Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #32: Writing on Religion: The Stylite

BuddhistNuns

Some of my writing follows religious themes. I am constantly intrigued with what people believe and how religion affects their lives. I try not to be partisan. My religion is Christianity, but my writing recognizes a wide system of belief or lack of belief. One of my characters begins a prayer, "Lord Buddha, you know I don't believe in you." Religion takes many forms and includes many varieties and stripes of belief, from cool to lukewarm to overly-zealous. I am not hostile to religion, but then again I see the problems too much religious fervor brings about. Fundamentalism of any sort—whether it is a Baptist fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell or an atheist fundamentalist like Richard Dawkins—is not a good deal. Yet religion can make for interesting stories.

The next story in my publishing history was one about religious, titled "The Stylite."

Saint Simon the Stylite

What is a stylite? It's really weird. Stylites were monks who live on the top of platforms. That's it:  they lived on platforms set on poles up to forty feet from the ground. People sent food up to them and they lived on the poles in all kinds of weather, praying, meditating in their solitude, sometimes so many that the areas they lived in were called "forests." These were some of the excesses of piety that existed in the early days of Christianity—unbelievable to us but historically true.

Myrna is a devout girl who belongs to and identifies with the Orthodox Church. Her world is turned upside-down when her brother, Stephen, who lives alone in a house a short distance from where she lives with her parents, declares his intention to become a stylite. The family is alarmed when they can't talk him out of it. They call in the priest who says such behavior might have been a proper expression of devotion in the second century, but now it would amount to spiritual exhibitionism and would become a scandal to the church. He promises to talk to Stephen.

She goes to school the next day. Her friends ask her what her brother is doing. She hopes their priest has altered his inclinations, but when she drives home, she finds a crowd of reporters at his house. The story is all over the internet and on television. With horror, she realizes what this will mean for her at school, where she is popular. Her enemies will use it to brand her as weird. She will topple from her high place on the food-chain there. She despairs, not understanding why her brother would do such a thing. He has been loyal to the church, but never overly devout or pious. She, in fact, is the one who has stayed for different periods of time at convents and seriously entertained the idea of becoming a nun.

While contemplating this, she—like many people in the Bible and throughout Christian history—has a revelation.

Myrna has a date that night. Because of her commitment to religion and to perhaps becoming a nun someday, she has remained a virgin. She asks her boyfriend for a kiss before they head out to a barn dance. He notices the miniskirt she is wearing and says he better not because it might make him try to violate what he calls her "underwear rule"—meaning that underwear will not be removed—in other words, she does not intend to have sex with boys she dates. Myrna simply replies “Tonight you don’t have to worry about my underwear rule. I’m not wearing any.”

The next morning she goes to her brother and sends a note up to him. She will not be a nun, she tells him:  Stephen—I understand. I won’t go to the convent, ever again. I can’t be a nun now. I’m disqualified. It happened last night. I think you know what I mean. Please come down. She watches with relief as a rope comes down and her brother climbs it to the ground, abandoning his place on the stylite platform.

Religion is good in many ways; still, I can't help but thinking that when it leads to extreme asceticism—self-denial and the abrogation of pleasure in life—it isn't helping itself or anyone else—the very thing Stephen is trying to show his sister. Benjamin Franklin, whose views on religion were controversial, said he was in favor of people having faith as long it did some good for the human race. John Milton said he could not praise "a fugitive and cloistered virtue." My views lean toward this. Living on top of a platform is not the best way of showing your devotion toward the Divine—but there are a lot of other ways of showing devotion that are also wrong.

"The Stylite" appeared in a journal called Five Fishes, no longer in operation, but, happily, with an archive. You can read the story here. Some poems are featured first, you will need to scroll down to get to my story.

Read my latest book, Le Cafe de la Mort. Coffee to die for, served up by the Angel of Death.

