Thomas Sullivan

Beware the Ides of March…plus two. March 17^th. A fateful day on my calendar. Yeah, I know, it’s also Happy St. Green’s Day and somewhere in the mongrel mix of my past there was enough Irish inbreeding going on to keep the name Sullivan circulating, so why shouldn’t March 17^th be significant? But the Sullivan ancestry was left more or less hanging a few generations back when they couldn’t find one of us to hang in person. We got thrown off the geographical isle of Ireland for crossing the denominational aisle of the church – love trumps all – and as I hear it there was a little matter of a grudge against us on account of a priest happened to be standing in the way of a well-aimed bullet, and by the time the parishioners found a rope my significant forebear was headed to the New World (see first hardcover: THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON). After my daughter revisited the Emerald Isle and returned unscathed, I went there myself in fiction (see current paperback: THE WATER WOLF). The Sullivan men have always been cowards, but their women are fierce.

No, the Ides of March Plus Two thing started in 1964 when I missed my event in the swimming Nationals. Almost every year since, something major has happened in my life on or about March 17^th. Sometimes it’s a disaster, sometimes it’s sublime. But this essay won’t travel very far, if I start telling you about that. My focus is on the fact that there is such a date in my life, and that I’ve noticed the fateful twists connected with it.

I don’t consider myself superstitious – I’m a mind over matter guy – but I pick up all kinds of cues and omens. That is, I pick up patterns, coincidences, repetitions. Whether or not they are cues or omens is strictly how you choose to interpret them. Linguistic patterns will catch my notice. Repeated colors, sounds, sense details of any kind. And spoken thoughts. Particularly those. But also behavioral things – someone going to a window twice, or keying off someone else in conversation, or lifting on their toes, or drumming their fingers. Or consciously trying too hard not to reveal anything, which always says a great deal. I will pick up tones that way, emotional coloring. If it repeats, I will probably notice it.

What patterns do you notice? Figure that out and you probably get a handle on who you are. We turn our receptors on for those patterns and combinations that are important to us not just to survive but to thrive. What is your radar set for? What are you looking for in life – self-esteem, power, control, wealth, health, sex, love? All of the above? Some of that radar is hard-wired, some of it acquired. Some of those receptors for your wants are knee-jerk, some of them are conditioned. The acquired and the conscious we build ourselves with whatever inner strength, organization and discipline we have. Hmmm. That rules out writers.

Or not. Actually, for all our lack of conformity, writers must have something pretty intense driving them in order to stay afloat on the lonely oceans of rejection and uncharted directions. We work in a vacuum. Some writers do that methodically, others by maintaining a comfortable level of unfettered chaos. But we remain free and independent. We set the rules and we work for ourselves. Sounds good, but it’s a helluva struggle for most artists. Sub in “writers” for “cowboys” when you sing “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…” Add cowgirls – or is a “cowgirl” redundant? Point being, whatever it is your soul is hunting for, your reflexive radar and your manually controlled radar are necessarily aimed at it. And the more intense and dynamic you are, the less likely you are to sit back passively and wait, so the more you probably favor manual control.

That’s the part I’m interested in – the part over which we have control. I think creative people have to consciously control their radar, because they can’t just accept life, they have to reinvent it. They dream aloud. Ditto soulful people. Ditto lifelong idealists, after they reach the point where they collide with the imperfect world. Oh, Lord, is this going to be heavy. Feel free to bail, ‘cause hot damn, just because I’ve never successfully said this in my whole life isn’t going to keep me from trying. People on automatic are – well – single-minded, predictable, stable, trusting. The ones I know like that seem to live life more easily. Bless ‘em. I’m one of the cursed. I dream aloud. So I need to notice the patterns so that I can reinvent life.

If you read my earlier essays on the languages of emotions, things & events, and ideas, this is how that theory occurred to me – through picking up patterns. In growing up (…yeah, yeah, did Sullivan ever grow up) I think emotions were the first thing on my radar screen. Not what was being said, but how it was being said. The tone and color. The subtext. Little kid living in too many countries before he was six, waking up at first light and trying to remember what house he was in (I still have trouble remembering where I’ve recently been), inscrutable languages – a babble – all around me – so I listened to something other than what the words meant. And second on my radar screen was things & events as one, and then ideas, and I didn’t come back to tones (emotions) until fairly late in the game of maturing. I don’t think I knew how to articulate emotions. They existed in the soup of my subconscious, suppressed by logic and not to be trusted. It was women who taught me to analyze emotions. But I still don’t trust them (emotions not women). I was that person sitting tight, trying not to give away too many clues about myself. When I learned to hide by not hiding, but by getting in people’s faces so that I could control who I appeared to be, it was a whole new ballgame. I could really interact then. And I made a living playing poker for a while and betting horses. Neither was a compulsion. Poker was people, horses were athletes, and I was reading both. I don’t think the horses gave a damn who I was pretending to be, but I’ve noticed that stallions don’t like me and mares are indifferent.

