Every August, my wife and I travel to Turkey and stay at a vacation house her parents own near the bayside city of Çeşme.
In addition to the expected pleasures of visiting family, sunning, swimming, watching the remarkable sunsets, and eating great food—boyos (think of a dense, biscuit-sized croissant), gevreks (the bagel’s leaner cousin), sucuk (spicy sausage, usually eaten in a sandwich with a pigeon-shaped roll called a kumru), kofta (Turkish meatballs), lokma (Turkish donuts), stuffed mussels, fresh sardines, and the most amazing figs, olives, melons, and peaches known to mankind—beyond all of that, the one great joy both Mette and I look forward to in Çeşme is one I think most Unboxers can appreciate.
Reading.
Specifically: beach reading.
The picture below represents the books Mette managed to devour while sunning herself on the warm white sand. (She’s the kind of reader every writer dreams of.)
My haul was significantly less impressive, but what I lacked in numbers I tried to make up for in heft (he says heftily).
Basically, beyond a series of articles on political theory and histories of the Apache and Afghan wars (they’re strangely similar), I principally focused on one book—Jungian psychiatrist James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling—and a lecture series from the Teaching Company titled The Modern Intellectual Tradition: Descartes to Derrida.
Now wait, wait—before you doze off—I will admit my approach to beach reading may seem a bit stodgy, but both the book and the lectures made a significant impact on my understanding of character and characterization.
Allow me to explain.
James Hillman has long been a favorite of mine, ever since I learned of him from novelist Jim Harrison, who referred to him as “our modern mage.”
When many people reflect on Jung’s impact on literature they tend to think of Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler, but for my money Hillman deserves equal billing, for two main reasons: one, he’s a practicing therapist and, two, he’s a wonderful prose stylist.
His premise for The Soul’s Code, in which he claimed to want to “set psychology back two hundred years,” is that we need to return to a more imaginative, creative, and less statistical or diagnostic understanding of human nature.
[W]e need to return to a more imaginative, creative, and less statistical or diagnostic understanding of human nature.
Specifically, he sought to reintroduce and examine the concept of the soul, or the individual destiny, the ineffable thing that gives our lives purpose, direction, and meaning.
His metaphor for the soul is the acorn, the humble kernel that possesses in its nature the blueprint for the stately oak it will become.
He also believes that the individual first perceives the soul via a “unique image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.”
This image or daimon is more than a conscience, because it doesn’t merely concern what is moral or immoral in our behavior. It concerns what honors or betrays our individual essence, our calling.
He gives some wonderful examples of how this unique image served to guide a number of gifted individuals, from Judy Garland and Josephine Baker to Eleanor Roosevelt, Field Marshall Edwin Rommel, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti—and, in a darker vein, Adolph Hitler.
(For my own part, I have for many years recognized as central to my own sense of self an image I had in a dream as a young man. I saw myself as a monk dwelling in a cave on the side of a cliff, who opens his robe to reveal an exposed heart—much like images of the Sacred Heart I saw in my Catholic childhood. The takeaway, as I perceived it: as a writer, my life would often be relentlessly solitary, but if I placed faith in my heart it would assuage my loneliness and guide me toward truth.)
Of the many intriguing and provocative ideas presented in Hillman’s book, two in particular stood out for me, because they seemed so clearly applicable to characterization.
Of the many intriguing and provocative ideas presented in Hillman’s book, two in particular stood out for me, because they seemed so clearly applicable to characterization.
The first was the connection of the soul to motivation. Again, using his acorn metaphor, Hillman considers motivation “the call of the oak.”
In human terms, this means our daimon, our soul, calls to us in such a way we feel driven to respond. Whether we understand it as our destiny or fate or not, we feel compelled to act in accordance with the urgency this higher, better, more complete self demands. It gives our life its purpose.
This resonates with what I have referred to, in discussing character, as the Yearning. (I addressed this in a WU post from two years ago titled The Tyranny of Motive.)
Simply put, a character’s Yearning is the kind of person he wants to be, the way of life he wants to live. A character who gives up on his Yearning has fundamentally betrayed his life, and it is in recognizing and gaining a deeper awareness of his Yearning, through the conflict in the story, that the character finds the will to continue, despite the harrowing, life-altering costs.
