Robert Sheckley

Philosophy & Science Fiction:  A view of a personal reality

    The 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.