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Manifesto for a New Fiction

SOL LUCKMAN

[Excerpted from the acclaimed comic novel, currently available for free download, BEGINNER’S LUKE.]

The problem with much contemporary American—some would say, world—fiction is twofold. If we understand many commercial novels these days to fall somewhere on the spectrum between literary and visionary, with much in the middle that scarcely deserves mentioning, it’s hard to ignore the fact we’re living a classic Catch-22. Literary novels are just not that visionary, which is another way of saying they’re often boring and unimaginative, slaves to a dogged realism—whereas visionary novels are, typically, none too literary, which is another way of saying often poorly, if not execrably, written, cobbled together with their narrative machinery clanking and clunking.

http://www.phoenixregenetics.org/images/stories/beginnerslukead.jpg

Historically, the exceptions confirm the rule. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS are indeed consummately both literary and visionary. These classics have also been imitated so many times—unsuccessfully, even laughably—it beggars belief. Here and there a contemporary novel pops up on the radar in this magical Twilight Zone where craft and invention seem indissolubly wedded—Robert Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING comes to mind—but those of us literary-visionary hybrids who scour today’s fictional landscape in search of inspiration usually come up empty.

The fly in the ointment is that old bugger, realism. Nearly two centuries after Stendhal’s novel-as-mirror traveled the tedious highway of fiction, and despite the influences of modernism and postmodernism, the majority of today’s novel readers, like Coca-Cola addicts, still want the Real Thing. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will.

I don’t mean any of this theoretically. Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.

We must, then, for them to be of any worth whatsoever, live our theories practically. For writers this means, inevitably, doing the deed—not just having the idea but putting it on paper, writing down not just the bones of our dreams but their flesh and blood as well. Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals. The current twin foci on theory and realism conspire to dry up the spirit and wither the soul, blind the eye and deafen the ear, broil the brain and microwave the heart—and perhaps most disturbingly for us radical wordsmiths who still haven’t sold out to the Man, brown the nose and pucker the rectum.

If we’re to avoid becoming fiction robots in a corporate world, we must stop adding to our educational excesses, eschew the assembly line of MFAs and bottom-line publishing houses, commit ourselves to a way of writing that engages in a valiant struggle to push the limits of plot and language so as to awaken, not anesthetize, the reader. Anything rather than live in the dead world of those cold people, the Intellectuals. Anything rather than subject ourselves to the fusty chain of academic command, the savage petty politics where the arguments are so heated because the stakes, as someone once astutely quipped, are so small.

We must lay our ears back and push on into the literary fourth dimension, realm of feminine chaos and infinite possibility, forego regionalism and play with farce—and, especially, always appreciate the bizarre. Love for the bizarre is, itself, transformational. When you welcome the bizarre into the fiction of your life, anything and anybody can be transformed from dogsh*t into gold.

Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves. Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality. There can be no turning back, for readers or writers, after our historical strokes of madcap genius. Or so my story goes.

Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.

In so doing, maybe, over time, our inherited and mostly dysfunctional posterity urge based on ego will gradually give way to something more stable, healthier, that might be called simply the urge to be. To have been versus to be. Product versus process. In the face of a literature of monoliths and petroglyphs, we have the choice to opt for incompletion. May our new writing shine with the protean power of now. May imagination become the new faith.

[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of comic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]

Tagged Beginner's Luke Power of Now Sol Luckman adventure awakening being character comedy consciousness creative writing experimental writing fiction funny humor imaginary imagination intertextuality literary magical realism metafiction new age novel novel series parody pastiche satire spoof visionary writing

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Eight New Paintings for Summer, with Commentary

SOL LUCKMAN

One of the most effective ways to deal with the increased energy and time acceleration of these fast and furious days is to engage one’s creativity—pragmatism be damned.

Canyon Tree

When we’re authentically engaged in our personal creative space, time ceases to exist—rather, we tend to lose our old self-limiting habits of attachment to time’s clever tricks and inconvenient whims.

Slot Canyon

The move here, one that is as simple as it is powerful, even reality-altering, is from (not) living in the past and future, to fully inhabiting the Now.

Monument Valley

Perhaps this helps explain why I’ve been so busy lately, without feeling particularly busy: I’ve been “in the zone,” so to speak, creating with abandon.

South Rim Sun

Let me assure you, this way of living internally beats the socks off waiting around for some good news to happen externally. Because, who knows, you may be waiting a while.

Hoodoo Sunrise

And maybe, just maybe, following our bliss, harnessing the “Power of Positive Feeling,” is integral in generating the very good events that will eventually make the news.

Moon Organs

For the most part, I've continued my passionate love affair with painting transcendent Southwestern landscapes designed to inspire deep appreciation of the magic inherent in creation.

Canyonlands

Nothing is more in the Now than painting—especially with fast-drying media such as ink and gesso, when there’s no time to think about anything except what's happening on the canvas, in the Moment.

Moonscape

And perhaps, just looking at the results, you will find yourself, however briefly, existing entirely in the present as well.

[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. Characterized by Reader Views as a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND” and by Apex Reviews as a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast,” BEGINNER’S LUKE is also, as literature professor Niama Williams has written, a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at www.CrowRising.com.]

Tagged 2012 Arches Arizona Canyonlands Grand Canyon Mayan calendar New Mexico Now Power of Now Sol Luckman South Rim Southwest Southwestern art Utah art beauty consciousness creativity desert fine art high desert ink on paper landscape nature painting red rocks source field sunrise sunset time acceleration watercolor

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Three Simple Strategies for Riding the Waves through 2012

Sol Luckman

“Take two of these little pills and call me in the morning.”