Hillman’s discussion of the soul—which, as a recovering Catholic aka agnostic aka part-time lousy Buddhist, I find a little ooga-booga—made me understand, despite my skeptical misgivings, that the Yearning reached deeper into a character’s being than even I had realized.
And that led me to the second great idea of the book—the fact that, without this sense of calling, our psychology gets reduced to what has happened to us—the effect of parental influence, genetic disposition, the vagaries of luck, and so on.
That means we’re fundamentally mere victims, products of experience rather than active agents shaping our lives. And there’s no source of impetus or motivation to shape our lives absent some deep sense of what we expect from ourselves and want from our existence.
Extending the lesson to characters: protagonists who are mere victims of circumstance, lacking a profound sense of agency, create listless stories.
Now, maybe those great expectations we have for ourselves arise not from some daimon or soul but from the example of those in our lives who inspire us, demand something more of us, nurture our ambitions and hopes.
And yet it is hard to escape the suspicion that those inspiring examples speak to something already present in our character. I respond to teachers I have admired because they saw something special in me, and refused to let me live down to something inferior.
Moving on to my other source of summer inspiration, as I said, it was a series of lectures on modern philosophy.
And from a character standpoint, the one philosopher whose ideas resonated most with the notions of destiny, motivation, and soul discussed above was, curiously enough, the avowed atheist (and Nazi—sigh…), Martin Heidegger.
I know, the Nazi thing is a little hard to get past, like the fascist leanings of Ezra Pound and George Bernard Shaw. I try to remember, though, that Heidegger had a profound influence on Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, all of whom fought in the Resistance against the Nazis.
So maybe it’s not the philosophy that’s to blame. (Heidegger redeemed himself, at least somewhat, in his post-war writing.)
Anyhoo…
The elements of Heidegger’s thought that struck me as clearly related to characterization were his concepts of Concern, Authenticity, and Existential Guilt.
Heidegger believed that to be in the world meant to be concerned with it. The individual cannot help but feel this concern without turning away from the truth of his existence.
This too speaks to the Yearning, that inescapable hunger to pursue a more rewarding way of life, more in tune with the truth and dignity we crave. That better self, that nobler life, will never happen absent a profound concern with the world and our place in it.
That better self, that nobler life, will never happen absent a profound concern with the world and our place in it.
Authenticity is the aspect of being that connects one’s actions with his understanding of his own mortality, the inescapability of death. To deny this fundamental fact of our lives—we die—or to act in a way that trivializes or negates it, is to be inauthentic. Life matters because it ends.
That doesn’t mean we can’t crack jokes. Just make sure they’re funny.
In terms of characterization, authenticity is a measure of the character’s own awareness of the stakes. Just as the Yearning awakens the character to who he wishes to be, how he hopes to live, his authenticity measures that hope and desire against the reality of death. If not now, when? The clock is ticking.
The sense of being finite and limited also awakens us to everything we are not. And this sense of lack creates an anxiety-tinged guilt, the awareness that something always remains undone, unaccomplished, unfulfilled.
This inescapable recognition that we can be more than we are resonates with my concept of Lack, which I also addressed in The Tyranny of Motive.
In a sense, Lack is the flip side of Yearning. Because of the nagging awareness that my life is incomplete, I suffer a deep-seated need to fill up that emptiness, become more like the man I expect to be, do more of what I inwardly demand of myself, strive more actively to live the life I hope for, long for, dream of.
Because of the nagging awareness that my life is incomplete, I suffer a deep-seated need … to live the life I hope for, long for, dream of.
In summation (he said summarily), my beach reading gave me a more profound understanding of concepts I’d been using in my own writing as well as my teaching.
These concepts support both religious and non-religious interpretations—you can find them in various forms in Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Buddhism, Freud—and, of course, Carl Jung and Martin Heidegger.
Recognizing that made me realize once again that this fiction biz is more than just “making stuff up.”
We can’t escape fundamental human truths in crafting memorable characters—even if that realization comes to us while we’re working on our tan.
Does the notion of a soul, a destiny, or a daimon figure in your characters?
