Writing

Voice and Truth in Fiction

A little on point of view first…

Point of view refers to who sees the action within a story or novel. You can have multiple points of view, so long as each shift from one character to another is adequately marked, by way of punctuation; for example by starting a new paragraph, or a new segment, for a change in point of view. Traditional novels of the nineteenth century were often recounted by an omnipotent narrator, one who saw everything, knew all that was going on and oversaw the voice or voices of the novel in an explicit way. Individual characters’ voices were portrayed mainly via dialogue. This was true of the Russian novels (e.g. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky), often resulting in large works that had a wide focus: social, temporal and spatial, united by the voice of the narrator.

It is not always easy to explain the concept of Voice, and there is a great deal of confusion surrounding this concept. The omnipotent narrator is a dying breed today, and most writers are able to call upon different voices for different creative purposes. In more recent times, the person who tells the story, the narrator, is linked to the question of voice in an often implicit way. It is, perhaps, better to give examples of this. See Below.

A little bit of psychology…

I’d just completed an online course with Writing NSW, the wonderful organisation for writers situated at Callan Park in western Sydney. Did you know that, according to “voice guru” Lee Kofman — our fantastic teacher for the course — an important part of getting voice right is linked to self knowledge and being sensitive to others’ personalities.

A summary of what I learnt in the course:

We are all made up of many personality parts.
Our narrators and characters need, also, to be multifaceted, not one or two dimensional.
The eccentric or “different” parts of characters and narrators are often the most interesting for the reader.
“Nice” characters, and other stereotypes, are untruthful and boring.
Exercises and lists of psychological features based on yourself, can be a springboard into creating interesting characters.
When we write, we naturally express parts of ourselves, and this will flow over into writing fiction.
We must validate the eccentric or “different” aspects of ourselves, in order to be able to do so for our characters.

How To Create An Authentic Voice?

This aspect was achieved through students attempting a series of exercises based on creating characters and expressing feelings, without being “untruthful”or overly simplistic. In the struggle to find an appropriate or interesting way to describe a situation or a character lies the source of finding your voice as a writer of fiction. This can be best illustrated through giving examples of truthful or unique voices in literature.

Examples of An Authentic Voice

One good example of a perfect use of Voice, is by Tim Winton in his novel That Eye The Sky. He writes in the first person, vividly depicting the voice of an eleven year old hero, Ort Flack. In doing so, he uses a lot of grammatically incorrect sentences and sentence fragments, just as in dialogue, suggesting the young person’s voice, while at the same time being careful not to overdo the technique:

I don’t sleep that good. Never have. Even when I was little and Mum or Dad put me to bed, I’d lie awake until they’d gone to bed themselves—longer even. It’s lonely in the middle of the night with just you and the sky and the noises of the forest. There’s no one to talk to except that big sky. Sometimes I talk to it. Sounds funny, but I do. Ever since they brought me home from the hospital the time I was so sick, I haven’t slept good….Dad won’t sleep much good when he gets better, that’s for sure. Still, he’s not much of a sleeper anyway. (Penguin, 1986, p.13 )

Grammatical correctness is thus sacrificed, from time to time, for the sake of the voice: “Tegwyn and me are walking.” (p.31); “Mum makes herself a second cup, and me too; makes you feel real grown up, two cups. She looks like she’s gonna say something for a sec…and says nothing. She smiles.” (p.91)

Winton combines several techniques for portraying voice. One of these is his use of colloquial language and special vocabulary, including slang, and another is his use of short abrupt sentences interspersed with longer ones. In this way he manages to produce Ort’s voice, without overdoing any one strategy all of the time.

Another example of an effective use of Voice that I came across recently is in a short story “Dying, Laughing” by Susan Johnson, a writer who had recently returned to live in Brisbane after ten years in London. The story about a young Aussie mother is told in the third person. Kylie is totally out of her depth in disciplining her two young boys; and yet she comes across as a strongly rebellious personality, fighting depression, angry but also capable of nurturing; all shown by way of the narrator’s voice, impersonating someone like Kylie. The story contains aspects of satire, irony, humour and blackness interwoven and held together by the tell-tale voice. As in Winton’s story, the writer intersperses sentence fragments with longer sentences, and uses slang and colloquialisms to add humour and colour:

