My Favorite Themes and the Power of Words

June 18, 2008 - Seattle
The June blog, dedicated to books and publishing, as it should, except for a note about Father's Day. Happy Father's Day, everyone!

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As I mentioned, I am reading A NEW EARTH by Eckhardt Tolle. My gosh, I've typed that name enough times I should know the spelling by heart.


I realize what follows may seem like extra promotion for a book that hardly needs it. Yeah, I should be talking and building the buzz about some deserving unknown author who has not been blessed by Oprah, with all the associated glory and goodness.


As happens with most people, I stumble upon little wise books usually when they are squarely in my face, emblazoned with the praise of recognizable names. Evidence, I might add, of the importance of branding. But more about that later.

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I like A NEW EARTH very much. Here are some nice pithy spoilers:

Negation of the female principle was necessary because conquest of the earth could only be achieved in the male form.

Ego and obsessive scheduling are hallmarks of a culture obsessed with achievement and material gain.

The individual pain-body associates conceptually with martyrdom, religion and spirituality, but results psychologically in contraction of the primal spirit in favor of the temporal ego.

The collective pain-body associates conceptually with activism and patriotism, but results in a us-versus-them mentality, nationalism, and ideology driven terrorism.

A lot of the book is even more abstract than the above. But the book actually goes beyond hippy mantra to provide a psychological explanation of the institutional and cultural paradigms that we now recognize as environmentally destructive and spiritually empty.

Hopefully I have convinced you that you have now absorbed the gist of this book and therefore need to find your new reading elsewhere, say in one of the books by Finial Publishing. What a great idea.

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I just got back from Oslo and Stockholm.

While in Oslo, I had a chance to see Jenny Holzer's word art at the Telenor office complex in Forneblu near Oslo.



The red letters under the eave of the building scroll such observations as:

LOVING ANIMALS IS A SUBSTITUTE ACTIVITY

ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED

YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY

ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN

Her scrolling digital messages can also be found at her site. I was mesmerized, watching a kind of ironic minimalist TV. Yeah, it's the artsy fartsy one in me that takes note of these things. But when you stop and think about the content we normally experience like:

JEEP RAM TUNDRA, THE WILD UNTAMED IN YOUR SUBURBAN SUV

HEAVY TRAFFIC AND INSANE VEHICULAR HOMICIDE, EXPECT DELAYS

You get the idea. Fact is, were it not for artists like Jenny Holzer, working for years with little recognition and renumeration, social communication would be just this commercial noise and perfunctory drone. What is encouraging though is that the small stories of our lives, told as scrolling corporate art or Oprah-ordained bestseller, do ring clear and true above the perfunctory drone...the power of words.

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All of which puts me on the defensive. After all, Eckhardt Tolle and Jenny Holzer touch on some of my favorite themes; I count them in my philosophical tribe.

But I can see people, some persons very close to me in fact, casting us as artsy fartsy dreamers, pretentious poets and spiritual quacks who mine our highly-developed pain-bodies to find clever, pretty ways of dissing everyone and everything. A conclusion that does not surprise me a bit.

Books and philosophy after all are not necessary factors in our closest relationships. I met my husband in a dance club and to this day my New Age predilection barely registers with him. My mother comments that my thinking is "Western", and I only vaguely understand what she means.

One of the most difficult things about publishing and writing is finding an appreciative audience. This is also one of the great things. Finding a reader who "gets it" makes it all worth it.

Virginia Woolf, for instance, is famous for novels like A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929) and ORLANDO (1928) which explore the inner life of women and androgyny. But it would be hard to imagine her work finding an appreciative audience in the cultures of Asia or the Middle East. Even the Christian literalists of America might condemn her novels as corrupting to family values and the work ethic.

So leave it to the Brits to help bring Woolf's literature to mainstream culture, even as an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie, where it continues to speak to the generations.