mwotw

Once upon a time in Eastern Europe there was a band of gypsies who’s thing it was to go house to house whenever they were hungry and hadn’t any means. They’d ring a random doorbell and ask whomever answered for a pot to cook in and a stone.

“That’s all we need for soup.” they’d say and smile.

Incredulous, and eager to be entertained, the people in the house would usually produce a pot, a stone and gather round the gypsies to watch them make Stone Soup.

After about an hour of sitting together around the fire, some of the people from the house would begin to get hungry. “Is it soup yet?” they would ask. “Not yet” the gypsies would reply.

“But an onion, a potato and a ham bone would surely hurry it along…”

The moral of this story is “Capital without action is just money.”

I’ve never been the sort of person to sit and stare at something I’ve made for a long time after making it. I like to move on. If you had asked me right after I “finished” writing Ferus Rex whether it was going to be the only novel I ever wrote, I would have said “No way!” Ten years later, it looks very likely to be the only one. But ten years ago, I tried to plunge right into novel #2 like my life depended on it. I conceived to write a novel that would cure the queasy feeling of self-indulgence engendered by the writing of Ferus Rex. How that directive led me to the plot of Powerless Day, is anybody’s guess.

The year is the not-so-distant-yet-very-different future, I learned to write about thanks to William Gibson. Neuromancer foresaw accurately some things that were coming because of the Internet. When writers want things to change very dramatically in a relatively short period of time, they will sometimes interpose an apocalypse of some sort, between the present and the day-after-tomorrow they want to describe. How you actually got from A to B is relegated to the oblivion of prologue. While the words scroll upwards on the screen and the John Williams score manipulates us into the feeling that something significant is being explained, a writer has merely to declare the way things are. What continuity, if any, there might be between present and prospective future is for the reader to think about on his way home from the multiplex.

In the case of Powerless Day, all you really need to know is that America is in an undeniable decline. Things are bad at home. They are bad in a number of “trouble spots” around the world. Unemployment is exorbitant. So is crime. In many ways, American society has been flipped upside down. The white poor outnumber minority poor. The urban landscape in most major cities is dominated by a small number of organizations with a mixture of racial, ideological and political origins. In the heartland, the hillbillies are arming and entrenching. But in Los Angeles, local government, organized crime and street gangs are engaged in outrageously candid warfare on the city streets. In New York, it is the same. In all the country, there is a high hysteria in the air. The experiences of rape and riot and violence are common in most places. Half the populace is checked out on drugs. The other half is having an orgy while Rome burns all around them. (more…)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which “opposing” Things are held in balance, as in the question of “”Religion vs. Science”", and also about the ways the lines between “separate” Things can sometimes get blurry, or even erased, as in “The Essence of Judaism: Spirit or Blood”.

Tonight I want to discuss a balance of “separate AND opposing” forces that I think we will all recognize in our own lives, but that I would guess seldom figures among our conscious and deliberate thoughts.

Fortunately, we DO have the works of a few great writers, who came upon this very question themselves, and have dramatized and dimensionalized it for us in literature.

One such is Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost.

Though there are sooo many ways to talk about Paradise Lost, for purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on the question:

Who is the Hero of the Story?

Without having to read PL, all that you need to know about Satan, Adam and the question of their respective claims to “Heroism” in PL you already know from Popular Culture/Religious Dogma:

1. Satan said “Fuck you, God — ban me to Hell, I’ll make it a place in my own Image”

2. Adam, seemingly the product of a God made smarter for his prior scuffle with Lucipher, was given but 1/1000th the power of the Dark Lord, has to live ALWAYS with the question: “Does God exist?” (and therefore always falling in and out of FAITH), and, most cripplingly, is FULLY subject to the will of God (though in the odd guise of free will).

Though God had enough power over Satan to ban him to Hell, he could NOT control his actions THERE, or stem his INFLUENCE over a world full of Adams.