I would love to hear your comments and questions.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #31: "Wolf Moon," Writing About Werewolves

If you write paranormal fiction, you will eventually deal with werewolves. Some really high-up people wrote about them. Rudyard Kipling had a story called "The Mark of the Beast," where a British guy defiles a Hindu temple and turns into a werewolf; but the other British guys torture the priest and he turns the guy back to a human. Great colonial story! Frank Norris, a socialist writer from the turn of the century wrote a story called Vandover and the Brute, about a businessman who periodically turns into a werewolf. So some major players in the world of literature took the genre on.

For me, it was movies starring Lon Chaney:  The Wolfman, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Abbot and Costello Meet the Monsters. Later came The Howling and, of course, that classic, An American Werewolf in London. Maybe the best one of them all was the 1957 film, I Was a Teenage Werewolf starring Michael Landon. I had never tried to write anything but then the idea for a mixed genre story came to mind and I started composing "Wolf Moon."

Michael Landon as a teenage werewolf

Werewolves, like vampires, are tormented by what has happened to them. They don’t' want to be caught up in a life that turns them into a monster, but they don't know how to get out of the situation. So they are lost, tormented souls who are very nice guys sometimes, but when the full moon emerges, watch out. There's a scene in Abbot and Costello Meet the Monsters where Bud is tied up by Dracula. Lawrence Tabot shows up to rescue him, but just then the full moon comes out from behind a cloud and he transforms scene. Bud is okay and at the end of the film Talbot the wolfman plunges into a lake after getting his vengeful hands on Dracula, who has just transformed to a bat.

"Wolf Moon" is the story of a group of alien slavers who capture some Terrans living on a remote planet. The captain of the ship is a little puzzled over them. They are the only humanoid inhabitants of the planet. They live in small houses and have modern accommodations but no communication equipment and supplies that look like they have been dropped off by a government or other agency. There are many more men than women.

The crew of the ship wants a woman and he gives them one. They plan to take her to a house on the planet they have landed on to refuel. The full moon on the wintry world makes the night bright, but the minute the crew of three drags the woman outside, she rips them apart and disappears into the frigid landscape.

The planet is part of the Italian League. In my sci-fi universe, there are still nation states on Earth and some of them maintain colonies. Italy is one of these. The Italians tell the slavers they need to leave at once, threaten to kill them if they won't and tell them the Terrans are werewolves. The captain doesn't understand the word, though he recognizes the word "wolf" in the compound. When he comes back on board, the other Terrans have escaped. They send him out to find the woman, saying they can't go out in the moonlight themselves. When he asks if this is a religious restriction they laugh at him. He finds the woman in a cave. She attacks him and tackles and scratches him before he is able to stun her with a blaster.

He wraps the naked woman in his coat and carries her back to the ship, wondering how she has survived the cold and wondering why, when he first saw her, she looked like a bear or some other upright-standing animal. The other Terrans care for her. Their leader tells him he will be required to take them back to their home planet. They also notice a scratch on his neck.

The captain is a Housali, a race with blue skin. The physician among them wondered if he will transform, but their leader reminds her that some of their numbers are not Terrans but come from other planets. She wonders if he'll have blue fur and starts to clean his wound. The ship is sealed up so no moonlight can get inside, but the Housali feels a wild stirring in his blood—something savage he had never felt before. He knows it lies outside, waiting for him, something frightening but also oddly appealing.

The journal in which this story was published is defunct. It does not have an archive. I've been marketing it to other journals, but with no success so far. 

A scary non-werewolf tale, Le Cafe de la Mort, 

is available from Amazon. 

 See more titles on my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments!

What's your favorite werewolf movie?

Where did the legend originate?

Werewolf is from Anglo-Saxon, but the legend goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. 

Revision note!  A journal called Grey Matter will be printing "Wolf Moon" in the near future.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #30: Evil and Experience: "The Seven Gates to Hell."

