The Silent Pulse

Ever have a day where nothing goes right? If you can relate to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst, then you have and you know.

But what about the other kind of day? Imagine this: you wake up after a restful night’s sleep and the backache you had yesterday had vanished. Your cat greets you, and your dog wags his tail and they seem fine with each other, for a change. The coffee tastes delicious, and when you open your computer, an acceptance of an article you submitted eons ago comes in. You leave for a scheduled dental appointment, and where usually there are no parking spaces— the perfect one right in front of the dentist’s midtown office awaits you and, behold, the meter is already paid for the next ninety minutes. Your dentist is full of cheer and so are you, because, after she looks inside your mouth, she declares it looks marvelous and then she adds, “no cavities!”

And so it goes for the rest of the day.

Call it YOUR DELIGHTFULLY BRIGHTLY VERY GOOD DAY.

Many years ago, I attended a book launch where the author George Leonard spoke of his new book, THE SILENT PULSE. He explored this seeming perfection suggesting it can be created. It’s been on my mind ever since, though it remains mysterious. I experience these sorts of days as if I’m a character in someone else’s story, and I thank the author for this exquisite sweet very good narrative arc, even if it cannot last.

Go VIRAL

How can you make your blog/tweets/Instagram/site/whatever catch on?

As one who has never had a post take over the Internet by storm, (or as they call it, go viral, which sounds ominously sickening) I can’t speak from experience. I’m an observer, just like you.

I find there are three kinds of posts that sometimes (but statistically rarely) catch massive attention.

The first are inspirational yes-we-can and never-give-up and the-best-is-yet-to-come sort of posts. When written with passion and conviction, (and especially from experience) they are needed and wanted and— let’s face it— like water on parched earth. I save, disseminate, and re-read these.

The second are the things-are-so-hard-right-now and I-could-use-your-support for-the-challenges-I’m/my friend/someone I know-is- facing and feeling-overwhelmed sorts of posts. If the story is told well and from a place that feels authentic, our empathetic nature just gravitates to disseminate these and try to enlist help.

The third sorts that catch attention are the mysterious, impossible to explain. At least I can’t. These are the nonsensical-peculiar and can-you-please watch-this-because-it-is-intriguing/amusing/or I don’t know what and what-the----?!?

Example of such is here.

The third kind of viral posts exemplify why no one can reliably plan an economy, or predict the future, or answer the ultimate matter of why we are here with complete accuracy.

And these third viral kinds of posts are the most interesting to me. Even though most are strangely inane, I continue to marvel at what our species will deem worth our while.

January 30, This Day in HISTORY

There is something ominously grim when I look at January 30^th’s notable marks. On this calendar day in 1933, Hitler was sworn as chancellor of Germany. On this calendar day in 1948, Gandhi was assassinated. On this calendar date in 1956, African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s home is bombed in retaliation for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

That’s just for starters. On this date, also---

·         1925 – The Government of Turkey expels Patriarch Constantine VI from Istanbul.

·         1930 – The Politburo of the Soviet Union orders the extermination of the Kulaks.

·         1969 – The Beatles' last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The police break up the impromptu concert.

·         1972 – The Troubles: Bloody Sunday: British paratroopers open fire on anti-internment marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 people; another person later dies of injuries sustained.

·         1979 – A Varig Boeing 707-323C freighter disappears over the Pacific Ocean 30 minutes after taking off from Tokyo.

And so much more.

If this is your birthday, I apologize. I hope you celebrate with gusto and do something wonderful so the cloud hovering over this date lightens a little. Many small and a few great actions can make the kettle less black. Let’s polish it into a beautiful reflective silver shine.

I don’t know what is set in stone, predestined, or guided by unseen patterns. What I am sure of is that what we do matters.

History was. Now let’s make some.

Good Instincts

Or—

A Pat on the Back, Me

Sometime ago when I was looking to be agented, a well-known literary agent turned my novel down saying she has a client working on something she felt was similar. This agent was surprisingly specific about the setting and a couple of details of her client’s WIP. She asked that I check with her if and when I had other work, and was still unagented.

