Last Post? Nah!

I notice that, after enrolling in LPW701B, there is no obligation to keep a journal in that course, so it would be appropriate for me to close my blog off here.

However, I've noticed that the requirement to write on the decisions and changes I am making to my manuscript, as I learn more and alter the perspective I'm using to approach it, is having a very positive effect on the story itself.

The discipline of having to justify my position or my changes in the writing has, I think, given me a lot more confidence in my writing process. It has contributed a great deal to making this story a deeper, and more layered one. I believe it hase has far more intellectual integrity now.

So I don't think I'll be closing off the blog. It's just too valuable a tool to walk away from.

Not having a tutor to address my posts to may be a little odd. I'll have to fabricate some "model reader" with a similar Ecoesque "encyclopedia". That's an interesting writing exercise in itself: creating a reader-character to read my writing on my writing. Hmmm!

Recursion rocks!

Characters: Made or Born that Way?

In one of the last emails of the semester, Carolyn responded to my draft writing project, asking me how my main character got the way she was (Beasley). Did something happen in her life to make her the way she is, or was she born that way?

The fact that she had to ask made me confront a real flaw with a lot of my writing: I don't write origin stories for my characters. Normally, I could get away with this, but in this case, my character is so internally extreme, Carolyn had a perfect right to ask.

I don't feel that it is necessarily useful to state this sort of information in the story itself, but I certainly should know it. For one thing, it allows me the option to fill in the past, or drop hints, or - if nothing else - it informs the way I write the character in the present.

It was a tremendous and well-deserved kick in the butt, even if Carolyn didn't mean it that way. She should have - and I'm grateful. So, how does a young woman manage to develop such a fixation on religious transcendence, especially now?

Accounts of the more ecstatic saints, like Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Sienna, or Rosa of Lima are very vague as to the origins of this desire to be so thoroughly involved with a direct dialogue with god. In all cases, accounts suggest this extreme religious fixation began very young. In the case of Rose of Lima, at the age of four (Hansen). Teresa of Avila is said to have pledged "the flower of her virtue" to Christ at the age of nine (Teresa of Avila). One has to wonder how many nine-year olds know what the "flower of the virtue" is, never mind giving it away.

It's hard to sort the hype from the reality. With the exception of Teresa, who wrote her own autobiography, most of the saints lives are written by someone else, and often many years after their deaths.

There seems to have been a desire to establish that the subject was spiritually superior from the very beginning, following along the lines of a Christ child who never cried, never got colic (Soeherman).

"...The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes..."
(Away in a Manger)


Many hagiographers sought to establish that these women are born this way.

In the modern world, with the insistence that so much of what we are is determined by our DNA, including personality traits like outgoingness, shyness, musical talents, etc. one might, from a science perspective, have reason to insist that my character was simply born with a predisposition to search out transcendental experience.

Certainly there is a lot of historical evidence to suggest that many people, born in different times, cultures and religions have pursued behaviour that led to ecstatic experiences. Considering the ubiquity, it would not be unfair to suggest that perhaps my character was born with a "god gene".

However, this is fictionally unsatisfying to me, and I'm sure to many readers, especially in the present day. In the time of the hagiographers, before psychology and psychiatry, there was little motivation to explain a drive like this, since it was considered such an admirable and laudable pursuit.

In the 21st Century, we view a lot of this behaviour, whether self-harming or not, to be aberrant. Therefore, we look for causal factors.

My character's father has died when she was very young. It occurred to me that, I could take a Freudian psychoanalytical approach to establishing the cause as the seeking out of an alternative father figure that could result in this sort of religious devotion to the ultimate father figure, God (Spencer). However, this is the first idea that occurred to me, and because of this, I felt it was too obvious an explanation - no matter how psychologically sound - verging on cliche.

There is also a considerable amount of writing that suggests that mystic lives were often adopted by Medieval sufferers of trauma and abuse (Atlas). This was, of course, the first explanation that many of my readers of an early draft of the story assumed. But, as I explained before, I really wanted to stay away from the spectre of sexual abuse. However realistic it might be, I considered it, like the death of the father, too pat an explanation, fictionally.

