I’m doing what I hope is a final rewrite on a longish story. I “finished” it a few months ago, then let it settle for while, then someone reminded me that I had better actually finish it for real. I went through it and found a bunch of little inconsistencies and places where the writing had to change tone. Tidying everything has been taking a longer time than feels reasonable, but it’s getting there. I’ve done 12 pages out of 16 and have made progress on the last 4, all the while wondering why the simplest things sometimes are the hardest to fix. But it’s getting there. Four nights of full, medicinally induced sleep have done good things for my concentration — and my eyes, too. I was beginning to wonder whether I needed glasses, but it seems all I needed was some kip.

Meanwhile, just as we thought they’d finished demolishing the building down below, they’ve started on the foundations. They’re not using the jackhammer any more: for some time, the weapon of choice has been a bulldozer with a large drill-bit head attached. It makes a budda-budda sound from 8:30am to about 6pm with a short break for lunch and looks like a stocky metal bird pecking the ground. I have to keep reminding myself that however annoying it is up here, it must be a thousand times worse for the workers down there, who have no ear protection, and for the security guards outside our building. Usually cheerful chaps, they’re starting to look a bit stressed.

Speaking of stress, the other night Stu saw a baby elephant escape its handlers and run off, knocking down an elderly Japanese man as it barged into the traffic. Luckily the cars stopped in time not to hit it. He said the elephant was rocking, a definite sign of stress, but its owners kept it in the busy street with tourists playing their usual stupid game of teasing it with food. I’ve seen a guy do that with a full-grown bull elephant — holding out the bananas and snatching them away again. I’m waiting to see one of these morons get trampled into moron jam. But the old man was just a bystander in the road. A couple of weeks ago there was a heartbreaking picture in the newspaper of a young elephant lying in its blood on a major road, killed by a drunk driver. One of the people with it was also killed. As I’ve probably mentioned, it’s illegal to bring elephants into town — but there’s no elephant pound, so even if the cops could be bothered arresting the handlers, they’d have nowhere to put the animal itself.

On the domestic front, I went back to Chatuchak, and found on closer inspection that the giant anthurium’s leaves were badly torn from having been roughly tied up.  Way to treat a lovely plant. So I didn’t buy it after all. I did find some small shrubs with pale purple trumpet flowers that smelled gorgeously like sandalwood incense, so those are on the list of possibles for the balcony.

In other news, the v-necked t-shirt has finally come to Chatuchak. It used to be that you could only get high round necked tees there, and virtually everywhere else in Bangkok — unflattering, and too hot for this weather. But necklines have finally taken a dip. Most were still high, but maybe 10% were vees or low scoops, so I picked up one with a little bobble-headed skeleton pirate girl on it and one that I can only describe as a Team Shiva rugby shirt in green and black.

You can find some wonderfully offbeat, original designs at Chatuchak. I was particularly taken with the dress, long, grey and severe, with a wraparound front panel on which was appliqued a metre-tall picture of Jesus in loud colours, adorned with beads and sequins — a sort of vestment for the modern crusader, perhaps.

(Continuing from here.  Cut out MS formatting; I’m sure it only leads to trouble. This still feels like utter self indulgence, but better out than in?)

Still, it would be out of keeping with the quiet and recuperative spirit of the evening, so that it seemed not unreasonable to leave it until tomorrow.

While his thoughts ran thus, a young monk came to the open door and knocked. Rengzhe was perturbed by the possibility of a messenger from the Abbot. But it was only Dtap, with the thickly burnt face, coming with a fresh kettle of water. The youth’s hands were as covered in melted scars as his face and he held the kettle awkwardly in twisted fingers. But he set it down on the brazier without mishap and bowed to Rengzhe and Gwynn with the graciousness of a butler in a fine house.

When Dtap had withdrawn, Gwynn reviewed what Rengzhe had told him about that unfortunate young man. The cause of Dtap’s scarring was simple and horrible. When he was a child, his father had thrown burning oil over him. The man had been prone to violence all his life, but for reasons not even he had been able to express had hated his son with an intensity that provoked him, in an episode of rage, to go far beyond the ordinary cruelty of a beating. Rengzhe had used the story to illustrate the doctrine of successive lives, according to which there must have been bad blood between the two souls that had come into existence as the boy and his father.

