The Grasshopper Issue #84: Truth
Truth and beauty, beauty and truth
I’ve been thinking about the role of truth in writing. It should be simple but it is far from simple. There is factual truth, backed up by facts and experts and experience. There is ‘the ring of truth’ where something sounds right, there are opinions, there are intentional fabrications, and there are outright lies.
I’m particularly fascinated with the phrase, the ring of truth, something that sounds true but is not definitively true. I can argue that great novels have the ring of truth even when they are entirely made up. And I think fiction writers are tasked with inventing true worlds if they are going to be taken seriously.
An odd thing, intentionally inventing a truth with no basis in reality. But what we are doing when we attempt that is causing a suspension of disbelief. It’s a powerful tactic that when pulled off brings readers back for more.
Great fantasists excel at this. There is a reason Tolkien’s writing is so popular and so embedded in our popular mythology despite being completely made up malarkey. We want to believe it’s true and he gave us very convincing worlds and characters, including entire languages, maps, and whole societies.
Remarkable, when you think about it.
Even more remarkable when you consider the comments of one of the actors in the acclaimed film versions of The Lord of the Rings. He pointed out that no one speaks in dialog like the dialog in the book. He found it nearly impossible to say a lot of Tolkien’s lines. Nevertheless we lose ourselves in it. Millions of us.
Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist, is known for his contemporary magic realism, stories where the fantastic takes place in ways that just read as the normal way of things. Cats unexpectedly talk and characters respond as though that is a little odd but why not?
I more than dabbled in this in my first novel. My character crosses a threshold into some kind of parallel reality over and over again, discovering a capability in himself he was unaware of.
This posed an interesting challenge: to have the reader share his response of not believing it but not being able to deny it. A kind of stage magic trick disguised as ordinary reality when it is far far from it.
But fiction writers make things up. What about something like an opinion writer, which is my bread and butter? If I express an opinion, my opinion, about a topic, to be successful I have to accomplish two things. It has to be plausible, that ring of truth thing, and my readers have to want to believe it, even if they may harbor doubts.
It has to be compelling on multiple levels and this can require subtlety, that same balancing act between belief and the suspension of disbelief. I have to believe myself as I write the words and my belief must be solid and true enough that readers might find truth in it for themselves.
I don’t much like clever or glib writing, especially when writing about the real world and powerful subjects. Those things require passion and using cleverness dilutes passion into mere showing off or insult, the lowest form of opinion.
But I certainly have taken that route when faced with writing about the particularly absurd world of contemporary politics, which constantly borders on magical thinking and outright lies. It’s hard not to be cynical in the face of a lot of that stuff.
Truth, a writing topic with a lot of angles and rings.
Truth is often accompanied by fear. The truth can be extremely scary, especially when it either turns your worldview upside down, or delves into places the reader may be avoiding because they fear the truth they may encounter.
You, the writer, have an awesome responsibility to either tell the truth or make up one we want to believe. Yikes. But that is actually the truth.
We’re the first reader we have to convince. Tolkien took himself into the Mines of Moria with his characters. He heard the drumming that told them they were not alone. And he brought us along, those of us who willingly surrendered to his world for an hour or two.
Pretty cool stuff, but more than a little crazy too. One of the best things about being a writer.
The Coffee Test (Wozniak)
A machine is required to enter an average American home and figure out how to make coffee: find the coffee machine, find the coffee, add water, find a mug, and brew the coffee by pushing the proper buttons. This has not yet been completed.
~ Wikipedia, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) entry
I’m taking a layman’s approach to AI. The above, from Apple co-founder and chief nerd of the planet, Steve Wozniak, is from a list of tests devised to determine if a computer is sentient.
The Turing test, devised by computer pioneer Alan Turing, is the classic example. A conversation is held between a computer and a human while a second human listens without knowing which is which. If the observer cannot tell who is the computer, sentience is defined.
The concept of sentience is one that fascinated me, in part because it is an important and controversial one in Buddhism. Sentience can be broadly defined as self-awareness. Which is probably hopelessly simplistic, but I am not inclined to philosophizing about stuff like that.
Can a rock be sentient? Who knows? We have no test for that. Get to work Woz.
Speculation about things we cannot know, like what happens when we die, is a favorite topic for writers. In fact it is a huge fiction category, speculative fiction, more popularly known as science fiction. As a writer I like to dip into near future speculation in my opinion writing. But I never portray my ideas as reality, they are idea games, what ifs.
