Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • On The Road…And Back

    Few things satisfy me more than going on a trip with Donna.  In the last three decades we’ve taken some fine vacations and she is the best traveling companion I’ve found.

    This one, however, contained extra pleasure.

    On The Road, July 2013

    On the Fourth of July we flew to Sacramento, CA, to attend Westercon 66.  I’d forgotten (if I ever really knew) that Westercon in years past had been a Big Deal.  Major regional SF convention.  It had fallen into decline, though, and this one was the first in an intended recovery.  I hope they manage it because this one was truly fine.  Even if it hadn’t been, though, it would have been great because two of our best friends, Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, were co guests of honor.  We’ve known each other since Clarion in 1988.

    But wait!  There’s more!  As well, Brooks Caruthers, Jay Brazier, Kimberly Rufer-Bach, and Andy Tisbert joined us for a mini-class reunion.  One of our instructors, Kim Stanley Robinson, also showed up for a day, as did the current director of the workshop, Karen Joy Fowler.  Another Clarionite, Cliff Winig, class of ’97, attended as well.

    I’ll write more about this later.  For now I just wanted to put a place marker down to note that the feelings felt and expressed were unexpectedly strong.  Donna commented that watching us it seemed our Clarion group had parted company only last month, so fast did the reconnection happen.  I’d forgotten the way in which these people mean so much to me.

    After the convention, however, we leased a car and headed into the Northern California hinterlands to finish up some of what we’d missed back in 2001 when we drove from Oakland to Placerville to Eugene to Seattle.  The balance of the trip was as amazing as the beginning, in wholly different ways.  I shot over 500 photographs.  Over the next several weeks I’ll post those I deem worthwhile and tell you all a little bit about the trip.

    Basically, we headed for the coast.  The first leg ended at Eureka.  We went up the coast to Crescent City, then up 199 and down the other side of the range to Redding.  We ended in Alta, for a quiet weekend with two friends who have made themselves a pocket of peacefulness atop 4000 feet of foothill.  As with all the best trips, it ended too soon.

    Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with another image and the promise of more details and other photographs.  We’re back home now, chock full of memories, and glad of each other in new ways.

    On The Shore, July 2013

  • It Was Many Years Ago…

    Twenty-five years ago I arrived on the campus of Michigan State University to begin the six weeks of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. Donna had driven me up, along with a friend (because I didn’t want her driving back alone—which led to a small bit of confusion because while Donna was catching a nap in my dorm room, everyone else met Drea and then when Donna picked me up, there was some, as I say, confusion…) and then left me there for six weeks of the best pressure cooker experience I’d ever had. I’ve written about it here and here.

    That was a defining time for me. It told me that I could be a writer and gave me the tools to do it.

    That was a quarter century ago and soon we’re traveling to the west coast for a reunion of sorts with a handful of fellow classmates. Some of us have done quite well. Others…well, me, for instance…

    This month marks the tenth anniversary of the release of the final Secantis Sequence novel to see publication. June of 2003, Peace & Memory came out from Meisha Merlin.

    Book Three of the Secantis Sequence, which began with Compass Reach, continued with Metal of Night, and ended—for now—with this one.

    Of the three, it has my favorite cover, which is a tale in itself, done by the estimable O.B. Solinsky. It captures a scene in the novel and evokes one of the themes as well. I enjoyed the entire process of working with him on this and the result still makes me smile.

    But as I say, that’s the last one published. Due the vagaries and vicissitudes of the publishing industry, my “career” more or less collapsed after that. Meisha Merlin no longer exists.

    I’ve been trying to get back into the game pretty much ever since.

    I did publish two more novels after this one, one a sharecropper novel that pretty much sank without a trace and Remains, which is by some miracle, still in print. I’ve provided links for both novels.

    Since 2003, I’ve been scrambling. Mistakes were made. I’ve been through a couple of agents. (I am now with one of the best I’ve ever had, Jen Udden of the Donald Maass Literary Agency, and we shall do great things together.) I’ve continued to write. It’s easy to succumb to despair in this business. It is so hard to get into print, harder still to stay in print, and the work can suffer from the difficulties of finances and the doubt that plagues any artist.

