One Hundred Posts and the Holy Grail

This is my one hundredth post on this blog, and I had thought I would save such an anniversary number for a rundown of my conference experience in France, but I still can't get my head around it enough to write about it yet. It was my first visit to France, and it was long, almost two weeks including the two days in transit. A lot happened and I think I just need a little more time to process it before I write about it. So, I will write about my writing again. I took my notebooks with me to France, but ended up being so busy and stimulated that I did not do much writing or editing while I was there, but I could feel my creative well filling, as the Artist's Way says. I worked on my Parsifal edits a little on the plane coming back to Los Angeles, and continued on that over the few days following my arrival back home. I originally picked up where I left off in March when I went back to The Flower of Knighthood for a final polish, but I realized that I was struggling with it because that was in March and I spent so much time and effort on the first book that I didn't connect perfectly back to the Parsifal manuscript when I returned to it in mid-stream. I went back to the beginning of the book and started reading back over it, and finding a few more edits to make, and that is going much better. I'm thirty-seven pages into it now, having originally covered more than two hundred, but it's well worth the backtrack to get my bearings again. I want to read for continuity as well as edit, and that's going perfectly so far. I worked very, very hard on this book during the last months of 2006 and all of 2007, and I'm proud of it. I am also finding another happy outcome of the weird order in which these books have been composed - as I've said before, I wrote the first one and edited it, and thought it was through, then discovered after I wrote the second one that I had learned a lot about writing during the process of creating it and could go back and apply that to the first one. With that new knowledge, I went and re-edited it, and now I am finding that via that undertaking, I have now learned much more about editing, which I can now apply to the second book. Synergy! I'm therefore both a better editor and writer than I was when I started; I am really excited to see what I can bring to the next book, which I mentioned in an earlier post I have also returned to. I like being productive, and the past few years have certainly been so. I now have Parsifal to edit, and two more books in the series to finish writing, a play that I've been incubating for years, lots of songs, and a multimedia project that I've also been conceptualizing for a very long time. And, there are always magazine articles to be written. The thing I like best now is creating; making things makes me feel happy and alive. I have enough material in the pipeline to keep me fulfilled for at least another decade, which gives me a great deal of hope for the future. The Holy Grail is the realized Self, and the best means for self-development that I have found is the practice of creativity. I find the Grail each time I write or sing, which makes every single day a sacred quest. I think that that sentiment is well worth spending my life on, not to mention my hundredth post.

Back from France

I returned from France on Tuesday the 22nd, but have been too tired to blog about my trip yet. I have never been so jet-lagged. It's so bad that I've gone to bed between 8:30 and 9:30 every night this week, which felt amazing, but I've gotten exhausted every afternoon around 4 pm because my body thinks it's past midnight. Bear with me, I certainly have more interesting things to say about the trip than that I am tired; it really was great, so good that I am already planning another visit for next year.

A Bientot Et Merci

I leave for France tomorrow morning at 8:15 am. The Flower of Knighthood is published online as a download payable via Paypal and with the free sample enabled as well. My friend and I worked on it yesterday and today and got it up and running this afternoon. Here is the link if anyone wants to look at it - I've also posted it in the informational sidebar to the right for future reference and book orders:

www.fleurdamour.us/books.html

I have been packed for several days and I am ready to go. I have my current scribblings for The Engagement of Sir Gawain to take with me to work on during downtime, and am printing part of the Parsifal manuscript to take, too. For reading material on the plane, I have Dionysos by Carl Kerenyi (I blogged about it a while back, but did not have a chance to finish it because I was so busy editing my book) and Elements of the Grail Tradition by John Matthews. One of the fun things on this trip is that we will watch The Fisher King at the conference, I think in English with French subtitles. How cool is that? I can't think of a better place to see it. I may try to take a day trip to see Chartres cathedral, too - I did not think I had time, but I am going to see if I can change trains there on the way back from Rennes. Chartres is only one hour outside Paris, and I'd really like to see that cathedral. We'll see if I have the energy left. No matter what, this is going to be great.