Shortly after, another agent offered representation, and I’ve been agented since. That particular novel has not sold, and we have moved on to my next.

About six months ago, I ran into a review of a middle grade novel that sounded so much like my unsold story, and I checked it out. What-d-y-know, its setting and specifics fit perfectly with the response I got from that agent. I began reading the book online in its E-version. I found myself heaving as the first paragraph reminded me of the way I chose to begin mine. But there’s more. The name of the main character, (an uncommon one) was the very same as in my story.

I did a bit of searching to find and verify that this writer’s agent was indeed the same one who liked my story, but had a client working on something similar.

I bought the book in its print version. I read it. It is a very good book, well written, and it deserves its place in the market.

You wouldn’t blame me for doing the next thing. I wasn’t going to, but something in me felt I just had to. I wrote to the writer to tell her I liked her book (true) and added that I liked the main character’s name very much.

Almost instantly, I got a reply. The writer was grateful for my appreciation, and added that, incidentally, the main character’s name was her agent’s suggestion, after her editor didn’t care for the name she had used originally.

I sat, heart pounding, staring at the screen. It’s rare that you get such confirmation of the tentacles you put out in the universe actually reaching somewhere. Bingo.

I am well aware that names, titles, and even general plotlines are not intellectual property and thus, rightly, can’t have a copyright. Inspiration comes from what we have read and seen before, and writers take from others (often subconsciously) all the time.

But it still felt... weird.

There’s a good article about writer’s envy that just came out a few months ago. I must have incorporated it inwardly, because I spent only a few moments feeling these pangs. I looked in the mirror and said, “You’ve done well. You had the good story and a name that was worth borrowing.”

Both stories deal with unseen connections across time. It’s fitting that I found just such a true connection between them, the one that was published and the one that was not. 

The Incidence of Coincidence

Still thinking of the passage of years, I wonder what are the odds that someone I knew for only a year in second grade (and haven't been in touch with at all) would pop back into my life fifty plus years later, and halfway around the globe, and we’d turn out to be living in the same neighborhood.

I know, this is “too improbable.”

Well, it happened to me.

Here we are in second grade. We were good friends living on a tree-lined street in a lovely neighborhood in west Jerusalem.

And here we are a short time ago having coffee two continents away in our lovely neighborhood café, on the west coast of the United States, and what-da-y’know, also on a tree-lined street.

If I get another rejection to my fiction novel where the editor says the coincidences in my story are improbable, I’d have to point to this blog-post and add a few even more striking “improbables” from my life. I can document them all.

Fiction has nothing on real life when it comes to the amazing weave that is the fabric of our lives.

I’d love to hear about your improbable incidences, and no need to call them coincidences.

Invisibility Cloak

There are days when I wonder if I’ve inadvertently donned an invisibility cloak. You know, the Inbox is empty, the phone doesn’t buzz, and whatever good vibrations I had sent out seem to have faded at the universe’s horizon.

A good friend told me she just had one of those days. “I wondered if I actually died, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know it,” she said.

Exactly.

It doesn’t happen to me often. My inbox influx can testify to that. But when it does, it’s both eerie and unsettling.

My best way of coping with outer silence is to write, because that is a form of turning inward while staying wide awake to life. Another helpful action is to spend some time “liking” and such on social sites. (I keep it genuine, for to do otherwise would bring a feeling of spiritual demotion.) Facebook will immediately bring into my inbox others who liked the same.

Hey, it’s proof I’m alive.

The next day the floodgates open, and all those waves I had sent out come back to shore, seemingly at once.

 

This is good to remember: unlike earthly death, the invisibility cloak will slide off. It isn’t permanently glued on.

Game of... What?

I was walking with a friend, for a “walk & talk,” i.e. exercising the body and the mind.  We just had our mid-session coffee and were headed back. On a winding street, right next to their trash, neighbors had put some of their discards for the garbage folks to pick up.