If not, what gives your characters the deep-seated motivation that compels them to rise above the slog of the story, continue pursuing their goal even as the conflict intensifies to the point any reasonable person would give up? Where does that deep need, that drive come from?
And do comic characters need this kind of heavy lifting? Does Wile E. Coyote have a soul?
Today is Mette’s and my wedding anniversary, so as of about 5:00 PM Pacific Time I will be leaving my desk to celebrate my life with the most amazing person I know. If you submit a comment after that time, I promise to respond tomorrow. Thanks for understanding.
About David Corbett
David Corbett is the author of six novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime, Blood of Paradise, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, and The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories, and his non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest (where he is a contributing editor). He has taught through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character, and Writer’s Digest will publish his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
Does my hero have a soul? Yes. It slumbers and is stirred awake.
That is a specific intention in my WIP. In connecting to an old love, he connects to the greater world–and thereby finds the grace finally to let her go.
Does Wile E. Coyote have a soul? Of course he does. How can one suffer so much, and show such resilience, without one? He has a hunger. A yearning to catch what cannot be caught.
I think if Wile E. Coyote ever caught the Road Runner, he would not eat the skinny bird. (Eat what? There’s no meat there.) He would at last have the talk he yearns for, a conversation with God.
Benjamin: That might be my favorite comment ever. I want to see that Roadrunner cartoon where his divinity is revealed.
BTW: Romantic love is the one place the soul reveals itself most convincingly. Identical twins, who share the same DNA and family/social environment, fall in love with distinctly different people. (Hillman goes into this in some depth. There’s a whole chapter on “The Parental Fallacy,” i.e., that our upbringing alone accounts for how our character is shaped.) Thanks for chiming in.
Loved this, Benjamin. I’d like to see it in action :)
Whoa. Mind blown. This post says so much about my characters and my storytelling. I totally see how my female protagonist recognizes her soul, her calling to destiny. She actually has a dream she can’t let go of, in which she sees herself as the right hand of a leader who wreaks powerful change in the world. Finding her way to her calling is her Yearning.
Meanwhile, her male counterpart is definitely resistant to his own daimon, leaving him (through the first half of the story) at the whim of the ebb and flow of the forces around him. And now I perfectly see it: he finds his way to his calling – the truth of a soul vision he’d been denying – through her. He senses the Lack (of what he could and should be) through her powerful embracing of her own daimon, and thereby of his.
And this is a theme I’ve been drawn back to again and again. I think my own soul finds it powerfully romantic – and/or redemptive. And therefore (hopefully) meaningful (as opposed to melodramatic, toward which I also have a tendency). Though I’m not sure if this “finding one’s way to the soul through another” is a common theme, or one that will appeal to readers, but it seems to be a part of my Yearning as a writer (or is it my Lack?).
Maybe Wile E. Coyote finds his daimon through the Roadrunner? (Splats at bottom of cliff and holds up sign reading: You complete me.”) Beep, beep! (That’s Roadrunnerian for, Awesome post! Thanks, David!)
Oh, and Happy Anniversary!
Hi, Vaughn.
First, I heartily commend your choice to have two characters whose responses to their destinies is distinct, and to have one inspired by the other.
Two, see my comment above about romantic love and its role in exposing or revealing the soul.
Last, yeah, the melodrama issue. It’s one of the reasons I’ve resisted embracing this whole business. I can see the merit of postmodern skepticism and focus on language in the construction of identity, etc.
And I see how the experiences of two world wars shattered western confidence in a lot of the old verities. Look where they led?
This is why reading this book and listening to those lectures together was so helpful. I saw that much of the modern grappling with the aftermath of our own historical horror show relates to struggling with this issue of life’s purpose.
Maybe Hillman is right and psychology needs to get set back 200 years. Maybe we took a wrong turn. (It’s interesting how many current political theorists and philosophers think this, and go back to where they believe we took the wrong fork in the road and try to rethink modernity by turning left instead of right.)
I always love your comments, because your lust for story and narrative is so, I dunno, lusty. Thanks!
David–
Your post confronts the modern reader–by which I mean s/he who comments on posts in websites–with one of our current dilemmas: We are called on to react RIGHT NOW to something that deserves reflection, rereading, etc.
