Holding Out For Hope

21st September 2018

According to the Buddha, all of life is suffering, and the world seems to want to drive that point home right now. Democracies are giving way to autocracies, governments look more and more corrupt; the poor seem to get poorer and the rich get richer. There's Trump, the world's current emperor with no clothes, and he's not even the worst you can say about the USA - he's simply the fool being used by a highly corrupt party that has very little sense of the good, and a whole lot of allegiance to what is most expedient to its own survival. There's horrible racism and misogyny and just plain inhumanity, and that's still within the fifty states.
In addition, you have Russia using insidious means to expand its influence and its borders; and throughout Europe we are seeing the rise of authoritarian regimes. In England there's Theresa May and her party about to lead not only England off a cliff with Brexit, but Scotland, too, which expressly voted for this not to happen. The world over, we are witnessing vestiges of imperial power still wielding its ugly sword in the faces of those who would dare to oppose it.

Nothing in the world seems very stable at the moment, and it has you glued like a maniac  to your online news or your twitter feed.  It keeps you awake at night, because, perhaps the Buddha was right after all, and the whole turning globe we live upon is just a mess and complete mayhem.

                                    

But not so fast. Though it doesn't make for urgent headlines, not all the news is bad. Despite the gloom that the autocrats in power like to feed to their minions, things have been on the uptick in the world for quite a while now. I'm going to list a few of  these things here, because every time I come across them, I'm able to catch a breath and actually enjoy the process of being human for a while.
Here's how the world is improving:
1) The incidence of war and people dying of war in the world is at an all-time low. Violence of all kinds in the world is down.
2) Death rates are falling globally. Better sanitation and advances in medicine translate into longer life-expectancy.
3) Infant mortality rates are down 15% in the last decade.
4) Maternal mortality has halved since 1990
5) The rate of global illiteracy has gone from near one hundred percent in the year 1800 to under fifteen percent in our time.
6) 721 million fewer people live in extreme poverty now compared to the year 1981

So, smile and be happy. The world isn't actually falling apart. In many ways, it is just starting to bring itself together.

Hooks 'n Agents 'n Things.

7th September 2018

For those people who read this blog to keep abreast of my book(s), I have some news: the last time I talked to my agent at  the beginning of this year, I had already begun my latest book, and I was feeling like I just wanted to clear the runway for it, by getting at least the last two unpublished parts of my Veil Of Time trilogy (Druid Hill and Iona) out into the world. After four plus years, Veil Of Time continues to sell, and I continue to get requests for the sequels, causing the original publisher Simon and Schuster to want to hang on to it for the time being.  My agent has taken the other books out to publishers, most recently in Scotland, but the upshot is that no publisher wants to take on two parts of a trilogy. So, I have been in a bind over it, and I told him a week or two ago I would rather just go straight to Amazon and publish there under an agreement my agency, Aevitas, has with them, rather than have these books gathering proverbial dust on my virtual shelf.

So, he has sent me the templates for book covers, and that's where that stands. He told me he has also sent out to Scottish publishers another of my books, Hazel and the Chessmen, about the theft of the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum by a raggedy bunch of Scottish Nationals. All good. Movement has been detected.

In the beginning, when I was in my late twenties, my goal was to write five novels, so that if one of them hit the big time, I would have four others in reserve to come out in quick succession. By now, I have nine novels, quite apart from the one that is burning a hole in my head and heart, this new one, entitled, "The Second Coming."

No one can fault me for lack of persistence. I have long since put in my thousand hours. Ironically, my actual published book is probably not the most well written of my canon. But it has a hook. Being a heist, Hazel and the Chessman also has a hook.

But I have written other novels that are not bright and shiny for the gatekeepers of the publishing world - for one, my story about the Mustang. Everyone who reads it cries, but a horse story these days is not what a horse story was in Steinbeck's day. What, no sex? What, no high speed chases? What no mule with questionable gender?
Every book for the aspiring writer is going to be her next big thing. This new book doesn't have so much a hook as a whole lot of controversy. I didn't write it to dangle anything like a hook. I wrote it to answer a question in my own head. Maybe this time, that will be enough.

The Truth Comes Out

24th August 2018

"In a time of universal deceit, " wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

I have changed my mind on the role of politics in literature, though it is a razor thin path to tread and the razor in question runs along the issue of propaganda. The truth has to be spoken not by design but because it comes gushing out of the collective consciousness. The artist is the valve.