Children wanted everything! All the time, all at once! If she’d realised what a child was, before she’d accidentally made one, she would have run a mile… Bloody Nixon, born whinger, crying when he came out, starting as he meant to go on. Nixon her first born, skinny and long as a rabbit, crying on the roof. … On the floor, where he usually laid himself, full-length in front of the fridge, to be exact, his mouth open so that you could see the black pit leading into his gullet. Sometimes she wondered what she could stuff in there to stop the sound: honey? Lollies? Her fist? He had the largest pair of tonsils she had ever seen: two fat glistening nubs of flesh decorating either side of his throat, two undulating, pulsing, alien attachments that fascinated her… She knew she didn’t know much about anything, not really, so now she thought about it she wasn’t even sure they were tonsils. (Susan Johnson, GriffithReview32, p.59)

December 22, 2021 0 comment

Writing

How To Find A Voice For Your Novel

The Voice that Comes to You…or Not

Mystery is part of the writing process, and for some writers there are those thrilling moments when a voice “just comes” and takes them along with it. In fact, however, most of us must create narrators and characters through considering craft, especially point of view and voice. And these are essential components when it comes to revision.

Strategies for Finding Your Voice

One possible method for finding an appropriate voice for a work that you are planning to write, is to imagine you are telling the story to someone whom you know will “get it”. This could be a friend, a colleague, or even a relative. Read the story aloud, as if you are recounting it to your buddy. This is building on the “heard” aspect of voice, which is an especially powerful and telling one. Record the story aloud, at least after you have a first draft. Play it back as you walk or relax at home.

At some stage, you will need to show the work to another person to read. An editor will want to know whether you want a line edit or a developmental edit done. Perhaps, you might choose, instead, to employ a beta reader to look at it for overall flow and structure. This need not be someone you know, or it could be the buddy you imagined telling your story to.

Childhood Memories as a Starting Point

Memories of nature that surrounded me as a child, growing up outside a small country town, are what give flavour and rhythm to my writing. Meditating on the sight, colours, smells and sounds of that time assist me in finding a vibrant voice.

Another method is to research what have been the instigating factors in other writers’ lives. For example, Ann Patchett writes about her time growing up in California at a place called Paradise. The only literature in the house were comic books, especially Peanuts. Through Snoopy, she learnt a lot about the writing life, its rewards and its failures. It taught her a lot about her future life as a writer and the rejection slips and disappointments, as well as the glories. Think about the books and mentors in your past life.

Other Writers’ Voices

Read books by writers that you like, and think about their voice and try to describe it.

A good example of a strong narrative voice is of Jeannette Walls’s use of voice in the opening pages of her creative nonfiction memoir The Glass Castle. Walls starts her story off with the statement: “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.” The action is seen through the eyes of her adult narrator. It is important to remember that the narrator and the writer are not one and the same. When the memoir focuses on the child character, the narrator remains the same as the persona in the beginning, it’s just the character that changes.

November 22, 2021 0 comment

Novel Writing Writing

Write about what you know … 3 authors who recently did just that!

Three colleagues who assisted me in getting my writing off the ground, have just published new works: Dina Davis with A Dangerous Daughter (Cilento Publishing), who avoided lockdown and actually had a book launch in Darwin recently; Helene Grover missed out by a hair’s breadth to publicly launch her memoir, Sometimes the Music (Cilento Publishing), before lockown intervened; and Geraldine Star, who has just published her debut novel, Shee-Oak on Amazon.

A DANGEROUS DAUGHTER is a brave and inspirational story about healing from a mysterious mental illness set in Australia in the 1950s. Ivy, a teenager from an immigrant Jewish family, is on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to survive undiagnosed anorexia nervosa. After failed and sometimes brutal attempts of medicos to trial a cure, Ivy’s family sends her away to relatives in Perth, where hope becomes possible for Ivy through psychoanalysis. Drawing on true events from the author’s life, A Dangerous Daughter will resonate with people of all ages and cultures who have endured the shame and blame of this misunderstood disorder.

“Through deftly combining her life experience with fiction in A Dangerous Daughter, Dina Davis provides a window into the much-misunderstood eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, and the complications that surround it.”

“Dina Davis’s courage in creating this book will be a gift to many.” Dr Dianne Moses, Physician

Helene Grover’s SOMETIMES THE MUSIC is another bravely honest narrative; in places poignant, funny, adventurous, and, in turn, expressing a certain vulnerability. Sometimes the Music presents the captivating lives of Helene Grover and Serge Ermoll, two dynamic individuals, children of migrants from Paris and Shanghai, who land separately in Australia, where they ultimately find each other, and the music of Rock’n Roll and jazz, which bonds them together through difficult times. Helene says: “Some people plan their life. I fell into my action packed one.”

Geoff Kluke – Australian Jazz Legend, writes: I loved Helene’s book and you will too. Couldn’t put it down. She brings to life so many of those fabulous Jazz Legends and Characters many of whom are sadly no longer with us. The stories are so fascinating and entertaining. It brought a smile to my face to be reacquainted with many of them once more.

