Straw Dogs: You're Not Special

In a recent Reddit discussion, I came across someone who claimed that East Asians perceive the gods as cruel, and therefore East Asians don't pray to them. Most of the people in the thread were understandably perplexed at this person's assertion. But having studied Taoism, I think he may have been referring to Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching, which opens by telling us that heaven and earth treat all things as "straw dogs" — which is to say sacrificial objects. In ancient China, dogs made of straw were built for a specific ritual purpose, lit on fire, and cast aside when the ritual was complete.

I guess you could take that to mean that the gods are cruel. Certain interpretations of the Tao Te Ching certainly don't help: "Heaven and earth are not benevolent," reads one translation. "Heaven and earth are ruthless," reads another. 

The problem here is that it's hard to narrow in on the specific meaning of ancient Chinese, especially in a poetic text like the Tao Te Ching that's ripe with mystical overtones. But my gut tells me that we're not supposed to think that the universe is hostile, any more than we're supposed to think that it's benevolent. The universe just is. Nature just is. When a tornado rips through a community and uproots trees, levels homes, and leaves death and destruction in its wake, nature isn't being mean. It's just doing what nature does. Some will be quick to attribute the storm to some kind of karmic response, others to God's wrath. But what if it's just a storm? Likewise when a child develops a terminal illness: We can twist ourselves in knots wondering why a loving God would allow an innocent person to suffer, or we might surmise that the gods — if they even exist — just don't care.

I think that's what Taoism attempts to teach us. If "shit happens" ever summed up a religious/spiritual philosophy, it's Taoism. Maybe gods exist; maybe they don't. Either way, if we take our emotions and desires out of it, we can find no tangible evidence that, if deities do exist, they don't really seem to care about us one way or another. We're straw dogs. We're born, we live, we die. That's our only discernible purpose. It's only our egos that persuade us to think that we humans hold some special, privileged place in the universe. That we're made in the image of God, and that God is love. Nice sentiment, but entirely unprovable outside of philosophical abstractions.       

Nor should we have any reason to think we could ever bend the gods to our will. Prayers and offerings to the gods are ultimately for us, to bring us closer through reverent ritual actions to the ideals that the gods represent. We can imitate their characteristics as recorded in scripture and lore, but they can't be bribed to get us the job, or let us win the lottery, or heal little Jimmy. The gods aren't that weak, and we're not that powerful. They don't need us. And, again, this is assuming they even exist.

I'm not trying to make an argument for atheism, if that's what it sounds like. I happen to think there is some kind of creative force out there, and I think quantum mechanics might hint at what it looks like, if we entertain the admittedly far-out idea that consciousness is a building block of the universe — which points toward concepts of divinity that look more like Brahman, or Neoplatonism's One, or, indeed, the Tao itself, than anything that has to do with an old man on a cloud judging us by an arbitrary book of rules. 

I also believe a spirit world exists, even if I can't pretend to know much about it. And I admit that the idea of karma and rebirth makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of things, at least as a belief in my mind. But that's all it is: an unsubstantiated belief.

The point I'm trying to make is a very simple one: We're not special. 

Being humans, we have the capacity to fill our lives with meaning and purpose, build relationships with other people, pursue our hobbies and interests, and try to leave behind a positive influence. But we can easily confuse these things with the idea that our existence holds any inherent purpose beyond simply existing for 70 or 80 years. We're sentient beings on one tiny little planet in the vast ocean of space. That's it. Yet we devote an incredible amount of time and energy on this little speck of dust — this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan so wonderfully put it — trying so desperately to be noticed and acclaimed, as if we're actually something more than the insignificant and transitory blobs of flesh and bone that we are. These days we go so far as to create false identities for ourselves, complete with their own accompanying garish little flags, in the hopes that by remaking ourselves in our own image, someone will notice and applaud our fragile egos for a few fleeting seconds. 

But none of that changes the reality that the overwhelming majority of us will be forgotten within a few short generations, a name on a headstone that a stranger might momentarily ponder while passing by in the cemetery, maybe wondering what the person lying in the ground under his feet was like, and then never thinking about it again. Even many of the once great and powerful will eventually be reduced to a footnote, like Shelley's Ozymandias. "Look on my works and despair," indeed.

There's a spoken-word poem on Chicago's third album whose second stanza goes as follows:

When all the great galactic systems
Sigh to a frozen halt in space,
Do you think there will be some remnant
Of the beauty of the human race?
Do you think there will be a vestige,
Or a sniffle, or a cosmic tear?
Do you think a greater thinking thing
Will give a damn that man was here?