 

Tritone--the Devil's Chord

I've noted before that I'm a musician, a guitarist (and I play banjo and mandolin) and, as a result, much of my inspiration for stories comes from the world of music. I write about musicians and their experiences; a lot of my stories relate to songs and ballads. My story "The Seven Gates to Hell," came from the time I went into a small book store and picked up a guitar magazine. Thumbing through it, I encountered a full-page ad for a guitar player who seemed to be into some sort of occultism. The ad mentioned magic and how it operated in our lives. He was kind of a big guy with a beard and a shaved head and had shaped his hands into a contorted chord form on the fretboard of the guitar he was holding. Below him an advertisement for an LP (yes, they still had those in that day) said something about "Opening the Seven Gates of Hell."

 

The picture stuck in my mind, for some reason. Years later—quite a few years later—the idea for a story based on what I had seen and thought about it developed. I resurrected my old ongoing character, Sossity Chandler, since it would be a story about musicians. Sossity had fallen by the wayside in my writing career by that time. She had appeared in "Innerspace," which I thought was a good story (and got published in a high-class journal) and as a minor character in "Jergen Kouhaut's Blues." But for some reason, I had written stories about other things and not about her. This story, however, suggested Sossity:  her sharp, brooding energy, her expertise as a musician, and her success as a pop star.

She remembers seeing a picture (similar to the one I saw) when she first started playing at age 13 and sends her personal assistant to find a copy of the magazine. Her assistant manages to do this and Sossity starts trying to find information on the person in the advertisement. His name is Marius Cumberland from Illinois. She manages to contact someone who knew him, obtains a copy of his old cassette tape, has her tech people transfer to CD, and listens:

The music was a little creepy, she reflected, with lots of dissonances, chord jumps, distortion and inversion. She noted that he used the augmented fourth, which in the Middle Ages was called diabolus in musica—in fact, she noted, he used it so much its repetition annoyed her. The Devil’s music, she thought, the tritone formation that was actually banned in the by the Church back then. Obviously he wanted to invite the devil along on his musical journey down the seven paths. She admired his rapid-fire riffs, savvy improvs, the chord combinations and tonalities he achieved. But in all of this she got no sense of the Seven Paths to Hell. Music, she reflected, smacking her lips as she enjoyed a good glass of Traminette, militated against evil and hell by its very nature. Despite what medieval theologians who detected the devil in a chord structure or TV evangelists who said rock music rolled to Satan’s rhythm might believe, music created beauty and form. Trying to make music evil was a herculean task—maybe it could be done, but if anyone had succeeded doing this she had never heard the finished product. And Marius Cumberland had certainly not achieved anything like this. The fact that his music gave her pleasure and not pain proved as much.

Sossity's idea of what constitutes evil is conditioned by things she has read and learned. True evil militates against pleasure. She rejects Renaissance idea that evil is liberating. She believes in "the banality of evil." People she knew who tried to be evil—and she had a few friends who had become occultists or anarchists—were generally tacky, ridiculous, and deluded. Evil did not empower, it desiccated. It disabled the human spirit. There was nothing enlightening or emancipating about it.

She eventually makes contact with Marius (whose real name is Mark) and meets him at Dayton, Ohio, when she plays a fund-raising concert there. The years have changed him. He does not look so sinister now. He looks old and shrunken. She asks him if he is still into occultism and magic. He says no, tells her he has gone back to the nominal Mormon religion of his younger days and had to spend many years undoing the damage his involvement in occultism had done. It had split up his marriage. He worked now as a postal clerk and did not play guitar much. She arranges to re-release his tape, though she suggests a different title—something to which he agrees. She later reflects on the nature of music, good, and evil.

The story appeared in Ranfurly Review, which has ceased publication but has an archive. Here is a link to "The Seven Paths to Hell." (Note: it is a PDF file, so you will have to scroll down to page 40 in the text.)

For more reading in this vein, check out my latest book, Le Cafe de la Mort.  Coffee to die for served up by the Angle of Death. 

