Trains of Trust--Drawing on the Imagination

At age 17 I heard an imaginative phrase in a popular song that has stayed with me ever since.  The song was called “Stoned Soul Picnic” by a vocal group, The Fifth Dimension. It was written by a song writer named Laura Nyro. You might not have heard of her, but if you listen to sixties music, you’ve heard songs she wrote:  “And When I Die,” done by Blood, Sweat and Tears; “Eli’s Coming,” Three Dog Night; “Sweet Blindness,” Fifth Dimension; “Stoney End,” Barbra Streisand. She sang and release albums, but she is much better known as a song-writer.

Laura Nyro

The phrase I heard was “trains of trust.” 

The lyric in "Stoned Soul Picnic" went as follows:

                                There’ll be trains of blossoms (there’ll be trains of blossoms)

                                There’ll be trains of music (there’ll be music)

                                There’ll be trains of trust, trains of golden dust

                                Come along and surrey on sweet trains of thought

The other things she mentioned that there would be “trains of”—blossoms, music, golden dust, and thought—I could envision. You might have a train or string of flowers, a train or sequence of musical compositions, a train or column of golden dust floating through the air. Everyone has trains of thought. But what did she mean by “trains of trust”?

I thought about it and pondered it for years. I still don’t know what it means. But I do know it is beautiful and imaginative. Imaginative images such as this one are the key to writing—to writing a song, a poem, or fiction. Imagination is especially necessary to writing speculative fiction.

Early in his career, Neil Gaiman was given an assignment by the BBC to write a screenplay about homelessness.  He wrote Neverwhere. That novel is a fantasy, one of my favorites, and one of the best, in my opinion. But is it about homelessness? Gaiman didn’t do a straight-up drama about people living on the streets. He wrote about an imaginative world that exists in tandem with the real world of London. There are vampires, monsters, angels, supernatural beings, magic, and sorcery. But is it about homelessness?

Old Bailey in Neverwhere

Yes. Homeless people get Richard into London Below from London Above (does this suggest class?). The people there are poor, shabby, and live in abandoned cellars, on the streets, and in deserted buildings. They barter rather than buying and selling. There is violence and danger. They live in quasi-tribal groups and exchange favors as a kind of currency. They dress outlandishly in clothes that don’t match and are too big. They live, like the Marquis of Carabas, in lean-to huts. Much of the pain, anger, and displacement that the homeless know can be seen in the citizens of London Below. Gaiman’s use of imagination made for a more powerful statement on homelessness than if he had done a straightforward story about it. And it became, in its novel form, a best-seller.

Anyone who has read speculative fiction knows the imaginative creations of Lewis, Tolkien, Heinlein, and James Oliver Rigney—add the name of your favorite here. Imagination is key to successful speculative writing. In my own novella, Strange Brew, a 1970s rock singer who has opened for the Rolling Stones meets up with a witch. Witch and rock singer make for some real imaginative passages. In The Sorceress of the Northern Seas, I get to do world-building with a mix of sorcery, goddesses, the Romans and Celts, and a girl to whom nature is more than willing to grant magical powers.

Door from Neverwhere

How do we gain imagination? We encounter it. We read books and we watch films and we take chances in our writing. To write imaginatively, to walk the line between something being dazzlingly innovative (like Stardust, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or Stranger in a Strange Land) or silly, overdone, and bombastic (no examples here, but you’ve encountered them) is to know what truly imaginative writing looks like. I wish there were a short cut, but there is not.

Let your imagination run wild. But imagination

can run in the wrong direction and it can get lost

in elaborate world-building that is often not in

the least imaginative--not to say no fun to read

--not to say boring. If you let your imagination

run wild, know something about the shape of the track.

Check out this link and more (on Amazon). 

I think this and all my writing quite imaginative.

The Present Mother in Absent Mother Literature

If you study literary criticism, you will quickly learn about the absent mother in literature. Feminist critics have pointed out that in many great works of literature, by men and by women, the mother is absent. She is mostly dead, sometimes missing, or unknown. But she is not there, not present, not often a character in the narrative.

Death of Kathy in Wuthering Heights

The critics suggest that this is because many authors fear a strong female character. Let’s face it. Mothers have a lot of power, a lot of influence. Mothers shape lives. They exert a powerful influence over their children. They are personalities to be reckoned with. In a society where patriarchy is the norm, where men are given the advantage at all times, such a figure threatens the dramatic mix. So it’s easiest to get rid of mothers. So mothers are dispensed with in written literature, television, and in film.

You could find many examples, but here are some familiar ones. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte kills mothers off almost instantly. It covers three generations, and all the mothers are dead soon after their children are born. In Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet has a mother, but the main female character, Ophelia, does not. We get no word on what happened to her. Ophelia has a brother and a father. Of course, if she is going to be dominated by her father, bossed around by her brother, and finally driven insane, she can’t have a strong, loving, powerful mother to go to for refuge. So get rid of the mother. On the paranormal side, the mother is gone in Carmilla. This early vampire novel has a father raising a daughter—like so many other novels. In TV, the venerated Andy Griffith Show followed suit on absent mothers. Andy was a widower. Opie had no mother. In their place was the fussy, virginal Aunt Bee. And so it goes.

Helen Bonham Carter as Opehia

I post this because Mother’s Day, a holiday celebrated in the US and many other nations, just passed by. Can writers of speculative fiction reverse the absent mother trend? I’d like to think so. Very often, the strong women we see in speculative fiction are not mothers. And very often the mother is absent. Hunger Games has a mother who turns out to be strong in the end. There are strong mother figures here and there, but we need many more of them.

I’ve tried to write some strong female characters and have included mothers in this category. In my full-length novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas, the main character, Lybecca, has a mother, Editha, who is gentle, kind, and who has turned her back on magic. Yet she has a profound influence on Lybecca’s life—an influence that keeps her daughter from being sucked into the evil sorcery that is so appealing and teaches her to use magic for goodness and justice. Editha’s mother, Devonna, is a powerful sorceress who shapes her daughter’s life in a way Devonna regrets. Eventually, she is highly influential on her granddaughter. I tried to create these powerful women, who do not die and are not absent.

Speculative fiction writers, women and men, have offered the world some strong female characters. I hope we can also oppose patriarchal trends and create mothers who are powerful, influential, and important. It will be a revolution if we are able to do this.

Check out The Sorceress of the Northern Seas and encounter some strong female characters, mothers and women who are not mothers—but all powerful and human.