Caleb Fox

Please check out a new blog several of us have started, http://freefallhome.wordpress.com/. It's a start-up on a collection, or community, of stories about the quirky creatures known as human beings.

In our minds the blog is a kind of SOUTHERN EXPOSURE, but it will become whatever the contributors make it. Enter, read, chuckle, and contribute a story yourself. Only you can make it a community.

The first story is in the blog below, What Did the Navajo Lady Put in Her Mouth?

Sarita and I live in Navajoland, and the clash of two cultures is worth a grin sometimes. Here's a report of a recent event:

Michele bustled into an exam room. Since Navajo Health is not Cedars of Lebanon, she’s not a doctor but a physician’s assistant. She’s blonde, big of hip and bosom, undeniably cute, and unstoppable as a HumVee.

An elderly Navajo lady huddled in a chair opposite, dressed traditionally in velveteen skirt, turquoise bracelets and necklace, head scarf, and jacket. (For whatever reason, even in August at a temperature of 102, there’s always the jacket.) As Michele opened her mouth to ask what the problem was, a stink bug skittered across the floor between them.

Michele raised her foot to stomp it. The old lady was quicker. She snatched the bug up and popped it into her mouth.

Michele kept her voice down to a low scream. “What are you doing?” She reached, but the old lady averted her head.

“Get that thing out of there.”

The old lady said, “Mmphphssrrhhss.”

Michele tried to pry the mouth open, but the old lady clamped her teeth tight.

Michele fingered. The old lady said, mushing her words out around the bug, “These things heal mouth sores.”

Michele babbled. The old lady froze her mouth closed and glared.

Michele left and sent a nurse in to perform the bugectomy.

Soon the old lady trundled down the hall toward the waiting room and the front door. Michele looked at the nurse but thought better of asking about the insect.

“Respect for tradition,” said the nurse.

Michele sighed.

Eduardo Galeano's trilogy MEMORIES OF FIRE is a kind of mythic history of Latin America. Here is part of his folk tale account of how human beings were created:

"In their dream about God’s dream the woman and the man were inside a great shining egg, singing and dancing and kicking up a fuss because they were crazy to be born. In God’s dream happiness was stronger than doubt and mystery. So dreaming, God created them with a song:

“I break this egg and the woman is born and the man is born. And together they will live and die. But they will be born again. They will be born and die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.”

"Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life"--Robert Louis Stevenson

I’m often asked, “Do you write novels to teach or entertain?”

The short answer is neither. A good way to explain is through an ancient Buddhist story:

A samurai, reaching forty, decided to devote the rest of his life to spiritual matters. After a difficult journey of many miles through every kind of weather, he came to a famous monastery and asked to see the sensei.

“The sensei allows each seeker to ask one question,” he was told.

When his opportunity came, the samurai asked, “Tell me, sensei, what is heaven and what is hell?”

The sensei said, “A brutish oaf like you has no right to ask such a question.”

Furious at the insult, the samurai drew his sword, cocked it, and was about to lop off a head.

The sensei held up a finger and said, “THAT is hell.”
The samurai stilled his arm and noticed what was going on inside him, tumult and rage. Yes, that was hell. An extraordinary lesson.

Then he realized, This man risked his life to teach me something. A tear of gratitude rolled down the samurai’s cheek.

The samurai held up his finger again and said, “And THAT is heaven.’

This is a superb diagram of what fiction does. Instead of offering messages or diversions, it gives readers experiences. Experiences don’t address the intellect alone--the sensei didn’t offer a lecture about how heaven and hell are inner states of this world, not the next one. Instead they engage the imagination, the emotions, even the body and bring awareness not to the mind but to the whole man. Just as a good novel does. Goose bumps. Startled jumps. Tears.

That’s why the answer to the question is neither. Maybe one day people will stop asking. After all, neither writers or readers need an explanation of what’s happening in novels. They simply know, by experience, that it’s good.

Bravo.

David Seals, the author of POWWOW HIGHWAY and the new SWEET MEDICINE, is disseminating this e-mail widely:

El Capitan Medicine Wheel
New Mexico

We're up about 8 miles above the village of Arabela on el Capitan Peak
- 50 miles west of Roswell - where there's a Kiva inside a huge circle
of a Medicine Wheel. The Archaeologist from U. Arizona with us says
it's about 1,000 years old of the Anasazi period.

I stumbled on the tiny 'blow-hole' covered with brush and hidden in
trees, and felt the cold air blowing up from somewhere, in and out,
like the Earth breathing, very similar to a blowhole at Wuptaki ruins
near our home in Flagstaff.

We were able to crawl down in the open hole to the side, like a cave,
or an ancient kiva. And there It was, in the middle. "It's alive,"
local Mescalero Apache elder Tommy Veneno said. Thre was a black
cylinder about 3 feet high and oval, with strange old markings on it.
To the touch it felt like tissues to me, very hard but also soft -
like the 1947 witnesses described debris found near a UFO crash. He
called it a "Pod".

