risk because a less talented writer may find themselves simply killing off a character because they have run out of ideas.

Writing a momentous scene like the death of a character may be the ultimate challenge for a fiction writer, because we have to reach into places in ourselves where we seldom venture.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

~ The opening line of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield

The opportunity to venture into the unknown is why I am a pantser rather than a plotter; one who lets the story tell itself. There’s plenty of advice about the importance of opening lines from the perspective of drawing readers in. Dickens is famous for them and they were spectacular. We all know the thrill when you start a story and know it is something special.

But what about the importance of opening lines for the writer? That cannot be overestimated. And, to be clear, this applies to any writer, fiction, essayist, op-Ed, or self-help. Just as a rocket needs an immense burst of energy to leave the launchpad, a writer needs a few lines that start the thread of a story on the right footing.

I’ll be honest, my first time around with a novel, I was never satisfied with my beginning. You’ll see it this week when I begin serializing the book. But it won’t be that beginning because I wrote a prologue, which was my true entry into the story, though it took the form of a flashback that set the essential mystery.

That prologue, which I love, was the actual entry into the tale, though I’m not sure I knew it. I just had a story to tell and it began with a book I was not sure had ever existed but I felt a memory for. Out of such thoughts a story unfolds.

Drifting back down to earth, my daily writing is much more related to the reality of life in America right now and how it reflects across the globe. And my opening lines are always designed to intentionally draw a reader in, maybe provoke them, which does not always mean to anger, but to start a person thinking.

And maybe, that defines what a beginning must accomplish. We must provoke the reader into reacting one way or another. I need to think about that.

Provocation

Now there’s a word I have not given a lot of thought to, but now that I’m thinking about it, it is extremely relevant right now. It’s the strategy of politicians across the spectrum. Artists often go after outrage to get attention. Alarmists, and I am occasionally one in my opinion writing, use it as our primary tool, the hammer we use to wake a reader up.

But a hammer is a blunt instrument that can do a lot of damage in the wrong hands. A lot of those politicians, for instance, who open with remarks designed to provoke, can find those words coming back to haunt them. I think Mr DeSantis, the presidential candidate, may come to regret saying he will slit the throats of government employees on his first days in office.

Just an example, but he said it.

Some writers excel at provocation. Others work their way around it in ellipses but it ultimately sits somewhere in the center, drawing us in. Joan Didion excelled at this roundabout way of coming at a subject. In her classic essays about a past presidential party convention, she notices detail after odd detail about the various factions, small things that build an image, a background to the big story we sense lurks out there.

This is another form of provocation, the tease, the telling detail, the random statement. To me, it is the sign of a master storyteller, the creature sitting by a fire whose quiet words draw others closer in anticipation of the tale to come.

That’s our assignment, to be that primal creature barely seen in the firelight.

When I checked my Medium stats this morning (Sunday), everything had changed drastically and not for the better. They revamped everything about the way they measure results and my daily earnings went down by 90% from my average this month so far.

By Medium standards I have a large following and get many reads so it seems impossible that this is for real. They have provided new content guidelines but they are extremely vague despite lengthy explanations of what they are doing.

If these are legit and permanent changes I don’t see how I can continue to write for them. The platform has been a significant part of my income for several years so this is a blow.

As you know, my companion publication here, The Witness Chronicles, digests pieces from my political and climate-related writing on Medium and it has proven very popular with Grasshopper readers who get it (all of you, btw). So it is hard for me to reconcile a drop like this overnight.

I can only hope it is a mistake or an anomaly. If you write for Medium in the Partner Program I would like to hear what your experience has been in the last month. Comments, as always, are open.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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