Understanding My Novels

Thoughts I had at work today regarding the series of novels that include The Amazing Morse Series and Seven Stones, as well as novels yet to be finished:

I am constructing the paradigm through which humanity needs to look if it wishes to survive.

How’s that for a bold statement? Give a few moments before you judge. I think my books best make the case but I’ll try to summarize for you. It's not so much of a perfect summary as thoughts upon the matter.

The Amazing Morse was a story of an individual overcoming the restraints one is capable of placing upon himself. Your worldview can act as a straightjacket upon you, restricting your ability to move in the directions you wish to go.

Perchance To Dream, my second novel, involves the individual overcoming the restraints society places upon him. In the end, it shows that the disbelief of a single individual in a shared vision, can save the whole.

The Association deals with the inevitable rise and fall of societies due to their imperfect conception of reality. In it, it is stated that in the fall of a dominant paradigm, people and groups of people constrict, and fear and defensiveness take the place of trust and interdependence. The tragic result is always violence, war. Man can no longer survive war.

War. It is the symbol of all that is wrong with the human race as well as the one great human evil that we must evolve from if we wish to survive an age of atom bombs and ICBMs. I go back in time 100 years to do an earlier series which will tie into my Amazing Morse series, beginning with Seven Stones. I decided that seeing the foibles of the present age might prove too difficult for some, and so I went to another era in order to critique it. That we do not see the foolishness of our own era and find it so easy  to mock whatever is different about another era is a theme that runs through The Amazing Morse Series.

The year is 1913, shortly before the start of WWI. I wanted to show the senselessness of war and this one truly looks pointless in retrospect. At the beginning of the 20^st Century, Mankind had emerged from primitive means of production, had at hand the tools necessary to build whatever society he wished to build, and yet morally and emotionally had not been able to elevate from the fear of others and the desire to protect himself through violence. The very science he believed could free him from his past had built new and unimaginably cruel weapons to kill him. The seven stones in question are representative of the seven continents. Divided, each stone is a strength but one that does not work with the others. Individually, power is destructive. It is only the unity of the seven stones that can achieve the understanding mankind requires.

The era immediately preceding World War 1 was also a beginning of new perspectives. In art, different perspectives were being represented in a single painting. Albert Einstein was postulating ideas that were tearing down our conception of the universe. Constants were being shown to be relative. The very world we lived in, or at least our understanding of it, was beginning to break down. We needed to find new ways of thinking about the world, not just simply more answers to plug into our existing paradigms.

The Seven Stones trilogy will end with an understanding of what has gone before and a laying of a basis for understanding that will spread throughout the 3 Amazing Morse books as well as the not yet written The Beyond Show  trilogy. It is the shattering of humanity’s mindset and the rise of a new, more comprehensive one. It is the realization of our interconnectedness and the rejection of violence as a means of change.

The Amazing Morse: To liberate oneself before being able to liberate the world, or at least one is able to liberate the world only so much as one is self-liberated.

Perchance to Dream: The doubt of an individual can save the whole. It only takes one person to put a crack in a paradigm held by the group, allow cracks to show in it.

The Association: The idea of a society coming to grips with the collapse of an imperfect understanding is not resolved in the action of the novel, but the roots of what will happen in novels to come are revealed.

Magic is my description for the ability to see unimpeded by the intellect (i.e. whatever paradigms we have acquired), to see through the eyes of a child. Because life is truly magical when we are young, although occasionally very frightening. This is not to say our vision should not be assisted by the intellect, the paradigms we have imagined, merely that we should not mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself. We should never mistake the model for the real.

Perception versus reality, that is the source of all struggle. The more we mistake the finger for the moon the intellectual construct for what it represents, the more religion and philosophy divides rather unites us. Two differing vantage points are not reasons to quarrel but opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding.

In denying another person’s perception of God we are limiting our own understanding of God, and in a very real sense denying God.