    But as I told another artist recently, I’ve given up giving up. I don’t know how many times I’ve quit only to wake up one morning with a great idea, and suddenly I’m hip deep in a new project. (This one will work, this one will do it…)

    I said Peace & Memory was the last Secantis novel published. It’s not the last one. I have a fourth one completed, Ghost Transit, and notes on another, Motion & Silence. The sequence was always intended to continue.

    So it’s been ten years. I have every intention of not going away, of seeing the Secantis Sequence back in print and continued. With that in mind, I have an experiment I’d like to run. I understand the utility of the whole Kick Starter thing, but funding a project is not quite the same thing as creating a demand. Demand is created by people talking, people asking, people wanting. Maybe letting publishers know that something is Out Here that’s not available in print. Not sure. I’ll leave methodology up to the groupmind.

    Meantime, in celebration of ten years, order copies if you’ve a mind. I have a preferred venue, of course, Left Bank Books—you can get the three Secantis books through them, at least until supplies last. (And lots of other really good books—you can order online from them, so please do, support local bookstores.)

    Ten years. And twenty-five. Time flies when you’re working hard on something you love.

    Clarion is no longer on the MSU campus, but all the way across the country in San Diego (link above). I, however, am still in St. Louis. Still writing. I suspect I will be for some time.

    Thank you for your support.

     

  • On The Extraction of Feet From Mouths

    I’ve been thinking deeply about the recent eruption of controversy in SFWA over sexism.  Seems just about anywhere we look in the last several years there are examples of men behaving stupidly toward and about women.  While this is nothing new, where it has been cropping up seems surprising.

    There have been several incidents, both online and out in the world, within the skeptical community.  The boys came out to try to tell the girls to get their own clubhouse and stop invading what for some reason these males had regarded as somehow the province of people with testicles.  Prominent women—skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists—have been treated to high school-level chauvinism by males intent on…

    On what?

    It’s worth reading this article by Rebecca Watson, one of the most prominent women in the active skeptical world.  Some of what she has gone through seems totally bizarre, of the “what planet did this happen on” variety.  And yet, there it is.  The Thing We (people like me) Had Thought We Were Done With.  Males acting like schoolyard bullies toward women, especially women who claim themselves as individuals with minds, choices, and, apparently, interests that don’t include them.  The boys, that is.

    Reading that, someone like me can feel pretty virtuous.  “I don’t think that way!  I don’t do that!  The people I hang with don’t, either, we’ve outgrown adolescence and never were that gauche!”  We might feel that way and some of us might even be justified.

    But not all of us.

    I’ve been a science fiction reader practically all my life.  I’ve been a professional SF writer since 1990, therefore a member of SFWA.  I have credited science fiction, my early exposure to it, as reason for my awareness of gender issues, my embrace of feminisim, and certainly my affiliation with skepticism, rationality, and—may I say it?—humanist morality.  The circles in which I move resonate with all this as well and over decades a kind of blanket of comforting isolation has settled around me that has buffered me from some of the kinds of bullshit that has evidently been there all along.

    There’ve been several instances of sexism over the last few years within the science fiction community, some at an apparently low-level, others fairly significant, culminating in the current Matter At Hand over a series of articles in the SFWA Bulletin (as well as a cover painting for one issue) and the responses prompted concerning them.

    Disclaimer:  I tend to ignore the Bulletin anymore.  A lot of the information contained therein is wonderful for beginning writers or those just starting up the ladder of their careers.  Occasionally there’s something technical in an issue worth reading.  But really, it comes because I pay my dues and I go through the Market Report.  Therefore, I had to go find the issues at the center of the storm, dig them out of the pile, and read the pieces in question.

    Which means that I absorbed them somewhat in isolation.

    Nevertheless, to my complete embarrassment and shame, I misread what was supposed to be the problem.  Then I compounded that failure by defending them.

    Not full-faced “what the hell is wrong with you people” defend, just…

    The offending articles were two in the long-running series of dialogues by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg about the history of the genre.  These are, for those of you who do not get the Bulletin and don’t know, done as conversations, two guys who’ve been around for a long time, yacking about the Old Days and who wrote what, published where, said that, or did this.  They are framed as personal reminiscence.

    Which to my mind is a somewhat different context than a straightforward article about, say, copyright law or manuscript formatting or how to write a cover letter.  It’s a different kind of work and therefore has different parameters.  Like memoir, what the author (or authors) get to talk about and how they talk about it gets more leeway.  Constraints are not as tight, subject and content are more flexible.  To my mind.