We have a Navajo film crew with us, so it's all being recorded, after
we got permission in ceremonies last night from the Spirits, and
they've measured the rough Wheel, which is huge, with the Kiva dead
center.

This is the exact spot 1947 witnesses saw Ships flying, and my father,
a AAF pilot at the time, also had a UFO
sighting.www.abductionatroswell.com

I informed the white folks in town, where the current UFO Festival is
going on, but they don't seem interested in coming out and seeing it!
Maybe because it's only Indians? They just want to have their cartoon
commerce in Roswell, and aren't really interested in what the Mystery
is all about, or at least not taking a hike up on the Sacred Mountain.

More Skins are coming in today, and we've marked it with red flags so
people can follow the rough deer trail. Bring plenty of food, but
there's a sweet Spring also here with water coming out of the ground.
There's also very interesting burn marks on the rocks of the Wheel,
like a landing or launching site.

I'm scheduled to go into town tomorrow and talk to the Festival, with
the Navajo footage, which should blow them away.


NOTE: The Festival fathers refused to allow the Navajo footage to be shown, so Seals canceled his speech.

A celebrated editor once reprimanded me, "A middle-aged man can't write a scene from the point of view of a ten-year-old Indian girl." Even though he was speaking conventional wisdom (and didn’t know I was below middle age and am of mixed blood), he was dead wrong. This is one convention I defy. Join me.

I write my novels from within the minds of several characters, including the "villain." (Tricky technically, but...) My immediate reason is the truth of the story: Each character is a universe within, each has a distinctive way of seeing the world, which explains why he acts the way he does. Showing a range of points of view conveys the truth of the story. This is what novelists do.

But there's a larger reason for delving into other people's minds, for me a beacon not only of writing but living. Human beings are of infinite variety, and not just the obvious ones. Whether you’re a woman, man, or child, Asian or Anglo, Hispanic or black, you have an amazing landscape behind your eyes. Through fiction, and almost only through fiction, the rest of us can step into such landscapes, look around and be fascinated, and then look out at the world through foreign eyes and be absolutely dazzled. SO THIS IS WHY SHE ACTS THE WAY SHE DOES.

What could be more important? What greater gift could stories give this fractionalized world? An older history prof, speaking of my story about Crazy Horse, paid me a great compliment: “From now on I will never see people of color in the same way.”

The object of writing, as of reading, is to sail into the new. If you're a white guy, make a point of writing from inside women's minds. If you're black, write from inside the head of an Irish back-room politican. If you're a Latina woman, step inside the mind of a Hindu convenience store owner. For here lies discovery. In this land there be wonders. Here opens your own growth, and here is the gift you can offer the world.

Can you twist your mind around these strange facts? Richard Wagner was a vociferous anti-Semite and wrote operas full of cosmic love. Frank Baum wrote THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, but as Kimberly Roppolo pointed out last week, also called for the genocide against the American Indians. Luigi Pirandello had his Nobel Prize medal melted down into a bullet for Mussolini's soldiers. Ezra Pound supported Mussolini loudly. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, an anti-Semite and Fascist, is considered one of the master novelists of the last century.

How can the same mind churn with hate and produce art of extraordinary beauty? The Lakota visionary Lame Deer pointed out that, even if a shaman is a bad man, Spirit may speak through him. Does something similar happen with artists?

Even the first minute of Wagner's "Prelude to Tristan and Isolde," with its surges of love and longing, convinces me.

How and why? Who knows? Maybe art transcends all and lifts the artist above his ordinary self.

Should we read/listen to such artists? For me, how can we not? What are your thoughts?

Can you think of times the movie was better than the book? We usually (especially writers)say the opposite. But aren't movies sometimes better than the books they're based on? Here are some cases where I liked the movie better. I invite you to send me your own lists, or your objections to mine:


THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR (based on Irving's A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR)
THE GRADUATE
THE GODFATHER
THE WIZARD OF OZ (though both were terrific)
and maybe even ATONEMENT

--caleb

Why do you write (or read) fiction? Why do I? Here are some long-ago words of Richard Wright on the subject:

“That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perception, making new and -- until that very split second of time! -- unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain to seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.”

I once heard Lawrence Durrell address the same subject. During the years he was writing THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET, he said, he and his friends never thought of writing as a career. “We thought of it as a windscreen to better living.”

John Fowles, best known for his FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, commented that people write novels to express what it feels like to be human beings and walk the world in their time.

Somewhere in the vicinity of these comments lies my own truth. Writing fiction is not entertainment, though having some sport along the way is a good idea. Nor is it primarily imparting a lesson, a job for teachers with hickory sticks. Nor yet is it understanding your own life, at least not if “understanding” is meant in an intellectual way. It is rummaging through your experience, tasting and savoring it more fully, laving yourself in all the wonders and terrors of being in this world—and capturing those feelings in words that enable writers and readers to have Eureka moments—“Yes, that IS what it is. In the ground of my being this is how I experience life itself.”

We could just settle for Wright's perfect phrase, “the deep fun of the job.”