CHAPTER 9
The View from Where I Am
A writer is not fledged
until he finds his own voice. Until then, he is only doing what most writers
do—learning the craft until he finds his writer’s voice, if he`s lucky; only
then can he take flight and claim a point of view that is uniquely his own.
I heard the call to
writing in grade school, and in high school I fell in love with the romantic
ideal of becoming a writer like Earnest Hemingway, who became my high school
hero and literary mentor; but my call to writing was supplanted by my call to
become a seeker like Larry Darrell in Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, and my life no longer became my own because I had
forfeited my call to writing to the guiding principle of my life that kept
dragging me by the scruff of the neck to find the right path that would fulfill
my soul contract to find a way out of the recurring cycle of life and death through
my own efforts—an unbelievably foolish demand
I made of myself; and I chose the family I was born into, because my family
shadow was deeply rooted in what I needed most to realize my true self.
But who would
believe this but another soul with a point of view from that state of
consciousness where one is both what he is not and not what he is, a fully
integrated soul self, that state of resolved self-consciousness that Jesus
pointed to with his saying that the kingdom of God would come when one has made
his two selves into one, neither male nor female with no hypocrisy? But one might
well ask, can there really be such a person?
“Ye shall know them by their fruits,” said Jesus. “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth
forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an
evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not good fruit is
hewn down and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know
them…”
(Math. 16-20).
What, then, would
be the fruit of a self-realized person if not the consummate goodness of their individual
virtue—the best music from the musician, the best poetry from the poet, the
best from the physician, the best of one’s chosen field? A fruit so sweet in
its individual goodness that one cannot help but see their difference, people
of destiny like Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi, highly evolved
souls that have realized wholeness and completeness and returned to serve
humanity with the gift of their highly evolved individual virtue—Mozart, Beethoven,
Shakespeare, Einstein, and countless unsung heroes who affected the world with the
ripened fruit of their goodness.
Given the logic of
the individuation process, which I’ve been studying since I began “working” on
myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching, the more conscious I became the more I saw the various shades of good and evil
in people; and then one day I became acutely aware of the connection between good
and evil and the values that people lived by.
So, I had a difficult
choice to make; and I chose to live by values that made me the best person that
I could possibly be. And I made it the ethic of my life to be a
good-kind-honest-truthful person, idealized by Wordsworth’s poem “Character of
the Happy Warrior.”
That was my path, my
virtue. And then one summer day, to my surprise, while standing in the doorway
of my mother’s kitchen while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table,
I had the most astonishing experience of my life. A feeling washed over me that
I was immortal and would never die. That’s it. No angels singing, no heavenly
choir, no golden trumpets, just a quiet feeling that I was immortal and would
never die.
And all fear of
death vanished. As did the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness. And
I no longer longed to be me. I just was.
I was me, whole and completely myself, a
feeling that has never gone away some forty years later; and as much as I
wanted to share this with my mother, I could not. She would not have
understood. I did not understand either. And it took twenty years to work out what
happened to me that day in my mother’s kitchen, but I finally solved the
mystery.
By “working” on
myself with pathological commitment to Gurdjieff’s discipline of conscious effort and intentional suffering (including his
techniques of non-identifying and self-remembering), plus my Royal Dictum (my edict of self-denial), and
my Wordsworthian ideal of laboring good on good to fix, I created enough virtue
to shift my center of gravity (my “I”) from my existential outer self (my
ego/shadow personality) to my essential inner self (I coincided with myself and
become one self, whole and complete; that`s when I experienced my own immortal
nature that Jesus referred to as being “born again”);
and from that moment onward, I lived my life from the perspective of my true self,
which is the viewpoint of the third and final stage of human evolution, and
everything that I wrote from that day to this I wrote from this unique perspective,
my own writer’s voice, like the spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Wednesday, December 20, 2017:
A Room of My Own
I’ve been meaning
to write a spiritual musing on my writing room for years, but the idea never
possessed me until I read Lindall Gordon’s biography, Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Life, while I was in the middle of
painting my writing room this summer; and, of course, the idea was set free by
Virginia Woolf’s Victorian convention-breaking comment that sparked a fire in
the soul of women everywhere and set the stage for the modern feminist
movement, and which became the theme of her iconoclastic little book A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have
money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
That would apply
to any writer. And if they have the money to be free to write, all the more
power to them. But life doesn’t work like that. Ask Alice Munro, who had to
squeeze in her writing time whenever she could between household chores (she
was married with two small children); but she persevered and wrote, and wrote, and
wrote, and at the respectable age of 82 was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2013 for her “mastery of the contemporary short story.”
