I commiserate with writers and novelists these days who are frustrated, confused, annoyed - if also preoccupied - with the problem of how to describe what is happening in the world today, right now, in this pop-cultural milieu given the relentless, unending stream of headlines, tweets, updates, announcements, news feeds, hot topics, gaffes, quarrels, fights, publicity stunts, weather stats, sports highlights, best-sellers, musical top 10s, celebrity -marriages -divorces, -arrests, ups and downs, oddities, freaks, flash-in-pans, flavor-of-months. These "vanishing moments" - one on top of the other - year after year - are enough to make my head spin... So what gives....what dwells... what resonates ...what survives...what endures that is worth writing about? How is it possible to provide the salient details, when those same details keep morphing, shifting, changing, transmigrating into more of the same (only different) forms of detritus for the mind?
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Living in the eye of the whirlwind or living in the whirl itself? Some have gone that extra step, when the pain of life is so unbearable we allow ourselves to be swept away, and view ourselves from the madness of the whirl and no longer even the center of the ego's eye. Those are the Hollywood used and they've gone all in, to be swept off the streets in the morning. Perhaps we put up with the whirl of pop culture to prevent ourselves from knowing ourselves again, one more day at the end of the road. Perhaps we insist upon it. Pray for the storm to pass and listen for the still, small voice.
On the other side of the whorl of subjective desires one must be plagued with the thought that there is objective reality. Especially since it has a way of reasserting itself. Fleeing far enough from reality leads to a little thing I like to call "hell on earth"TM. I've been thinking of a grand space opera as the modern vehicle for portraying this search for that which remains. Not sure I buy into that whole "the journey is the destination" idea, as I am wont to assert there is something to find, or even to find us. Was it Sun Tsu who wrote, "You may not be interesed in war, but war is interested in you."? If you look into the abyss, Sauron's eye might be looking back.
Part I of III, "Flight". Opening scene, a "whirlwind" has enveloped the entire planet, the weather is erratic, bizarre, torrential. The stars are falling from the sky. And the government is about to have to admit that all satellite communications have gone out. Our hero/anti-hero enters the stage to try to get to the bottom of things. Fancies himself a good guy, scientist, realist. Wife and a kid. Enter the extra-terrestrial "electric lady"TM, from a flash in the sky. She knows more. She is intrigued that the earth is spiraling out of the solar system normal to planetary orbit like a bullet from the barrel of a gun, only no gun. She's come to get to the bottom of things, before the Earth's sun is super-novaed.
I am intrigued by turning the sci-fi genre around a bit. Instead of assuming a star fleet academy sometime in the future, when money is abolished and non-intervention has been established (utopian), we begin right where we are today, as a human race, and with a little bit of inventiveness, open ourselves to a possible future, to reveal where we are today. Not just to disclose a poor philosopher's "dark secret"(TM Tom Sheehy) but to disclose the possibility of knowing reality, abandoning lies, and clinging to hope based on reality, as such. Setting the ground for the possibility of Good news while admitting the bad that makes it susceptible to ridicule. Nothing short of laying bare the gospel, which is of course why I am unfit to write it.
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