“Sex is a key to enter a spirit....Sex is like a dream when you are awake; I think dreams are collective. Some parts do not belong to yourself.”
The quote is by author Haruki Murakami from an interview he gave a few years ago. I've started this entry with it because there is something compelling in his words, which draw me deeper into some place I cannot name.
That place is where I find myself located now as I struggle to keep with the word count for the National Novel Writing Month. My original idea was to write about something apocalyptic, something about social structures breaking down and the discovery of a hidden species who live in a parallel world to our own (not another dimension, but another habitat niche that currently exists on this one). The idea has since been dominated by a cast of three central characters who are bound together by family and by perception. I am no longer sure where it is heading because the story now seems to be erupting from a part that does not belong to myself. Perhaps I have entered some kind of collective dream?
The act of writing certainly connects me with my life force and with what I essentially believe (as opposed to what I think I ought to believe). My manuscript, however, is not any suitable narrative form. It begins and trails off in diffuse directions. There are too many ideas, too many layers, and all I can do is type out my character's thoughts and attempt to capture a sliver of their inner lives.
But I like the idea of dream time, where all times lines converge and linear time holds no dominion. There all minds can submerge in universal symbols. Of course, there are many who think the idea of some kind of collective unconscious plane is sheer bullshit and should be relegated to the realm of the esoteric. I'm thinking of Sam Harris and his excellent (but weighty) book 'The End of Faith', where he includes Jungian psychology in this category. I'm not so sure Harris' assessment is fair. I think we need some model to explain the creative realm of that exists on the shores of our mysterious psyches. I like to believe that there is still room for the unexplained and perhaps unexplainable. I have to admit, though, that the skeptic in me has serious problems with the idea of surrender. I refer to the surrender to the creative process and the trust required when you happen to be right brained creator like me who can only follow their characters and images into the dark to get a sense of the shape of the story, and not the other way around.
The romantic in me likes to think of these depths as the realms of poets and great artists. Whenever I'm in this frame of mind, I like to believe that we are all deeply connected to realms we can no longer perceive. Our senses have been civlized into obedience. The wildness has been disciplined out of us. There have been so many artistic movements that realized this and tried to break through the patina of the civlized.
In my freewheeling jam here, I question what it means to be civilized. So much horror has been created in the real world in the name of civilization, but I diverge from the point. The point being that perhaps we all are connected in a deeper sense, much like the buddhists believe. We are all part of the net of life. Art, then, is part of this collective dream.
Metafiction attempts, perhaps, to illustrate this point in another way by revealing the artifice of art, but also the interaction of art with life and life with art.
After all, where on earth do characters come from?