So I reserve the right to do that later.
Right now, I would add that James Hillman’s acorn analogy for the daimon/soul/individual destiny takes me back to my labors as a forehead-knuckling undergraduate grappling with Aristotle.
He talks in similar terms of essences, which I think is what you mean. The acorn has the pre-existent potential destiny of becoming an oak.
I believe in this concept, but in terms of biology or genetics. Unless cloning reduces the gene pool, we will all continue beginning life as unique (nature). And whatever experience comes after that will be unique as well (whatever nurtures our nature).
I am writing about all this in my current WIP, but as novelists must, I’m writing about it in terms of characters acting in time and space, not philosophical abstractions. And for me, the challenge confronting my characters is to find a way, find the will to overcome “destiny.” To be free, people must do this. Otherwise, they are acting out a script written for them by genes and environment. In the end, this effort is largely doomed to fail, but the effort–Hamlet would say the readiness–is all.
Postscript: you liken your revelatory dream to the images of the Sacred Heart experienced in childhood as someone being raised Catholic. Which do you think gets the credit for the dream, the acorn soul/destiny you were born with (nature), or powerful imagery experienced in childhood (nurture), and later seized on to lend coherence to your sense of purpose?
Hey, Barry:
You put your finger on the thorniest knot in this whole dilemma. To what extent are we free if this “destiny” lies within us from the start? The conflict between nature and nurture, or fate and chance, has baffled great minds since we began knuckling our foreheads.
Spinoza believed our freedom lay solely in accepting the inescapability of necessity (like the Stoics with fate), and that a happy life lay in acceptance, not struggle.
(BTW: it’s interesting how many modern political thinkers are returning to Aristotle’s notion of virtue ethics as grounds for a just society. )
As for my own soul image, I really can’t say whether the early experiences shaped it or it was responding to something innate that those earlier experiences echoed. That’s the conundrum. Maybe we don’t discover our destinies, but create them. (This was Pico de Mirandela’s idea, and it’s interesting that it too until the Renaissance for someone to formulate it.)
Anyhow, food for further thought. Thanks for the knuckles (love that image)..
Barry, I think people confuse the notion of free will with the fact that God stands outside of time and so knows all. It is our choices that determine our character.
Right, Vijaya, it’s one of the central paradoxes of Christianity: how can free will exist if God knows everything that ever happened and will happen?. That’s what “omniscience” is, after all.
Actually, I’m saying it is NOT a paradox. As writers we get to play god and determine what our characters will think and say and do. We are omniscient in that sense. But in real life, God, though omniscient, doesn’t write our lives. Knowing what we do throughout time doesn’t mean that we are puppets and He’s pulling strings. He simply *knows* the choices we will make, even if they are terrible ones. That’s why free will is such a scary thing. Without it, there can be no true love. We have to choose it.
David –
Outstanding! Resonates as both a discourse on writing craft and a philosophical commentary on the individual and human potential. Wow!
I hope the political unrest/violence has not compromised the magic and wonder of your exotic beach.
Thank you.
We were largely unaffected by the anti-Americanism that seems to be contaminating the media in Turkey. But that’s a different post. :-)
Yes! My main character’s soul directs her every action. Without the inner person, characters become cardboard for me. Thanks for posting this to remind me that I have to look deeper in my second book.
Heh heh. I recently read The Soul’s Code, too, David. I found parts of it hard going, maybe because of my skepticism with the ooga-booga bits. Wish I’d read your succint summary beforehand! Still, I found much that helped me with deepening characterization.
In addition to the concepts you’ve described, I really liked this quote, where he’s been talking about how some people feed their imaginations with the literary equivalent of junk food. He says that it doesn’t matter; we find the food that satisfies our appetite. Literary or commercial: “What matters is passion, which may be more predictive of capacity and production of motivation than other usual benchmarks.”
Passion. That’s what I’m working on bringing more of to my characters.
Hi, Barbara:
That’s pretty funny we turned to the same book at the same time for some of the same reasons and had similar reactions. Are you my long-lost twin?