Which suggests
much more than having a room of one’s own to write in, and the money to be free
to write; it suggests that a writer will write no matter what, because if they
do not write they will feel like they have betrayed themselves, something that
my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway explored in his story
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and which haunted me most of my life too because my
call to creative writing was superseded by my call to find my true self, and
only when I had satisfied the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness
was I free to devote more time to creative writing, which brings me to my
writing room in the two-story house that Penny and I built in beautiful
Georgian Bay, Southcentral Ontario…
I’ve always wanted
a room of my own to write in, and I went out of my way three times to
build a room of my own; the first time when I built an addition onto my
parents home in Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario when I opted to stay at home for
my mother’s sake after I left university to start my own contract painting
business, and for the next fourteen years I stayed at home in my attached but
separate apartment unit and worked my trade and read and wrote until my father
died; and the second time I built a room of my own was in the triplex that I
built in Nipigon by converting the loft of the top apartment unit of our
triplex into my writing room where I wrote every morning for fourteen years
until Penny and I built our new home in Tiny Beaches, Georgian Bay (on STOCCO
CIRCLE, a street named after me no less!) in which I converted the empty space
above our double garage called the “bonus room” into my writing room but which
I never got to finish painting until this summer, fourteen years after our
house was built.
So, a room of my
own to write in was precious to me, despite the fact that my writing room was
my sanctuary and haven of safety while searching for my true self which began
in high school when Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge struck me with the immortal wound that called me
to become a spiritual seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell; and I did most
of my seeking through reading in the privacy of my writing room until I found
my lost soul that I had come into this world to find and which I wrote about in
The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price. And after I
found my true self and wrote all the books that my quest called me to write
(the last being my twin soul books, Death,
the Final Frontier and The Merciful
Law of Divine Synchronicity), I was finally free to do justice to creative
writing that I was called to in high school by the writer who became my high
school hero and literary mentor, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway whom, ironically, I’ve
just finished writing about again in My
Writing Life, which was inspired by the gift of an Indigo Hemingway Notebook
that I got from Penny’s sister last Christmas and which morphed into a sequel
to my literary memoir The Lion that
Swallowed Hemingway that I wrote three years ago.
Not that I didn’t
write creatively all these many years (my novel Tea with Grace is still my favorite of all my fiction), I simply
could not devote all of my precious time and energy to creative writing (which,
as any writer knows, demands complete attention); I had to work my trade to
make a living first and foremost, and I had to also heed the call to write the
books that my quest for my true self demanded of me, which to date numbers
fifteen and counting; so I had little time for creative writing.
But now that I’ve
finally told the story of how I found my true self, I am free to write all the
poetry and short stories and novels that I am called to write (not to mention
my spiritual musings which always come to me unbeckoned, like today’s musing on
a room of one’s own); and, in all honesty, I could not wait to finish painting
the faded and boring white-primed walls of my writing room, because after
fourteen years it deserved to be dignified with a color best suited to the
creative writer in me, a colour that my life partner Penny Lynn chose—HOPEFUL BLUE.
And
why did Penny choose this colour, other than the fact that we both loved it? As
she said to me, without a trace of irony: “I just hope it gets on the walls,
that’s all.”
———
Not only do I have
a room of my own to write in (I love the metaphor of “bonus room,” which in our
house plans referred to the empty space above our double garage), I also have
the “bonus” of a voice of my own in the point of view that I realized in my quest
for my true self; a unique vantage point from that state of resolved
self-consciousness that can only be realized in the third and final stage of
evolution, and it goes without saying that writing from this outside-the-box perspective
can be threatening to conventional wisdom.
But why? What can
be so threatening about a perspective that reflects life from a state of resolved
self-consciousness that takes God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife for
granted? Why would the world be threatened by this point of view?
The short answer
is RESPONSIBILITY, because the only
way to resolve the dual nature of our false and real self is by taking
responsibility for our own evolution, and this is not an easy responsibility to
bear; but despite how hard we try, we cannot deny the imperative of our inner
self to wholeness and completeness—and
that’s our dilemma!
So there we are,
driven by the teleological imperative of our inner self to grow and evolve and
become what we are meant to be, “a bliss peculiar to each one by individual
existence,” as the poet John Keats described the identity of our soul self,
trapped in our physical body that is biologically driven by the selfish imperative
of our ego/shadow personality; it’s no wonder that man is torn in two, because
we cannot realize the one without sacrificing the other. And that’s the dilemma
of the human condition.
“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, /And
each will wrestle for the mastery there,” wrote the philosopher/poet Goethe;
and I spent the best and most creative years of my life resolving this conflict
in my breast, and I know just how threatening my point of view can be to those
who are not yet ready to bear the burdensome responsibility of taking evolution
into their own hands and become what they are meant to be.
That’s why my
heart goes out to Jordan Peterson. His maps of meaning have taken him as far as
they can take him in his profound study of human nature, and as always happens
when one’s path can take them no further on their journey to wholeness and
completeness (which he rendered into 12
Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos), life calls them to a higher path;
and the good professor was called to the hero’s journey in his defence of free
speech—an impossible imperative to be a shining light for this crazy world; and
I just love watching him slaying all those pesky postmodern nihilists and politically
correct dragons out to take him down, like Cathay Newman on Britain’s Channel 4
News and Nellie Bowles in the New York Times, to name only two, because I’ve
never seen the hero’s journey play itself out with such passionate, daemonic intensity.
It’s no wonder that he lives in “constant existential terror.” But he’s a
“deeply, deeply good man,” and the Logos impels him…
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