“And yet,” he had said, “the migration of souls is not at all the most important conclusion one could draw from that man’s behaviour. It’s a possibility—one we happen to believe in—but not an incontrovertible fact. The fact is that two human beings were caught in a storm. Both experienced the consequences of an irrational, unchecked hatred and a single moment of black passion. That,” he said, “is the really interesting thing. Of course, what the man did was terrible. He didn’t experience his share of the consequences for very long—he was hanged a week later. But from the moment that he burned his son until the end of that week, he became a most fascinating person—an utterly shattered vessel. In such disasters, the soul finds its opportunities. The soul of the son, of course, found its opportunity too. He joined our brethren because he wanted to escape from the world; but since we’re all human here, this is still the world.”

After a pause that he filled with a mild introspective smile, he added, “One would think that flexibility must be a good thing, but that isn’t always the case. Inflexible persons are apt to break at least one in a lifetime, and through breaking, change and grow. Flexible persons bend, and do not change very much. Great flexibility is thus a kind of inflexibility.”

They were, at the time, in the little room to which Gwynn was confined, his leg in splints and his head a little muzzy from the dose of poppy wine of which, along with the inescapable and inadequate soup, Dtap had been the bearer that day.

“And which are you?” he had asked his caretaker, who looked rather picturesque seated in front of the window, with the green forest—it was summer then—behind him.

“To tell you the truth,” said Rengzhe, with a humorously self-deprecating look, “I don’t know yet. My life had been rather smooth, you see, until the accident that brought you here. Since it was a terrible thing, and yet here I am, sitting here talking to you quite calmly, I suspect I might be flexible. If that’s the case, I ought to leave this life here, to which storms come only occasionally, and find a more exposed position where I’ll get a real buffeting.” He laughed at himself and said, “I suppose that sounds quite strange to you. It even sounds a little strange to me.”

But Gwynn said, “I wouldn’t dream of finding any man’s thoughts or experiences strange,” and then offered nothing in reply to the curious look his statement earned from the monk.

It was only a fortnight since the violent episode that Rengzhe chose to call “the accident”. All that Gwynn had told Rengzhe about himself was that he had been in Kourbakhary and Rûm and was looking for a beetle. It was a long way from these bland facts to the hallucinatory truths of his past. Perhaps, in any case, from where he stood—lay—now, all the romantic and supernatural madness he remembered actually was, had been, no more than a hallucination; perhaps every event in his life had occurred differently, when this temple was placed at the centre of the world and all else, present and past, was viewed through its draughty windows.

(Continuing from here. More of an omniscient POV than I usually do, I think. Takes more time, but feels somehow satisfying. Writing this is the equivalent of soaking in a warm bubble bath after a day working — to slight effect, I fear — on the intricacies of book#2 with demolitions going on below. Bulldozers with enormous drill-bit heads have replaced the jackhammers. They are drilling all the concrete apart to salvage the rebar inside. Maya Gold chocolate arrived from Alex and made my day.)

Rengzhe lived in a small and sparsely furnished room on the second floor of the monks’ living hall, which took up one side of a quadrangle. Although he was reasonably senior in the temple hierarchy, there was no personal luxury conferred by rank. Even the Abbot had to make to with a simple cell for his quarters. Rengzhe’s room had a single window, shuttered against the night, which had produced a wind to rattle the shutter. A lamp burned on top of the cupboard in which the monk’s possessions were kept, including the kettle and the plain china cups. Gwynn and Rengzhe sat on the floor with a cotton-backed bamboo mat laid down between them, the monk cross-legged, the other with his good leg folded in front of him and the injured one stretched out.

Rengzhe had watched his guest eat a bowl of yam soup, while he abstained from food himself, taking only tea and water. He had undertaken to fast while he built the mandala, and it was a rule that a fast could be broken in the morning only.

