In the summer of 2005 a frightening piece of information came to me: Stephen Donaldson would soon publish Book One of a new series of fantasy novels, The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Good news, you might have thought. I mean, if you like dense, challenging prose, vibrant characters and a richly imagined alternate world, then Donaldson’s books are just the ticket, as far as I’m concerned. And it had been more than twenty years since he’d finished the First and Second Chronicles. I’d read all six books in the series. More than once. How nice it would be, to go back to that world and walk again with those characters.
But I remember, oddly enough, being rather upset at the news. Why? Well, at the time, I was knee deep in the writing and editing of our documentary - What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. We’d just completed our interview tour. I was wading through hard-drives full of footage, piles of books, inboxes stuffed with articles and essays, and stacks of documentaries. I was analyzing, beholding, correlating, deliberating, evaluating, figuring, gauging, and holding every last piece of information, opinion, and conjecture I could get my hands on regarding our collective and precarious situation here on Planet Earth. I was staring at the end of cheap and easy oil, the extinctions of species, the quickly shifting planetary climate and the growing human footprint that fueled these things. I was feeling my way through the despotic, dominating, disconnected, and delusional global culture that has not only, as Sherwin-Williams says, “covered the planet,” but has seeped into every cell of my body and every facet of my ego. I was facing head-on, and with every morsel of my soul, what felt like the final result of all our collective choices. The end of empire was breathing down my neck. The runaway train felt ready to jump the tracks. It was a very intense time.
A new Covenant novel? You’ve got to be kidding, Mr. Donaldson! There’s no time for that. The economy cannot possibly last long enough for you to finish. You’ll just get me hooked again and then leave me hanging. You’ll leave Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery trapped in some terrible situation in the Land with no hope of resolution. Ever. And I’ll … what? I’ll have to drag my half-starved, irradiated carcass across the bleak, post-apocalyptic American landscape of my nightmares and force you to finish the story for me face-to-face, sitting around a campfire in your New Mexico back yard. At a time when I was staring daily, hourly, minutely, into the collapse of Empire and the possible extinction of the human race - the extinction of my family and friends, my children, myself – the notion that you would start a new series that I would not be able to finish filled me with dread. I think, in the end, that situation was simply something I could wrap my heart and brain around. The rest of it, the unraveling world I could see ahead, was too big to hold.
But I bought Donaldson’s book. Read it. Moved on. Eighteen-months-worth of twelve-hour days finished the documentary and we did our screening tours. Book Two came out in October of 2007 and I read that. We recuperated, moved to Vermont, convened a few dialogue circles, started another documentary, stopped that project, and then moved to Maine. And in October of 2010, Stephen Donaldson published Book Three. At last! He’d done it! Just under the wire!
I finished Book Three a month or so ago. Get this: the further I read, the more it became obvious that, unlike any of Donaldson’s previous series, this one would require a Book Four. Due out, no doubt, in 2013. <Insert Big Dramatic Sigh Here.>
It gets even funnier. I’ve now published All of the Above, Book One of my own three- or four-book series of novels that will follow President Linda Travis and Cole Thomas as they make their way into a new view of reality.
Waiting for the collapse of the global industrial economy has been a tricky business for me. On the one hand, I know it has to happen sometime. From what I can see, unending growth and a net-destructive impact on the planet simply cannot be sustained forever in the physical levels of reality. On the other hand, predicting the how and why and when and where and who feels pretty much like a losing game. Hovering in the unknown, with one foot in “what’s here now” and the other in “what will come,” it had been extremely difficult, at times, to know what makes sense to do. I mean… does it make ANY sense at all to spend almost two years writing, editing, and publishing a novel when it looks as though the economy could go belly-up at any moment? And does it make ANY SENSE AT ALL to write a novel in any case, given what’s going on in the world?
Ya got me.
Maybe the trouble is in that phrase “make sense.” The dominant culture has taught me that things that “make sense” are rational and logical. But what if I take this phrase out of the realm of the head, where the dominant culture put it, and place it lovingly back into my heart and body, where my senses actually reside? What then?
What I notice is that, while I’ve never been able to come to some rational, logical answer to the question “Does this make sense?,” my body and heart have sensed all along what to do. My body has willingly sat long hours at the keyboard, even as it complains about how hard that has been. My heart has drawn me back to this story, over and over. (I wrote the first five chapters over twelve years ago, after all. I couldn’t let it go until it was finished.) And when I’ve been able to get very quiet, I’ve been able to touch – briefly, as if touching a fawn – that larger something, that Muse, that Source, from which this story seems to have come, as if the Great Hologram Itself simply gave it to me to put to the page. While my rational mind was trapped in uncertainty, my heart and body kept following their excitements and promptings and senses, and brought me here, to the end, with the book now out in the world, and just under the wire, perhaps?
Who knows what it’s for, this book? I don’t. Not the rational, thinking, brain “me,” at any rate. I know it changed me, just to write it. I know it goes out wrapped in the intention to be of service, with a wish to further the conversation about what it means to be alive in this time, and with a hope of aiding in the evolution of our collective hearts, minds and spirits. And I sense that this is a time that calls for new stories. But beyond that, like all of our children, this book shall have to go out into the world on its own, to do whatever work it came here to do. I will nurture it, guide it, and help it along the way, sure. But it’s mostly out of my hands now. And I guess that’s a good thing, because Book Two has been slowly downloading into the hopper for some time. I have a sense that, after a good rest, and some much-needed attention paid to the other domains of my life, the Great Hologram will once again grab me by the scruff of my neck and sit me down at the keyboard, for reasons I may never really understand. And that, perhaps, is how my life will look from here on out: doing things that never really “make sense” to my rational mind.
So I find myself facing again what I’ve faced before: I am not in control, but I am in conversation. As a recovering White Guy™ I am learning to refrain from saying “how it is,” but as a living facet of the Great Hologram, I do get to say what I see and feel and experience, as long as I then stop, and listen to the Multiverse around me, and enter into real dialogue with Reality. I get to be a part of the dialogue without having to know the answer. In fact, the Great Hologram needs that from me. And what a relief. Knowing how “it is” has been such a burden.
Right now, what I see to do is to begin my own Book Two. So I will. The Multiverse will have its own ideas about how things must unfold. So it will. We’ll dance together as the Earth spins and the Universe expands and the hurricanes blow and the markets leap and tumble. We’ll shout and sing and argue and make up. I’ll hold up my part in the conversation. Then I’ll listen. And when it’s my turn, I’ll speak again. It feels like that’s what I came here for, so I may as well stop resisting it.
And who knows? Perhaps the global economy will soon falter, as so many anticipate. Perhaps life will get really local before I finish my story. And perhaps, one day, Mr. Donaldson will make his way to me, traveling slowly and sanely across the quieter, more sober, more conscious and compassionate American landscape of my better dreams. Crazier things have happened. Maybe we’ll sit around that campfire and swap stories. “You left Linda Travis and Cole Thomas trapped in a terrible situation with no hope of resolution,” he’ll say. “Tell me how it ends.” I’ll pour us another cup of tea, and then I’ll tell him.