The what if game is at the heart of a lot of writing; you might argue it is at the heart of all of it. Even scientific papers, which always start with a theory, pure speculation which the research goes on to prove, cast doubt on, or disprove.
It’s an interesting idea as a writing technique to look at where we use the what if game. In fiction it’s the whole game, even with historical fiction which often claims a kind of quasi accuracy, except any historian will tell you history is almost entirely speculation.
We can’t know what life in ancient Egypt was really like just because we can read hieroglyphs.
This kind of examination of storytelling, which probably encompasses all writing, can be a fascinating part of being a writer. But I’d caution against thinking about it as you write, or worse, before you write.
For me, at least, the act of writing is stepping into the unknown and following whatever path you find, even with non-fiction, maybe even especially with non-fiction because great non-fiction writing always shows us a different angle from our own.
Think Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell.
The holiday has me a little behind on this newsletter. It’s Sunday afternoon and I usually try to schedule it to be delivered just after midnight on a Saturday night. This one may not go out until tonight, but that’s ok because I’m the boss of this thing!
Gotta love that.
I’ve set schedules for publishing most of my writing, spreading out the newsletters so I don’t go nuts or repeat myself too much, and publishing the topical stuff based on its relevancy- a lot of that needs to go out the day I write it because of context.
How much writing do you have to do to call yourself a writer? It’s a stupid question. There are great novelists who go decades between books. Others crank stuff out at alarming rates. The French crime novelist Simonen wrote a book every month for years.
Crime and mystery novelists tend to be prolific, maybe because each story triggers more ideas and angles for another.
I’ve always been prolific but not at that level, though now I can understand how people do it. I never expected to find myself writing a thousand or more words daily, seven days a week. But that is where I find myself these days and it feels natural.
If that changes, I like to think I’ll be ok with it but I have to admit that it is addictive. And I have an addictive personality.
Did you write today?
Martin
1425 words
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a weekly digest of three of my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free with a paid option to share support. Please check them out.
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Believe me, it makes my day. M
I’d written a comment before I was subscribed and hadn’t thought to save it. It winked out, and I expressed my frustration to you back in October. So tonight I decided to try to remember what I’d written, and the turmoil of emotions your essay inspired. I don’t remember the essay that triggered me (though I could spend a lot of time looking instead of rewriting mine). So here it is, more a reassembled urn, most of its broken shards recovered, but necessarily discontinuous, a kintsugi of my original. Hope it makes some sense.
Busses
My dad entered the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at the end of WWII, among his fellow American combat engineers and a British contingent thirty days to the day after Ann Frank succumbed to typhus. Ordered to survey survivors and photograph the dead, dad met Miriam, a surviving cousin of his mom’s, the only family member to survive the war. The virtue of dad’s campaigning alongside British officers gave Miriam the chance to slip through the British Mandate that blockaded Palestine from refugee Jewish settlers. There she joined the Irgun, a citizen spear point of the revolt against Lord Balfour’s Mandatory Palestine and contributed to Israel’s founding.
I’d flown into Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport just before Christmas, 1968 with dad. I was sixteen and had a fever. We stopped and got a room in old Jaffa so I could sweat it out. A bit over a day later we flagged down a bus, to fulfill dad’s wish to see Miriam again under the cozier circumstance of her own home surrounded by citrus trees at a kibbutz near Kfar Nahum. The bus stopped and the door swung out. To my dad’s query whether Miriam’s kibbutz was on his route the driver said “Yes, get on. Who are you going there to see?”
“Miriam Abelowitz.”
From the back of the bus came a shout, “Abelowitz, Abelowitz, I am Abelowitz.”
I don’t think all coincidences are all that coincidental. Dad and Miriam had a grand reunion.
Miriam’s son gave me ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’, a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. I’d been making animations since I was four, evolving from simple corner flips of stacked sequential drawings to a stop motion film camera. Heinlein’s futuristic space opera revealed to me that someday I’d be able to make my animations using a computer.
I’d need to wait until the technology caught up with my 1968 imagination. Until it did I needed to become a professional artist with work that truly needed to be animated. Computer animation for real people finally caught up in 1983, when I was the senior medical illustrator at the Yale School of Medicine. I’d been composing thousands of illustrations of surgical techniques using a steel quill pen on polyester parchment and was desperate to shed my Sixteenth Century scriptorium and embrace the creation of digital moving images. My dean had other ideas, or rather, zero basis for groking my fancy. His last words to me were a dismissive “Young man, there’s no room in medicine for cartoons.”
