Fingerprints

I awoke this morning in a pensive mood. I am not sure why. The old feelings of introspective mulling are upon me. So, this seemed a good opportunity to pause here and consider my thoughts, and to write to you, my dear reader.

The Work

Another summer marches along, and I am at least glad to say that it has been a productive one. Every day I wake up—not in the morning, no, never the morning, I rise at 12pm—and I spend about 3 hours writing. I have been working on a new Archaios book, doing a lot of worldbuilding, linguistic work, and everything else that comes with writing and making a secondary world. I was stuck for many months on the Archaios project. I was still worldbuilding but I had a lot of false starts on the actual story I was telling. The first narrative after the Bjornlinga, The Sundhrom Fragments, was one that I wrote and rewrote several times, but could never enter emotionally.

I ended up setting that book aside, and picking up a book that I wrote back around 2011, the first thing I ever wrote in the world of Archaios, a book I never published because I was never happy with it. Elsewhere I think I have recounted the story of how, back then, I had recently graduated with my master’s degree. I was mostly unemployed, other than some seasonal trade work I was doing. I was poor to the point of destitute. And I wrote that first Archaios book. When I finished it and looked it over, I thought to myself, “well, it isn’t Tolkien.” It felt like trite garbage to me. So I set it aside. I got into a PhD program, set aside “childish” dreams and my creative work, and tried to earn some money for my family.

Earlier this year, getting stuck on my follow up to Bjornlinga, I opened that first book out of curiosity. I don’t often read my own writing. It was...odd to read that work. What I saw there, objectively, was work that had some real promise. There was a good story underneath and some very vivid characters. But it was written by a younger man who had not yet found his voice.

Voice is everything with writers, at least with those who wish to aspire beyond mere typing. I have been writing my whole life, since I was a kid. And it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I found my voice. Maybe I am a slow learner. Clearly some, like Percy Shelley, found his voice quite early. But in looking back to the work I produced in my 20s and 30s there is a sort of self-conscious embarrassment, an awareness that the words would be read, a self-censoring, a restraint—not the good restraint of craft discipline, but the bad restraint of the critic’s voice in my head.

Anyway, as I read through that book I felt all that, and I while I liked the idea behind the book, I wasn’t crazy about the voice. But then, there was one character, a very minor one. In a book of forty chapters, this character had three. Very much a tertiary character. But there was something there. A thread of deep emotion, a longing and sweetness that rather echoed (or more accurately, prefigured) the longing present in Lilacs from the Dead Land. And I found it moved me still.

I took that thread and suddenly the words started flowing again, and the world began springing up around it. That is the book I am writing now. It took me many years to learn that there is no wasted writing, that even work that I have not published serves its own purpose. I have probably published, in book form at least, maybe around 180,000 words. My unpublished material is well over 1 million.

I rather suspect that none of that will ever be read. It will remain on the cutting room floor. Or in the archives, so to speak. And that is fine.

Fingerprints

I have, over the past couple weeks, been very drawn to the music of Rush and Led Zepplin. These are both bands that I grew up with, and so they are very much the music of my youth. But the attraction here is not mere nostalgia. Nostalgia for my youth used to be a very strong, and painful feeling that I used to struggle with, but that was a problem that I faced and wrote my way out of in Lilacs, and that book for me was a real soul-searching time for understanding why I was perennially trapped in the past. But this was something different.

It all started when I happened to watch the music video for Rush’s song Tom Sawyer, a song that I used to always play on the jukebox in the arcade while I tried to get the high score on the pinball machine.

But when I watched the music video, it didn’t cast me back to that arcade, and to the boy I was in 1990. It put me in the studio with those three men in 1981. I would have only been 3 years old at the time. Undoubtably I heard the song on the radio many times before that arcade. So the song is sort of sleeping in my unconscious mind. And in the music video there is a quality very different from anything you will see in music videos now.

You can see the lead singer, Geddy Lee, at the microphone in casual clothes and focused on his craft. He isn’t trying to be performative. He isn’t trying to seem cool. He is trying to make a work. He is a craftsman, an artist. The focus of the video, when it shifts to Geddy playing bass or keyboards, or the other two guys, remains on musicianship and craft, on the process of creation.

And note something else. This was 1981. They were using mixing equipment, of course, but it was very much an analog world. There was no autotune, no AI, no content machine, no algorithm. And no, this isn’t me sitting here saying “back in the day everything was good and now everything is terrible.” I always find that view to be nihilistic and self-defeating. And yet, I can still look and value what was, and perhaps, what has been lost.

