Rider, Horse & Dog: November 2024

I don’t know if you need to hear this, but if you do, I won’t tell it with humility; my teachers were vain. Back during their time it was a dishonor to Sun, Earth, and life in general to fail to attempt to be as truthful and brilliant as possible at any moment. Looking at our paradise, contemplating it a decade or two, you start to see human civilization as a type of comic book where one event follows the next, and where pretty soon the question emerges: what’s our truth as beings on a planet circling a star? Just a bunch of haphazard events bumbling into the future? The world’s banks, social orders, and religions jousting for supremacy? A confluence of everything? The rub is, the more you look into things the more complicated they become—especially if you’re an artist or scientist, where your whole existence is a burning desire to identify the truth. You can’t create great art or science without knowing what’s true.

Someone once said all nature is nothing but metaphor to the mind—meaning you can take our universe and anything in it, and use it to explain human life. For instance, you decide to meet for a reconciliation with a family member, or it’s an upcoming salary review with the employer, and unless there’s persuading on your part, things might not go the way you think they should. So you set forth finding reasons to point out one thing and mention another. How you are going to play the meeting? A match of chess, game of golf—a musical instrument? How are you going to counter the bishop with a knight? What club on approach to the green? What chord progression in the reasoning is the best harmony?

Of course the most famous metaphor of all time goes back to the Greeks, the one about people in a cave looking at shadows on a wall, believing it reality, and eventually those who climb outside to see everything as it is. Some restricted to thinking shadows on cave walls are all there is, and then those outside the cave in the world as it actually is, raises the question about wanting to know the truth, which in turn raises the old adage that ignorance is bliss, the conclusion being that many would much rather live in a cave of their making.

If a story can help someone live a life where they make the transition from cave-dweller to non-cave-dweller, I’ll hold fast it’s a good thing, as painful as it might be. And the argument that some people just can’t handle the truth, I reject. The capability of humans to lead other humans out of a cave into sunlight—the duty of artists and scientists—is confirmation the purpose of existence is to learn—and not learn just any old thing—but learn the truth. It’s why we’ve gotten this far; our species would have perished long ago if not for the capability to enlighten our own kind.

After a number of years of watching the world, looking into the abyss so to speak, I knew I had to write a novel because it’s an art form that can lead fellow humans to truth. One good novel—one story artfully told—the right words in the right order—can walk someone right out of a cave. Lots of people have a work of fiction that changed their life. So I read novels, noting what others had done and what I might try myself.

Anyone says writing a novel isn’t the most difficult thing a human can do doesn’t know what they’re talking about. A literary novel, a book that takes the past and present and combines it to make life relevant—that attempt to give meaning to us little monkeys who are sometimes warm, soft, and furry inside, and others as cold, cunning, and deadly as all the teeth and claws to have ever torn something apart.

I was struggling to finish my masterpiece, well aware tens of millions have attempted it, but never finished. I was losing steam—I needed inspiration—I needed a muse—someone beautiful and interested—maybe even doing something admirable with her life.

Life without art is like Earth without ocean, an incomprehensibility. And art, the type that can move an entire society out of a cave, requires an artist who is inspired. That’s why the relationship between muse and artist is sacred, for its profound effect on what comes into being and where we go from there. When someone inspires someone else to excel, or inspires any intention, invention, or act, creating a more truthful and thus more beautiful world—that must be sacred—right? Unless you’d rather be a robot. Then maybe the artist/muse relationship isn’t all that important. Maybe the metaphor these days is not whether you’re living in a cave, but whether you’re more robot than human—perhaps two metaphors describing the same truth. I don’t want people to be robots because robots can only do what they’re programmed to do. It’s the difference between being told what to feel, and actually feeling—maybe even the difference between being free or enslaved. I refuse to be a robot.