So I quit Yale a few weeks later and mortgaged my life to found the first digital medical animation company in the world in January 1984. My fiancé was still in Yale’s Graduate School of Nursing and I was the ‘breadwinner’. I’d also never owned or used a computer. Or a company. Nevertheless I persisted.
I was invited to give a TED talk in 2007 to present a scientific animation called ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’ I’d produced for Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. This was before TED talks were online, so I had no sources of brilliance I could purloin. I was scheduled to give my 9 minute half TED talk on the fourth (half) day. By opening morning, I’d not yet written my talk. The visuals video, my work, took ten minutes to assemble. I brought some 3x5 cards and a sharpie, planning to harvest ideas on story arcs, humor, personal observations and ‘Ideas worth sharing’ by watching actually worthy TED speakers in-vivo over three days. I was sitting in the front row of the theater in Monterey, California with my wife to my right and Forest Whitaker to her right. Ten minutes before the program start time, Chris Anderson, who’d invited me to speak approached with an ‘I’ve had an idea’ look. “David, I’m so happy I found you. We’re opening TED this year with Carolyn Porco, who runs the Cassini Mission for NASA. She’s got all these beautiful pictures of outer space and you’ve got all these beautiful pictures of inner space. I love contrast, so go backstage now and get miked. You’re going on second. Be ready to give your talk in twenty minutes.”
In 2008 I was in Guiyang, China to give a keynote address at the Asian Youth Animation and Comics Contest (AYACC), essentially an expanded reprisal of my TED talk. By the last day of the conference I’d devoured an intoxicating mix of exotic art, people and food. I was settling in the window seat of a fancy bus, looking forward to our foreign presenters’ tour of Guizhou Province - temple-dotted lakes, a garden of ancient sculpture surrounded by equally ancient bonzai trees, a gargantuan waterfall - when a Chinese teen caught my attention. “Are you sitting alone?” My assigned college student translator/minder was sitting on the second bus with a friend. In a lilting BBC accent she continued “I’ve never met a native English speaker before. May I practice and ask you some questions?”
“I’d like that. It’s going to be a long day on the bus.”
“Can you tell me the derivation of the term antidisestablishmentarianism and how it might apply to China today?” We all know the answer to that so I won’t bore you. Fifteen minutes of 19th Century history later, her follow-on: “Can you tell me then, the distinction between how an obligate hegemony like the Communist Party of China and a non-obligate hegemony like the Church of England deal differently with dissidents?” Which was when I found out that my fifteen year old interlocutor had been forced out of school at thirteen under threat of grievous harm for political reasons dating back to her family being on the wrong side of the cultural revolution. After leaving school, this young dissident’s academic records were destroyed. Deciding to educate herself she chose to teach herself English, which had “so many more words than Mandarin which I’ll need to describe what’s in my head and my heart.”
In South Central China, among the few English books this poor girl could acquire, were copies of Shakespeare’s works. So she memorized entire Shakespeare plays, dozens of sonnets and even recited Churchill’s speech to parliament after the Battle of Dunkirk for me after I told her my dog’s name was Winston. We chatted for hours, with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ peppering her speech. Who knew they weren’t contemporaneous?
I had a binary decision to make on that bus. If I merely wished her well and she disappeared, I’d tear my heart out in worry every day for the rest of my life. Twelve time zones from my wife and no cell signal, I instead promised her I’d get her a proper education and safety in the States. How, I had no clue.
That promise took three and a half years and four more trips to China to fulfill. She received an 80% scholarship to an iconic academic institution and a student visa.
At nineteen, her college matriculation was her first class since she was thirteen. Our foundling daughter went through college in three and a half years, met her future husband there and is now nearly finished with her MBA.
Your essay brought again to the surface the conundrum of jumping out of a fire and into, what?, as dad’s cousin Miriam had done, hurdling from a concentration camp to a hot war against an empire. Our daughter experienced the ‘deus ex machina’ experience of being lifted out of an impossible life into one of unlimited possibility. And yet, should Trump end America’s experiment, will she really be better off than had she remained in hiding in China? Unless the MAGA/Putin axis blows us all up, almost certainly yes - my pathological optimist rearing its head. But the heart-in-my-throat sensation I’d had from promising to protect her the day we met until she got her green card, over fourteen years later is showing up again. While we never cease to worry we weave it with hope where we can.