The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer.

The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

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Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

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scribble, scribble, scribble
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The Writing Life
A blog by Katey Schultz.

It Beats Working 9-5
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Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
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The Writing Life...

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
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The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

My influences
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’ve been influenced by a handful of books I’ve read and studied over the years, books that challenged my beliefs at the time and introduced me to new ideas and new ways of looking at life and all the issues raised by it. These, too, have shaped my philosophy of life.

The first writer who had a major influence on me was Bertrand Russell. Early on I was influenced by his essay “Why I am not a Christian,” but the book that has stayed with me is the one that got him banned from entering the U.S. to teach at the beginning of the 20th century, Marriage and Morals.

Marriage and Morals makes the revolutionary argument that as an institution marriage exists only for the welfare of children. Managed properly, in fact, proof of pregnancy would be a requirement before a couple got married, which is to say, before the State got involved in the personal relationships among consenting adults. Marriage was necessary to assure that children got raised in a stable environment.

Today, of course, marriage exists for everyone but the children, and as a result most kids get raised in broken homes. This book challenged me not only in its ideas about marriage but about couples. According to Russell, cohabitation was an ordinary activity between consulting adults about which the only laws necessary were contractual ones concerning property rights. Russell demystified sex for me, making it an activity no more unusual than eating and drinking. Sex was a basic human need, and you should arrange society accordingly.

My next influence made the issue of sex more complicated than this. The book was Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont. Here is where I learned about the Greek’s using three different words for love – Eros, Fidelia and Agape. This made perfect sense to me. But de Rougemont’s main point was harder to grasp.

Romantic love, he argued, is based on sin, infidelity and what is forbidden. The concept fascinated me. It was as if passion required a sense of danger, required obstacles to overcome – and indeed, in western literature from Romeo and Juliet to Tristan and Isolde, from Anna Karenina to The Bridges of Madison County, it was forbidden love that fueled the hottest flames.

I grappled with this theme in my own work, perhaps nowhere more successfully than in an unpublished short story from the mid-1970s, which is in my archive, called “Threesomes, Foursomes and the Like.” This begins as a story of infidelity but one of longing more than execution. A married man fantasizes about having an affair with a married woman with whom he is cast in a community theater production of Our Town (the very circumstances, you will recall, in which I met Faye). Before he attempts to literalize his fantasy, he learns that the object of his desire is already having an affair with their director. This bursts his bubble, and he becomes interested again in his wife. The story ends with their lovemaking:

After a tennis club swim and barbecue in horrid, humid August, I set up the projector on the nightstand to show movies over our bed and onto the far wall. With each film Sarah and I, naked at the foot of the bed, paid less attention to the parade of women with their vibrators and dildos, strangers in threesomes and foursomes and the like, and more to each other, until finally Sarah sat on me and offered her breasts, my joy. We began the rhythm that led to climax.

Suddenly Sarah said, “Look at the wall.”

Turned, I realized that the film had ended, that behind me the reel was spinning aimlessly, and I saw within the screen’s frame our own silhouettes, dark against the blue wall, like anonymous shadows waiting to be filled into flesh. I bucked and settled, exhausted.

Later Sarah said, “Maybe there are no failures of marriage at all. Maybe there are only failures of the imagination.”

I said nothing, and on this we slept.

Maybe there are no failures of marriage at all. Maybe there are only failures of the imagination. The Don Juan myth, to seduce one woman after another, is an endless, impossible task. Moving from one woman to another, as I did so often in my drinking days, is not a strategy for finding satisfaction or happiness, any more than moving from one town to another (“pulling a geographical,” A.A. calls it) solves any problems for an alcoholic. When the disease is in the heart and mind, in the soul, then treatment requires that these are the very things that get addressed.

I believe western culture has fallen victim to a plague of literality. Metaphor and symbol no longer breathe life into our existence. What we think, we must do – literally. We are so afraid of what we are missing that we try everything, aiming at experience like a madman with a shotgun, never stopping to reflect on what we are doing. Experience must be new. We must keep moving.

But erotic energy is most powerful when driven by mystery. I believe it is no accident that the divorce rate has gone up statistic-by-statistic with the proliferation of relationship theories, talk shows focusing on relationships, marriage counselors, and all the other rational attempts to make sense out of something that is essentially mysterious. There is a reason a man betrays a woman who is his wife and best friend in order to have a brief moment of fucking with a secretary he wouldn’t want to have an extended conversation with. If sex loses its mystery in marriage, then erotic mystery is sought somewhere else. Hence the brilliant ending of the movie Eyes Wide Shut, in which the wife reminds the husband of one important thing that must be done before their relationship can recover from events that challenged it: “There’s one more thing we must do.” “What?” “Fuck.” This is not resolution by talking but resolution by fucking. Biology rules.

Resolution by fucking. Erotic mystery is an escape from consciousness, a momentary return to our animal roots. Biology rules. Another book that influenced me suggested an eroticism beyond literal fucking that could reach the same mystical place. This was Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body.

I was introduced to Brown in a wonderful course in American Intellectual History that I took at UCLA. We read his earlier book Life Against Death and his essay, “Apocalypse: the Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind.”

Love’s Body embraces metaphor and mystery as the true basis for authentic living. Brown writes like a poet, and his book is full of memorable, thought-provoking lines:

· “Personality is the original personal property.”
· “To be is to be vulnerable.”
· “It’s not true unless it hurts.”
· “Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.”
· “To rise from history to mystery is to experience the resurrection of the body here now, as an eternal reality…”
· “War is war perverted. The problem is not the war but the perversion.”
· “The mad truth: the boundary between sanity and insanity is a false one.”
· “The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.”

Brown sees the error in western civilization as beginning with what he calls Protestant Literalism, with its subsequent loss of the sense of, and appreciation of, mystery, magic, miracle, and everything mystical in life. There is a similar sense of this loss in Andre’s long monologue in My Dinner With Andre. Where you don’t get a sense of it is in contemporary “new age” culture, which waters down the sense of revolution in Brown’s writing into a safe alternative ritual, just another religion, replacing good science with bad science. The existentialists, who were fashionable after World War II into the sixties, appreciate man’s condition as tragic, something to be overcome with heroic daring and self-definition, and are closer to Brown and his sense of mystical revelation and rebirth than new age culture.

A more recent summary of these matters is in the final book I will cite, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman. Berman writes, “…there is no such thing as purely discursive knowing, and the sickness of our time is not the absence of participation but the stubborn denial that it exists – the denial of the body and its role in our cognition of reality.”

To give verbal lip service to this concept is to give verbal attention to it, not to give bodily attention to it. This is the problem I have with people who congratulate themselves for being able to talk about their feelings, as if this were some kind of medal for mental health. It is just what it is – it is talking. It is not feeling. It is intellectual, not bodily. It is articulate, not inarticulate. In fact, a feeling is a feeling because it can’t be expressed – once it is expressed, it becomes a thought.

I belabor this point because I believe the culture in which I live is based on these and other false philosophical premises that lead directly to the great instability of our selves and our personal relationships. We have lost our sense of mystery. We have lost our sense of the terror of existence. We have lost humility in the face of unanswerable questions. We even have lost the ability to ask the questions.

The title character in my short story The Epistemological Uncle is based on a real person. Dick had an alcoholic relative whom I met as an old man sitting at the bar at the Lumberman’s Bar in Orofino. When he got drunk, the old man would start howling like a wild animal, the beast of epistemology, “Do you really knnnnoooowwww?!” I regard him as one of the sanest men I have ever met in my life because he knew exactly the right question to ask of life.

7/01/2003 05:52:00 AM | 0 comments

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After October 31, 2006, new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at