    So therefore when I read a couple of paragraphs in one of these about a particular editor who was evidently “drop dead gorgeous” and “looked great in a bikini” I thought nothing, or at least very little, of it.  It’s not the same as if it had been a straight up piece about how to submit a story to said editor and had included the aside, “and by the way, when submitting to her, keep in mind she’s a babe!”  Had such a sentence been in such an article, my hair would have stood on end and electric cascades would have run up and down my spine.  What the hell does that have to do with the professional relationship detailed in the article?  And it’s true, that if the article had been talking about a male editor, you would likely never see an equivalent remark “And by the way, when submitting to this guy, remember he has a hell of a package!”

    Had you read such a remark, we should all know (if it needs explaining, as it apparently does) that the difference is that in the case of the man it is an irrelevancy but for the woman it is a threat.

    More clarity?  While a man might view his “package” as an essential aspect of his identity, society at large does not.  The same cannot be said about a woman and her physical attributes.  Therefore, the inclusion of such a comment about a woman is automatically limiting and de facto sexist.  Because the writer has decided that this is the important fact about this woman and while he (or she) may not intend it to be limiting, there is a whole file cabinet of associated conclusions attached to such a description that gets opened once the statement is made.

    Is this a bad thing, you ask?

    Well.  As has been pointed out by some over this, good or bad, it is problematic.  Because the message has connotative force in the negative.  Because, unfortunately, for too many people, “looks great in a bikini” is the beginning and end of any worthwhile description.  All else becomes secondary.  Tertiary.  Immaterial.  Distracting.

    Welcome to Gor.

    My mistake was in not recognizing this essential fact.  That intent doesn’t matter when there is ample information that such a phrase will be taken as a threat by a great many people.*

    Resnick and Malzberg also consistently qualified who they were talking about.  “Lady writers” and “lady editors.”  Again, my context filters were on.  I thought, that’s who these guys are, they’re from a generation that would consider that a polite cognomen, what’s the big deal?  Forgetting, as I read, how qualifiers play into limiting people not of the majority culture in, say, ethnicity.  The main subject of the two articles was “Women In Science Fiction”—why the continued use of a label which served only to underscore a “specialness” that is not necessarily positive in the context of professional circles?  While the substance of what they had to say was overwhelmingly laudatory (Alice Sheldon was held up to be as good as Alfred Bester and at no point did a phrase like “well, she was really good for a woman” appear) that continual qualifier became a kind of apology.  In the context of a reminiscence, it was indicative of the character of the two authors—quaint, a “cute” term—but outside that context, it is like continually using the term “black writer” in a piece about African American Writers.  We already know the people being discussed are black, the only reason to continually use the qualifier is to make a point of difference.  Do it enough, the difference becomes the only relevant factor.

    I missed all this and shrugged it off.

    The other article was, in fact, a How To piece, in which Barbie was held forth as a model for professional behavior.  Now, I can see how the author thought this was tongue-in-cheek, a clever, satirical way to make a point, but…

    The only excuse for this is carelessness.

    Well, maybe not the only excuse.  Intentional, programmatic sexism is certainly possible.

    Barbie cannot be a model for any kind of self-aware, in control, self-directed person.  Other People have always determined, right down to the color of plastic used, what Barbie is, will be, or can be, and this point should have been obvious.  The use of a toy in a prescriptive article, aimed at women, can only be…well, problematic.

    Two things here.  The first is, I’m disappointed.  Science fiction has been for me a font of enlightenment.  I don’t mean by that “everything I know about living I got from science fiction.”  What I mean is, that many of the foundational ideas I consider important in my life first came to me from science fiction.  I had to flesh them out later, from other sources, but something as basic as gender equality first penetrated my adolescent brain from reading science fiction.  So for this to have occurred in the field which gave me my earliest intellectual nurture is profoundly distressing.  It’s almost like hearing someway say “Oh, I just say all that shit in my novels, I don’t actually believe any of it!”

    And, no, I am not saying that Resnick and Malzberg are themselves chauvinists.  I suspect they’re shocked and dismayed both by the reaction to what they wrote and hurt by the suggestion that they are sexists.  But they dropped the ball in understanding the context in which they wrote.  (They compounded it by crying fowl and bleating about censorship.  No one called for censorship.  If anything, a call was made for more awareness.)