Ah, those were simpler days, when all our troubles seemed resolvable by a magic bullet. No longer.

Today, through forces seemingly beyond our control, we’re pressed to dig deep for the answers to a suddenly kaleidoscopic array of strange and bewildering dilemmas.

Economic stability, or lack thereof. World peace, or what’s left of it. Peace of mind, but only when heavily sedated. Physical wellbeing, challenged by waves of cosmic energy ripping through us with awesomely accelerating intensity.

Why is it that everyone and everything, including ourselves, all of a sudden seems to be splitting apart at the seams?

For many who study cosmic cycles, it’s patently obvious that the end times are upon us—and that our planet is undergoing some heavy changes centering on the year 2012 that have been prophesied in scriptures and wisdom traditions the world over.

The Hopi nation just released a short official video about this truly wild period of history.

While certainly not rose-colored as to the extraordinary challenges of these times, ultimately the Hopi message is one of—pun intended—hope.

These times, say the Hopi elders, involve a “return to connecting our heart with the heart of the path to the future.”

Stated otherwise, the message is that we must regain an inner balance with all of nature, starting with ourselves.

We must travel from the inner to the outer when balancing ourselves and the world—a dual process that must occur in that order.

In other words, to heal and transform the world, we must first be willing to heal and transform ourselves.

This subject is near and dear to my heart, after I wrote about it extensively in my latest book, POTENTIATE YOUR DNA.

If we start by healing and transforming ourselves, we can survive, and even thrive, through the 2011-13 window of personal and planetary transfiguration.

The end times that are upon us, then, simultaneously constitute a beginning—one holding the possibility of a genuine rebirth for Mother Earth and all her children.

According to Vedic texts, in fact, we’ve reached the very nadir of planetary darkness, known as the Kali Yuga, and there’s literally nowhere to go but back into the light.

In other words, cosmically speaking, things simply have to start looking up, sooner rather than later.

In past blogs, which you can read here, here and here, I’ve addressed the “ener-genetic” nature of the radical Shift in Human Consciousness now well underway.

But one thing I’ve yet to discuss is strategies for participating as co-creators by riding on top of the tremendous waves of galactic energy sweeping our world—instead of being swept under by them.

Below, I outline three simple strategies you can adopt in your own way to integrate the powerful, potentially life-changing energies of this time period.

Strategy 1: Stay in the Moment

The intuitively sourced masterpiece known as THE LAW OF ONE makes it abundantly clear that in the Moment, in the here and now, is where we find love—not in some abstract yesterday or tomorrow.

Readers of Eckhart Tolle’s more mainstream THE POWER OF NOW have been exposed to a similar line of self-empowering thinking.

But for those new to this concept, or in need of a refresher, the energy of love—rather, the actual experience of loving energy—is so potent that, by itself, it can heal and transform the body, mind, and spirit.

Moreover, and especially important these days, love can, and does, protect us from that which weakens the body, mind, and spirit: fear.

As to what may or may not happen tomorrow, we have little control over that.

Best to “let go and let God” and focus on enhancing our lives (as well as those around us) with the most powerful energy available.

Strategy 2: Be More, Do Less

In a wonderful article devoted to the recent transition to the culminating Ninth Wave of the Mayan Calendar, Denise Lefay emphasizes that for many people (especially those of us who consider ourselves lightworkers), the time of always having to do is ending and the time of being is beginning.

“Now that many of us have completed the horrendously difficult Eighth Wave phase of transmuting, integrating and paving the way out of total darkness for all interested parties, we’ve got to learn how to consciously create from within ourselves … and BE what we’ve worked so long and hard to accomplish,” writes Lefay.

“Now we’ve got to adapt to increasing Source energies beginning to flow through us, our bodies and brains like it never has before while in physical bodies. Now we’re learning to DO by BEING; to understand by knowing on our own internally and not externally through other beings, guides, channels or sources.”

The point here, as I understand it, is not to do nothing. Rather, the point is to be entirely present when doing anything—and to only do things that merit our being entirely present.

As much as anything else, being more and doing less can help us stay in the Moment where love is.

And love can do all the rest.

Strategy 3: Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

Never before has counter-cultural icon Timothy Leary’s famous advice to seek the truth within, by whatever means necessary, been more apropos.

But here, allow me to clarify my interpretation of Leary’s words as they apply to these confounding times.

By “turn on,” I mean put yourself in a receptive mode to receive intuitive guidance about your life choices from your Higher Self.

Your Higher Self is like a Hall of Fame coach who can take you to the promised land if you can simply let go of your ego long enough to listen.

By “tune in,” I mean actively open to this guidance—through prayer, meditation, creativity, exercise, or simply being.

Above all, you must have the intention to tune in to the wisdom of your Higher Self.

And by “drop out,” I mean cut out whatever might be creating static—whether that’s TV, texting, Internet news, or “fear porn”—in your connection with your Higher Self.

Once we connect with our Higher Self, much becomes clear and much progress in our healing and transformation can be made as we implement our inner guidance.

Tagged transformation 2012 Hopi Kali Yuga Law of One Mayan calendar Potentiate Your DNA Power of Now Regenetics Sol Luckman Vedic ascension ascension symptoms balance body-mind-spirit cosmic energy economy end times healing hope intention meditation metaphysics prayer rebirth spirituality transfiguration wellbeing world peace

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Manifesto for a New Fiction

Eight New Paintings for Summer, with Commentary

Three Simple Strategies for Riding the Waves through 2012

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