These two authors have been part of writers’ groups for many years, the most recent one, linked to their current publishing success, being Randwick Writers’ Group, convened by Dina Davis. They have both been supported and published by Cilento Publishing, recommended by this author for all publishing and layout needs.

And then there’s Geraldine Star, also linked to Randwick Writers’ Group and others, who has taken the courageous step to self publish with Amazon, becoming an Indy author with her debut novel, Shee-Oak (Star Monde Australia). The lovely cover and layout are by Green Avenue Design, part of Cilento Publishing.

SHEE-OAK by Geraldine Star is a modern drama and testimony to the power of a stranger to undertake a troubled journey through alcohol, pills and romance to help transform a difficult young woman’s life.

A twist of fate on a rural back road begins an intergenerational story, in which vivid Aussie characters jump off the page with their personal battles, goals and changed hearts and lives. This is an authentic Australian story and voice with outback locations in which the dust and nature gets under your skin as you read.

Two women share a volatile adventure across the drought-stricken rural Hay Plain to Adelaide for a music festival. The transformative lure of pills, alcohol and romance drives them on with the possibility of a veritable explosion and tragic ending looming on the horizon for the women, ominous throughout.

I would recommend these 3 works for enjoyable/interesting reading during lockdown. And look out for future publications by them!

July 15, 2021 2 comments

Mythos Writing

Revisiting Persephone in the Underworld

My Links to the Myth

I have for a long while been drawn to the archetype of Persephone, who must descend into the underworld for half the year. My connection is linked to a long-term personal wish and desire for growth and change through psychological means. Personal attraction to an archetype is like an urgent calling, something that really speaks to you and urges you to investigate it further. There is also a possibility of extending this to a social context.

I previously wrote about this myth in relation to global warming and environmental degradation. See the previous post on this site at: https://anneskyvington.com.au/the-myth-of-persephone-and-demeter/
Now we have been rocked by a global epidemic that we have come to know as Covid19, a virus almost certainly transferred to humans from animals. Misinformation leading to increased fear among people, including the explosion of conspiracy theories, has added to the problems of finding solutions. If we are to progress as a species and as social beings, we must learn to work together as a global community.

This latest shock, represents a Persephone in the Underworld occurrence on a global scale. We are all in these dark times together, and we therefore need to look for solutions together.

The overarching symbol of the underworld is ‘the unknown’. Because it is hidden from view and unseen, it is a realm to be feared. However, one can learn to accept the reality of the underworld, just as Persephone has had to do. And by so doing, one can gain in fortitude and endurance.

The Story

Out of a crack in the earth, four black horses appear. Driving a chariot, Hades kidnaps Persephone who is picking flowers in a meadow, takes her against her will, down into the subterranean depths of the underworld. The earth closes up again, and all that is left above ground is the flowers that Persephone was collecting for her mother. She is to be married to Death, the consort of the King of the underworld. The black horses that draw Hades and the chariot represent intelligence, but, in this case, dying consciousness.

Demeter is finally able to recover her daughter, but not before Hades persuades his wife to taste of the forbidden fruit — that will ensure that she stays underground for half the year, representing the seasons of autumn and winter.

The relationship between Persephone and Demeter is basic to the whole myth. Persephone is the golden, naiive child of her mother, Demeter. She lives and plays in the apparent safety of the fields and sunlight provided her by Demeter, Queen of the horizontal world above ground. Demeter imagines that her daughter is safe from harm, happily picking flowers in the sunshine with friends and animals above ground.

The Role of Demeter

Demeter, whose domain is ‘cornucopian’ consciousness — the life of the fields and vegetation — is at first bereft, shocked and saddened over her daughter’s abduction. She then reacts with anger and inflicts famine on the earth above ground, instead of wisely seeking counsel about what to do in order to find her daughter and bring her back.

As goddess of grains and harvest, Demeter lives on the surface of things, unaware of the dark lurking out of sight; she is therefore lacking wholeness. Jung wrote that you can either have goodness or wholeness, not both together. In other words, experiencing the dark is part of becoming whole.

On a deeper level, however, the rape of Persephone represents for Demeter, a jolting of consciousness. This enables her to access, eventually, deeper levels of herself in order to grow.

The Transformative Meanings of the Myth

Demeter must learn that it cannot be always spring. She starts a relentless search for her daughter, but she remains depressed and angry; these negative emotions cause her surface domain to be depleted. If Persephone receives a shock at her abduction and kidnapping, Demeter is jolted out of her complacency, out of her superficiality. It’s a painful but necessary psychic shift that takes place within her. She experiences loss for the first time, and a new order, a new narrative, is born out of her despair and suffering.