    The president of SFWA made a statement about all this which I think is worth reading.  Furthermore, the editor of the Bulletin has stepped down.

    I said two things.  I put my foot in my mouth over this because I also failed to see how things have evolved and how they have played out in the last 40 years.  I imagined that we might reach a time when men and women might be able to recognize and appreciate each others’ sexuality without such recognition in any way acting as threat or limitation.  Because a woman is beautiful (or a man handsome) does not mean she is obligated to be that for the fantasy edification of people she doesn’t know or should be constrained by that fact because others can’t see past the surface.  For many people, physicality is destiny.  Or fate.  And often, when people in possession of certain physical traits act in ways that don’t fit  those fantasy preconceptions, there is a kind of breaking that occurs which is profoundly tragic in that such preconceptions should never have been put in place to begin with.  Limitation goes both ways.  If all you can see is the great bod, the perfect smile, and the lush hair, I feel sorry for you—you’re missing a whole world.

    Men don’t see this as a problem, though, and that’s why it’s such a big deal.  Men have never been barred from being anything else they want to be by their looks.  At least, not as far as the larger culture is concerned.  A man is good looking, well, that’s just one more thing in the plus column, lucky bastard!

    Women have different experiences with that.

    Many men will still not get it.  (No doubt a lot of women, too, though for different reasons.)  What they will see is another demand that we stop enjoying women.  That we must ignore their physicality, their sexuality.  That we must turn our libidos off.  They will see this as another call that we stop being “men.”  That’s not it at all.

    Treat women as People first.  Not female People.  People.  It seems so simple, that.  And yet…

    Part of the problem in all this is the lack of grasp exhibited by otherwise bright people.  You have to ask yourself, what makes you think that the kind of stuff you’re likely to hear in a bar made suitable copy for a professional journal?  When you insert a sexualized comment in an article about professional people in a given field, you really aren’t talking about them, you’re talking about yourself.

    Anyway, I still have a couple of toes to extract, so I’m done talking for now.

    One last thing: You’re never too old to screw up, but you’re also never too old to learn from it.

     

    _________________________________________________

    * Threat?  What threat? I hear some think.  The threat that nothing one does matters if one doesn’t fuck.  That no matter what accomplishments a woman may have, if she’s not also someone interested in, willing, and able to get sweaty with a male who thinks it’s his right and her privilege, then she’s not worth considering.  That any female who seems to think she can be her own Self without this aspect is delusional and that self-selected male has not only the right but the obligation to “show her what she’s missing.”  Basically, we’re talking about rape, implied and actualized, because what matters is the sex.  To be sure, something of this attaches to men as well, but without the element of coercion, which renders it wholly different.  Consider for a moment the most basic difference in attitude regarding “conquests.”  Men who seem to have sex with numerous women acquire, with a few exceptions, a patina of glamor, respect, and envy, while women who engage in a similar lifestyle receive a very different designation and concomitant image and with few exceptions is generally negative.  Furthermore, for men, it is simply one more aspect of their overall image, but for women it almost wholly subsumes anything else about them.  If the boys want the women to stop pointing out their sexism, this will have to change, and the fact that it’s still the case means we have yet to achieve the kind of gender equity men like me thought we were on our way to achieving.

  • The Men of Tomorrow

    So, the other night, the 22nd to be exact, I committed Public Performance.  I had help.  Two brave musicians, both of whom are better at their respective instruments than I am at mine, joined me to play jazz-like music at the Mad Art Gallery where Left Bank Books and other St. Louis Independent bookstores celebrated World Book Night.  I mentioned this in a previous post.

    The main event of the evening was an on-stage interview conducted by author Curtis Sittenfeld of author  J.R. Moehringer.

    Here we see Left Bank’s Shane Mullen introducing them:

    Speakeasy

    The interview was great.  Lively, informative, and Moehringer is very entertaining.  Afterward came author signings, aimless milling about, imbibing (cash bar) and…us.

     

    Men of Tomorrow

    This event was the brainchild of Left Bank’s co-owner, Jarek Steele, who approached me one day at work a few months back and said, “Hey, I have an idea…”  I said yes.  Then later, I thought I said yes! Am I out of my mind?