One of those discards was a cat-perch & scratch contraption. I marveled that anyone would throw out a clean, unused looking and solidly built cat dream. I couldn’t afford such a delightful gift for my three humble felines, and they make due with cardboard circular scratch-a-ma-things. They’re happy anyhow, being of humble stock and having spent too much time in a shelter before we became their parents. But this could be a Cinderella story. A mini-palace just for them.

My friend and I carried it for two miles back home. There, I placed it on the porch, shampooed it just in case it contained some hidden vermin, and let it air for a day before bringing it in. As I worked to make sure it was indoor house-proper, I imagined the sad circumstances that might have caused someone to put it with the garbage.

The shortest story, one consisting of only six words, came to mind. Some say Hemingway wrote it when he wagered he could write a complete story in six or less:

For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

You can imagine the sad circumstances I was conjuring as possible back-story for our “find.”

But this one has a happy ending. You never know with cats, especially ones not used to fancy-froufrou, if our hauling this heavy tower, made of a plywood core, would appeal.

Since then, it’s been a revolving Who’s-on-top—

DD called it “our very own GAME OF THRONES.”

*We honor discards. One kitty’s garbage is another’s throne.*

The Word

A friend was rejoicing at the sale of her first manuscript to a publisher. The joy of being able to say my editor for the first time brought back memories.

Yes, there’s nothing like the first.

The first my publisher. The first my editor. The first my book. The first my agent. These can come in a different order, but that^ was mine.

But really, none of these is really mine. I don’t own them.

What writers have are stories. Stories we make with chapters we construct with paragraphs that we make by joining sentences. Sentences we make with words. It boils down to this: the only thing that we own are the words.

My word!

Even the words are a gift.

The opening verse from the gospel of John rushes in:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The meaning of this enigmatic phrase, for me, is that all comes from thought. Thought extended outward begins with words, and words begin with one word.

As I sit and contemplate this, I realize nothing is mine.  I rejoice at having nothing.

Deus Ex Machina*

*a.k.a. G_d from the machine

There’s a literary plot device known in Latin as deus ex machina. Originally from the Greek apò mēkhanês theós, and used in Greek plays, we have many examples from Judeo-Christian stories. I’m thinking of the biblical story of Job, where the philosophical discussion and events are resolved by the appearance of G_d from the whirlwind, and all is resolved and restored. It is not resolved by the main character, nor by any of the other characters’ actions. In fact, that is the very point the book of Job is making.

In literary analysis this has come to stand not so much for divine intervention as for the addition of an unexpected event or character not organically coming out of the story. Such things do, in fact, happen in real life. But in modern storytelling, where the heroism depends on humans conquering life’s obstacles, it often feels contrived and unsatisfying.

In the how-to circles  it's a no-no. If I read or heard it once, I have heard it many times. We don’t do it anymore.

Oh, really?

I suggest we do use it, and use it everywhere. This is where fantasy comes in. A whole genre devoted to coming up with world building rules that zig-zag between life as we know it and fantastic elements popping in conveniently to work their magic. 

You need the main character to get in somewhere where they can’t possibly? — Introduce, and then give ‘em, an invisibility cloak. Voila! Harry Potter, anyone? Why didn't we know about this magical invisibility thingy all along? Because we just needed it now, silly.

The same for magical realism, a genre I am partial to as a reader and a writer. Think of the uses of time-travel, not in the form of scholarly research, but a device where the main character actually gets to hop in a few centuries back and even retrieve a long-lost object.

Deus ex machina hasn’t gone away. If anything, it is used more than ever. We just have other names for it.

Let’s consider these famous quotations about LOVE

St. Valentine’s Day, with the heart-shaped chocolates and musings about love, is shortly upon us.

 

Years back, DS asked me why almost all the popular songs are about love. I answered that love is, well, popular. The accoutrements and trimming attached to love have always been popular. Speaking about love is a perennially popular topic, and singing about it is “the popularest.”

 

This got me thinking about famous quotations from venerable sources that, when you stop to think, don’t quite hold water. Don’t get me wrong, they all contain some truth. But in the main they come short.