I think passion is Hillman’s hallmark. It’s in his convictions and in his writing as well. But that also leads to some of the sentimental sloppiness (“ooga-booga”) that seems to have put us both off.
So passion requires a bit of rigor to make sure it doesn’t merely gush. But that passion is echoed by Heidegger’s notion of concern, and we have to accept we are here, in the world, and engage with it with fullness of heart and will and commitment.
Despite the “ooga-booga,” we both came away thinking more deeply about this stuff, and I think that’s the takeaway–something is at work in the depths of our nature, spurring us on to be greater, braver, wiser, more kind, and truer to the kind of persons we know we can be.
I was also somewhat unconvinced about the “evil soul” and his analysis of Hitler. I resist notions of “born that way” which easily evolve into “irredeemable” and “rotten to the core” and “just no good,” i.e., the idea of a soul devoted to evil is a gift to those inclined too quickly and lazily to merely judge. (It also often makes for lousy, one-dimensional villains.)
Also, returning to Barry’s point about freedom — doesn’t a person with a soul inclined to selfishness, violence, greed, etc., also have the freedom to temper those impulses?
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Ms. Like-Mind.
Wow. This makes my planned WU post “I Like Beer” look a bit shallow in comparison. I may need to rethink that one…
David, there’s a lot to chew on here, and I’m having a good time re-reading and digesting. And I learned a new word! I would have assumed “daimon” was merely some hip-and-trendy spelling variation of “demon,” like some writers do with “majick” and other occulty words.
The notion of having a calling – or yearning – has always resonated with me. I’ve pretty much always felt a calling in some direction or another, and heeding those callings has led… well, if nothing else, to a life that’s been interesting so far.
And I agree that giving our characters a yearning is very important. But here’s a question for you: Do you think that in real life, everybody has a yearning? As a young man, I felt very alienated by having a strong calling (music), when few of my friends or schoolmates seemed to have any similar yearnings (other than for sex, beer, etc.). And it doesn’t seem to me that western society encourages us to think that philosophically. So I feel like there are probably a lot of people out there who just kind of punch the clock, without anything really driving them in a very passionate way. And I think that’s a shame.
Would you agree? Or am I being short-sighted and snobbish to think that way? I’d be interested in your thoughts, since you’re so much more deeply schooled in this stuff than I am. Thanks for bringing up such thought-provoking ideas!
Hey Keith:
Oh, phooey. I was so looking forward to “I Like Beer.” (I have a feeling you’d nail it.)
You touch on something that Hillman addresses but not entirely to my satisfaction. His examples of calling almost all relate to people who have excelled. The study that identified motivation as the one factor present in all successful people focused on … wait for it, wait for it … successful people!
But he does in fact dedicate a whole chapter to “mediocrity,” and asks point blank: “Is there a mediocre angel? Is there a call to mediocrity?”
He answers by saying the calling is a call to character, not greatness. “Character is the mystery, and it is individual … Character is not what you do, but how you do it.”
Meaning: we all have a sense of who we can be and how we should live. We all have that nagging inner voice: “Clean your damn room.”
I know exactly the drifting, take-it-as-it-comes type you mean. I’ve been that guy on more than one occasion in my life. I also think that that approach can be useful sometimes — too much focus, ironically, can blind you. But sooner or later, that nagging suspicion you’re wasting your time kicks in.
As for the daimon — Hillman likens it to the Christian idea of a guardian angel, but again its purpose isn’t just about morality, but destiny and purpose. It’s not just the voice of conscience, but a companion figure that reminds us of who we should be, and how we should be going about it.
I kind of like that idea. I’d probably eat way less junk food — or drink less beer — if I thought my daimon was sitting there going: Really?
Then again, who knows. Maybe my daimon loves beer. I am Irish, after all.
Great point, David. It’s not like having a calling is always fun. In fact, it often means – at least in my case – living in a state of near-perpetual disappointment, due to failing to achieve exactly what one is striving for. Gotta think some more about this…
You just put your finger on existential guilt. I am aware of all I am not. Yeah, serious bummer.