    This entailed gathering other musicians, rehearsals, and then renting a keyboard.  I had to learn a few new pieces, Rich and Bill had to figure out how to play along with the bizarre manner in which I play.  I have to admit, our first rehearsal was not promising.  My handicap is that I don’t usually perform with a group.  99% of what I do, I do solo.  That is a very different discipline than ensemble.  I had to overcome some bad habits (a couple of which I failed to overcome, but hey, nobody noticed), and get some chops down better than I’ve done in some time.

    A word about the keyboard.  This detail almost ended the project before it began, because my piano is not portable.  Not really.  After calling around, I found MidWest Music.  These folks rent instruments.  Yes, they had a digital piano available.  They told me the model, I checked out a couple of demos, it seemed perfectly suitable.  Donna and I went out to set it up and…

    Well, they had a brand new instrument they wanted to showcase, so I got an upgrade to a Roland RD-700nx.  Yes, I’m linking to the demo video so you can see why I had the musical equivalent of a one-night-stand with this.  I likened using this piano for this gig to taking a Ferrari to the supermarket.  It was far more instrument than I needed that night.

    We showed up nameless.  I was asked by our events coordinator if we had one.  No.  One night?  A one-off?  A couple of things passed through my head, but…no.

    Shane named us.  Suddenly we were “Mark Tiedemann and the Men of Tomorrow.”  After a moment of “Aw, come on!” I started to think, “Hey, that’s not bad. ”  By the time we went on, I decided to ask him if we could keep it.  You know, just in case this ever happens again.

    It has been a long time since I played at all seriously in front a room full of people I didn’t know.  It kind of surprised me how nerve-wracking it was.  But…

    I always know when I’ve done okay because I come away from the performance with almost no memory of what I did.  Mistakes and just plain bad performances I remember with a clarity that cuts, but if things go more or less well, there’s just a hazy wash of “Yeah, I was there” and not much else.

    I want to thank Rich and Bill here for making me sound as good as we did.  Bill is an exceptional drummer.  I can say this because he took the weird and rather undisciplined rhythms I play, made them his own, and glued the performances together.  Rich is an exceptional guitarist.

    So that’s how my week started off.  How’s yours going?

  • Afterimage

    I finished the first draft of the new (old) novel, a rewrite of a rather pathetic bit of crime fiction that I just could not give up on.  The chapters are being reviewed as I write this.  I’m taking some time off.  I put in some long days on this and it still isn’t ready for prime time.

    Meantime, something somewhat disturbing to keep the reader wondering, “Just where did he go that weekend and who—or what—was he with?”

    Alien Detective copy 2To tell you the truth, I’m not sure myself.  I woke up in my own bed, but the room looked too normal.  I stumbled to the bathroom and decided the hat had to go, but it helped, and I’m not sure I can get through what’s to come without it.  I need a shave.

    There’s missing time.  Someone else is missing it, though, I remember every second of it.

    I may be in the mood for some alien jazz.  On the other hand, the Fool’s March is drumming in the background and my eye is pulsing in rhythm to the slipped and syncopated beat.  Another day in Memeopolis, no body but the killer must be caught.  It should be up to me, but who’s gonna trust a face like that?  See, the hat it essential.

    Whatever happens, I will be played out.  After the last coda and the ink is dry, sleep.  Not a big one, just medium-sized.  There are too many more stories to figure out.

    Have a nice world.

  • Coming Up On…

    Every writing project comes to a point when it crowds everything else into smaller and smaller spaces, mainly of time.  Right now I’m 3/4 of the way through what I’m currently working on. As a result, my reading has slowed to a crawl (I’ve been taking far too long to get through an ARC that is really good—review to come) and I’m barely keeping up with everything else.

    Donna has spent the weekend in Iowa with her sister, leaving me to wallow in potential bachelor disorder.  But I’ve managed to keep the place not only clean, but straightened out a few things.  I could never get used to her being absent, but occasionally I get more done when I’m alone.

    However, the last couple of months have been taken up with another project that’s been demanding as much if not more time than the novel and has me a bit on edge.  I’ve been practicing piano daily in preparation for an actual gig.