“May I ask,” inquired the monk in a conversational tone after pouring their third cups of tea, “whether you feel any effects from the experience of watching the ritual?”

Gwynn gave the question honest thought for several moments. He wondered if he did feel anything. It seemed to him that he didn’t, so he said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Rengzhe nodded, having expected an answer in the negative. “Well,” he suggested, “perhaps you’ll feel something later on.” To his surprise, Gwynn seemed to agree.

“The affects of art aren’t always immediately comprehensible,” the white foreigner said, smiling in a way that suggested he was thinking about something of private interest.

“Was that diplomacy?” asked the monk, with a slight crinkle of his eyes in an otherwise poker-straight face.

“I’m never diplomatic with you, Rengzhe. I can’t be bothered. You should know that by now.”

“Yes, I should,” the monk admitted. “Thank you, by the way. It isn’t necessary to have a watcher, but it’s better. The universe has one experience through the creator’s eyes, another through the watcher’s.”

Gwynn only said, “I see,” his pale green eyes holding whatever thoughts were behind them without spilling a drop. He was, in fact, trying not to think, and was having reasonable success in that endeavour. Since certain events that had taken place in a certain city approximately a year ago, not thinking was a skill he had found to be worth practising in view of its occasional, but, on those occasions, often strong, benefit to the sanity he hoped to hang on to for the rest of his life—however long that always doubtful extension of time might be.

“At any rate,” Rengzhe said, “I thought you might appreciate a different kind of boredom.”

“Well, they do say a change is as good as a holiday.”

“Speaking of change—for the better, I hope—how’s the leg today?”

“Not too bad.” Gwynn looked down at his outstretched limb, patting it as if it were a dog. “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair soon. Figuratively speaking.”

“There’s no need to be in a hurry, unless some business of your own presses you,” the monk said mildly.

“Well, the man who sent me off looking for that beetle would like to see it, I’m sure.”

Rengzhe nodded absently, so that it was now Gwynn’s turn to wonder what was going through the monk’s mind. The wind chose that moment to throw itself against the shutter, reminding Gwynn—as if he needed it—that winter would arrive in no long time. The leg was good enough for riding, but it wouldn’t be completely healed before the mountains were covered in snow. To wait out the winter in the temple would be prudent, but on the other hand there was his sanity… And there was Mrs Curzon, of whom he would have no news until he returned to the wider world.

Rengzhe, for his part, was thinking about the Abbot’s inquiry of a week ago. He had equivocated then, but the Abbot would certainly ask again. Eventually he would ask directly, if Rengzhe did not get around to asking their guest—“the man you saved”, the Abbot had said, in an equivocation of his own. It was a simple enough request, but Rengzhe felt entirely uncomfortable about making it—so uncomfortable that he wondered whether a desire not to be importunate was really the only thing stopping him from asking.

(Continuing from here.)

The statue of gilded brass, many-armed and crowned with a headpiece of several tiers, sat coldly frowning upon a throne under a projecting canopy, with the altar under its feet. Even Gwynn had to admit that it gave off an impression of supernatural life. Some masterful hand had directed the making of its features into that sour expression of eternal disapproval. Several dozen candles surrounded it, flickering in the drafty wooden room, the envelope of restless light donating a further layer of illusory vitality to the figure within.

He felt he had the idol’s measure. A shady past, acts of terror, children snatched in the night by those supernumerary arms, libations of blood. Now roped into riding shotgun for a pittance of prayer, that it might slay the internal enemies of the soul, it was presumably waiting for the cosmic stage machinery to roll the good old days around again. It could have chosen to wait, he thought, with a better grace.

He prepared to get off the couch by first cautiously bending and straightening his right leg a few times, working the limb back and forth until the muscles began to feel somewhat flexible. The brace was under the couch. Reaching down, he found it and strapped it around his knee. With the joint thus supported, he stood, testing his weight on it. Perhaps it was only his natural optimism talking, but he thought it felt better than yesterday. It was undeniably improving. As of last week he had been walking without a stick—this development having brought on the fit of goodwill in which he had agreed to spend all day watching Rengzhe finish the mandala.