The other explanation that occurred to me, and the one I prefer, and propose to pursue, is the idea of a kind of virally inspired religious addiction.

There is some precedence for this in science fiction. Both Frank Herbert and Alistair Reynolds have written about populations being infected by that caused the sufferers to become intensely religious (Reynolds).

Of course, this idea is not appropriate for my story. But it did get me thinking that perhaps one of the places a person might experience altered states of consciousness, and become intensely attracted to them, would be during illness - childhood illness. If a child were growing up in a very religious setting, and were deathly ill, a mother might pray out loud at the beside of a feverish child, infusing their hallucinations and fevered dreams with religious imagery.

This offers an explanation of both nature, in the form of an early childhood illness, and nurture, in the form of the religious behaviour the people around her might indulge in at her bedside while she is in a semi-conscious and psychologically vulnerable state.

Looking at the early paintings of Frida Kahlo, and their intensely religious imagery combined with images of herself, and her own very damaged body, does suggest a sort of religious reading of suffering - a kind of physical experience she associated with martyrdom: a translation of physical pain into ecstatic experience (Goldsmith).

At a formative age, the experience of this type, combined with, perhaps pain and illness, might act as the seminal experience that would lead to a life-long obsession to regain that state.

This, for me, is a far more satisfactory explanation of the origin of my character's obsession with religious transcendence. It also offers an explanation of how, if pain accompanied her early experiences, she would have reason to believe that pain might play a significant part in triggering new ones.

Many thanks, Carolyn, for being such a great critical friend.

References:

Anonymous. "Away in a Manger" Hymn. Wikipedia. 14 May, 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_in_a_Manger

Atlas, Jerrold. "Medieval Mystics' Lives As Self-Medication for Childhood Abuse".The Journal of Psychohistory. Fall 2003 31,2: 145-169. 13 May, 2008 http://primal-page.com/atlas.htm

Beasley, Carolyn. "First Couple of pages of the novel." E-mail to author.13 May 2008.

Goldsmith, Marlene. "Frida Kahlo: Abjection, Psychic Deadness, and the Creative Impulse" Psychoanalitic Review, 91.6 Dec. 2004. May 15, 2008 http://www.atypon-link.com/GPI/doi/pdf/10.1521/prev.91.6.723.55959.

Hansen, Leonardo. "Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima, Virgen del Tercer Orden de Santo Domingo, Patrona de la America". Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Mexico. 1847. 9 May, 2008 http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1080016593/1080016593.html

Reynolds, Alistair. "Absolution Gap". Gollancz 2003.

Soeherman, Miguel. "A Child Observes and Imitates - Sermon". EWTN Website. Nov. 2006.
13 May, 2008 http://www.ewtn.com/library/CHRIST/childobserv.HTM

Spencer, Boyd. "Sigmund Freud: Lecture notes for Theories of Personality". Easter Illinois University. nd. 13 May, 2008 http://psych.eiu.edu/spencer/Freud.html

Teresa of Avila, "The Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus." Gutenberg Project Website. 1904. 9 May 2008 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8trsa10h.htm.

Scars in The Splinter

The story opens on the subject of a scar and an embedded splinter that has not worked itself out of the skin, although many years have passed.

Scars play a symbolic role in The Splinter. Each of the characters has them, although some are more hidden than others and they are all self-inflicted to a greater or lesser extent. Even Dolores' mother Eugenia is scared by, as the priest notes, hard labour, grief and dental problems. The priest, Father Steven also has an internal scar - a limp from an old sports injury. These scars are self-inflicted but not as intentionally made as the scars of the others.

Jacob has needle mark scars from habitual heroin use. Simon has intentionally scarred both his face:

"The skin on his face was seamed with scars. A pair running parallel lines from just below his eyes to his chin, two on either side of his forehead, and a thatched pattern of smaller scars that ribbed his face on both sides from his cheekbones to his jawline. Worst of all was that his lower lip was cleft cleanly down the middle. When he smiled, the gap made by the cut widened to show a row of even, white teeth."

