Golden Books 1: The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars

Over at the blog Steven Brust shares with his roommates, the question was posed about the “golden books“—those ones that because you hit them at just the right time, and they were just the right thing, made a lasting change in you, and how you interact with the world.

I didn’t comment there, but I’ve been thinking about it. Several books pop to mind immediately: Mindplayers, Valis, the entire Travis McGee canon, and Brust’s own book The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars are pushing to the front of the queue. And that’s just fiction. I’m sure there are more.

And that seems like a good basis for a series of posts: about the books that I am aware had this kind of effect on me and my worldview, about why they had that effect, and what the effects were. Maybe even some looks at how I think I would perceive them if I were coming to them for the first time now, rather than as I was at the time.

So let’s start with Steve’s book.

(That’s not the cover of my copy, but it is the cover of the edition I have given away the most copies of, to people who needed to read the book.)

On his bibliography page Steve has this to say about the book:

I think at a certain point, every writer has to ask himself why he writes, and what he’s hoping to do. I wrote this one to answer that question and to explore other questions about art that had been troubling me. I have mixed feelings about it—I think I did all right with it, but it is too personal to have a very wide appeal. Still, I’m glad I wrote it, and I’m always pleased to run into people who like it.

It’s true—I used to get Steve to inscribe copies of this book to women I wanted to impress, and he always seemed pleased and a little curious about it. He asked me one time, “Why this one?” with some genuine interest. The answer is both complicated and simple. Simply, it’s because it was the one I thought would most likely impress the women. Heh. The more complicated answer has to do with why I thought that, and why this is one of my personal “golden” books.

The first time I read this book I didn’t really understand what it was about. It had been marketed as fantasy, but it wouldn’t be too hard to make the case that this is a straight-up literary novel—the fantasy elements, such as they are, are contained within the fairy tale segments that break up the “real world” narrative. They aren’t intended to be taken as real, but are rather thematic reflections on the “real world” events. I hadn’t expected that. I bought the book because I had liked Steve’s Drageara books, and I was expecting secondary world fantasy. Fortunately the book was, in a sense, deceptively packaged, and it got me.

I think I was literally too young to understand that this book is really an artist meditating about the place of Art in the world, his relationship to it, and how to engage with the process of creation. Hell, the first time through I think I just read the fairy tale segments. When I think about that now, I’m stunned–because the other stuff in the book is so full of the important and the serious, albeit often hidden behind the mask of a first person narrator with attitude. (Although, I suspect that, as Steve hints in his comment above, in many ways this book is the one of his books that makes the author most vulnerable to the audience, even with that distinct first-person abstraction layer in there.)

Maybe the reason I didn’t get it as a kid was that the book is remarkably short on plot, compared to Steve’s other works. That’s not a failing here, it’s kind of the point. You could make an argument that the plot of the non-fairy tale segments which make up the bulk of the book is “Artist goes from canvas to painting”. At least that’s how my younger self saw it.

These days I think there’s a lot more going on: a larger story about a man’s relationship to Art, of his relationship to his peers, of their group response to both the concepts of art and each other’s specific works, of the interaction between perception of artist and art, of the personal relationships between a group of people going through a turning point in their lives, about the stuggle for self-definition and the definition of place in the community, and so on.

And that’s without even considering that even inside the simple “from canvas to finished work” story there is a kind of adventure. The adversaries here are not the elf mafia, or corrupt aristocrats, but instead the failures of vision, the failures of execution, the failures of confidence, and the blindness to self–all of which, incidentally, are typically the kinds of problems that mythological heros have to surmount. If you read it like that there’s a lot of plot just in the painting, without the story of the studio.

I also recognized at some point that what Steve engages, by looking at painting, is really writing novels, and writing music, and sculpting, and …. well, it’s really any kind of creative, artistic work—I believe this point may have eluded teen Chris.

I think this was probably the first book I encountered where these kind of topics were attacked head-on, inside a fictionalized narrative. More than anything else that’s what makes this book “golden” for me—the way it frames the questions, and some of the few answers it offers became part of how I see the world. I could talk about an artist’s struggle with purpose, for instance, in a completely new way after reading the book, and the seeds that were planted have continued to grow for a couple of decades, but as with any tree the growth is always informed by the nature of the seed. My conscious understanding of man’s relationship to Art started with this book.