The window had no glass, only a decorative wooden grille with floral bosses at the intersections of the bars. The night air passing through from the wooded valley was damp and cold. Gwynn turned up and fastened the collar of his quilted cotton tunic. The slate-blue garment, embroidered with stylised plants and folkloric animals, was a souvenir of his eastern travels. He wore it with a wide red fur-lined belt and grey corduroy leggings that were now much too loose, and not only around the shrunken muscles of the still-healing leg: he had become gaunt on the meatless, inadequate diet of the monks.

To be cold again was still a strange novelty after his years in the desert and the tropics—and this was hardly real cold. It was only the middle of the tenth month. The moonlight out the window showed a skyline of pines reaching into a dark mist, while a lantern under the temple eaves shone on the reddening foliage of a mulberry tree on the edge of the little courtyard.

How long this old part of the world would have to wait for the young world to pay it a visit was anyone’s guess. Tucked away in remote mountain peaks, it was a railroad engineer’s nightmare. Unless there was something very valuable in these hills, mechanised transport might be a long time coming. There was no gas lighting or heating here, no running water, no heavy industry. There was nothing to hear tonight but the drone of a few voices chanting in a hall, the wind in the trees, a fox barking; the kind of night, it had to be said, full of nature’s beauty, but not lacking the human touch, that he had hoped to enjoy when he had set off into these mountains under the excuse of hunting a beetle.

He was now thoroughly familiar with such nights. However, familiarity had not bred contempt—not even boredom had done that—and he had, after all, found the beetle. Still, he felt, the opportunity to see the coming winter beauty of the peaks might be passed up in the name of avoiding the further boredom and likely discomforts of a snowed-in month or two.

He turned from the window back to look at Rengzhe. The monk had picked up the tray on which were the pots of sand and tiny funnels for pouring the colours, and was returning it to a cupboard behind a sliding panel in the wall, after which he stood ready to go, a spot of moonlight gleaming on his shaven head. He was otherwise a dark figure in bark-brown robes, short and slight in stature. He claimed to be forty-five, but looked ten years younger. If he was tired, he didn’t show it.

“What,” Gwynn asked, determined to sound livelier than he felt, “are you going to do with the sand?”

Rengzhe turned towards the altar. “It will stay there until morning,” he replied. “If there had been a congregation, half would have been distributed to the people and half poured into our stream to give it to the earth. Since there’s no congregation here, the earth will receive it all tomorrow.”

“It must be sad, not to have a congregation.”

“If sadness is observed from outside, one feels tender towards it. It’s like a bird that has fallen out of the nest. Then compassion supersedes sadness. Of course,” the monk added, looking up at Gwynn with mild mischief, “since you were here, I could give half of it to you.”

“And I could keep it in a dish and use it as an ashtray.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” Rengzhe stated lightly, feeling nothing but warmth towards his irregular and reluctant student, whose sole concession to the culture of the monastery had been to agree not to carry weapons openly indoors. What a wonderful opportunity for practising acceptance this foreigner had given him, when all was said and done.

“Let the earth have it,” Gwynn replied. His gaze travelled down to the table, now sitting bare in the middle of the floor, an empty stage. Rengzhe had told him that the mandala represented the world and that its purpose was to strengthen benevolent forces that had lost vitality in the course of their everlasting battle with evil.

The monk nodded. “And let us have tea,” he said, than which no suggestion Gwynn could have found more acceptable.

***

(It’s no use — trivial though this plot bunny is, it wants to get written. This is where I’ll have to leave it for now, as I should be getting on with other things.I don’t know whether there’s much point for readers in my posting these bits and pieces, but it’s good for me when I get all extroverted.)

Well, we took the upstairs apartment. The owner agreed to our price and to renovations, and we decided the views and the convenience of moving within the same building were worth the extra rent. With that settled, my mind has also settled, and I actually got some writing done today — however, rather than work on anything serious and book-like, I let myself play with something I started idly scribbling last year (or was it the year before?) and abandoned on grounds of triviality. But maybe there are worse sins than triviality. So here’s the beginning of a lustrous, bright, soft and nutrient spaghetti eastern, set in the accommodating world of TEC (which is contained within a movie studio backlot, I’m sure). I actually have a plot for this, more or less, so you never know, it might get finished.

