One Way Do Not Enter

Organized religion looms large in each of my books (most recent: Grand Designs). This might be surprising, considering their settings, in and around the auto industry, but in many respects the books are about large, corrupt institutions. Churches in the 1970s fell too frequently into that bucket of slime. Beyond the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, people like Jim Jones showed how far astray moral institutions can get.

Maybe I have a problem with authority. For the better part of two thousand years, churches have held nearly absolute sway over people’s lives, telling them what to think and what they could do. This wouldn’t be too bad if they really had an infallible pipeline to truth, but they have proven time and again to be worse than wrong.

Poor people were robbed of their meager livelihoods by demands for tithes. Women were effectively silenced. Men, especially those in the upper echelons of the hierarchy, enjoyed everything the times could provide, including sexual license and unimaginable wealth, despite their vows of chastity and poverty.

One of the cultural mechanisms that encouraged this to happen was the Western view that there is only one right answer to every question. “I am the one true God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “I am the way, the truth and the light. Walk ye in it.” You get the picture.

This orientation gave authorities the license to suppress all dissent and alternative views as heresy. People who thought otherwise were burned at the stake.

This perspective is very different from the Eastern model espoused by Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Taoism and Shintoism. These systems accept the possibility that there are many paths to enlightenment. There is a saying that a Japanese is Shinto at birth, Christian when marrying, and Buddhist at death.

Talk about covering your bases.

But some things just don’t translate. One of my daughters teaches yoga. She works for a man who fancies himself a swami, a great teacher. While yoga is largely based on Buddhist principles, he seems to have lost sight of the possibility for alternate understandings of truth. He wants all his staff to conform precisely to his interpretation of the way to enlightenment.

He is not alone.

One of the bugaboos of the religious right is that their moral code must be the law of the land. They believe abortion is wrong, so no one should be allowed one, even if only about a third of Americans are practicing Christians. That doesn’t even consider the range of beliefs among Christian sects, some of whom support a woman’s right to control her own fertility.

The bottom line is, churches are fair game. They have amply demonstrated their own corruption. If I choose to vilify them in fiction, what I write contains a ring of truth.

Besides, it’s almost impossible to burn an eBook.

The Sleeper Awakens

Do dreams have plots?

I have a terrible time sleeping. Thoughts swarm through my head like flies on a carcass. I get a measure of relief from my insomnia with a generic sleep aid that costs less than $10 a month. During a recent visited my doctor, I complained that I was lucky to wring six hours out of a dose. He offered me a prescription to the newly released generic version of Ambien CR.

It was over $100 a month! I politely declined my pharmacist’s offer to fill it. I still had two months to go on my previous prescription, but when I went to fill the last month’s supply, she informed me that the prescription had expired. I was in deep doo-doo.

Desperate for a substitute, I took four Benadryl, an antihistamine which is sold over the counter as a sleep aid. I felt like I was hooked directly to house current! My heart raced. Sleep completely eluded me.

When I finally passed into troubled dreams in the wee hours of the morning, my usual strange dreams took a bizarre turn.

It had a better plot than some of my novels. I don’t remember all the details, but the principal character had a problem and attempted various strategies to get some critical paperwork. He was confronted by the usual bureaucratic hassles and was assisted by friends or colleagues.

I read somewhere that we attempt to resolve real conflicts in our lives by reenacting them in sometimes symbolic form during REM sleep. We may not come up with an answer, but we wake up feeling better about whatever was troubling us.

Being an unemployed novelist, my life is relatively unencumbered by bureaucratic encounters of any kind. True, I’ve been arm wrestling with AT&T about getting a DSL connection to the internet, and I had to grovel before various Delta Airlines gate agents to get my granddaughters back to Ireland, but that was all behind me. And the book I’m working on now has no bureaucracy in it at all, yet.

I’m at a loss.

The larger question is, do dreams generally have plots? Most of the ones I remember vividly are more like endless video loops, the same problem keeps popping up, and nothing my dream self can do seems to resolve it.

Maybe I need to recruit a better writer for my dreams, or find out who produced that sleep deprived terror I suffered through last night.

I still don’t have any pills. Let’s hope I fare better tonight without Benadryl or my usual drug of choice.

Flights of Fancy

I watched a Bette Davis movie a few weeks ago: All About Eve. She is an aging starlet being undermined and ultimately displaced by a conniving ingénue. The story has all the hallmarks of drama from that era, the early 1950s. Davis is past her prime, and slowly slipping into that bottomless vat of acid that marked her later work.

What struck me about the story had absolutely nothing to do with the usual gushing praise or scathing criticism that falls on those rosy, but heavily censored dramas. One scene jumped out.

The stars accompany a friend to Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport in New York. Bette Davis and her unmemorable costar accompany a successful director friend to see him off on his flight to Los Angeles for a stint in Hollywood. They walk to the edge of the tarmac (!) before waving goodbye against a background of roaring aircraft engines.

I saw my grandchildren off today. They were on their way back to Ireland as unaccompanied minors. I required a special dispensation and pass to sit with them at the gate until their flight was called. This after almost an hour of discussion with a gate agent, trying to decide if they should even be allowed onto the plane. There was some discussion about their lack of a visa to enter Ireland. Ireland does not require or issue visas to minor children, but through some overly nit-picky reading of the rules, they could leave on their own but not come back, even if their mother was waiting there to greet them. Eventually, the agent reluctantly agreed to allow them to board their flight.

