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Manifesto for a New Fiction
SOL LUCKMAN
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.
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.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[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.]
Visualize: An Artistic Meditation for Creating a New World
Sol Luckman
Visualize your ability to visualize.
This is no small or laughing matter.
Your world, our world, depends upon it.
Literally.
Visualize your innate power of imagination to manifest the reality you desire.
Visualize hundreds, thousands, millions of people energizing
A similar vision, until one day very soon
The vision manifests as the veil parts
And the light comes streaming through.
This is no new age fantasy.
This is how the universe works.
It is how it has always worked.
In the beginning not only was the Word.
In the beginning the Creator had a vision.
The Creator visualized this world
In all its diversity, glory and majesty.
The Creator visualized our ancestors.
Then the Creator visualized you and me.
In an entirely real sense
Like Athena we sprang fully formed from the mind of the Creator.
In an entirely real sense
We are children of God.
In an entirely real sense
We carry the God-spark within ourselves.
In the words of Marianne Williamson …
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.
Or as the Master Jesus said
In words that seem to apply perfectly to these times
Of planetary and personal transfiguration …
As I do these things, so shall you, and greater things.
Something wonderful is transpiring.
Something amazing, something truly uplifting.
A new reality is being created out of the ashes of the old.
Some still cannot see it for the smoke in their eyes.
Yet, a new world is being visualized into existence by a growing number of people
Who are not “sheeple”
Or puppets dangling on a string
But creators ourselves, made in the image of the Creator.
The effect is nonlocal, morphogenetic, unifying, electrifying.
And it is assisted by the cosmos itself
Infusing us with all the energy we need
To accomplish the task of renewal we came here to do
After the passing of the old.
Carl Jung once said that breakdown is a prerequisite for breakthrough.
This is a universal truth.
Presently, we are reaching the moment of breakdown.
The breakdown of the old hierarchical system of control and manipulation
Is to be celebrated, not feared.
Join those of us visualizing a world with no Big Brother, no war for profit, no banksters,
No mortgage fraud, no compound interest, no taxation without honest representation.
Let us visualize a world with no derivatives, no securitized investments,
No Big Pharma, no Big Oil, no FDA, no FEMA, no nukes, no state secrets.
Let us visualize a new world where the earth is revered,
Freedom is respected,
Creativity is remunerated,
And genuine community is reestablished.
Visualize letting go of fear and being in the Moment, in the Now
Of this historical transformation into a world society
That is truly ours to bring about.
Finally, visualize answering these questions from your heart.
Now that we are on the verge of breakdown,
What will be your contribution to the breakthrough?
How will you use your divine ability to imagine a new, better reality into being?
What will be your gift, or gifts, to the world you help create?
Text and images copyright © 2011 by Sol Luckman. All rights reserved.
To learn more about Sol Luckman’s visionary writing and painting, visit www.CrowRising.com.
Eight New Paintings
Sol Luckman
"Beneath Sol Luckman's spare lines are universes of strokes, careful and conscious applications of brush movement to impart unseen dimensions, hint at that which we only experience subtly. This is amazing work." Art Rosch, professional photographer
As a longtime novelist and writer of nonfiction books, that I have been drawn to paint with ink certainly is not lost on me.
And as I am when composing actual words, in my paintings I am committed to exploring and depicting energy—specifically, that engrossing spiral of universal creative energy that is consciousness.
I see the world, and paint it, with a shaman’s eyes, as a place not wholly solid, but informed by a kinetic vibrancy that is fundamentally intelligent.
I am describing, of course, Great Spirit.
For Great Spirit is the world, just as the world is Great Spirit.
And not one of us is left out of this simple, all-encompassing equation.
It is my intention that you, too, will see this universe of energy in my paintings—as objects condition space with their essence, and vice versa, and the outside conflates with the inside because All Is One.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[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.]
Introducing the New Crow Rising!
Dear Reader,
Finally, after several months of dedicated work, I’m truly excited to announce my brand-new personal website featuring many of my original paintings, as well as my unique offerings in fiction and nonfiction.
Please check out the new and improved Crow Rising Transformational Media today at www.CrowRising.com.
In addition to browsing my expressionistic artwork, you can download your complimentary copy of my literary-visionary novel BEGINNER’S LUKE (called by Apex Reviews a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND”) and enjoy a lot of other paradigm-altering free content.
Thanks for flying high with Crow Rising today!
Sol Luckman
Artist, Author, Alchemist