 

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

 

Erich Segal

Really? Me no likey this one.

 

“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.”

 Loretta Young

Very nice Loretta, but it ain’t so, darlin’.

 

“Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.”

 Mother Teresa

Oh, brother! I mean, oh, mother—sometimes yes and mostly no.

 

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

 Aristotle

And I thought Aristotle was the earthbound thinker. Really, Ari.

So while all of these are nice enough, though sorely lacking, I find this last one, not as pithy or as poetic, to be much more satisfying:

 

“Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.”

Ann Landers

~~~

 

My sixpence-worth is that Love is a mystery. Just like life, and all of creation.

Keep singing, and send chocolates. That part is all good.

Groundhog Day

If ground-hog day was bright and fair,
The beast came forth, but not to stay;
His shadow turned him to his lair,
Where six weeks more, he dormant lay
Secure in subterranean hold—
So wondrous weatherwise was he—
Against six weeks of ice and cold,
Which, very certain, there would be...

~H.L. Fisher, "Popular Superstitions," Olden Times: or, Pennsylvania Rural Life, Some Fifty Years Ago, and Other Poems, 1888

Well, then— it’s today, and it’s all right if we missed it. GROUNDHOG DAY is for many young’uns an excellent Bill Murry movie, played over and over since its release in 1993. But the odd Farmer’s Almanac-like   custom is much older, and not less bizarre when analyzed. Does the groundhog see its shadow? Six more weeks of winter? Heh?

I think of it this way— the weather is uncontrollable. We want control. Give us some grounding from where we will navigate.

But I like to leave this post with a much more spunky quotation that should take us through the next six/eight/ten/please no more weeks:

“It's a holiday entirely based on the power of a psychic rodent. If that isn't the epitome of awesome, I don't know what is.”

~Flying LlamaFish, "7 Reasons Groundhog Day is the Ultimate Holiday," 2010, PunIntended.com

The Mystery of Simultaneous Blooming

The other day I looked with glee at my gardening handiwork. My trimming and legendary weeding left a nice neat line, edging the green plants in my yard.

Only a week later I passed by, distracted by the weight of grocery bags as I huffed up the stairs, when—what happened?—my lovely line of just-trimmed ivy looked like a child in need of a haircut whose hair was just ruffled by an adoring uncle. Branches were sticking up in all directions in an unruly dance. I couldn’t believe it.

I swear, this maniacal sprouting happened overnight. 
And it wasn't just one kind of plant; this contrarian response to my gardening was orchestrated by a few adjacent plant species, no doubt in sympathy with the ivy. My greens had unionized, it seemed.

^Not me— just a mammoth hedge and its trimmer

It reminded me of the mystery of Cereus greggii, a plant specie that flowers only one night a year all over Arizona, always simultaneously.

I thought about the attempted scientific explanation regarding chemical reactions and what not. But even scientists admit they don't quite have it.

Then I thought about how cultural phenomena that sprout with seeming coordination in distant parts of the globe are also explained, even as we don’t really have a handle on why.

Some months back, writers on my favorite kid-lit forum, chimed in about our works-in-progress. (WIP in writers’ speak.) Somehow it turned out that a whole host of us were writing time-travel middle grade novels set in the same state, South Carolina. It was eerie.

I did suggest some of us might move one state over. I mean, there are other states, Virginia. But no one was budging. Each of our stories had to be there.

Years from now, assuming a simultaneous publication of even a tenth of our body of work, (one can hope) it will be explained by cultural commentators somehow. But we, who lived it, know better. There is no rational explanation.

 I have experienced this mysterious phenomenon before. An idea I thought original, sprouted from others with whom I have had no communication. They didn’t steal my idea, and I know with certitude I didn’t steal or even borrow from anyone. It’s that Cereus Greggii thing, just happening in a different sphere.

Simultaneity. To me it is as close to proof that our five senses barely scratch what is real.

This is what I'm contemplating as I trim the front yard plants to make a nice neat hedge, again.