Month: August 2022

A study in futility?

I’m reading Purgatory Ridge, the third novel in William Kent Krueger’s series of stories set in the “Iron Lake” region of Minnesota and featuring former sheriff Cork O’Connor, who is part Irish but has some of the blood of the Anishinaabe tribe. O’Connor’s attitude toward history jumped out at me.

“History, in Cork’s opinion, was a useless discipline, an assemblage of accounts and memories, often flawed, that in the end did the world no service. Math and science could be applied in concrete ways. Literature, if it didn’t enlighten, at least entertained. But history? History was simply a study in futility. Because people never learned. Century after century, they committed the same atrocities against one another or against the earth, and the only thing that changed was the magnitude of the slaughter.”

Wow. To a certain extent he nails it there, although I don’t know if it’s fair that people never learn. It feels like folks have finally begun to realize the extent to which bullies have dominated public life through the years — or are the same tricks working year after year and it’s only the folks who pay attention who understand the game?

Mikhail Gorbachev has died, they say, and I remember a time when he was hailed as a potential hero for his perestroika reforms that opened the Soviet economy and eventually ended the murderous communist disaster that Lenin and Stalin and their successors wrought. For a while it looked like some history had been learned and some real change had occurred, but the ruling class has fallen back into the same patterns of pitting us against Russia and beating our plowshares into swords.

Will our rulers still be goading us into hating each other in 1,000 years? Or will the communications revolution, which has put us all in touch with our brothers and sisters around the world, finally show us how much we have in common, and we won’t get fooled again?

I’m going to bet on the optimistic spin and go to bed tonight believing in 1,000 years we won’t be studying war no more.

The writers room

He took off his shirt, revealing tattoos scattered across his back in a not-artistic fashion, walked into the water up to his waist, and plunged in. Across the way houses nestled on the side of a hill. Docks and rip rap lined the shore. A pontoon boat waited, moored, ready to be pressed into service on some other sunny day.

His head bobbed as he swam slowly across the river, which was about 200 yards wide at this point. He climbed onto a dock, strode across a deck, slid open a patio door, and stepped inside. A moment later a scream, short and loud, ended as suddenly as it began.

Oh crap, it’s too gentle a day to maintain a horror story. What do I do now?

“The characters in a book live day by day and nothing happens,” said the woman at the table. “There’s no story. They’re bored, there’s nothing to do here, until one day they realize they’re happy having no stories to endure.”

One of the men across from her looked up. “That’s it?”

“Hey,” she said. “Seinfeld did a show about nothing and milked the concept for nine years. Why not do a show with no story?”

“Excuse me,” said the little man taking notes at the corner of the table.

“You have to have a story!” insisted the man across from the woman.

“Says who? Stories are overrated,” said the woman across from the man.

“Excuse me,” the little man tried again.

“Stories are the building block of all we do! You have to have a story!”

“Take your stories and shove —“

“EXCUSE ME!” The little voice was so powerful it hushed the room. Everyone looked at the man with the notepad. “Thank you.”

He gathered himself up and assumed his most dignified pose, which, to his credit, had more than a splash of dignity.

“Now then,” said the little man, “Who screamed?”

Magic in no time

I woke up and sat down to write. I heard the sounds of the house springing to life. I didn’t think I had much time, so I set my mind to write something special in an intensely short time.

Five minutes later, I looked at what I’d written and thought, “Whoa.” Now I believed all those songwriters and other creators who confess that they banged out their most memorable work in an insanely short period of time.

You don’t need a lot of time, just a determination to create something before you tackle the day. If the will is strong enough, if the desire is deep enough, you will create.