It is precisely the pressure-cooker times in which we live that has shifted my opinion on this. As I watch Donald Trump try to shut down the avenues of free speech, as I bear witness to the lack of any independent voice in the Scottish newspapers and TV,  I see that it is up to the artists to take up the cause. They are the last hope in the face of universal deceit. Donald Trump recently tried to convince his base that they should rely on no news outlets but himself, that they should not believe what their eyes and ears are telling them; and Trump's right-hand man, Rudy Giuliani, tried to make the case this last week that the truth is not the truth.
It was a 1918 US senator who said famously that the first casualty of war is truth. These days, wars have gone cyber on us. They are the wars of hacking and misinformation.  Truth in the Trump era is already on the ground and gasping;  truth was put on hold, too, when British prime minister met with Sony CEO in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 to ask him not to run the series Outlander in Scotland until after  the referendum, even though it would be available everywhere else.

The good news is, that suppression only works for so long. As Shakespeare famously suggested, "The truth will out." Freud had a thing or two to say on this issue, too.
In eras when the truth has been successfully sat upon, when even the valves of art have been stopped, you eventually get revolution. So let's all be revolutionaries. In this era of untruth, let us speak it. As writers and visual and vocal artists, let us not shirk in our responsibility to what is so.

Too Late, Baby

10th August 2018

The more you learn about Trump and Russia and the Koch Brothers, and the ultra right wing effort to populate the justice system with its own kind, the more people like me (who have the happy alternative) decide it's time to pack up and go home. I can't join in America bewailing its lost democracy, because it has been an oligarchy-sliding-into-autocracy for a very long time. The right wing has slowly been occupying territory until a full 40% of the American populace is living on what John Stewart calls "Bullshit Mountain."

People from back home in the old country ask me where the moderate conservatives in this country are, and I have no answer, because they are doing a very good job of camouflaging themselves against  the wallpaper of the Grand Old Party.  I have never been a supporter of the GOP, but it is apparent even to me that its founders, or even only going as far back as Reagan (who was president when I first put foot on these shores) must be rolling in their  graves.
This apparition calling itself the Republican Party today is a collection of greedy and corrupt white Ol' Boys making a grab at the only thing they consider to have any worth - certainly not country, or moral ground, just the accumulation of filthy lucre. The corruption runs so deep, that unless our friend Mr. Robert Mueller has a magic wand in his bag of tricks, the indictments of the key players is not going to make a particle of difference. The Supreme Court, which is supposed to be the level-headed and wise tier of government is stacked to the point that it would give Vladimir Putin a free pass if he asked Trump to get him one.
I was hopeful until I began to understand just  how wide this network of greed and power-grab has spread,  and now I think there is no hope, and better to go back to Scotland where there is at least the chance that we might have a society in which justice has some meaning. Of course, Scotland, living in the shadow of the British Empire, isn't there yet, and really I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Brexit disaster, fueled and fed by another arm of this worldwide coup of greedy white guys, might in the end overwhelm our hope just as it has done the better angels of this country.

From time to time, I pull up videos of Barack Obama, like an orphan who is stuck with the evil aunt might conjure images of its mother. This displacement from value has come at us so forcefully that the deranged individual currently occupying the White House has over time even taken on a sort of normality. This is the new but deeply pathologicl normal, with an entire political party and a whole Christian faction enabling it.
I don't hold out much hope for America. I was hoping the constitution would win out, but these nefarious money-grabbers are weaseling into even that: the Koch brothers, while everyone is busy  being outraged by the behavour of the Clown-in-chief, is quietly working towards rescinding the 17th amendment, which handed the power to elect state representatives to the people. And they'll probably get it. Because nothing speaks louder in this country than the dollar bill.
       Authoritarian USA married to authoritarian Russia and in alliance with any number of smaller authoritarian countries will change the complexion of our world. The notion of a Free World will just be a memory we take out and brush off from time to time, like pictures of a dead mother. Like videos of Barack Obama.

Cacophony

27th July 2018

Aspen, in the summer, hosts the famous Aspen Musical Festival in its huge permanent tent with state-of-the-art acoustics and comfortable cushioned seats.

The wind gently rustles through, and even when it rains, it simply seems to add percussion to the music floating out all around you from the stage. Many famous musicians and many many talented students fill Aspen all summer, and it is a boon to be able to participate.