Destruction is often the right hand of creation and creativity.

Can you see how this myth is relevant to our response to the pandemic as a community, both local and global?

June 10, 2021 1 comment

Short Story Writing

The Night of the Barricades

I open my eyes onto a strange world into which I’ve stumbled as if by chance. All is new and filled with an alien radiance, muted colours, greys yet beautiful. Hippies are twanging their guitars along the Seine. Flower sellers and precious bookstall owners hawk their wares along the promenades above. The ancient cobblestones conceal the holographs of those trapped forever in bloodstained revolutions. Seduced at every turn. I think that this must be my spiritual home, on the opposite side of the earth to my birth place.

The Frenchman I met while travelling across the Channel offered me the use of his apartment for two weeks. Why not? I thought. My tourist’s trip through the Mediterranean countries can wait. Generous and eccentric to a fault, these French — opposite story to what I’d been told! I find his street in a Michelin Guide book I bought at the Gare du Nord: rue Servandoni, in the sixth arrondissement. One change and out at the metro station near the Seine.

It’s a steep climb up a creaking staircase to the small flat overlooking a courtyard at the back of the building.

February 15, 2021 0 comment

Novel Writing Writing

How I Created My Debut Novel

The Story of the Novel

Those in the know say Write about what you know. This could be my parents’ love story, with the boring bits left out.

My story takes place in a raw and natural setting called Karrana, where a stunningly attractive young woman is ready to break out of her universe and demand more from life. She’s clever and, like a bright chrysalis, just knows that she deserves more — like the cows know when it’s time to come home for milking. She meets the love of her life, or is it her polar opposite (?), at a victory dance. This novel takes place in an Australian country setting at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. She falls pregnant in a moment of raw passion and rebellion. This throws her back into the very environment she is trying to break free from. This is a women’s story, so it’s about love, nature, pregnancies, child nurturing and dissatisfaction. And for those men who would understand and appreciate these themes. An accident to her first ‘golden child’ sends the young woman into a spin — a bit like a depression — followed by something akin to enlightenment, wherein passion leads her into a forbidden liaison with a sophisticated, refugee doctor in Sydney.

I won’t tell you the ending, but suffice it to say that it’s a bit complicated.

How I Wrote the First Draft

I wrote it chapter by chapter over a period of 18 months in 2013 – 2014, meeting in a group of four every fortnight, Randwick Writers, convened by Dina Davis. My first mistake was to engage an editor to do a structural edit when I had written the first draft. It was not ready to be assessed at this stage. After this, I put the manuscript away for some time and concentrated on blogging. I was also attending a larger writers’ group, and focusing on memoir writing. Later on, I worked some more on the story, while attending the Waverley Writers at the local library.

The Question of Structure

I had discovered that one of the hardest things about writing a novel is accessing knowledge and skills to do with structuring a longer work. That is, with the overall storytelling aspect. It begs the question of how to hold the whole novel in your sights, in order to appreciate or critique the structure and add significant bits and sacrifice others that might be scaffolding or padding.

Writers’ groups, unless there are novelists within who are aware of textuality, cannot usually help you with this aspect. Participants often focus on the smaller aspects to do with punctuation, words and grammar, all at the level of the sentence or the chapter.

It’s even harder to remember previous scenes or chapters of your colleagues’ novel manuscripts in a group. And, if you are writing a modern work, you need to consider recent changes that have taken place in this art form.

The Bigger Picture

I thought for a long while that it’s all about understanding Voice, Viewpoint, Point of View, Scenes and other issues, such as pace and narrative arc. And about writing a segment or a chapter from go to woe, that is, from the beginning to the end. But, after getting a grasp on such elements, and finishing the first draft, I was still searching for that elusive missing link, that was how to discover the overarching theme or rationale? for the novel I was writing. This became my next quest.

A Manuscript Assessment

A talented manuscript assessor at Writing New South Wales, requested, for a moderate sum, a couple of chapters of my manuscript, together with a synopsis, and then offered an hour-long Q&A session, where we worked together, asking and answering questions. That was what got me over the hump towards completion. After that, I knew where I was coming from and where I was headed. This was important for structural cohesion of the whole work; it enabled a final culling—and/or perfecting—of relevant motifs and metaphors. Within a relatively short period of time, I felt ready to publish the novel, so that it all hangs together. The missing link for myself, was knowing the right questions in relation to overall novelistic structure, to discover the ‘meaning’ of the work. After all, the novel is about many things, but this needs to be distilled into one or two sentences. Of course, if you plan the novel beforehand, you may not need this process, but there will be other different issues to confront.