Keith and David, I had a dream about my daughter and she laughed when I told her. In my dream we were talking about excellence and she said she wanted to be mediocre. Who the hell aspires to mediocrity? My daughter summed it up well — I am facing my fears in my dreams, that she will not chase excellence. To do anything less is to throw away the gifts you’ve been given.
I think of my mother — to many she was just an ordinary woman, and she was, but she did the littlest tasks with great love. That’s really quite extraordinary. She truly imitated the Little Flower, St. Therese. She was called to marriage and motherhood and though she lived a life of obscurity, it was a life well-lived. She loved a lot.
I hope that my children can say the same someday of me.
I think your mother provides an excellent example of how we are called to character, not greatness.
A “life well-lived” and through love—that’s pretty much the measure, Vijaya. I think of my own mother that way. David, another poke-in-the-brain post (and Keith’s beerless comments weigh well too). I think many of us have some kind of existential yearning, a hunger to be a part of something bigger, most lasting, soul-satisfying than the common dealings of our day. Though as Vijaya points out, sometimes those common dealings are the exalted ones.
That kind of ever-unscratched itch is a good thing to plague characters with: do they feel their itch, ignore it, deflect it, wage war upon it? Try to force its consciousness on their children? And is character fate or destiny, so that it can’t actually be changed?
I know you’re waiting for me to answer those questions, but there’s beer to drink. Oh, and David, I might be at the WD conference in LA, so we can compare lapsed Catholic/lousy Buddhist/Irish backgrounds. (And as a youngster, when I saw the large framed image of Christ and his bleeding Sacred Heart in my parents’ bedroom, I was terrified. Thank god I never saw it in a dream.)
Happy anniversary!
David, a happy anniversary to you and Mette, and wishing you many more. I was drooling this morning as I read about the wonderful food, the books, and had to go on a walk before I could properly respond.
But two people came to mind as I read: Thomas Merton and St. Augustine. They both captured that yearning for the infinite God and recognized their lack so very well. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” writes St. Augustine. So true.
Most people who tell stories capture the longing naturally because it is our human condition. We long for home, for love, for immortality. Although I never read the Twilight series because I just couldn’t go on after 30 pages, my students, many of them young women were sucked into it because of the emotional content. Longing.
Hi, Vijaya:
I actually had you in mind as I wrote this post, and am glad you had a chance to read it and comment.
Interesting you should bring up Augustine, because he’s the example from Christianity I use when I discuss Yearning in my workshops. (Great quote, thanks. And thanks for the Merton reference as well. One of my heroes from college.)
Your comment about longing echoes in part Barbara’s about passion, though one is the verb, the other the adverb, as it were.
“Stories without desire are stillborn.” This is a quote from Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext. I’d add, given your and Barbara’s comments: The desire must run deep, and be embraced with one’s entire being.
Thanks for the comment.
I am honored David.
And Barbara’s passion. Too many people forget that it means suffering. To have passion for something means how much you’re willing to suffer for it.
Thank you for this, David. Concerning destiny–while an acorn holds within it the blueprint of an oak tree, there are many factors that determine what shape the oak tree will take, how old it will live to be. So while we are all called to be our greatest selves, some of us (if not all of us) will be hindered or shifted from that potential by what surrounds us.
This reminds me of John Scotus Eriugena (I don’t have his direct quote in front of me, only a paraphrase from J Philip Newell’s book “Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality”), who believed that “nothing in nature is evil in itself. That is, we and all creation bear within us, however covered over it may be, the essential goodness of God.”
Good thoughts for the day.
Hi, Lisa:
The hindrance you speak of is what I refer to as the weakness/wound/limitation/flaw, those incidents in our past that have held us back from fulfilling the Yearning, made us believe we aren’t worthy, damaged out faith in others, or in some other way directed our focus away from the promise of life and instead toward avoiding the pain of life.
Thanks for the book reference. Sounds interesting. I’ll look it up..
In honor of Columbus Day, what if he and his men had drowned at sea? Where would our futures be now? Where is the internet when we need it? Ann Kloman
My word so much of this spoke to me, to my soul, as it were. Before I hit on a few points (and go off to ponder these points and more), I want to wish you and your wife a Happy Anniversary.