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #29: "The Wood of the Suicides"

"The Wood of the Suicides" is one of the two stories by me that were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Every year, a book of award-winning stories and poems is published—a very thick volume—and constitutes what is considered the best writing of the year in English.  Nominations are supplied by magazines and journals, and even to be nominated for one is considered an honor. I've been nominated three times (one poem, two stories), though none of the nominations has landed my writing in the Pushcart volume. Maybe someday . . .

The story under discussion here originally appeared in a journal called Four-Cornered Universe, which folded after about a year. I let the story sit but 1) since I don't write a lot of science fiction; and 2) since I thought the story was a good one and wanted people to read it, I decided to work on it and resubmit the piece.

 

Dore's Illustration of Dante

"The Wood of the Suicides" was inspired by Dante's Inferno. When Dante and Virgil visit the area of hell where the violent are tormented for their sins, they come to a place of punishment for suicides, those who are violent against themselves. The suicides are turned into trees. The trees resemble humans somewhat; you can see faces on them and you can identify them as male and female. They can talk to you. The deeper their roots go down, the more their pain; and harpies, mythical creatures who are half-human and half-bird, perch in their branches and tear at them, pulling off the bark and drawing blood (reminiscent of a section of Virgil's Aeneid). I had read Inferno in an issue that carried French illustrator Gustave Dore's woodcuts, and the one of the Wood of the Suicides stuck in my mind as particularly gruesome.

But my story was not about hell. I thought, What if such a punishment was used not to torment but to rehabilitate? What if the purpose of doing so was both benevolent and retributive?

"The Wood of the Suicides" is told from the point of view of a Terran soldiers stationed on a remote but strategic planet at the edge of Terran space. The planet is inhabited by a race of beings called the Anva. They are a quiet, unassuming people. Their skills in such areas as medicine and agriculture are more advanced than any other race of beings in the galaxy. And they have a unique way of dealing with murderers.

Cullen, the main character, has a sister, Bria, also a soldier, who has murdered someone. The Anva turn her into a tree, their standard sentence for murderers. Upon returning from a deployment, Cullen's wife tells him the Anva have informed them that Bria's term of "rooting" (imprisonment in the form of tree) has ended and she is to be released. They set a time for him to pick her up. When he and his wife arrive, they are surprised at a couple of things:

After a short while, two priestesses came in with Bria. Two things startled him [Cullen] so much he stood up.

One, she was naked.

But even more than that, she was green.

He gaped. It embarrassed him to see his sister bare. He had thought the change of clothing would be for after she took off prison clothes. Instead, she had no clothing at all. And what also amazed him was her apparent lack of concern about it. She did not attempt to cover herself.  Her eyes looked bright, her face intelligent (if a little solemn); she did not seem drugged or incapacitated in any way. She stood there with her arms to her side as if being nude were the most natural and logical thing in the world and nothing to wonder at.

Cullen and Kassa, his wife, dress Bria and take her home. She asks him if it's "okay" that she's green and says her color will never revert to what it was before. The next day she tells about what it was like to be a tree. In a sense, it was beautiful living an elemental life, feeling the rain, snow, cold and heat. But being a tree was simple. Only one life system functioned. As a human being, you had eight or nine systems working simultaneously. Bria has learned, from the transitions her journey has taken her through, how complex and miraculous a human being is—and has taught her the crime of destroying another human life in all its glorious complexity. Her green coloration will never go away. It will always remind her of what she has done. This is the Anva way of dealing with murderers.

"The Wood of the Suicides" turned out to be an adventure in the imagination. It depended on an existing literary source but took the idea in new directions—which is a primary mode of creative endeavor, at least as I see it. And this one got an award!

Read "The Wood of the Suicides" in Empty Oaks. Scroll down to page 32.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

A great Halloween read is Le Cafe de la Mort. Coffee to Die For, Lady Death from Sandman

to serve you--along with Joe Black, Misa Amane,

Lady Death from "Appointment in Samara," and a mysterious Israeli woman who may be the Angel of Death from the book of Exodus.

I would love to hear your comments.