Creating a Logline

I came across Jeff Lyons through Reedsy. Jeff is an expert in the art of storytelling. He states that you need a ‘logline’, which is a summary or premise, in one or two sentences, even before you start to write your novel. Of course, most people, and I am one of them, don’t work in this way. However, I have found that it is important to be able to do this, at some stage during the creative process. According to Lyons, the logline should include 7 parts: (i) a mention of the World of the novel (ii) the main Protagonist (iii) the Problem faced (iv) the Goal or Challenge for the protagonist (v) the personalised Opponent (vi) Choices or Decisions (vii) the Action taken by the protagonist.

The Logline or Premise of Karrana

In post-World War Two Australia, Bridie, a spirited young woman brought up on a dairy farm, surrounded by beauty and rawness, seeks romance and ultimate fulfilment. She hopes her choice of a mate, who she meets at the Karrana Victory Dance, will lead to a different future than that her mother, and, later on, her husband, want to keep her cosseted in. Her passionate nature, aided by fateful irony, deems that she demands more from life than nature alone; a family accident takes a hand in ensuring this.

July 4, 2020 0 comment

Publishing Writing

Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills

A book about writing groups

Joining a writing group is very popular these days, at least in Anglo speaking countries. There are many different types of writing groups, just as there are various types of writers. Some writers simply wish to record memories for their family, children and friends to read. Writing correctly and clearly will be a main push for them. Others want to hone their skills towards the goal of writing a short story, or a longer genre, such as a novel or a modern memoir. They will need different skills, for example, knowledge of how to structure a particular genre.

I have been a member of three writing groups over the years, and most participants, when asked, expressed a wish to be published. One of the groups I was a part of was Randwick Writers Group, which has recently published a book that showcases work from six members in search of writing excellence. Each of the six participants found that being part of this group brought their writing up to a new level.

This book is unique in that it has followed members from the initial phase of setting up the group, until this point, five years later, when three members have published novels, and the rest are on the point of doing so.

If you would like to find out more about the workings of writing groups, this book is what you are looking for. As well as informational content, it also showcases the writings of the authors. It can be purchased through the publisher, Ginninderra Press or through online book stores, such as Amazon and other online bookstores. Enjoy!

Click on this link to have a peep inside the online digital version of the book.

https://www.book2look.com/book/TPULpSvFiE&bibletformat=epub

Purchase the digital book at Amazon Australia

May 7, 2020 0 comment

Writing

What I learnt from writing a novel…

Before You Start…

I don’t believe anyone just knows how to write a modern novel. There are theoretical questions before you even put pen to paper that a wannabe author needs to consider. Otherwise, you may end up with a hodgepodge of outpourings that no-one is tempted to spend the time reading. Perhaps, as they practise the skill, writers begin to be able to repeat the novel writing activity more and more easily. The following are some of the questions that you will need to answer to begin with.

What Genre is it?

One of the first things you need to know before you start to write a longer work is what genre you’re writing in. Otherwise, it’s likely you’ll never finish it, never feel satisfied with it, nor ever get it published. I’d begun my writing journey by pouring my heart out, about my life, about everything. This was a therapeutic exercise, if nothing else. Then I discovered that I didn’t really know what genre, if any, I was writing in.

Memoir or Autobiography?

Was it fiction, memoir or autobiography—or aspects of each? I’d come to realise that autobiography was usually written by famous people about their whole lives. Mine was closer to memoir, as it dealt with real events and real characters from my family, but with a restricted focus.

How to Write a Memoir

Through research I discovered that a memoir is a more modern genre than an autobiography. Furthermore…

(1 ) A memoir is only part of a life and has a certain focus. (2) It is written utilising creative writing devices, such as characterisation, scenes and events, dialogue, emotive language, and metaphor etc. (3) It has a structure and a dynamism that invite the reader to continue reading it. (4) A memoir is on average 50-60,000 words, that is, shorter than an average novel, (70,000 words) but usually longer than a novella (20-30,000 words). Autobiographies are often much longer, since they involve a lot of ‘telling’, that is, detailing of events in a logical sequence, and may contain photos as well.

Problems with Memoir Writing

There’s an innate problem with writing about your life, and that is that your relatives might not want to be shown up, warts and all, in a publication. Clive James got around that issue by using humour to recreate his childhood narrative, which is part of an autobiography, Unreliable Memoirshttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/398913.Unreliable_Memoirs

Benefits of Writing Fiction

When I turned to fiction, I found I could draw on family events and characters, while transforming them into something ‘other’, yet still ‘true’. To distance myself slightly from the events, I employed a subtly ironic tone, and a narrator who is inside, yet outside, at the same time.