The fingerprints.

This is the term that my mind keeps going back to. I grew up listening to music that preserved odd background sounds on the studio track. Reading books that held old pencil marks from decades earlier. The human touch was on everything. The fingerprints. And now, increasingly, that is something being erased. We seem to have lost, in large part, the pencil marks of human authenticity.

Music now is often created mostly on a computer. Drum loops are generated, riffs are made by AI, and the human voice, when it still exists at all, is heavily modulated by machines so that the music we end up with is machine music.

I am not much of a musician. When I was younger, it is true, I was sort of divided between music and literature as forms of art, and I have always felt that in a different life I could have given my life over to music. I used to play piano and sing, and taught myself to play viola. I studied music theory and composition...

At a certain point in my life I realized that I could either be mediocre at writing and music, or I could at least attempt to push everything I had into one arena. Art, and the muse, are greedy, and demand everything. There is barely, maybe just barely, enough time in one lifetime to begin to master one form of expression. I picked writing and abandoned music. And writing is hard. And I am still trying to figure out how to do it properly.

I have had some say that my writing has a certain lyricism, a rhythm to the words. Especially my Bjornlinga work, it has been said it sounds like metered chant. Perhaps.

All this is to say, that there is a reason I feel and understand a little bit what Rush was doing and working towards in that song. And more than that, as a writer, I understand what it means to struggle to create something that you can feel is authentic and true. The song Tom Sawyer almost didn’t see the light of day. Geddy Lee has said it was difficult to make, difficult to record, difficult to mix, and that the process was “beset with problems.”

That feeling of struggle is one I understand all too well. Rush wasn’t trying to create just another song to fill a space on an album. They were fighting to make their vision manifest.

And while the world has always had the cheap, the plastic, the commodity, I find as I look around that we move more and more into a world of seeming rather than being.

I was watching a Youtube video the other day, of a creator that I enjoy, and at the beginning of the video he stated that he was not actually interested in making the video, but he had to produce content to feed the algorithm.

I actually paused the video at that point.

It was a disturbing thought to me. It is as though he is a slave-acolyte chained to the temple of some horrendous demon-god, and daily he must work, he must feed the Algorithm Demon. Or he will perish. And for a moment, the curtain fell, he broke the fourth wall, and he confessed where he stood.

Content.

You cannot imagine how much I hate that word.

Content.

Not videos, or essays, or ideas. Not art. Not authentic work.

Content.

As though it doesn’t even matter what it is: make a video, a blog post, update the socials, post a selfie. Just keep generating, keep creating something to fill the void. More and more to feed the demon.

Suffice to say, I do not live in that world. To be brutally honest with you, the hyper-posting content world of social media deeply disturbs me. And it is a world that does not exist merely on social media and the internet. It has permeated our entire society, and an entire generation has grown up with it being presented to them as normal. It isn’t.

Normal is pencil marks. Fingerprints.

Normal is the human soul leaving its mark.

I don’t hate the internet or even AI. I use both. Daily. I am typing these words out on my laptop. I will post them online. I have headphones on and am listing to music that is being streamed. Would it be better if I were listening to a record and writing this by hand or typing it on a typewriter? I don’t know. Perhaps. Probably not though.

Because what really matters, I think, is that we keep the fingerprints on what we do, even if we live in a world of machines. For me, my writing could never be content. It could never be rushed, packaged, commodified. I don’t write what the demon wants. I don’t say that to disparage those who do. I feel sorry for those chained to the altar. I imagine that behind many of them are true creators, those who intensely desire to express something into the world.

And as I said earlier, I am not at all one of those people who think everything in the past was good and everything is bad now. There are people who write, make videos, make music, who share this work online, and who do so authentically. Some of them are even quite successful. And it is heartening to see. But it remains true that it can be difficult to find them underneath all the content. It must also be said that I would have never been able to watch the Rush video without Youtube, the king of all content demons.

I find that reclamation is better than nostalgia. What I mean is, instead of pining for the past, find what was good and true in the past, and seek to reclaim it in your own life. I am always baffled by people who complain about everyone being on their phones (in a Youtube comment, which they are writing on their phone). If you long for a more offline world, get offline.

Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, was in many ways the mind behind the band. I think his words are pertinent here, and worth reclaiming:

"I never wanted to be famous. I wanted to be good."