That's us. The straw dogs.  

But that doesn't mean you should just roll over and give up. Do you have to be made in the image of God for your existence to mean something? Do you need to believe you go to heaven when you die for your earthly existence to have any value? Can you not provide your own meaning and value, independent of what else may or may not go on in the universe? 

Be the best straw dog you can be. And let that be enough.

You Can Lead a Fact-Based Writer to Fiction, but You Can't Make Him Create

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio at Pexels.

I cannot write fiction.

I wish I could, but I can’t.

I’ve come to this conclusion as my wife embarks on her latest annual fiction-writing challenge. She loves making up stories. She’s a self-published author of lots of engaging book series. There’s some mystery stuff, some paranormal stuff, even some sci-fi stuff, but the one thread that runs through all of them is romance. Now, romance isn’t exactly my genre of choice, but she writes such rich and multilayered characters and engaging plot lines that I find myself waiting to discover what comes next at the end of each chapter. That’s the definition of writing a page-turner, I suppose. It’s a special gift that she possesses, and in a lot of ways I’m envious of it.

And I’m envious of it because I wish I possessed the ability to put together an engaging story with engaging characters. She makes it seem effortless. And every year she urges me to take part in her writing challenges with her.

This year, I decided I was finally going to get my book on spirituality out of my system. It wouldn’t be a work of fiction, but I decided maybe that was OK, because I can write good nonfiction. At least I think I can. I have a decent vocabulary and can build a persuasive argument. Heck, I work with words for a living. I was trained in practical writing. That’s what I’m good at. And that’s why I started my career as a reporter for a couple of Midwestern newspapers that you’ve probably never heard of. I was good at getting the facts out up top and explaining things clearly. There wasn’t really room for me to color the articles with my own artistic flourishes, which was OK because newspaper articles weren’t the place for that and, well, I just wasn’t very good at it anyway.

That’s not to say I haven’t tried writing fiction. I have. I’ve put a couple of bad examples up on this blog. And that’s why I decided that if I was going to take part in the writing challenge, the best thing for me to do was to stick to nonfiction.

So I bounced a lot of ideas around in my head, which is actually something I enjoy doing. I’m an innately curious person and almost always have thoughts of some sort rattling around in my cranium. And because I prefer to thoughtfully chew on ideas and figure out how to piece those ideas together in a logically coherent and consistent way, fitting disparate thoughts together like the pieces of a puzzle, I like to think that I often have a unique point of view to share with the world. Maybe that’s just conceit talking, but I fancy the idea that the reason I don’t fit into most people’s categories out in the real world is that digging in and examining the things that other people take for granted means that, almost by default, I end up never following the crowd. Anyway, I’d feel like a phony if I did.  

I say that because my problem with writing fiction isn’t that my head is empty of any ideas. Far from it. My brain truly never stops churning through thoughts and ideas. To the world, I’m a quiet man of few words, but in my skull it’s Grand Central Station, 24/7.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to take the thoughts and make them say what I want them to say. I fuss over getting everything right, even with my blog posts, and sometimes it leads to paralysis. I’ll publish a post, reread it, and think of 16 different things that I feel compelled to add. And I hit republish over and over until I’m finally satisfied. I can’t imagine what I’d be like writing a book. So after numerous failed false starts with this idea, I got impatient with myself and decided to put the project aside.

It’s not that I can’t organize the thoughts I want to get out. That part is easy for me. Again, it’s just making sure I say absolutely everything I want to say, in exactly the way I want to say it, and getting agitated when I think of something I missed. I don’t know that I’d ever be satisfied with a finished product.

There’s also the practical matter of the research I’d have to put in to cite my sources. That felt daunting, to the point of being overwhelming. I know a lot of time and effort goes into good storytelling, and the same is true for good nonfiction. And I found myself wanting to touch on so many points in my book-to-be that I think I’d find myself buried under source material trying to find references for my book’s footnotes. I don’t have the time to do that. I have a job to do, a house to help keep up as my wife recovers from her cancer treatments, a kid and pets that need attention, and a body that’s not doing so hot these days. It’s just hard to focus on something that doesn’t feel vital to the needs and demands of everyday life, I guess. It’s a luxury that I suppose I’m not allowing myself to have right now, or at least to prioritize enough to give it the time it needs to actually be good and not feel slapdash and undercooked.