It was a long time before I really understood just how far off life’s highway and into the ditch I was. Am. Most people walk down the middle of the road. Most people take things at face value and don’t mess around with the unlikely possibilities. I guess I thought everybody picked up patterns, that we were all tuned to shadows and echoes. But then again, most people aren’t writers, or musicians, or painters, or film-makers, or even soulful or lifelong idealists.

And it seems to me that as writers that is the heart of our specialty – finding patterns, repetitions. We look into our imaginations for analogous situations of what we know. We hold up mirrors for reflections. And we throw characters into circumstances that imitate the patterns we find in life. We need to milk every connection and meaning by recognizing the values, morals, ideals, flaws, ironies, lessons etc. that we can dig out of life’s content. If it isn’t common, if it doesn’t repeat, if it isn’t universal, our readers won’t recognize it. So we have to recognize it first and recreate the pattern in a lucid enough way to be communicated. We edit life. Can’t edit what you can’t recognize, analyze, internalize.

We do it with themes more than style, because style isn’t generally valued for that. It should be, and in enduring literature it is – not that mine is enduring – but a lot of publishing aims at escapist stuff, the next plot permutation, and sometimes style is quite immaterial to that segment of the market. Pattern/repetition in style doesn’t have to be profound, or poetic, or heavy, but it is clearly implicit in good prose, melding with wisdom, wit and insight. To make the point at its simplest level, here’s a very minor example I just saw tonight in Mark Helprin’s writing: “She was as apprehensive as any young girl might be. Young boys are mercurial, and they are supposed to be.” Just a little verbal balance repeating off the end word “be” to go with the content of a girl and a boy in a romantic situation – something to elevate the writing beyond a user’s manual printed in Taiwan at the functionally literate level.

Putting style aside for the more perceivable skill of theme, is there a way aspiring writers can develop that skill? In a nutshell: Is the root skill for recognizing themes the ability to recognize patterns, or at least repetition? (Repeat that three times.) I’ve put it so badly that it is at once frustratingly obvious at the same time that it is too subtle and pervasive to adequately sum up.

I simply know that everything I described about my growing up fed into theme recognition for me. If you are a writer, or an artist of any kind who is rendering life, or just a person who has poetry and something to say inside yourself, then maybe you can relate to the connection between repetition and creativity. More to the point, I believe that being conscious of pattern recognition as a necessary skill can sharpen it. You are what you do, what you think. You become what you practice over time. I doubt if a person can motivate themselves to improve that kind of consciousness just by thinking along the lines of patterns for, say, ten minutes twice a day. It can’t be just a cute classroom trick that amounts to quantifying possibilities into a database. You have to be intrinsically interested in it. It has to have value to you in order to motivate your creativity or sharpen instincts that are already in you.

The ability to manipulate repetition into meaningful patterns that connect with life or with sensory experience seems to be fundamental to all the arts. Is a song a song if it does not repeat notes in a pattern? Does a painting have to repeat nature at some level of abstraction or rendering in order to be recognized as a painting? Are stories our abstract way of repeating the world around us, and are themes a fine-tuning of this? I’m mixing repetition in content with repetition in styles here. Some art forms use repetition in style more obviously than they use repetition in theme, or vice-versa.

And here’s a spin on the whole idea as it applies to writing. Writer’s of darkness love non-patterns. Freakshows. They deliberately go for things without patterns or repetitions, things that don’t fit, that go bump in the night. One of a kinders. Humor is like that too. I’m often asked about how I could write literary satires and dark thrillers as well. But it’s the same trick. Or to use the classic Greek definition of comedy: “…the perception of the incongruous.” If the Greeks were into freakshow writing per se, they would have nailed it there, too. Man slips on a banana peal or a spider with intelligent eyes. One of those images hits the funny bone, the other may evoke fear. They are both unique things, breaks in the expected pattern. Non-patterns are like that – they jar you. And that makes them a pattern by negation. Wha…? Oh, come on, you get it. Was it G. K. Chesterton who said that anyone who didn’t believe in God would believe in anything?

So that’s it. A little heavy maybe, but I’m unapologetic. If understanding creativity were easy, someone would bottle it. And tomorrow March 17^th is upon me. Cross your fingers, knock wood, find a 4-leaf clover, hang up a horseshoe, and follow a rainbow to its source…

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Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com