    World Book Night is coming up.  On April 22, the night before the official event, Left bank Books is doing an event for it—Speakeasy —at the Mad Art Gallery in Soulard.  Come by, it’ll be fun, and…well, I’ll be playing piano, along with two other excellent musicians.  (Not that I’m an excellent musician, but…)

    This was the brilliant (read: insane) idea of Jarek Steele, co-owner of Left Bank Books (and my boss…one of them…), who casually suggested that it would be cool to have a jazz combo at an event called Speakeasy and, for reasons which now escape me, I said “Yeah, that would be.  Maybe I…?”  “Well, of course,” says he, “that’s what I had in mind.  Would you?”

    So I’ve been diligent at the keyboard, honing some skills that have been largely left unhoned for too many years.  Much to my surprise, the rehearsals are going okay, and, well…it will be interesting.

    But my daily schedule has been torn between the demands of a novel that is swiftly heading for conclusion and needs (demands, pleads, screams for) my attention and the little guilt-gnome in the back of my skull telling me to stop fiddling with that and practice!

    Leaves little time for much of anything else.  Like reading.

    After the 22nd, and my day of recovery, I’ll get back to, well, Other Things.

    On the other hand, who knows?  This might go so well that we three who will be doing this could decide to continue it…

    Sigh.  Doubtful, but never say never, right?  So it is with some reservation that I suggest if any of you are in the area and in the least interested, check out the event.  You will want to come out in support of World Book Night anyway, which is a certifiably cool thing to do.  It will be fun.  See you then?

  • Comic Con 2013

    A bit of news:  I’ll be at Comic Con in St. Louis, March 22-24—a couple weeks away!—both working the Left Bank Books booth and signing my own work there.  (Since I’m actually, you know, working for Left Bank Books, I’ll likely be more available than usual.)  Sharon Shinn and Rachel Neumeier will also be signing at our booth, as well as John Lutz and maybe Robin Bailey.  Others.

    I’ve never been to a Comic Con, so this will be a first for me.  Nice that it’s in my own backyard.  A good time will be had by numerous people, no doubt, hopefully by me as well.  If you’re attending, by all means, please come by, buy a book (or several), talk, make my day.

    See you there.

  • New Mars

    Yeah, I was goofing off this morning, trying to find a way into a rewrite, and needing to distract myself from overthinking it.  So I redid my header (see above).  It’s the same NASA image I had up before…only different.  I did some Photoshopping and added color and such.

    The framing tool for WordPress, though, forces some heavy crops, so here is the full image as reworked:

    Vibrant Mars!
    Vibrant Mars!

     

    As cool as the original was, it was also kinda monochromatic.  So I played around, did something more…Barsoom-ish.  Anyway, having once known how to add color to an image and then forgot the method, I have now rediscovered it and will use it a bit more often.

    It occurs to me, though, that in all seriousness, should we ever settle Mars and start using it, over time the surface will change.  No, I’m not talking about the future of a terraformed world, where we intentionally put liquid water back on the surface and beef up the atmosphere.  Such grandiose plans are the precinct of science fiction, although that may well happen, too.  But I’m talking about the more likely scenario, the opportunistic, done-by-the-lowest bidder exploitation of resources, which will have “unintended” effects. The release of certain gases, minerals, and so forth, the addition of others, the detritus of industrial works, all will work to give us a show that may end up producing effects somewhat like this.  We’ll get a front row seat, via telescopy, of environmental impact.  It may even be beautiful in certain ways, but it will be obvious change.

    Anyway, back to fiction, now.

  • Meaning, Cults, Freedom

    Recently, I finished reading Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollwood, & the Prison of Belief, about Scientology.  It’s a lucid history and examination of the movement.  I wrote a review of the book over at the Proximal Eye, here.  In that review, I touched on a few of the concerns I harbor in regards to religious movements, Scientology in particular, but all of them in general.

    The central question in Wright’s book—and indeed in others, for instance Jon Krakauer’s Under The Banner Of Heaven about Mormonism—is the question of volitional surrender.  Why do people hand over the keys to their being to institutions and ideologies that are often based on dubious claims, led by people with clearly autocratic tendencies, to live lives of functional servitude, if not physically certainly intellectually?