On Sunday, I went along to hear Augustin Hadelich play Mendelssohn's violin concerto, so I took my seat very close to the stage, not wanting to miss any nuance of his performance. While the orchestra filed in, we had time to skim through the notes: the first piece, which I won't name, was just recently commissioned and this would be its American debut. I know I'm going to sound like an old fogey, but I wasn't optimistic.
The orchestra was in its last cacophonist moments as the conductor walked onto the stage. The concertmaster shook his hand, and gave the tuning A. Everyone played an A. Everyone was in tune. And then for some reason the orchestra went back to the beginning and started a ferocious cacophony of tuning up and practicing again.
You know where I am going with this: No, they weren't tuning up, but that's what this modern ten minute piece sounded like. Cacophony. So, call me old fashioned, but art to me has to contain a certain beauty, a certain coherence and a certain resonance with a higher consciousness.
If this modern piece reflected the state of our collective consciousness, then I don't hold out much hope for humanity. Of course, it's hard to have any hope, living through these times of war, thuggish leadership and inhumane practices.
The saving grace of the piece was that it was short. It finished to lackluster and off-beat clapping.
And then Hadelich came on,  launched into his violin concerto, and all was right again with the world.

It's not that Mendelssohn suffered no pain in his life: he composed like a maniac from the age of nine. Grief from the loss of his beloved sister Fanny sent him into ill health, and he died from a ruptured blood vessel at the early age of thirty-eight. And it's not like the violinist Hadelich has had it easy: at the age of fifteen, he was severely burned in a family fire, was airlifted to Germany for recovery, but it wasn't clear he would ever be able to play the violin again.
The point is, you can have cacophany going on in your life without having to spew it out into the world. You can take pain and create beauty, and that, it seems to me, is what the modern composers are missing.

Out Of The Fire

13th July 2018

There are thousands of acres of wildfire burning about ten miles down the road from where I live. You stand on your doorstep, and it smells like hell burning.
Everything is fine in your world until suddenly it isn't, and I kind of like the fact that even in this world of men (I choose my words carefully) nature will always have the last word. It would only take a sun flare-up, and all our little handheld computers with all the information we have stored on them will disintegrate in a little puff of smoke. Mankind could go the same way, and without us the earth would quite merrily keep on spinning, even changing its axis from time to time; the Milky Way would keep on hurtling through space.

We go through life with a magnifying glass trained on the facts of our lives, even though the facts of our lives hardly have any significance at all. We plow through life ignoring the destination, thinking that our foot on the pedal is of utmost significance. It ain't. The sign posts are pointing the way to dusty death, and we are but poor players.

That's the fact, but also the glory. In the grand scheme of things, the fact that I lost my lovely little cat this past week, the idiocy of Donald Trump, the corruption of Brexit, the fire burning ten miles down the road, the silly human race running around beating its chest, its churches and sepulchers, the altars to all it holds dear, are imperceptible flashes in a great cosmic frying pan.
That's all.

Small Countries For World Peace

29th June 2018

I have received a lot of flack in the face of my push for Scottish independence.The argument goes that, the world needs to pull together rather than splintering off into smaller parts. Surely in the face of global chaos, my opponents argue, we should be calling for unity.

But this is definitely one of those cases of perspective, like those drawings that you can look at in two completely different ways:

Are you looking at a duck or a rabbit?

In the case of Scottish Independence, as in the case of Indian Independence (1947) or Norwegian Independence (1905) or even American Independence,(1776)  you have to look at the picture in a different way.  What changes your perspective here is  history. No one would argue that America would have been "Better Together" with Britain, or that Iceland (1944), which is doing very nicely governing itself, should have stayed tethered to  Denmark. Or for an example closer to home, Ireland (1921) the fastest growing economy in Europe, should have remained in the UK. In all these cases, history has proven that the country in question does very well on its own, and so it will be with Scotland. In fact, Scotland, without its revenue draining off to the south, will do better than most, because it is a resource-rich country with many innovative minds as a sort national characteristic ( think, penicillin, steam engine, television, telephone, road Tarmac, bicycle, insulin, telegraphs....the list goes on)

Of all the 62 countries that have sought separation from Britain alone, not one has asked to be allowed back in. The story of these smaller independent countries (not counting USA anymore, since it became its own empire-building conglomerate) is that they settle into secure little nations with low crime, low unemployment, that look after their people and don't go around causing any harm to other countries. From this perspective, you could look at the quest  for independence as a stride towards world peace, and the more smaller countries you can make out of large conglomerates like USA and USSR and The British Empire, the better things will be for everyone. You could look at Scottish independence as a rabbit and not a quacking duck. The choice is yours.