Proximal Eye – Page 15 – Mark W Tiedemann

Jack Vance: No Place At Saponce

May 30, 2013 5 Comments

Jack Vance wrote idiosyncratically in a field of idiosyncracy. The very lushness of his prose bespoke an era well past its prime that, when sought, could never be found. Azure, jeweler’s brass, roseate and softly crystalline. Contradictions made to coexist and cross-inform. Footprints trace a path along the the receding shore of a sea once filled with more deliberate monsters than now, the waves gilded by a fading sun that somehow shines proudly if wearily, attesting to empires whose ruins are more wondrous than any new powers might contrive. He often wrote of the stuff of melancholy, while avoiding melancholy itself. One could see how tales told about these times and places might turn maudlin for greatness lost, but not yet, not now. Now we must see what fascinations recomplicate in a present not yet to form a past still waiting. Was it science fiction? Fantasy? Did it matter? Suis generis is sometimes used only when imagination fails to pigeon-hole,

Veering Into The Present

May 8, 2013 No Comments

An attractive pitfall of popular history is the Pivotal Moment. The writer centers on an event or an idea that signals a shift in the course of history, leading somewhere other than where it had been heading. The Donation of Constantine, the First Crusade, the invention of moveable type, Galileo’s confrontation with the Church, Newton’s codification of the law of gravity, things like that. The point being made is that these events are so tectonic that Everything Changes. The pitfall is not so much that they are wrong but that they are taken as solely responsible, isolated moments, forks in the road. It is easy to ignore or forget everything else around them. Focusing only on the Emperor Constantine can suggest that without him, Christianity might not have become the official religion of Rome and thus history might have taken a different course. (Personally, I think Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire east was far more significant as something

A Country Of Distant Voices

May 1, 2013 2 Comments

In the opening scene of his new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini shows an Afghan father telling his children a story. The story is about lifes fragility in the face of an unpredictable and unnegotiable universe, the loss of children, and the tenacity of memory. In the story, the father is offered a choicehaving a lost child returned to him to live a life he knows will never be more than difficult, often harsh, or leaving the child in the relative paradise to which it had been spirited while the father is granted the gift of forgetfulness, so he might return home with no memory of loss. The father chooses the latter. But all around him, when he returns, memory remains, part of the landscape, continually troubling his life with fleeting moments of doubt about something he cannot name. He has left his memories far away, in the mountains. But the mountains are always there. So, it turns

Primary Influences

April 21, 2013 3 Comments

Reading and writing are inextricably linked, but it’s a lopsided relationship. One can be a voracious reader without ever feeling the need to write, but being a writer by necessity demands voracious reading. There are some who seem to believe they can write without having to read extensively (or at all!) but I imagine this is a self-correcting delusion. It may be a more obvious problem in this age of self-publishing ease, when one’s shortcomings can make unfortunate and sometimes wide spread public displays, but the simple absence of any kind of artistic æsthetic on which to base the work is fatal to the endeavor. Besides, what would be the point other than a profound narcissism. Part of the fantasy of “being a writer” is to join a fraternity whose past membership has provided the delight you hope to offer, a delight you have presumably found in reading. I imagine that for some writers, the desire grows gradually, a cumulative

Culture’s End (The Ends of Culture)

April 3, 2013 8 Comments

Once in a while, work comes along that, while not doing anything apparently new, turns a settled form inside out and frees possibilities. In writing, this generally means that, in the wake of such work, the things it is possible to say and the ways in which they are said broaden. Branchings occur, reactions, new growth, inspiration ripples along. Iain M. Banks triggered—at least for me—a renewal of an old science fiction mainstay, the Space Opera. Practically from the beginning of the modern form in the 1920s, interstellar adventures have been woven into the DNA of the genre, replete with strange planets, exotic aliens, and occasional examinations of political systems, albeit not on a very sophisticated level. Everything from the Roman Empire to a kind of United Nations model has been used, sometimes to unintentionally silly effect. Given the suppositions on hand, it is not a small task to plausibly imagine such a universe. Some of the best works have

Knowing Who To Follow

March 30, 2013 4 Comments

Choosing the right character to carry the story is one of the essential jobs of constructing a solid narrative. Often that character will seemingly do the work for the author in the telling of his or her story. Everything follows from viewpoint. If the wrong one is chosen, the work can still be finished, the story told, but it can be an arduous task and, except in the hands of the most skilled, the effort shows in the finished product. From certain writers we expect the right choices as given. It never occurs to us to question them the way we might question a less seasoned author. Reputation is based on the repeated nailing of all the important factors. Such respect can be so ingrained that when a mistake is encountered, a wrong choice made, and the narrative doesn’t flow as it feels it should, there’s a tendency to blame ourselves. We’re not reading it with sufficient attention, we’re not

To Be Good Again

March 8, 2013 No Comments

Redemption is a complex thing. We like to pretend it’s straightforward. Do this, forgiveness, atonement, compensation can be made. The greater the need, the larger the act required. There are two things wrong with this. The first is that we can know everything about what we have done (or not done) that requires an act of contrition. The second is that contrition—forgiveness, atonement, compensation—is the same as redemption. Khaled Hosseini shows how this is a mistake in his deceptively simple storytelling in The Kite Runner. He understands that redemption is not about atoning for something you did wrong. It is about changing what it is that allowed you to do something wrong in the first place. It is about becoming. One is redeemed by taking the responsibility—and the risk—for who one is and making that consistent with what one can and should be. He also understands that part of the journey to that new state is learning the truth of

Clarity

February 26, 2013 1 Comment

One of the most perverse aspects of American culture is the contradiction between our self-professed guiding ethos and what many of us actually do. This is the country of the self-made, the independent thinker, the individualist. We build elaborate mythologies extolling the virtues and victories of our heroes, who are all of a piece, wholly their own creatures, dependent on no one and nothing to be what they are. Daniel Boone to Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the self-sufficient American is our national role model. Yet a look at our actual history shows that we as a people are surpassing great joiners. We attach ourselves to collectives, to movements, to institutions, and borrow ideologies from them, speaking with a group voice and shunning those whose independence of thought causes them to criticize whatever party our fellows have joined that gives them a sense of worth. We have been known as the most religious country on Earth, per

Detecting Sauvage

February 15, 2013 No Comments

A couple of years ago I read Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. I still have the one for which he gained considerable fame posthumously, 2666, waiting for me to tackle. I say “tackle” fully cognizant of its implications. For a book like this, one should prepare. Stockpile food and water, coffee (my god, yes, coffee!) and tell friends you’re going on a long trip and to maybe take care of your pets for you. One should be prepared to leave one’s life by way of the page and cut what ties are possible, because it will be a journey. This is not “light reading.” November 2 I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. So it begins. Might as well say he had been invited to join Life. It’s rare that anyone is “cordially invited” to do so, although there are many opportunities along the course

Breakneck Mousetraps—Past and Future in Cloud Atlas

February 3, 2013 6 Comments

It begins in the past. Not one past, but three, and then a kind of present. Then a future. Two futures, but the furthest is so much like the past as to be functionally the same, only reversed. The great ship of the technologically advanced is the image fading in the center of this novel, as if the reader has risen to a height of inevitability that can do nothing now but sink back through the layers that cannot support it. The hyperbolic arc of human trajectory achieves its limit, turns, and falls back to the point where the mirror reality of that insubstantial future rests. We cannot stay in that future because it is built on anticipation and hope, contending with dread and cynicism, which rob it of any force of inevitability. It looks real, substantial, has within its possibilities everything we know and everything we are and everything we can be and everything we should not be. There

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye