Also, just in case anyone is missing out, I invite you to look at the comments posted after the previous entry on this blog, where you'll find the vindication of my Tolkien tantrum and the verdict on Cymbril.

But anyway, to the nitty-gritty of this posting -- I came across the following quote earlier this evening. It's talking about the cathedrals of Europe:

"The divine presence lives in nature, in space, and in light, and the cathedrals brought these elements together in such a magnificent way that even today modern man, so cut off from his own divine nature, can still feel them." -- Janet Brennan, "The Cathedral Code," Fate, December 2006

When I read those lines, they resonated with me. I felt they provided a clear elucidation of the reason I love caves and caverns so much. Nature, space, and light. When I think of the most holy places I've ever seen (churches aside), I have to nod in acknowledgment. Those three elements are always present. The barn I played in as a child: a lofty, dusky space, scented with fragrant hay and old wood, suffused with the green glow of light falling through Virginia creeper leaves. The barn was built by man, but nature had embraced it and encroached upon it, peeking in at all its windows, skittering across its plant-sprouting floors. And then caves: Grand Central Station in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky -- a place where soaring passages come together, an enormous space in the deep Earth, with towering boulders dim in the distance, a shadowed ceiling high above -- a place made by the hand of God. Nature, space, and light. Some of my favorite places in Mammoth Cave are the grand stairways, where the path ascends flight after flight of stairs, all within a gargantuan chamber.

In The Lord of the Rings, my favorite setting by far is the mines of Moria. How I would love to have seen it when it was Khazad-dum, during the noontide of Dwarrowdelf, before Durin's folk disturbed the Balrog! Nature, space . . . and light -- for it's the dim lighting that makes the place so alluring. The Chamber of Mazarbul: we've got indirect lighting filtering in from outside. That was an ideal I strove for in my years of designing dungeon for my Verralton campaign: echoing halls in the Earth, dimly-lit by filtered sunlight through fissures or from various haunting sources of light. (For anyone who may be going "Huh?!" right about now, I'm talking about Dungeons & Dragons.)

That got me to thinking about my writing. Dragonfly was written when I was in my early twenties, and (I'd like to believe) it still holds up pretty well. My second novel, called (in various drafts) Lachii or The Fires of the Deep, was an absolute disaster. I labored away on it for five years before I ever showed it to anyone. When an editor and two agents rejected it, I went on laboring away on it in isolation, striving to bring it to "perfection" before I ever let it out of the nest again. And it became, as I later described it, "like a clan of inbred hillbillies" -- worked over, re-worked, and re-worked so many times, with no input from anyone but me, that it got to the point where I couldn't even see it anymore. The world in which it's set had become intimately familiar to me. But that world is vastly different from our own, and the more I lived in it, the less capable I became of communicating it to people who didn't live there. In the draft I eventually let some friends read, I realized that, in a single sentence, there might be four or five specialized terms of which only I knew the meaning. Oh, I provided a glossary, yes indeed, a magnificent opus that I worked on night and day. But as one friend commented, "Do you realize that a third of this book is glossary?" Um, oops.

What was missing from the book, I now know, was light. The "nature" was there: a subterranean world, echoing and epic in every way, built directly upon my childhood love of caves. The "space" was there: endless, miles-wide corridors called dulons, large enough to fly airships through without getting anywhere near the world-walls (Shur) or the ceiling (Ra). The world was built -- elaborately built. Just as Inuits have all those words for different kinds of snow, my Hurlim people have many different words for stone: lodin are the dry boulder fields; kalodin are the huge, dry boulders; lys is wet, living stone; lysshur is a wet, living stone wall; losshur is a dry wall; los is dead, dry stone. There were abundant folk sayings that made sense in the context of the Hurlim world: "He's on a skurl under the needles." "That'll happen when los becomes lys." "Hey there, all! What's in the bucket?"

Yes, the world was painstakingly built. Yet it still didn't feel alive. Somehow, it seemed all merely academic -- a theory.

I know now what was missing.

Light.

I'm not saying this is true for all fantasy writers, but what's revealed in that Janet Brennan quote above is certainly true for me. The triangular equation is nature, space, and light. When the three are present, I can build a setting that feels real, that invites the reader to come in. (The hot Orcharan sands of the Arena seem to work for test readers of "Here About to Die.") But in my Hurlim world of Ama, I was trying to manage without light. The Hurlim people rely on a sense called yla, which is also an energy that flows through the Earth, emanating from the core. It passes through all spaces and solid objects, bearing a record of all it has passed through. Hurlim eyes, attuned to the yla, can read in it the distances and the surface textures, but it is a sense wholly apart from color. Water appears opaque: if calm, it appears as a flat surface; if rippling, it appears to ripple -- but nothing can be seen beneath the surface; hence, the Hurlim fear of water, which seems solid, but which can swallow the unwary traveler who sets foot on it.

In contrast, look at Dragonfly -- also set in a subterranean world -- yet one in which the descriptions (though often horribly overdone -- hey, I was a kid, cut me some slack) are vivid. Dragonfly, for all its dimness, is full of light: torchlight, jack-o'-lantern light, firelight, balloon-light, moonlight, starlight. . . .

The lesson to be learned is this: when a writer doesn't have light to work with, his/her hands are tied. Imagine an artist trying to paint a picture of a landscape without light! Take any book in which the settings are vibrant, in which you can picture everything so clearly that you feel you're there, living inside the scene -- and then notice how light makes those descriptions possible. See what I mean?

Maybe it seems elementary to you, a principle that we wouldn't need all these words to arrive at. But for me to realize it, I had to write draft after draft of an enormous novel. The hardest thing I've ever done as a writer was trying to tell a story without light. In the next draft of The Fires of the Deep, you can be sure I will have found a way to introduce light into the Hurlim world -- and we'll have the shadows and the dimness and the glimmers and the silhouettes -- to give the characters a vivid setting in which to live and breathe.

The act of writing any story, to use Tolkien's term again, is an act of sub-creation. We rearrange elements God has provided and stack them up in our own way, in our own tiny corner of the universe. Looking back to our prime model, the original Creation: it began with "Let there be light." Seems to me that's the way to begin.

Muchas veces al recorrer las librerías, busco en la primera página de los libros algo que me atraiga; la intensa condensación de una obra poderosa, la estela de una voz que toca alguna cuerda sensible; la nota justa en el lugar justo. Otras veces, leo un comentario en el diario o escucho al pasar una conversación y sé de inmediato sin mayor información, que esa historia o ese escritor es para mí, que tengo conseguir ese libro o algo muy malo me va a pasar, que una parte de mi estará incompleta y que, ahora que estoy avisado, será sólo mi culpa. Así que me dejo llevar por esa corriente que me lleva de una isla a otra, y luego a un  pequeño archipiélago, y luego a otro, tal vez del otro lado del océano. Naturalmente las leyes del inconsciente ya no pueden ser novedad para nadie, pero encontrar las raíces profundas de un gusto como este sorprende siempre como una revelación íntima, y por lo tanto, algo incómoda.

Desde chico, siempre me sorprendió la historia de un hombre que al llegar a la costa de un afluente del amazonas desarmó, o en rigor ordenó desarmar -lo que no es un dato menor- el barco y volvió a armarlo en la costa opuesta para continuar el viaje por otro río. Supe después que durante la filmación de esta historia, Herzog logró una proeza análoga: subir el barco -ordenó subir-, un auténtico barco, a una montaña –en realidad una pendiente pronunciada-. Yo era un niño y no entendía sabía bien de qué se trataba, pero sabía que en esa historia había algo mío, como en un sueño se descubre una verdad secreta. 

Después, Kafka. Me gusta Kafka por varias razones, pero ahora veo que una de las más importantes es la de que pone a sus personajes ante misiones imposibles (la banalidad inicial de la anécdota no altera este hecho). Mensajeros que tienen que atravesar un palacio y una ciudad (infinitos a todos los efectos prácticos), burocracias invisibles e impenetrables. In. Im. Ya quisieran ellos tener un barco que arrastrar por tierra.

Bernhard. Un filósofo o matemático tiene un proyecto delirante. Construye un Cono habitable en el centro geométrico del bosque de Kobernaus, un "entorno inhumano", de dimensiones "inhumas". En Helada, un estudiante de medicina es enviado a observar y documentar la conducta de un viejo pintor demente exiliado en el corazón de los Alpes. En La Calera, el protagonista se recluye en una fortaleza  para entregarse por entero a un estudio “filosófico-científico” del oído humano, cuya primera página nunca escribirá.  En El Malogrado, un pianista de talento se marchita hasta la aniquilación luego de escuchar la interpretación genial de una pieza musical. La idea, espero, se entiende.

Millhauser, de nuevo: a diferencia de los personajes de Bernhard que emprenden una obra imposible, los suyos construyen obras posibles hasta volverlas imposibles. No basta con crear un autómata que imite a la perfección al ser humano; pronto querrá lograr también su imperfección, de modo riguroso, que es la perfección, inalcanzable, de su arte. No bastará con crear un parque de diversiones que satisfaga las ilusiones y fantasías de sus visitantes; deberá también reempazar el mundo en el que viven. No alcanzará con lograr la emoción de casi perder la vida a manos de un lanzador de cuchillos. El secreto será naturalmente, perderla del todo.

Beckett, con sus personajes que no van a ninguna parte, se arrastran en ningún lado, esperan a nadie, pero, van, se arrastran, esperan. ¿Es forzarlo mucho? No me parece. Forzarlo mucho sería sumar a Dostoievski, por ejemplo, con sus personajes bigger than life (¿alguien conoce una expresión en castellano tan buena o mejor que esa?), pues ya el objeto de esa pasión es menos claro. Evidentemente hay algo de superhombre en todo esto, o de técnica provocante, al decir de heidegger, pero no es lo fundamental. Recomendable sobre este punto es la escena del documental Burden of Dreams sobre la filmación de Fitzcarraldo, en la que el ingeniero le explica que no se puede subir el barco con el sistema de poleas que estaban preparando porque podría costarle la vida a varios de los indios que como parte de esa enorme  máquina de empujar “¿Cuántos?” pregunta Herzog.

Pero no es sólo eso. Es más bien la sensación de estar pedaleando en una bicicleta fija, de llegar a destino sólo para que se abra otro camino, y aún así elegirlo, porque no se encuentra otra forma mejor de ser humano y que incluso al máximo de nuestras posibilidades no somos más que seres trágicos y banales, pero nos tomamos con una seriedad suicida.

Todo esto me lo reveló un cuento de Millhauser en el que un miniaturista de la corte intenta superar su arte con piezas cada vez más pequeñas. Llevado al extremo, el artista consigue lentes de aumento pues la simple mirada desnuda no hace justicia a su arte. Pronto ni con el lente alcanza ya. Y sin embargo, el viejo maestro sigue del otro lado del vidrio, sin ver nada, convencido de que su mundo está allí, con todos sus detalles, con sus pequeños, invisibles cerrojos, y cajones más pequeños que la cabeza de un alfiler.