And on his chest:

"Whorls and lines, puncture marks, words and raised symbols. Instantly and without thinking, she reached out a hand and touched one of the ridged scars with her fingertip. It followed the strange terrain of his skin down and over to just where his heart sat, beating hard beneath the surface."

And of course Dolores has scars on her knees:

"the web of white scars that criss-crossed her knees, and then covered them with her hands, feeling awkward."

And on her back:

"Sitting up made her wince. The blood had dried on her back, and the robe had stuck, in places, to the wounds. She pulled the coverlet off the bed and wrapped it around her. The least painful way to deal with her problem was to stand in the shower and get everything really wet. She'd been in this predicament before."

For each of the characters, their scars have meaning to them, although Eugenia's aged face is the most natural of all.

To Father Steven, his injured hip reminds him of a time before his life had narrowed down to what it had become as a priest, "when his world had been a diorama of possibilities".

Jacob's scars are also a memory of his past, but are also a constant reminder of where he could so easily end up in the future if he cannot successfully fight his addiction.

Simon's scars are not only the story of his past, but the disfigurement he must bear into the future. They are the maps of his travels into the battleground between faith and nature. He has cut himself for every time he lost a battle against the calls of the flesh and the number of them leads the reader, I hope, to believe that there have been many of them. The more dramatic he felt the transgression was, the more flamboyant the cut and the more obvious the scar. The ritualized and patterned nature of the scarring suggests that he translated each of his sins into a unique pictograph, to be worn on the skin as a brand, like Cain.

Once Dolores sees the scars on his chest, she interprets them mystically. Aware of what it cost him to make them and the kind of internal changes that such religious self-harm would trigger, she believes them to be proof of his godliness, a diary of his religious experiences. Seeing them, and "reading" them the way she does, allows her to believe that she can trust him. What she does not really understand is that his are actually the product of penance, whereas hers are the by-products of her journeys into ecstatic states that have very little to do with penance, and more to do with a yearning for union.

Dolores' scars are, as with the others, souvenir of her past - in this case, her mortifications. The recent scars on her back are also mystical - almost like eyes in the back of her head. She believes she can sense things through them that are sub-rosa. Although they cause her pain - which she acknowledges - she has certain affection for them. They are the reminder of her pilgrim's progress.

The only scar which is not self-inflicted, and which happens accidentally, is the cross that breaks beneath her chest and embeds the splinter into her skin.

550 words (5,186 and counting)

A Change, and a lot of re-writing

You may have noticed that the name of my character has changed from Moira, to Dolores.

After receiving some very good feedback from Carolyn, which included the criticism that Moira's voice wasn't consistent as that of a teenager, I started to examine the character to really look at who she was. I realized that one of the problems was that I just didn't know that many Irish-American Catholic women that well. I knew a lot of Irish-American men, but not women - and definitely not the age of my main character.

It occurred to me to wonder why I had given her that ethnicity in the first place, considering I knew so much more about Hispanic Catholics, from Spain, South America and Hispanic- Americans. I don't really have an answer to why I did it, but it needed to change.

I know a lot more about religious mysticism with an Hispanic slant. I know how people of this background express themselves. I know how reticent they are, as more recent immigrants, to rely on state institutions. If I wanted to keep my main character enclosed, somewhat isolated, shy and very religious, I had to build the right world for her.

She's never going to talk like a normal 18-year old because she isn't one. But I can build an environment that will make her oddness a lot more believable.

So I've started on quite an extensive re-writing of the world the story is set in, and I've named her Dolores (after Maria de los Dolores - Our Lady of Sorrows). I thought it was apt.

"She pushed the yearbook across the kitchen table to wear the priest sat, causing his teacup to rattle in its saucer. The kitchen was cramped and full of shabby knickknacks. Memorial plates, plastic flowers and a parade of little miniature saints and devotional candles sat on almost every available surface. The walls were decorated with images of the Virgin Mary in her habitual blue cloak. One was clutching a baby Jesus to her chest; the other held her hands wide, exposing a lurid pink heart. Over the melamine kitchen table, a plastic shaded lamp gave everything a sickening green glow."

266 words (4,636 and counting)