Sweeping with the flat of his hand in a spiral that began in the centre of the mandala and moved out to the edge, the monk erased the mandala on the low table before him. With that deliberate and measured motion, geometrical representations of spiritual forces, laid out like an ambitious decorated cake, had their physical form removed, and the painstaking efforts of two days were rendered into a mound of coloured sand which the monk swept into a round vessel of ornamented bronze which the monk placed on the altar and prayed over, his hands pressed together, for several minutes. At the conclusion of the prayer, he clapped his hands once, then took three paces back from the altar and its towering idol, bowed, and clapped his hands again. Finally, he turned around, looking towards the foreigner who lay on a couch under the dark window.

At the first clap, Gwynn had felt the sense of being awakened from a sleep he knew he had not had. He had watched the creation of the mandala since morning, becoming mesmerised by ritual and boredom, while increasing hunger and thirst had kept him from dozing off. He would have liked to say that this was the entire content of his experience, but eventually a change had occurred, as if a drug had been slipped to him, and he had felt time falling into eternity like rain into the sea. Now the shutters of time closed with a bang over the illusion of eternity. He was awake, and a monk was looking at him. Soft brown eyes went with the dark, flat, charitable face. His serenity appeared to be a complete and radiant thing, like the full moon. However, as the man himself would have said, the full moon was a fine example of a transient state.

Gwynn spoke first, after licking his dry lips. He said, “Is that how you hope to destroy yourself, Rengzhe?”

The monk laughed aloud and made a self-deprecating gesture, and immediately it was as if a monkey, launching itself from one branch to another, had jumped in front of the shining moon. “Oh, I’m not that arrogant. They say it’s possible to annihilate the illusion of oneself in an instant, but I’m a plodder, so I certainly won’t destroy myself in this lifetime.”

“There’s always the chance of an accident,” Gwynn returned offhand, at which Rengzhe beamed and laughed again. Gwynn had learned that the monk took most things  seriously and lightly at the same time, and the more seriously he took them, the more lightly he took them as well.

The idol fell outside the category of most things. Although Rengzhe would admit that it was as much an illusion as all else in all the worlds, Gwynn had not been able to manoeuvre him into laughing at it.

Well, book#2, a collaborative experimental novel I’m working on in partnership with Preston Grassmann, is past the first draft and into the editing stage. I’m excited about this project. I think it has a lot of integrity, intelligence and heart, as well as a sense of fun. Everything about it is under wraps, I’m afraid. One thing I’m not afraid of is not finishing it. With two writers on board, I’ve found it’s definitely a case of two heads being better than one — and of course you can’t give up on the work or put it aside when it feels difficult.

Since it’s all secret, I can’t say much more. I’ll update again when we’re past the structural edit and into the line edit.

For a while I’ve been spending a short time every week or so with the tarot trumps, doing a visualisation for each one, just to see what my mind makes of these archetypes. I’m anything but a tarot scholar and I haven’t tried to become one for the purposes of this exercise. The idea is to do this without preconceptions, just to see where my reactions fall naturally. Even when I do know something about a card’s traditional interpretation, I often come up with something else. Two I did recently were Death and the Devil.

Death — image of a bull, in white, red and ochre on a black ground, like a cave painting, rearing upright. His body is painted with various markings, including several “bullseye” rings of concentric circles. I realise that the other markings designate the cuts of beef that a butcher must know. He is marked for death. By his tragic expression, he knows it. The message seems to be of unavoidable fate and the individual’s protest in the face of it.

This card is often read as an indicator of change and transformation. One might read the marked bull as symbolising particularly the inevitability of change and the futility of protesting it. But I think the meaning here is a little sterner: the inevitability of real death. Death is the shadow over life, and one day the shadow will touch you. So, with that in mind, how will you conduct your life? It might also refer to the inevitability, during life’s course, of endings, failures, disappointments, wounds, mistakes that cannot be rectified and losses that cannot be recouped. The bull feels tragic and he wants to resist all this. He knows his own magnificence and it seems unfair to him that all his strength should be useless. Death is the price of life: necessary for the species, unfair to each individual. Perhaps unfairness is also a message here. What will you do when life pours a thoroughly undeserved shower of shit on you?