Oh, let me start with a little background. I’ll try for some brevity here. I’m not college educated, though I’ve taken a few courses here and there. So there are a great many things I try to read and understand, and often I feel my lack of understanding.
My religious background is similar to yours- my mother’s side of the family being Irish Catholics, my father sending my four sisters and I off to a Baptist church out of spite. I’ve since studied Buddhism and practice yoga, meditation, and Reiki. I do believe in a Great Something, something that is compassionate even for the most ignorant and fear-mongering of us.
I have felt this in the wake of some of the worst moments of my life. It’s not a voice and not really a vision, but this sense of what I call Stillness, or perhaps a Witness. I believe it’s what has helped me break a long (and generational) chain of abuse and helps me now break down a great weight of guilt and deeply-ingrained negative self-talk. When people say, “Oh you’re such a good person” or “how did you survive this or that” I have to give credit to this Witness, or my soul. It never lets me settle or give up even when I’m begging to do so. It’s the same thing that drives me to write. I can’t let go of writing because of this Other. Sometimes I dream it is a lion, other times it’s a mermaid. Now my writer brain wonders if it’s possible the soul is a shape-shifting thing?
The acorn with its blueprint- I read somewhere about this and find it to be true. For the acorn to release and realize its blueprint, it undergoes great chaos. Thinking of this gives me strength, helps me find gratitude even as I make the most difficult of choices.
Another thing that struck me was your use of the word agency. I’ve been writing my book by hand and in my notebook I have that one word circled in the margins on more than one page. I recently told a close friend that this is my great question: agency vs. the cultural definition of happiness. It’s the quest my character is on. Her daimon drives her in the wake of consuming guilt and self-hatred to beat the stigmas, labels, statistics, etc.
Writing about her has allowed me to grant myself a little more empathy. What a gift.
Such an insightful post and I will be coming back to it, though I feel my comment has gone on long enough. I’ll check out the books because I have this insatiable hunger to not only learn, but to better understand what drives humanity, and thus, our stories and characters. Thank you!
What a lovely, moving comment. Thank you so much.
Toni: I’m sorry I couldn’t respond more last night to your message, but I only got it as we were walking out the door.
I love the idea of a Witness. That is the best re-imagining of the daimon I can think of. I intend to use that in my teaching and my own characterization. It’s such a vivid, concrete, personal way to envision the character”s ideal self, ideal life.
Thanks so much for sharing that thought, and your other revelations about the hard road you’ve traveled, and what has saved you. It’s such an important lesson — yeah, it’s hard, but there is honesty and kindness and strength.
“Life matters because it ends.”
Yes. So simply put. The truest truths always are.
I so appreciate this weighty post. Yearning, the feeling that something is left undone or unfulfilled, has always occupied my mind and my writing. Our restless natures, our heroic quests. And I so appreciate your identification of essential victimhood in modern psychology! One of the things that I hadn’t realized was driving me nuts about it!
That yearning works for protagonists AND antagonists. The best antagonists feel they are fulfilling some deep-seated need or helping others/the world, not just doing dastardly things for crass personal gain.
Thanks for giving us so much to chew on.
That’s an important point, Erin. If we fail to see the sense of destiny and purpose in our our opponents’s actions, we’re either not imagining them fully or judging them — either way, it’s a limited vision.
And yes, it’s easy to be driven nuts by psychology. (Ha!) Love that.
Tom:
Sorry I didn’t respond earlier — and sorry I have to respond here and not directly to your comment, but we had reached the point where the comment box could only hold one word, and I could only imagine how weird my response would look on the screen.
Yes, would love to meet you at the WD Novel Writing conference. We’ll discuss these issue and out zig-zag approach to faith and insight there. Looking forward to it!
Dude. You can’t just ask at the very end if Wile E. Coyote has a soul. That’s a whole other post. That’s a very good question.
As for all that preceded that: Kudos. Thank you for waking me up. I’ve been drifting through shallow waters for some time, and it’s refreshing to see a guy who writes “The Devil’s Redhead” talking about Hillman and Heidegger. Thanks.
David, took notes. This post speaks to the underlying urges of my MC. That acorn, that soul, that something within that is rarely discouraged. No matter what I throw at her, she’s going to serve that need. Thanks.