And that’s why I thought it would impress women—they would read the book and have some of the same viewpoint-altering “I’ve never engaged with these questions, or certainly not in this way” experiences I had. They would note the skill with which the author builds them into a compelling narrative, avoiding the dreaded “message” book—indeed the book is a lot more about questions and process than about answers. After having this important mental and literary experience they would, of course, be impressed with me for appreciating it, for bringing it to them, and even in a cult of personality way, for knowing the author and getting the book inscribed.

(Yes, my wife has an inscribed copy. I don’t know if the plan worked or not, but I must have done something to fool her.)

It’s very different from Brust’s other books, and since he wrote it his craft has certainly improved—he’s a better storyteller now than he was then. He hasn’t written anything like this since, and I suspect if he wrote it now it would be a completely different book–both because the whole project is something that you would only attempt with the arrogance of youth, and because how he feels about a lot of the questions the book engages have probably changed after an additional 20+ years as an artist.

It’s not just this big, probably-pretentious-sounding-but-I-swear-it’s-not, stuff that the book used to hook me. It’s not just the craft with which the big stuff is woven in a narrative, or the way that the narrative wanders in time and is reflected in the fairy tales… In addition to all that big stuff, there are a lot of little crystal perfect bits—snippets of other things in there that captured exactly things I had thought or felt, in a way that was much more coherent than anything I had come up with. I get that feeling all the time–reading Russell is sometimes a series of those “That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t have said it that well” moments—but much less often from fiction than from non-fiction.

Here’s a relatively trivial example: the expression “it’s a ‘kick from the knee’ thing” is a phrase that’s just part of my vernacular now. I use it to mean “it’s one of those things that you think you understand when someone explains it to you, until the moment when you really understand it, and then you realize you never understood it previously, and, to top it all off, you can’t explain it any better than the people who initially explained it to you”. That’s a lot to fit into four words, but it’s something I run into all the time. In any serious study of philosophy you hit this all the time. In any serious work with computers you hit this all the time. In learning any kind of physical skill you hit this all the time.

That expression, and the perfectly captured notion it encapsulates, come from the book. Here’s the passage:

Chapter Fourteen

1. Mending The Net

I remember when, in karate, I learned how to do front kicks. I’d been doing them, sort of, for more than a year, and I didn’t realize I was doing anything wrong. For the whole year, Sensei had been saying (among other things), kick with the knee, just let the lower leg relax, and manipulate the ankle so you attack with the ball of your foot. And, more and more, kick with the knee, kick with the knee.

One day, between kicks number four and five out of a set of ten at medium speed, I kicked with the knee. That is, I let my lower leg relax and concentrated on getting the knee out there, and bam. The kick flew. It was fast, and strong, and felt so good I almost couldn’t stand it. I was astounded at what I’d done, but after that, well, I had it, and that was that.

What’s funny is that I hadn’t done anything other than what Sensei had been telling us to do for more than a year, yet when it came, it was like a Zen moment of enlightenment. I wanted to share it with some friends at the doj, but I couldn’t. Why? Because all I could say was, “You kick with your knee; just let your lower leg relax.”

Everything I discovered like that; I try to listen to my teachers, and follow their directions, and sometimes I even think I have it, and then one day, bam.

In one life-drawing class, using pencil and paper, the prof gave us a long lecture on light. A lot of what he told us were raw facts — like the math or physics you use to determine the length of a shadow, and how to represent the shadings of light with only a pencil. But there were other things he was saying, especially about the old Dutch painters, that I only thought I understood. You must always have a light source in mind, and that affects everything on the canvas, even if the light is diffuse and the source isn’t explicit. Okay, that was simple enough, right? Wrong.

I only understood it one day about eighteen months ago, working on a study of the alley in back of the studio. Just, all of a sudden, for no reason, I understood. The effect of the sun from my right permeated the canvas, brightening some spots just a little, darkening others by only the tiniest amount, but it was there, I understood it. I almost had an orgasm.

I wanted to talk to David about it, but all I could think of to say was, “You always have a light source in mind, and that affects everything on the canvas.” So I didn’t say anything, but, hell, my paintings have been better since then.

My front kicks are pretty good, too.

I don’t know how I’d feel about the book if I encountered it now for the first time–I almost literally can’t imagine it, since the book set my initial concepts of many of these things in place, and I’m pretty sure I can’t even imagine how I might feel about the concepts now with twenty years of differently-based thinking behind me. It’s probably not the kind of example Mark Chadbourn was thinking of when he said that exposure to our genres at the right age shapes the mind, but the idea fits.

I suspect I would still enjoy it, although perhaps not with the passion that I did when it first clicked for me and shaped a chunk of my mind.