Day Of Grace, Decades Of Assurance

I’ve had a lot of satisfying creative experiences while traveling this peculiar and sometimes baffling path I’ve chosen. A lot of kicking at dirt clods and falling blind drunk into ditches, too, but never mind those. Of the highlights, I can think of only two that I would be eager to re-experience afresh, if such a thing were possible … if, say, someone put out a home kit where you could pop the lid of your own skull and poke around with an electrode to stimulate memories.

One ranks up there for reasons that are more Hunter S. Thompson than anything, and doesn’t belong here. The other, though, a seeming product of the favor of angels or demigods, has always stood for me as an affirmation of what may be possible for any writer, allowing for a brush with that elusive energy some call grace.

It was a novelette titled “As Above, So Below,” and I wrote it as the capstone for my second story collection. At over 23,000 words, it wasn’t a quick dash from beginning to end — there was time and complexity enough to fall deep deeper deepest into it — and it wasn’t light material. It was about a guy who’d come to the end of countless incarnations and was the first to become … what comes next.

Four years ago I saw someone on an online forum pay me a compliment that I don’t expect to ever be bettered: “This was the story that got me to seriously consider that Hodge is some kind of literary shaman.”

I don’t mention that out of self-aggrandizement, or to try to drum up a few bucks in royalties. Used copies of out-of-print books don’t generate royalties, and the piece has never been reprinted — one of the perils of droning on for 23,000 words — although it was selected to hold down 1998 in a century’s best anthology that’s been due out … oh, any decade now.

Instead, this was a compliment for subtler cause than what it may look like on the surface. And I repeat it because I know no other way of conveying the degree to which it clicked that someone, somewhere, felt in the reading what I’d felt in the writing.

More specifically, in the completing.

That is what I would relive, if I could.

I finished it late on a spring afternoon, and soon went for a walk in the park we lived near. How to convey the numinous character of that walk…? I doubt I can, entirely.

• But imagine moving through a landscape at half-speed, without quite touching the ground, yet seeing, feeling, every molecule of earth and air. Like that.
• If the angel of death — Neil Gaiman’s version, preferably — walked up and held out her hand and said, “You have to come with me now,” I wouldn’t have argued that it couldn’t be time, that there was more to do. Because, right then, there wasn’t. Like that.
• Celtic legends tell of hapless folk who walk between just the right pair of trees, or past the right mound, and end up in some other realm, and don’t return for years, even though they swear they were only gone one night. Like that.
• A sense that doorways had been opened and anything could come through, could happen, and whatever it was, it would be exactly right. Like that.

Like all that. Times ten. Twenty. More.

I don’t know what made this one so different, so transcendent. The feeling took a few hours to fade. I’ve never experienced anything like it since, although it hasn’t been for a lack of longing, or identical habits, more or less. I’ve dug as deep in other works. Toiled the same feverish hours. Felt the same push and pull to the end. There’s nothing else to try, and that’s probably just as well. Addicts kill themselves trying to recapture a high like this.

In tribal cultures, the shaman is the one apart who rides the beat of a drum all the way to another world, and comes back with something for the good of one or all. Information. Insight. The lost pieces of somebody’s soul.

It’s not usually a role that’s sought, but instead accepted, sometimes only after fierce reluctance, an acquiescing to the demands of forces that won’t take no for an answer and keep hammering until they get their way. If you write for anything other than the shallowest reasons — the old line about sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper until blood comes out of your forehead springs to mind — then that insistent knocking probably sounds familiar.

I’ve heard, too, that in tribal cultures that had only an oral tradition, the written word was initially regarded as an act of sorcery. A thought set down here could be picked up there, verbatim, no matter how much time had elapsed.

An experience like I had with that singular novelette makes me think this wasn’t wrong. It has served as a lifetime reminder of just how potent, how world-shifting, that magic can be.

The thorn in this, however, is having to accept that you can’t force magic to happen. The best you can do is open yourself up to the wonder of process, to the possibility of awe, to the forces beyond and the inexplicable give and take at their core, and if the magic — the deep, resonant, transcendent magic — happens, it happens.

But if it doesn’t…? Assuming you’ve done everything else as right as you can, you should still finish with something to be proud of.

I want to say there’s always next time … but that seems too expectant, maybe a whiff demanding, and that would be wrong.

Maybe we only get one or two of these experiences per path, per life, if that, and their value is a factor of their scarcity rather than the likelihood of repeating them like party tricks. Maybe their worth lies in how long they continue to glow inside, like that first declaration from someone you dared to love who whispered that they loved you back.

If we’re touched by grace, maybe once is all we really need.

Because when it’s real, it doesn’t rub off. It lingers, a lasting confirmation that maybe, just maybe, the path where it has found us is the right one.

***** Why stop now? You are invited to segue over to my blog, Warrior Poet, which explores writing and storytelling from the timeless perspective of the warrior poet ethos. Currently on tap, “You’re Not Getting Worse. You’re Just Seeing Farther Ahead.”

[Photo by Michael Hodge]