    There are separate questions here, concerning different stages.  For those born into a group, being raised within its codes and customs, the Outside is by definition alien and the individual is required to do exactly the reverse of the adult who comes into that group from the Outside.  The same question can apply to the apostate who has grown up knowing nothing else—why would you throw over all that you know to embrace this Other Thing?  (The Amish offer an excellent example of the problem, with their practice of rumspringa, a kind of wanderjahr for the youth to go see the outside world and decide for themselves whether to stay or leave the community.  It would seem to be a fair practice, offering freedom of choice, but how fair can it be?  One can read a book about another culture, “know” it intellectually, but that’s a far cry from being able to operate within it, or understand it on any visceral level.  Instead, it’s a kind of wilderness test, which more than likely causes sufficient anxiety that a return to what one has known one’s entire life is virtually guaranteed except for the most adventurous—which may serve the community by culling out those so independent-minded who may cause problems later by nonconformity.)

    It would be easy to dismiss certain problems with cultism by seeing past eras as offering essentially little to counter the claims of a charismatic proselyte offering a path to transcendence, but the fact is most of these movements seem immune to any kind of counterargument for those who seem determined to join something that offers them such a path.  For the first generation of Mormons, it didn’t matter that Joseph Smith was obviously coming up with his revelations out of his own head.  When his wife called his bluff on polygamy, all she managed to do was sheer off a splinter group and increase the resolve of the core followers.  What was happening was a sophisticated con, but it didn’t matter, not to those surrounding Smith and later Brigham Young.  It was at that point no longer Smith’s revelation but theirs.  He couldn’t have stopped if he had wished to.  The intricate and alchemical brew of group coherence had happened and it had become Another Thing, an Experience that was true as an experience, regardless of the facts or the motives behind its inception.  The followers had created it and made it its own entity.

    Which would suggest that the thing being believed in is less important than the clear need on the part of the acolyte to believe.

    Subsequently, this creates a hermetic seal around the object of belief, because belief is not real unless it is absolute.  Criticism of the tenets of faith are not so much attacks on details as on the act of believing.  The whole being of the believer becomes so intertwined with the thing believed as to be one and the same, inseparable.  Personal.  And yet, curiously dispassionate.  It’s not so much a choice as an inevitability, a recognition, an “of course” moment, a “how could I have been so blind?” revelation…

    …which automatically renders any question of “how can I be so blind?” inadmissible, unhearable, unsupportable.

    It has nothing to do with intelligence.  It’s all about meaning.

    The central question of all philosophy is simple: Why am I here?  Even philosophies that seem to render this as an unanswerable—and therefore purely academic question—start from there.  It’s a good question.  What is my purpose in this life?  Religion supplants the inward-directedness of this by offering more cosmic possibilities, often of an unknowable nature, which require belief.  Faith.  No matter what, there is a purpose, a point, and even if I can’t see it, it is at least there.  Meanwhile, here are some guideposts, some rules, some practices that will keep me on a path more or less in sympathy with this higher purpose.  By serving this belief in a telec universe, our own sense of purpose can be, if not answered, at least validated, even if the cause is abstruse or abstract.

    Trusting that purpose will be fulfilled simply through faith is not sufficient for the organizations commanding the obeisance of their membership.  If there is a purpose, then actions must be taken to fulfill it, and in lieu of any other clear program, conversion becomes their raison d’être.  They must be seen to be purposeful.  What higher purpose, then, than to change the world.  The clearest way to do that is to convert the world to their cause.  (This is functionally impossible, because there has always been and will always be competing doctrines, but it does raise an interesting question of what would they do if they achieved this end?  After the point at which everyone believed in the same thing, what next?)  And so the continual proselytization such institutions sponsor. (This has the added benefit of redirecting any kind of skepticism from the proselytes potential to ask questions of their own faith into a concern for the potential converts lack of faith.)

    There are many definitions of cults, some of which contradict, but at base it is a tricky thing because a “cult” bears sufficient semblance to well-established religions that the only apparent difference is size.  If a charismatic preacher with a hundred followers claims to speak directly to god, he’s a nut.  But if the pope makes the same claim, it is accepted as a matter of faith and accorded a kind of respect the preacher cannot command.  Size.  A hundred people can be deluded, but a billion?  At that level, we tacitly acknowledge that Something Else Is Going On.

