The Grasshopper #73: A Changing Point of View, Like It or Not

The best laid plans are just that, nothing more

Sep 10, 2023

brown and green tree log on green grass during daytime — Photo by Willdwind / William Martret on Unsplash

Sometimes you just have to go off the map, to get lost. Whether I like it or not a certain amount of personal transformation stuff has shown up here in the past few issues and, it seems, it had to happen.

I’m not going to stop writing about writing, my original theme, and an important one despite the hundreds of writing newsletters here and elsewhere. But it was always going to be personal, I was not offering a course or coaching sessions or editing services (shudder).

This is a story about lives, not just process.

I have always carried a kind of cynicism about personal transformation writing, the confessional stories of hardship and lessons learned. I suspect it has something to do with being a white, middle class, boomer guy and years of programming by society.

But what I didn’t realize about the best examples of the genre is the writer has no choice. Their life has gone off those rails they built and they are searching. When you are facing change, chosen or not, daily, it’s hard not to write about it. It is literally in your face.

So, my readers, you are going to get a certain dosage of me out in the wilderness and finding I like it, and remembering a time when getting out into unknown places was my passion. A passion that became controlled and corralled until it no longer existed except as a sort of writerly desire.

Things like that don’t like to be contained, especially when that core part of yourself doesn’t like what you’ve become, at least not all of it.

Earlier this week I wrote about Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, in which he introduces a character rarely found in modern male literature, a man who has no trace of machismo. Larry has, presumably, had any of that erased by his experiences in the First World War.

Interestingly, one of Maugham’s contemporaries, though I doubt they liked each other much, was the uber-macho writer Ernest Hemingway. But in his first ground-breaking novel The Sun Also Rises we hear from Jake, his narrator, who was also irreversibly damaged mentally and physically in the same war.

Hemingway was severely wounded driving an ambulance in the War.

Even the most macho writer of that century turned out to be a damaged person like a lot of us.

There’s a thread of this old white guy writer meme in my head right now and I have to go with it. But I no longer find that point of view particularly interesting on a personal level or maybe I should say Larry interests me more than Jake, but they certainly might have had a conversation, uncomfortable as it might have been.

Or not.

By the way, if you have not read these books, you might think about it, as they are both great reads and examples of storytelling that was new at the time and still feels new even if the backgrounds would look different now. They are certainly not historical novels.

It’s Labor Day weekend as I write this, an ending point of summer and an entry into the melancholy season, fall. We are having a mini-heatwave, a few days in the nineties, though nothing compared with the horrendous heat that has blanketed much of the US this strange summer.

Here we are welcoming what feels like summer weather, if only for a few days. Though these days are already noticeably shorter at both ends.

“Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men

back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,

they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,

tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.”

The Odyssey, Homer, trans Emily Wilson

A complicated man. The word she (and Homer) uses is ‘polytropic’. I ran into it in reviews of her translation and have been trying to find a good definition this morning, but I immediately get lost in the insane complexity of Greek language scholarship. These people can’t answer a simple question.

So, I’m going with a complicated man. That’s the first line of the Odyssey by the way, a pretty good opener. I always wanted to be a complicated man, though not on the surface. I suspect Odysseus was right there to be read, all the complications there to be seen by his men and lovers.

Until this morning I had little desire to read The Odyssey but now I think I may need a trip to the library. Certain stories hit us at different times in our lives and there might be synchronicity with that right now.

Never a bad idea to go to the direct roots of western storytelling if you are a writer.

My instinct during the Covid lockdown was to go to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, again a new translation. If you’re going to read classics in translation, do some homework, read reviews and read the best translation you can. It really makes a difference in readibility.

Translation is a strange thing, one I admire but find baffling. To take the poetry and setting of one culture and time, and translate those things into something a reader here and now can enjoy…it’s not a simple task, but it can make a huge difference.

Between the writer and the reader we now find a third person or persons, and they cannot help but add their own stamp to the original. It may be the most subjective of the literary arts.

Yes, I’d like to read the strange prose of Haruki Murakami in his native Japanese, but that will not happen in this lifetime. He is widely considered a magic realist writer, which means things take place matter of factly that are unreal, like cats suddenly speaking up or holes in the ground leading to unexpected places.

It would definitely be fascinating to know enough Japanese to read these strange events as he meant them to be read. But we, as readers, put ourselves in the hands of translators, who offer us the gift of a window into a world otherwise unavailable. That’s pretty cool.

It’s been two weeks since I had a drink and it has been interesting, to say the least. Once my eye started to clear up I went right back into my fairly busy writing practice with these newsletters and articles for Medium.com.

If anyone out there is holding onto the fantasy that drinking and being a writer are somehow related in an important way, I will tell you my writing and my motivation are stronger than ever. Let that fantasy go, it’s baloney.

I grew up in the stoner culture of the seventies, a strange, mostly dark time. It began with the excruciating end of the Vietnam war and ended with the celebratory nihilism of punk rock, the original stuff, not this fake punk we see these days.

Back then the music truly was about despair and anger. A lot of those musicians killed themselves one way or another and the survivors moved on to create a much more optimistic music in the eighties.

But that nihilism was all over the arts. It was a gloomy time.

I’ve been looking for new novels to read but my contemporaries have not been surfacing anything that sounds really interesting. I’m open to suggestions but be forewarned: dystopian stuff really irritates me because it seems so easy to invent a world going to hell.

Maybe living through the seventies taught me that, for many, darkness was the only option. As much fun as I had back then, I don’t need that again, not even in a story.

Given that I’m pushing myself through a major life change, it’s probably not surprising that I’m writing something new for me. I’m not sure what it is, which tells me it might be interesting. Unlike my day to day writing, I’m avoiding thinking about what I may do with it down the road.

I’m afraid of disturbing a voice I’m just learning to channel. It’s one of those ‘don’t think about it’ things. Kind of the opposite of political or climate writing, which is definitely about confronting what I see as very real, even if many choose to not see it.

On the surface, these would seem to be apocalyptic times, and they may come to be viewed that way. But when you are in the middle of unfolding history, it just is what is going on. A Cat 5 hurricane with 180 mph winds in the Atlantic? Hope it doesn’t hit near here.

Blasé.

Humans tend to go on with things during hard times and that is where the stories are that interest me these days. I think that's why dystopian fiction isn’t feeling too real right now. We are smack dab in the middle of our own version and it is real life, not a plot framework for a lazy novelist (sorry, I’m just fed up with that crap).

I’m trying to limit my tirades these days, though the news certainly provides enough fodder to support them. At my age (man, I hate writing those words), my role is observation and calling attention to just how strange things are right now.

Yesterday I wrote a short piece about the Trump mugshot (see next week’s Witness Chronicles), a surrealistic image unimaginable before these days. An ex-president literally mugging for the camera to look like a tough guy, but ending up looking like just another petty crook.

You can’t make this stuff up, which is a phrase that comes to mind nearly daily. Maybe I live an insulated life but I don’t know anyone who thinks that mugshot is anything but a weird joke, the comic book version of our daily reality right now.

When you write, push harder. Push through the cliches when you catch yourself using them (I’m guilty). There’s something clearer under that first or second layer of writing. Dig for it.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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