Plus, I think I’m at a place in my life where I no longer feel the need to be heard. I used to take my time crafting and polishing 10,000-word posts on this blog because, as I said, I felt I had a unique point of view and I wanted to share it. I wanted to try to reach someone, anyone, and make some kind of a difference in the world. Now? Well, I think I’ve just gotten used to the fact that no one listens to me and probably never will, and there’s little I can do or say to have an impact on the world in any event. And I’m actually OK with that, where I think I used to be a lot more neurotic about wanting, even needing, to bend the world to my will. But that’s what everyone else does, and what does it really do but lead to needless conflict? There’s very little that any of us has any real control over in this life. You can come to terms with that, or you can burn yourself out with anxiety over things that you can’t do anything about.

As for my spiritual point of view, I still think it would be fun to share, and I would hope that it would cast a fresh perspective on things for people who struggle to feel a connection to established religious traditions. If I could reach even one person, I’d feel that I’d accomplished something and that the time spent putting the book together would have been worth it. So maybe someday I’ll still write that book. Maybe it will be in retirement. Who knows.

So with that idea set aside, I turned my attention to trying, one more time, to pull together enough ideas to write a story. I didn’t force myself to come up with an idea: As serendipity would have it, I just happened to have an idea rolling around in my head. Had I forced myself to come up with an idea from scratch, nothing would have ever happened. But I did have some rough ideas to work with, and I thought about how I’d craft them into a story that somebody would want to read. And I just got nowhere. I even monkeyed around with an AI engine — not to have it write for me, but just to try to generate some basic ideas that I could then expand on. Still, nothing.

I think the root of my problem is that I just don’t know how to characterize. Everything I write sounds like a book report or a Wikipedia article. I’m like the Joe Friday of writing: I gather and present just the facts. And there’s a place for that. But fiction is not necessarily that place.

What I mean is this: How do you make fictional characters sound human? How do you make them sound not wooden and mechanical, going through the motions, like a puppet that you’re moving from Point A to Point B with your words? And then, how much description do you need? And what is good description versus bad description? I have no idea, but for other writers it seems effortless to figure this out. People laugh at writers who turn out bad prose. But how do I know if mine is good or bad? What standard do you use? How do you find an engaging way to say your character walked to the kitchen for a light breakfast before walking out in the courtyard to plant flowers? I’m supposed to tell you how the sun illuminated the beautiful colors in the garden, and how the warm air felt good against our protagonist’s skin, and how the smells of spring intoxicated her, and what all this meant for her in that moment. But I can’t do that without just saying the literal thing that she walked to the kitchen, had breakfast, went outside, and planted flowers. A, B, C, D. Just the facts. I don’t know how to take those things and transform them into engaging prose that sings, that sticks with you because of how vivid and memorable the descriptions were. That’s my problem.

There seems to be an unwritten (heh) understanding among writers of what actually constitutes good writing. But it’s a very subjective thing, which stands to reason since art is inherently subjective. And it’s something that I guess you either get or you don’t. In that sense, maybe it’s more that good story writing is ultimately an intuitive thing. You can put paints and a blank canvas in front of a thousand people, but only one or two, if you’re lucky, are going to create anything that exceeds a Kindergarten level of aptitude. You either see the beauty in your head and can use your hands as a conduit to put those ideas out into the world for others to see, or you don’t. Creativity is just something you can’t force, and I’m not even sure you can successfully teach it to any great degree.

I’m like this with music as well. I understand music theory. I know what time and key signatures are. I know what notes go where on the staff. I know how to place my hands to make chords on guitars and keyboards. I even understand the logic of the circle of fifths. But I can’t actually do anything creative with that knowledge. For me it’s just all head knowledge. I can’t translate it into something expressive and beautiful. And I think that to expect that anyone can do it with just a little bit of practice and determination is to ask for something that ends up making a lot of people feel like a failure, as if they’re just not smart enough to figure it out.  

Likewise, I know the ins and outs of English grammar and mechanics. I was that weird kid who enjoyed diagramming sentences and figuring out the relationships between words in a sentence. I make my living as a copy editor because I understand how language works. But in the same way that I can’t sit down at a piano and write an original song full of depth and beauty, I can’t sit down at my laptop and craft you a story. For whatever reason, I just can’t.

But it’s OK. There’s no point getting mad or frustrated about it. If the artistic skill isn’t there, it simply isn’t there. That’s just the way it is.

And so I’ll leave it to my wife to write the fun books with the interesting characters. Head over to dreamwriter.earth if you want a sample of her good works. For me, for better or worse, I’m afraid you’re stuck reading dreary blog posts.