The point is that in sixty years, we have gone from an overly permissive, trusting society to one so paranoid even a child cannot return unencumbered to her mother. I’m not opposed to airport screening. I think it’s a good thing that someone is watching closely to prevent anyone wishing to do us harm from succeeding.

What I object to is the degree to which we have acquiesced to this universal intrusiveness. We all march through screening like cattle on the way to slaughter. Hardly anyone objects.

I object! But my response is first of all queasy fright whenever the word “airport” enters my imagination. I feel the same as when I load up TurboTax in anticipation of April 15. My second response is to avoid travel that involves security screening. We recently drove to Niagara Falls, Canada, but I refused to cross back into the US there, because I dreaded having to pass through the clutches of Homeland Security. Twice.

I have nothing to hide. I won’t even let my wife smuggle produce over the US/Canada border, but that doesn’t alleviate my unease. The scrutiny alone is unsettling.

I am now reluctant to cross any border or board any flight because of the ordeal it requires.

I’ll smell my own shoes, thank you very much.

Arc of Triumph

The original form of Greek Drama called “Comedy” was not intended to be funny. It was about triumph adverse circumstances, resulting in a happy ending. “Tragedy” retains its original meaning, dragging along a sad ending.

That said, I suppose I’m being too harsh toward Leonie!, although I’m not sure whether the story is a tragedy or a comedy. Certainly the principal character faced adverse circumstances. She was sickly. She was ill-behaved. Today she’d be classified with Attention Deficit Disorder. She wasn’t very bright, either, but that might’ve been dyslexia. Who knows?

On the other end of the arc, I’m not sure whether she overcame her circumstances or not. After much difficulty and many abortive starts, she was accepted into the Sisters of the Visitation. I suppose that was a triumph. She didn’t seem to accomplish much as a nun, especially compared to her sister Therese, who published several books before dying at twenty-four.

In Catholic eyes, she led an exemplary life, apparently inspiring other struggling postulates. She continues to have a strong following sixty years after her death. That must count for something. From my point of view, following a cloistered life is a failure. Life ought to be lived, to be filled with accomplishment, or at least facing its challenges head on. Retreating into a convent is like committing yourself to an asylum even though you aren’t sick.

But then my experience with prayer doesn’t credit it with as much value as Catholic Religious do.

Leonie! wasn’t fiction, but a dramatic biography. She was a real person with real tragedies and psychic deficiencies to cope with. She chose the same life her sisters followed, which isn’t all that surprising.

When writing fiction, we are not constrained by minor inconveniences like facts and truth. If our character needs to triumph over adversities, we can pile them on to our heart’s content. If we want a happy ending, we can easily construct one. Tragedy is there just beyond the clack of the keyboard.

My only compulsion is that a story needs one or the other. If we leave our readers dangling with an ambiguous ending, they’ll feel cheated. SOMETHING has to happen, and our readers need reassurance that a clear resolution has been achieved.

This is especially important to me as I compose a story around my autistic character. Autism is already a tragedy in the first chapter of a child’s life and often it is only through extraordinary effort that a modicum of normalcy can be achieved. When authentic genius emerges, that is a comedic triumph of the highest order — in the best sense of that word.

That’s what I want to get into print.

Inspiration

We attended the world premiere of an inspirational movie3 called Leonie!, put together by the Catholic Church.

I am neither Catholic, nor particularly in need to inspiration. I went because about half the movie was filmed in and around the house of some friends in Romeo. Their Victorian manse bears a striking resemblance to the house where Leonie and her sister Therese Martin grew up.

Local lore buffs may recognize that name. Therese Martin, aka Saint Therese, is the person behind the Shrine of the Little Flower on Woodward in Royal Oak. Though named after the same saint that inspired Mother Teresa, late of India’s slums, she seems to be little known outside Catholic Circles.

Inside is another story.

Therese, who was a Carmelite nun, died of tuberculosis at 24. She was an extremely self-effacing person, but also a prolific writer. Her wild popularity is probably due to her literary legacy as much as any good works.

All her sisters who survived to adulthood became nuns. Most of them, like her, became Carmelites, but Leonie, the subject of the new movie, entered the Sisters of the Visitation, instead. Leonie had been a sickly, rebellious, not-too-bright child who somehow slipped into the religious order. Apparently they didn’t have competitive entrance exams or a selective admission process.

After watching the film, I remain unsure how or why Leonie’s life is seen as inspirational. True, she was surrounded by suffering. Several sisters died in childhood. Her mother died at 45. Her sainted sister Therese died at 24, and her father succumbed to dementia. I imagine that life was typical of late eighteenth century France or anyplace else, for that matter. Medicine was next to useless.

While I was raised Catholic, I no longer practice. Maybe they skipped that chapter in catechism, but I never caught onto the appeal of asceticism. So you live a cloister life of denial. No one sees except the other religious. The world goes on in its slow downward spiral toward depravity. What have you accomplished?

The contemplative life is focused on prayer: appeals to God to intercede in human affairs. This is something I do have firsthand experience with, and from direct observation, it doesn’t do anything beyond self-delusion.

Are people spontaneously healed at Lourdes and Lisieux? I don’t know, but all the people with life-threatening diseases who claimed healing died anyway. Certainly God never answered any of my prayers, despite my sincere, fervent entreaties.

Leonie had a difficult childhood, grew up amid sorrow, joined a convent and died. So did many other people, most without the benefit of the Church to support them in their hours of distress.

I am not impressed. 

Someday, I'll publish an account of my own religious experience. It will not be so pretty.