After writing up the first draft of my story, and gaining insight from members of a small writing group made up of writers working on novels, I found myself on my own. No one was able to tell me, even experienced authors and editors, how to shape my work into this most enigmatic of objects—a novel.

Constraints of Writers’ Groups

Writers in groups tend to share short segments of their novels with colleagues. The best feedback one can offer in such a situation is grammatical corrections, or, perhaps, comments on the style of the writing. Positive or negative feedback rarely touches on ‘the big picture’ (of structure, voice, timing, and overall viewpoint), which is the most important and difficult domain of the novelist.

Short Story Writing

Creating a novel proved different from writing a short story, which I’d practised and blogged about here. Being a lot longer, at least eighty thousand words, a novel is more difficult to structure than a shorter genre. After researching novel writing, online and in books, I went back to the drawing board and tried different methods for transforming content (chapters, scenes, segments) into something readable by others.

Looking at the Whole

How do you hold an overview of the whole novel in your mind? This is essential, before you can tie ends together, deleting boring parts, or adding in the motifs, imagery and metaphors that act as signposts for the reader to enjoy the flow of the narrative. This is part of the question of narrative drive. Each chapter and part of the novel must lead logically or thematically on to the next part, for the reader to remain interested—driven!—to read until the end. As a writer, you will have to find your own method for holding the work ‘in the hand of your mind’, so to speak.

The method that I chose was, towards the second half of the process, to lay the chapters out on the kitchen table, from chapter one through to chapter forty, considering themes, arcs and overall ‘meaning’, after having discussed the latter with an narrative expert during a question-and-answer session.

December 27, 2019 0 comment

Short Story Writing

At the Swimming Pool

A Short Story

Jeanie is one of these inch worm types. One toe in; one toe back. The cold has always been alien. From birth, really. Even today, with the water temperature around twenty degrees. Babies are gurgling in mothers’ and fathers’ arms in the pool, for God’s sake.

Cassius with the lean and hungry look is descending the stairs. Italian background, perhaps? You can’t help but notice him. He’s wearing long black tights. Nothing else. She sees the bulge as he mounts the cement block. Has he come from the yoga centre up the top? The Breathing Space? That would explain the tights.

A shallow dive from his perch on high. Shallow depth at this end, mind. Heart-stopping … gasp…! The thin man’s head emerges intact, midway down the pool. No problem. She breathes out, a sigh of relief.

Breaking the ice is the problem for Jeanie. Rubbing water on her legs, her arms. It doesn’t help much. She flinches. Retreats, as a small child jumps in, splashing her.

Immersing the neck and the head is the worst. Actual pain. What a waste, if you’ve just washed and primped your hair. Still, it’s over once your hair is wet.

She knows … knows it all…. Enlightenment, even, doesn’t help.

Cassius is doing laps. Such style. Such graceful ease, the arms arced at the elbows, breathing in and out on either side.

She’s immersed now in delicious liquid. The whole body baptised. Is the water getting warmer? Or has her body adjusted to the cold? There are warm spots in the water. Do adults urinate in the pool? Babies and children, perhaps? She thinks of the French word for swimming pool: “piscine”.

Jeanie notices people. The matriarch with the white cotton hat. Standing in the water up to her neck. Watching. Greek background? German, perhaps? The middle-aged man with white hairs on his shoulders, like a bear. A new baby makes swimming motions, safe in its father’s grasp. Little arms and legs moving back and forth like a turtle. The French family, doing perfect Australian crawl.

Cassius is heading for the block again. Another shallow dive. Effortless. She breathes through it this time, knowing now that he knows how to avoid smashing his head on the rocky bottom. Crimson blood rising to the surface.

The white-hatted woman stares at him. Frozen. He meets her gaze. She points to the signage at the steps of the pool. Dozens of small icons. Jeanie follows the direction of the sharp finger. Hard to see from here. A dog with a slash across it? A diver with a red cross through it? Is there one for urinating? She thinks not.

‘Diving is not allowed in here,’ the woman scolds, ‘it says so on the sign.’

‘I know how to do it,’ he says, ‘without hurting myself. From years and years of practice.’

He’d chosen a space when it was clear of bodies too. No children in the way.

‘It is to protect others,’ she says. ‘Children … from getting hurt.’

Jeanie can see both sides, now. She’s seen teenagers jumping and skylarking from the high cliffs at the Surf Club side of the rock pool here. No one’s ever said anything to them. Not even the lifesavers.

