(Note: the context for this post are the first two posts in this cycle, below)
As my novel came out, in April 2007, Oprah was helping to make Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret the best-selling U.S. book. Now she does the same for Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose. The New York Times doesn’t even stop to sneer at these authors; up the Hudson River, The Omega Institute gushes over them.The demand for these books shows a moral and spiritual hunger in the land, but it is dismissed by the critical elite as unimportant. They instead seem content with description and irony: with describing the forces in our lives as out of reach to us, and with showing us (e.g., The Daily Show) the inherent gallows humor. So the fact is that many people laugh bitterly at our sense of helplessness, while some people look for a way out.
With a late-Roman quality, the guidance of the critical elite starts to look like mostly the advice to be stoic.
And so, before saying what I oppose, and why I think the ironic elite and the elite among those trying to escape avoid my novel, I’ll try to say what I’m for. Writing, I have, first, a point of view: I share in this hunger too much to be artistically impartial. Poking around, I have something in mind to build, to fortify, to mend. What that is is the counterculture, a Western movement of several centuries (now global along with its host), which opposes the acquisitive rationalism embodied in science and business with a very open-to-interpretation humanism. How, the humanists ask (stripping it down) in varied ways,can we make the society we live in feel good to us.
Right off, we see disputes, and an ambiguous relation to technology. Ike builds our roads just as Kerouac takes to the road to feel good. We carry grand, personal recorded music collections in our pockets. Yet with another shake of the kaleidescope we are reminded of how stuck out on the margins we feel.
In the 19th century this counterculture begot socialism and communism, which for a time gave followers a sense that they could make life better. Yet as these movements fell, often becoming evil, their members and next generation newcomers who might have been members were left without a plan. It was then that this tribe or elements in it lost its political thread and turned inward. And, a few decades later, these wanderers, now calling themselves new age, holistic or Integral, are guided by two bright but dangerous maps. The maps are bright in offering directions and solutions, and dangerous, I think, in leading a movement of rebels away from both direct experience and civic engagement.
The first bright map is mysticism. To use Oprah’s blockbusters as guides, the mysticism ranges from mechanistic to contemplative. The Secret promises a code that lets us get what materially we want from life: a top notch car or spouse or job. Less attached, A New Earth tells us to become detached from flesh-and-blood life. Both views have long legacies. Jesus uses mechanistic mysticism (loaves and fishes) to light up his crowds. Contemplative mysticism (finding experience richer than what everyday life offers) runs deep in human history. But each type turns from matter to mind, a journey few people make on their own. So mystical traditions focus our thoughts, and are in this way, I believe, highly rational. Also, entrepreneurial mapmakers and readers abound.
The second bright, dangerous map I see is theory, when it sets aside sense and experience. One can gain a head wind around a set of ideas and sail farther and farther into them, especially if a teacher urges the voyage on as a flesh-and-blood substitute. However thoughtful Integral Theory, for example, the guru-led movement it anchors often creates a cerebral, sheltered, close-minded experience, blinkered by codes.
I think the counterculture today is over-influenced by mysticism and theory, and so forgets or ignores its heritage and (with contemplation) its greatest resources. I also see its critical work as the reviving of these resources. Yet the movement’s momentum and its money-making seems to lie, instead, regrettably, with mysticism and theory.
Which brings me to the broken mirror. Studying the catalogs of Omega, Esalen, etc., I find pride of place given to an art called mystical, transcendent, visionary, fantastic or Integral, but not realistic. That is, the movement with its present mystical and theory-ridden influences wants an art that watches people fly through a world of ideas. It soon gets pedantic, I think: the art, driven by attitudes of self-help, tells people what to see and what to feel.
What this self-help art can be contrasted to is realism, the great thread of Western culture, the showing of people half-uncomfortable in flesh-and-blood life. Yet the mirror realism uses has been splintered by history and rarely shows us much we believe. We are also saturated with narrative entertainment, depleting drama, a crucial realistic form, of its force. We are hungry, and the realism we know of doesn’t seem to be very nourishing.
Most regrettably, what this omits from the picture are people. And so, when I began, fascinated, to write about the counterculture as it is now, I based my story not in the ideas of the many factions, but in the people who were involved. They all have backgrounds and passions that while driving them to the movement, exceed it. With my personal artistic inadequacies, and with a broken mirror that reduced me to using a jagged-edged, thin shard of glass, I set out to show these people, these seekers, encumbered by social forces in their flesh-and-blood lives.
The culture’s critical elite hate the journey, and so are unwilling to read the novel. The journey’s elite—the retreat leaders, gurus and self-help publications—having gotten into the habit of providing answers, are now too theory-driven to like mirrors, and so are unwilling to read the novel.
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