Chapter One

    I don’t know if you need to hear this, but if you do, I hope you don’t hold it against me if I don’t tell it with humility. My teachers were vain. Back during their time it was a dishonor to the Sun, Earth, and universe to fail to be as brilliant and convincing as possible in a moment. My teachers were also the first to use the metaphor of visitors from another planet as a way of pulling focus on history and affairs of the world. Meaning, when attempting to see things as they are, they suggested looking at them as if you were a visitor from another planet, to lose the cultural and religious filters that often confuse things. The idea changed me, because when I began to look at the life I was living, as if from miles and miles above the face of the planet, I started to see things as a cartoon, I began to see civilization as a serialized installment of one event followed by the next. As I grew older, after looking at things for a couple of decades, I wanted to know the truth behind it. Even if existence was just a bunch of haphazard events bumbling into the future, various forces jousting for supremacy but none ever obtaining, I still wanted to know. Problem is, more I found out, more I tried to talk about it. I eventually found the truth—we’re not allowed to talk about the truth. A poet once said the ugliest thing about the truth is finding it, and another said that truth is so rare, it’s a delight to speak it. Maybe it’s that truth is a delight to the delightful and a horror to to the horrible, so part of me would persuade you to not listen any more and go away. On the other hand the Socrates metaphor comes to mind, the one where there are three types of people: those in the cave looking at shadows on the wall, those in the cave looking at the shapes which create the shadows, and those outside the cave looking at the world as it is. If a story can help someone live a life where they make the transition from being a cave-dweller to a non-cave-dweller, that would be a good thing, right? But maybe there are people better off living out life as a cave-dweller—I don’t know—you have to decide for yourself—but if you want to hear it, I’ll tell you.

    In getting to that point, getting to the realization that we’re not allowed to talk about the truth, naturally I had become a burden to everyone I knew. It had happened before, but this last time I was no longer in my twenties, not even my thirties, I was on track to be fifty. And so, no one returning phone calls, I refocused on art. At the time I had been using oil pastel and water color to create color-fields after the New York School of the 1950s and 60s. Colorfield art is where the entire canvas is nothing but fields of color and color combination. As far as the New York School painters were concerned the viewer was to stand close enough to the canvas that the entire field of vision was taken up with color. In my series I’d capture the space with lines of oil pastel and then paint gouache over it. After it dries, take a palette knife, scrape away the excess pastel, and with running water rinse away the gouache. It’s almost like developing a photo the way the vellum gives up pigment to reveal a pale hue of the original. Those that turn out good I started to sell out of coffee shops and art walks, and I got a few commissions here and there.

    Selling paintings was nice, but after awhile my attention shifted back to my writing. I grew up writing poetry, but as a writer I figured I should be able to say I had completed at least one novel. With all the political stuff I wanted to see if I could get it out there through a story. Anyone says writing a novel is not the most difficult thing a human can do doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Anyone ever tells you they’re working on a novel, be kind to them. I mean a literary novel, a book that tries to take the past and the present and combine it in a way that makes life relevant—that attempt to give meaning to us little monkeys who are sometimes warm, soft, and furry inside, and other times as cunning and deadly as all the teeth and claws that ever tore something apart. I was really struggling to finish mine, fully aware there are tens of millions of humans who have attempted to write a novel but gave up and never finished. I was losing steam, I needed inspiration, I needed a muse, someone beautiful and interested in the arts—maybe even doing things with life that were admirable—best case she was just as upset that we were both part of a civilization still dropping bombs on each other.

    The concept of a muse is a book unto itself and to me it’s a sacred alliance. Think if you turned on your mobile device and no music or movies were on it, or you went into town and there were no theaters, no galleries or museums to wander through. Life without art is incomprehensible, like Earth without oceans, but in order for art to exist it requires inspiration. Just like trees require water, art requires an artist who’s inspired. That’s when art can alter consciousness like it was meant to, when it can move an entire society one way or another. And the sacredness of inspiration isn’t only applied to the arts, but to the sciences too—meaning they’re two sides to the same coin because they’re both built on what’s presently known. And inspiration doesn’t have to be huge to be sacred either, even if it’s as small as the shift manager inspiring the cook to prepare a sandwich better. Someone who inspires someone else to excel, or inspires any thought, intention, or act creating a more beautiful world must be sacred because anything humans have ever considered sacred has been a part of this world, so any striving to make it better has to be sacred too. Unless you’d rather be a robot, then maybe the artist/muse thing isn’t that sacred. Then maybe we should be happy with art sponsored by money, not genuine inspiration based on truth of the moment. I don’t want to be a robot, I myself refuse to be a robot. I refuse to be told what to feel. I will feel what I’m feeling that moment I’m living and conscious. Feeling that way, naturally I don’t want fellow humans who live after me to be robots either. Robots can only do what they’re programmed to do. It’s the difference between being told what to feel, and actually feeling, and I want humans to feel freedom—which brings us to the ultimate question as a human: Do you believe we should be free, living in a free society, or do you believe a few should be free and the rest slaves? I’m getting ahead of myself, let me go back to the story about the muse.