As she treads water, half-wading, towards the end of the pool, she meets his gaze. Dark eyes. Intelligent. Brooding?

‘It’s just a case of fear,’ she murmurs, ‘about people hitting their heads…’

‘I don’t care,’ he says, ‘about other peoples’ fear.’ She flinches inwardly, desiring to know more. Perhaps he’s read that recent book she’s seen somewhere: The Subtle Art of Not giving a F*ck”. Four-and-a-half stars on Amazon. She might download the kindle version. Much cheaper, really.

‘I’ve recovered twice from brain damage,’ he lets slip out, ‘anyway.’

She wants to ask questions, find out more about him, but he’s off, probably sorry that the words have escaped his secret mouth. Smoothly tanned, his hair a little longer than the norm, but neat.

She watches as he springs out of the pool at the deep end. Lithe. Self possessed.

On the rocks that lead down to the water’s edge, Cassius sits in a lotus position, facing out to sea. The Pacific Ocean, not always, though, she thinks. Sometimes even antagonistic.

But today it is tranquil. Calm as its namesake.

In profile, like a sphinx, Cassius is lost in meditation. Upright, lean and spare, solar plexus taut, his body merged into head and bust. Toes sticking out at the end of legs that have disappeared.

What is going on inside of him? Inside his belly? Inside his brain? His mind?

She has read about the kundalini, a dormant energy inside all of us. When she googled it, she found the word ‘dharma’, ancient Buddhist teachings, and the expression:

‘The figure of a coiled serpent—a serpent goddess not of gross but subtle substance’.

Lovely words that have stuck in her mind. Words of poetry. Not to be confused with reality, of course.

Looking at the sphinx man, she imagines the snake uncoiling secretly within, tries to see the movement on the outside of the belly. Nothing. Not a move. Not a flicker. The surface hard and still.

Other words come to her now, slipping like small blue sea creatures out of the slumbering unconscious of her mind. Something about the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of the head. Waves of light and energy coming from the lowest point in the body, to the seventh at the top.

‘And with each awakening, the psyche of the person will be transformed.’

