(Posted January 4, 2011)
5:00 am. It’s friggin’ 5:00 am and I am up, my thin hair standing straight on end, my face stubbled, my breath horrific, evidence of last night’s maple nut Schwan’s faintly emanating from me like the odor of used pancake syrup.
Karelia. Estonia. Finland.
Places; lands and cities and landscapes and people, real and imagined are starting to whirl and spin and rotate in my mind again.
God help me.
I understand Van Gogh. I understand Pollock. I understand Plath. Woolf. Hemingway. Thomas. And all the other unstable artists and writers that have gone before me. No, I’m not going mad: But I do understand madness; the way a baker understands an oven without climbing inside it.
You see, I’ve just started another novel: Sukulaiset: The Kindred is the working title for the book. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? I mean, my best selling novel has a similar title, right? Isn’t imitation the height of flattery? But is imitating one’s own work flattery? Or mere laziness?
Back to the crazies. No, as I said, I haven’t become paranoid or delusional or manic (any more than I already am) or suffered any other such tilt of my internal gyroscope. It’s just that, well, before I sit down to begin, and I mean begin writing (as opposed to researching) a novel, my mind is usually blank. Nothing. Nada. No specific plot, no outline, no preconceived notion of where the story is headed. And then, as I begin to write, something happens. I won’t call what transpires “magic” because that term denotes too much faith in my meager abilities. Maybe “mystical”. Ya, that’s a better fit because where the stories, the characters, and the plots come from is, in essence, an unknown (maybe unknowable) repository. So what happens when this process begins to assert itself?
Today is a good example. I’m driving to work. A gorgeously cold morning has cleared to the east, over the big lake. I’m listening to poetry on my CD changer; Dylan Thomas recites verse as the tires of my Pacifica crunch ice. I’m not much of a poetry guy but something about Dylan Thomas makes me want to be a poetry guy. I’m not, you understand. Haven’t been since I wrote bad poetry to win my wife’s heart. But, listening to the Welshman from beyond the grave (the guy who inspired Bob Dylan’s adoptive surname) I dearly wish I could parcel words together in metered packages like Thomas.
Anyway, I’m trying to follow Thomas’ ever-changing, ever-challenging imagery, and suddenly, she’s in my mind. No, not my wife. No, not my mother. No, not a mistress. Elin. Elin Goldfarb is the woman demanding my attention: She’s the fictional Finnish woman (married to a Jew) who I’ve been writing about for fifty-five pages of unpolished prose. She’s trapped in Stalin’s Karelia (circa 1938) and things are not going well for her.
See, that’s where the mystery comes in: the unexpected, unpredicted appearance of imagined characters (in imagined circumstances) occupying my consciousness far removed from the safety and warmth of my study. When the mystery unfolds, as it did this morning on my way to work, it’s glorious. The problem is, without my hands on the keyboard, I only hear faint whispers, sparse suggestions from Elin. I need to be in front of the computer to clearly appreciate what it is Elin Goldfarb is telling me.
Tomorrow, I will get up again at 5:00 am and listen.
Peace.
Mark