    My own test has to do with permeability.  Is there egress equal to ingress?  How easily can people leave?  What restrictions are placed on individual interaction with the so-called Outside World, if any?  It’s one thing to claim that people are free to leave at any time, but if the organizational structure requires a cutting off of contact, a limitation of information from outside the group, whether physically imposed or simply a matter of conformity to the group, part of its identity, then it becomes a question meriting a closer look.  Cult? Or religion?  Or, more accurately, cult or church?  The Amish offer an apparent open door, but it’s not really.  Young Amish go out on their rumspringa utterly unprepared because all their lives up to that point have been lived in a bubble that limits information, limits experience, limits contact, and then makes it an either-or test.  (That the limits are self-imposed does not matter since they are self-imposed in  order to avoid group censure.) They are unequipped to make the kinds of judgments and choices so many of us take as a simple right to associate with whom and in what way we choose.  (The big difference regarding the Amish is they do not proselytize.  They don’t go out actively recruiting.  This, to my mind, removes them from cult status and makes them simply what might be called a Pocket Culture.)

    A cult guards itself from the Outside by demanding its members shut out anything not wholly contained within the cult.  It actively discourages interface with the world at large.  Sometimes it will go so far as physically impede such contact.

    But the members will accept this.  The question brought up by Wright’s book is, why?

    If one genuinely believes that their salvation is at stake, that they risk losing an eternal soul should they question—if, in other words, fear is the motive for strict adherence to a set of doctrines and behavioral restrictions—then it is possible one is being abused.  We have ample evidence and example of abused children remaining intransigently loyal to their abusers.  The possibility of inhabiting another condition, whether “better” or not, is unthinkable, because they risk their identity.

    Within the precincts of certain ideologies, part of the experience is literally seeing the world in a different way.  The “truth” of the doctrine is exampled in this seeing.  Things “make sense” in ways they never did before.  (It doesn’t matter here that this new way of seeing can happen with any conceptual breakthrough and that if we’re lucky it happens all the time, throughout life, as a natural part of learning.)  That apparent “clarity” can become so important that anything which endangers it must be avoided, actively shut out.  Questions about the central doctrines simply cannot be entertained when the stakes are so high.

    In this way, the apparent glassy-eyed acceptance of conceptual weirdness within certain cults makes sense as the only possible path for someone who has achieved a fragile balance because of a framework of belief and is afraid of losing it by questioning the very beam on which they now stand.  The tragedy is that this balance should be theirs no matter which beam they stand on, but the institution has convinced them that it is not theirs should they question or leave.  People feel they have found a home, but a home is a place from which you can come and go as you please, bringing back what you find, enlarging it and decorating it with new things.  The door is never shut in either direction.  Wright’s subtitle posits “the prison of belief” and that pertains when the door is shut and you either don’t leave or if you do you can never come back, which turns the world to which you’ve escaped into just another prison.

    Ironically, the one in the deepest cell may be the figure at the center of the movement.  The founder.  Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, all the others.  None of them could stop being who their followers thought they were.  Ultimately, it killed them all.  They had even less freedom to leave.  Their task was to design the prison and always be in it.  One wonders if they in any way fulfilled their own definition of purpose.

  • Other Stuff, Sundry and Otherwise

    I posted a new piece over at my Other Place, The Proximal Eye.  A few folks have expressed a bit of amazement that I began another blog.  After all, I’m constantly complaining of lack of time.

    But I’m a writer, first and foremost, and call me shallow (you did! how dare you take me at my word…?) but getting words out in front of people is what being a writer is mainly about.  Being paid for those words is, of course, part of the plan, to which the new blog is a necessary long term component.  That will become clear.

    I’m getting ready (soon, soon) to start work on a new novel.  Part of the delay is getting settled into a new schedule, since I have a Day Job once again.  Didn’t I tell you?  Yes, I work for Left Bank Books.  This is a heady combination of smart and unwise on my part.  I work in a bookstore now!  I have a book habit.  This is like employing a junkie in a pharmacy.

    But after a few hefty purchases, I’m beginning to exert discipline.  Don’t know how long it’ll last, but we’ll see.

    That aside, so far I’m enjoying it.  For one, the people working there are, without exception, terrific.  Eclectic, sure, but then what am I?  I can only hope to aspire to the level of eclecticism on display in the intellectual variety of the Left Bank crew.  If you live in St. Louis and have not paid the place a visit, well, what’s taking you so long?  Get your ass in there and marvel.

    Now for another act of self-discipline.  I’m cutting this short, right here, now, and turning to my other writing—fiction.

    Eat. Sleep. Read.  (Come in to the store, you’ll understand.)

    Also, make time enough for love.