She moves away to the other end of the pool. To the shallows. When she looks back to the rocks at the deep end of the pool, the sphinx-like man has gone.

~~~

The next day is Friday. There is nothing in the flat to eat. She hasn’t eaten breakfast, so by lunch time, Jeanie is ravenous. She dresses to go to lunch and then have a swim in the pool. She walks to the end of the beachfront and orders a late lunch at the restaurant on the esplanade above the pool. Expensive, but it can’t be helped. She will take half back for her flatmate.

She’d planned to go for a swim straight after lunch. But something leads her to look at the program for the Yoga classes in The Breathing Space, nextdoor to the restaurant.

The world is the great gymnasium, where we come to make ourselves strong, Swami Vivekenanda it reads out the front.

She walks into the yoga room. A lovely warmth engulfs her body. She finds a spot in the corner at the back of the class, places her beach towel on the floor. The sun is streaming in through glass windows. She takes off the tee shirt she’s worn over her swimsuit. She sits cross-legged, her palms facing up on her thighs.

Straight-backed and peaceful, she thinks of the sphinx-man at the pool.

The meditation teacher is a plump, motherly type in soft cotton harem pantaloons and a flowing jacket. Belly fat oozes over her waist. She exudes love, her voice soft and maternal.

It isn’t necessary to close your eyes, the matriarch is saying. Better to remain open, so as not to fall asleep. She feels spirit arise from deep in her belly.

A lit candle glows in front of Jeanie. There’s a strip of paper at her feet with a wisdom mantra on it: OM A RAPA TSA NA DHIH: ‘May the wisdom mind find you’ or something like that.

Her heart swells within her breast. She closes her eyes. She notes the video at her forehead, flickering on and off in tune with the woman’s voice. The colours are those of the rainbow, pink, green, orange, that flood the shapes in her head.

The serpent goddess of subtle substance slides into her mind.

The lulling voice of the teacher is telling them they can lie down now.

Ah, great! Horizontal.

She is talking about love now. About sending loving rays out towards friends, acquaintances, nemeses. Transmitting love direct from the heart.

Would the objects of her love receive the message? It doesn’t matter.

Will the sphinx-like man be the object of her transmitted love? Why not? If she saw him again, would she recognise him from the brief encounter at the pool? It matters not. The love is all that matters.

Perhaps it was he who had brought her here. She never would have thought of coming, otherwise.

Was he real, or was he an illusion, like so much about life and love?

One foot in front of the other; no need to hurry; try to live in the present time, brings her back to the swimming pool and to her inch-worm approach to life. And to the Sphynx-like mystery man who seemed to ratify her way.

This story was first published on Denise Baer’s blog: (http://baerbookspress.com/), along with other song theme-based stories.

November 5, 2019 0 comment

Mythos Writing

Ancient Stories from Childhood

As a child growing up in a valley where diversity was met with suspicion, I learnt, first-hand, about racism. However, I also saw paradoxes within my cocooned world, and turned to STORY to try to understand the conflicted reality surrounding me like a grey pall after bushfires.

One of my favourite uncles, let’s call him ‘Barney’, was the most forthright in expressing overtly, the racism that reigned in our world. Don’t go near them dirty blacks; strange words, falling on deaf childhood ears in my case, since the Aborigines were mostly out of sight in this happy valley. Yet this uncle was kindly, with childlike, cerulean blue eyes, which twinkled when he laughed and played funny tricks on us; and he worked like a dog for my beloved grandmother, who whispered that he was worth his weight in gold and that the Good Lord (who hailed from Northern Ireland in her case) would reward him in the afterlife. He’d been caned by the nuns for his stutter, which turned him off school and, perhaps, away from religion, for good. (The nuns were real cruel to us kids, he told me. Dadda let me stay away from school afterwards.)

Later on, I thought that it was a pity they’d taken Barney out of school— ‘thrown the baby out with the bathwater’ to quote an apt cliché — since education can be what saves children who are stuck-in-the-mud of poverty or of ignorance.

Strangely, at the end of his long life, Uncle Barney’d requested a Catholic funeral. Was it in reverence to his father’s religion, or was he, perhaps, hedging his bets when it came to the afterlife? For this occasion, I, a lapsed Anglican/Buddhist — and the offspring of a marriage between Catholic and Anglican parents — officiated at the ceremony. The dark-skinned Filippino priest was grateful for my support, given his poor English and lack of acquaintance with the deceased. The funeral went off without a hitch, and I was applauded as a one-time celebrant for the Catholic Church par excellence, much to the chagrin of some of my atheist brethren who attended the service.

‘You can’t please everyone’ was one of the lessons I’d learnt in childhood from reading Aesop’s Fables: a collection of oral tales credited to a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. It was the story titled The Boy, the Man and the Donkey that first introduced that idea to me.

There was another supreme paradox, and one that proffered a kind of balm for my heart and eyes. Uncle seemed colour blind when it came to his choice of best friends. They were four brothers from a neighbouring farmhouse that fronted the riverbank, who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages from The Thousand and One Nights; swarthy-skinned Assyrian men with dark hair and Anglicised names — Sammy, Teddy, Dan and Freddy — who we kids idolised for their storytelling prowess.

One of the stories, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, kept us entranced for weeks at a time, we kids and our uncles, sprawled around on the grassy bank of the river beneath the starry sky. The brothers took turns to recount by heart such tales from The Arabian Nights.

They were, I realised much later on, from Assyrian Christian backgrounds.

Not until adulthood did I come to realise the extent to which religious differences had led to many immigrants, such as our Assyrian neighbours, having to leave their homelands — in this case from the Middle East. My reaction to religions has been, as a result of such experiences, to lose trust in dogmatism, and to move towards an appreciation of mythology and of mysticism, spirituality in the broader sense.

Mystics from all paths, Judaism, Christianity or Islam, seem to be more interested in what unites people of different religions, rather than what separates them. The Sufis were mystics, who may lay claim to being the originators of all of the major human attempts to penetrate beyond the apparent world, to glimpse the reality that lies beneath appearances.

Sufis say that, before you can acquire higher knowledge, you need to look within and rid yourself of psychological and emotional blocks, and to resist following the spiritual herd, which can lead to religious fanaticism.

According to Idries Shah, the last publicly know teacher of Sufism, Sufis have had a major influence upon Western thought, via important individuals such as Roger Bacon, St Francis, Ramon Llull, and many others.

The early Sufis were wanderers throughout Asia and the Middle East, dispensing a form of Islam different from the modern one, and from that of the Islamic Golden Age in the Middle Ages. They connected with spiritual travellers from the West, who were escaping religious persecution, and with traders from the Far East, who exchanged wisdom and ideas with them, including Oriental Buddhism.

Christian mystics, too — the contemplatives — have been the ones who reached out beyond the boundaries of institutional religion to embrace the teachings of other faiths.

When I return to my Happy Valley and pass by the cathedral — with the lead glass window dedicated to my paternal grandmother — I remember the sense of mystery and of awe that enlivened me as I sat, long ago, in the pews there, and I realise that I have carried something of it with me to this very day.

September 8, 2019 0 comment