The Devil — image of a tiger wearing a jade-green silk robe and emerald rings. He is seated at a regal desk, writing a letter. Green is the colour of envy. Pride is the traditional sin of Lucifer, but here the sin must be envy, which comes from dissatisfaction. The tiger is splendid, but he isn’t satisfied. He is writing a letter to God. He says with a self-mocking air that it is a love letter. Whether he wants to be loved the best by God or to become God, he is not sure, or will not tell. Perhaps he does not distinguish between the two. One thing is for certain: nothing but the ultimate will do. Nothing less is good enough. I have always had sympathy for the devil, so that instead of wanting to chide him I find myself wishing him well. To say that there is something tender and touching here, a heart kicking in human pain, sounds soppy — but there it is. We all know what shame and disappointment feel like. Those emotions, at an existential level, seem to be at the root of his troubles. I have a hunch that if he were to take off his rings and robe and leave his desk, he might have more luck in his quest. He says I am missing the point. He wants to succeed as he is, to be loved as he is, vulgar tyrant though he may be.

This one is harder to interpret. If I had to take a stab at it, I would say that it is about identifying with our negative emotions and seeing them as part of our self, which we might call foolish behaviour; however, it is very close to the idea of asking to be loved for exactly and entirely who we are. Pema Chodron (American Tibetan Buddhist nun) points out that our best is often mixed up inextricably with our worst — think of Antony and Cleopatra, magnificent in their faults. A tricky one, as you would expect the Devil to be.

In which Gwynn is a strong female character, or in which there are no scenes of really explicit violence. I wanted there to be wide scope for readers to interpret the text, but sometimes I run into responses that make me wonder whether there really are infinite realities out there. (And therefore, which book would be the original…?)

This week, The Etched City is on the Book of the Month slab, courtesy of Joe Mallozzi, writer and executive producer for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate:Atlantis.

Discussion here, and more here. I’ll be answering some of the questions tomorrow-ish. I’m agog at the detailed responses. If I’d ever imagined that the book would earn this much thought from readers, I would have spent an extra year making it better.

My thanks to Joe and his book club. Since I rarely make it to conventions, I feel privileged to be able to have an online discussion with readers.

…for he loves fucking much. [source — good old Rochester]

So, after considering various opinions, I’ve decided that the people who tell me the new Gwynn story doesn’t stand on its own are right, and I will have to make it, er, longer and thicker.

I’ve finished another, 10 000 word story which I’ve had some positive feedback on. Depending on what other readers say, I might start sending this one out.

The other Gwynn story, where he’s hanging out with the adventuress, seems to be aspiring to the condition of porn, hence the title of this post. He does love fucking, and by all that dangles, thrusts, nibbles, sucks, and creaks in leather, he is going to do it on camera, with a crazy debauched woman, in a tub of milk recently vacated by three underage boys, or he is not going to give me the rest of the story.

Other tidbits: Angel Eyes is apparently behaving in his cage and Big Nose Kate is still alive. I’ve lost a kilo. I like to be 48kg, my body thinks 51 is fine. It’s an ongoing argument. Currently 50, abs kinda showing, huzzah! I’ve been jogging and cutting back on sugar, which is the only way I ever really drop fat. Giant snails — they come out in the rain. The other day I saw one about five inches long. These snails have pointed shells, huge sharp pointy teeth, and Bette Davis eyes.

And I have auditory hallucinations. Every morning the school near us sings their school song, which sounds like the Addams Family theme slowed down and churchified. But I keep hearing it faintly at other times of day when they’re not singing it. And if I play youtube videos with the sound off, I swear I can still hear things, even if I don’t know what the music should sound like. I’ve had these sound effects all my life, in this minor sort of way, and it doesn’t bother me. But it’s odd. I must have a wire crossed somewhere.