Philosophy & Science Fiction: A view of a
personal reality
he
more serious the subject, the faster I need to write it. The more
complicated I need to make the means by which I write it. Writing is too
simple. The computer, with its many programs, is a God-given gift for
creating complexity. It's a complexity that let's you work at full speed,
but results in your slowing down enough to have your say. I can't imagine
how I could write nowadays without a computer. It is my altar,
jet-propelled, with neoprene wheels and a hundred gears. It's neat. One
difficulty is the necessity of speaking without scholarly precision--from
memory--without looking anything up--because more is intimated to me than
I can grasp, and to stop to find the exact wording of a quotation is death
to the enterprise.
But I can't speak of a matter like this
without using learned inscriptions. They are mine because they reside in
my memory, vaguely but compellingly. I have them. They belong to me. But I
have no time or patience to look up the exact originals, to refresh my
view to see if I really understood them, to entertain endless second
thoughts. I must take what is in my mind when I sit down to write. I must
see my words to understand what I think. And then it is too late to
correct them.
My philosophy is a writer's philosophy. My
work is writing, and writing is my life. My connection to everyone and
everything is through writing. Writing is my glory and my sorrow. By
writing about my philosophy of writing I write about my view of philosophy
in general. But this philosophy is never fixed, never final. As I continue
to live, it continues to grow. I can't even call it "the philosophy
of writing." It is only the still-forming philosophy of one man who
defines himself by his writing. Jung is one of my masters. But Hillman
touches my heart.
There's a lesson to be learned, not in
what he says, though that's important, but in how he says it. That's the
sort of thing I'm interested in as a writer. Hillman is brilliant,
classical in style, paradoxical, not afraid to repeat himself to drive
home a point. He is a precisionist of language, talking about things which
in other regards admit no precision. Hillman's writings about, for
example, the underworld place of souls could serve as a model for one way
of writing science-fiction. It is a difficult rhetoric to learn. I've
puzzled for years over "The Dream and the Underworld," and
"Revisioning Psychology." To understand how they mean as much as
to understand what they mean.
In "Walden," Thoreau says that
when they were going to hang a certain man, they asked him if he had any
final words for the spectators. This man advised the tailors to tie a knot
in their thread so it wouldn't pull through. The words of his companions
have been lost. If I could, I would write such a word. Expression is the
heart of my need. To express a thing. To express me-and-a-thing in the
passing moment when it occurs to me to say something about it. Interest is
the matter that I follow when my soul is trying to write in the
underworld. I have no say over what interests it, no say over what it
might find an interesting way to say it. Without that consuming interest,
there's nothing.
To find what interests me, and how to say
it, is the ever-changing project of a lifetime. The more it changes, the
more it stays the same. And it always changes. I need a rhetoric that is
up to the moment of my interest. I need a syntax that abandons the old
rules, that finds its own way along the slippery slopes of sentences. Flow
can't be codified--It is always a matter of new wine in old bottles.
Talking with foreigners is a paradigm for
understanding much with few words, little syntax. In science-fiction we
have new minds stifled by an old rhetoric, trying to get something over to
you. After a while, I see that the most correct way is not the best way.
My soul is stifled when I give too close an observance to the rules of
syntax and usage. It is better to give up the formalism, permit a greater
noise to signal ration--find my own equivalent to Walt Whitman's
"barbaric yawp". In his recent book, "The Seat of the
Soul," Gary Zukav speaks of Guides who can, if asked, come to the aid
of the writer. Zukav is a scientific writer, but this, by most would be
declared unscientific.
What hard evidence have we for Guides? Yet
Jung spoke of that function too, and Robert A. Johnson, an American
Jungian psychologist, has written a book called "Inside Work"
dealing with ways of contacting "the people inside." All this is
what Jung meant by Active Imagination. As a writer, I need to use this
function. But I can't call it by any of the existing names. To do so would
make me sound too much like a theosophist in my own ears, prattling on
about The Great White Brotherhood. The guiding function, however, can't be
denied, at least not by me.
But different names have to be found for
it, or no names at all. I need an expressive rhetoric. In the introduction
to his seminal collection "The Kandy Colored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby," Tom Wolfe told how he came to write the piece of
that name. He couldn't think of a thing to say, couldn't find a way to
begin. He wrote pages of notes. Finally shipped the whole thing to his
editor. Esquire took out the two word greeting and ran the piece as it
was. The piece has become a classic. But has the lesson been learned? Have
I learned the lesson?
Now, thirty or so years after first
reading it, I have an idea what was going on with Wolfe. He turned out the
raw and found it was cooked. And Goethe, in his later years, was very
excited about what he called "a secret development" taking place
in him. The 2nd part of Faust was the result of this secret development.
Most people find it unreadable. It is a monument, but to what? To me,
showing me, hinting to me, as to what I must do.
There's a saying here in America, "To
a dead horse, a wink is as good as a nod." That's the sort of message
I need to continue my own secret development. I think of myself as an
adventurer. I go out, day after day, in search of the elusive something
which I can't or won't define, but which becomes, with luck, a piece of
writing. To find this takes me into chaos, and chaos leads me to chaos
theory, and chaos theory leads me to Briggs and Peat's "Seven Life
Lessons of Chaos," an attempt to find the social and psychological
lessons of Complexity Theory and Chaos Theory. I note that the stages of
the approach to chaos are characterized by depression, and the
breakthrough by elation. I note that a strange attractor often appears,
and becomes a living focus. The writer's work, like the world itself, is
self-organizing.
But how to use this insight in the actual
writing? Science fiction is my lab. Its walls are hung with old gods, bits
of other people's writings, my own dreams and intimations. I go there,
drawn by the mystery and fascination of the place. I publish my successes,
and sometimes my failures, too. The moment of creative elation passes,
inevitably. A hiatus ensues. From vibrant life I fall into the death-in-
life of Hillman's underworld. Like the other shades there, I crave blood,
living blood. Sometimes my Guide brings me a cup full. Then we have a
party. To speak naturally, you need to find an artificial way of talking.
The finding of that artifice which is nevertheless the naturalness of your
momentary inner nature is the quest of a lifetime. It's what I'm all
about.
he
more serious the subject, the faster I need to write it. The more
complicated I need to make the means by which I write it. Writing is too
simple. The computer, with its many programs, is a God-given gift for
creating complexity. It's a complexity that let's you work at full speed,
but results in your slowing down enough to have your say. I can't imagine
how I could write nowadays without a computer. It is my altar,
jet-propelled, with neoprene wheels and a hundred gears. It's neat. One
difficulty is the necessity of speaking without scholarly precision--from
memory--without looking anything up--because more is intimated to me than
I can grasp, and to stop to find the exact wording of a quotation is death
to the enterprise. 