Jongleur

I’ve gotten a greater level of insight into my own creative process lately with the work I have been doing on various projects. I’ve been working on my books for a very long time now and I’ve gained some perspective by seeing how they’ve finally started to turn out. I never dreamed they would take this long, but I also didn’t count on things like 9-11 and Katrina impacting me and making me lose a lot of time. No matter - I really do think things eventually turn out the way they are supposed to. I do like writing for magazines to some degree, and I pursued that path aggressively for a long time when I first started writing, but I ran headlong into the massive cultural shifts caused by the first wave of the internet and the terrorist attacks on New York City. I was living there diligently writing and networking when the dot-bomb happened, followed shortly by 9-11, and the bottom dropped out of the media industry for several years. I could not find much paying work in publishing, so I took jobs in finance that paid the bills and applied myself to writing my books rather than pursuing much magazine work. I kept my head down like that for several years, and by the time the dust settled and I looked up, everything had changed drastically, and continues to do so. It’s almost impossible now to find a staff writer position anywhere on a magazine or newspaper, and so many career writers have been let go that the pool for freelance assignments is more competitive than ever. I started writing for outside publications again in 2004 and I’ve done so off and on ever since, but what seemed like a curse around 2001 (not finding much ongoing work in publishing) turned out to my advantage. It almost seems like everyone is starting all over again, no matter how much experience they have, and I was able to utilize time away from the industry to complete larger and more personal projects. I am very proud of my magazine work, but I am ecstatic about my books. It was a profound exercise in self-development (alchemy, as I noted in the post below) to apply myself to something for so long as the sole architect. It took a great deal of research (all of which was enjoyable, since it was on subjects I already loved), near-constant writing and sustained editing to create these works. They are not trifling at all – I tackled some huge topics in them, and they have modern resonance and social commentary delivered in the context of timeless myth. I hope they will find a willing audience – they are not exactly breezy, but they provide substantial rewards to a thoughtful read. I did my best to frame my philosophical and social concepts within lively action and poetic language, but there is a lot of solid material in the books which demands that the reader think. I myself like a good challenging book that teaches me something and that I have to work to understand, and I don’t mind tackling a very long or dense non-fiction work if the information gained is worth the effort to me. I am not really a sound-bite kind of person. When writing magazine articles, the hardest part for me is generating headlines – they have to be short and snappy to grab the reader’s attention, and I don’t always excel at that. I’ve come up with some good ones for some of these blog posts, ones that I am proud of, and it’s good practice for me, but there are some duds here, too. I like writing articles, but I think I tend to be better at long-haul projects like writing books. My sense of time has always been strange, attuned to longer cycles than most people’s seem to be – I think I’m more geared to a lunar pattern of weeks or months than to a solar pattern of hours and days. It’s kind of a spiritual outlook, attuned more to deeper currents of eternity than to the faster pace of daily life, which has always made me great at things like seeing the big picture and having a long-term perspective that lends itself well to big projects, but not always good at little things like always being on time. I am getting more and more practiced at juggling projects from both sides of that temporal spectrum, though. I wrote regularly for a West Coast music magazine the whole year or so that I was writing Parsifal, and I found that taking on smaller projects on a monthly basis helped break up the bigger project in some helpful ways. I decided to see the articles not as any kind of distraction to the book, but as a welcome break for a short period, and that mindset really worked to my advantage. It’s starting to carry over into the larger projects, too. The last few weeks I’ve been working on edits for both The Flower of Knighthood and Parsifal, and suddenly started writing the third book, The Engagement of Sir Gawain, all while planning for this conference trip and handling some other things as well. I’ve always been pretty good at managing the juggling act to some degree, but I seem to have attained some relatively new ability to keep more balls in the air all at once, and that is a very good thing. I think it truly just comes from experience, like having one book completed made it much easier to finish the second one.

Fideli D'Amore

My creative interests are starting to come together in a way that is blowing my mind. I blogged in my last post below about how my housemate Ryan Wartena wants to set my whole book The Flower of Knighthood to music, and how, as insanely ambitious as that sounds, it has a precedent in the performance of bardic poetry and troubadour music, which are big influences on me. I have long been interested in the troubadours and trouveres (court musicans and poets in southern and northern France, respectively) and in the whole culture of courtly love in medieval Europe for which they provided the artistic expression. I am also completely fascinated with all kinds of mysticism in general and Sufism in Islam in particular, and I've been reading a great deal about the academic theory that Sufis in Moorish Spain greatly influenced the troubadours with their ecstatic hymns to the Beloved, i.e., God. They were not the only influence; there was also the cult of Mary, the older practices of pagan religion in Europe that placed a goddess in a place of high regard and other influences from the East via the Crusades, but I do accept the hypothesis that Sufi practice was likely a powerful component in the creation of that artistic and spiritual movement. I was drawn into the orbit of a Sufi order in New York that is under the direction of a female shayka of French descent, so I am fascinated for personal reasons to explore this meshing of worlds. The more I learn, the more I see that all of my major interests fit together to give a sort of breathtaking big picture of how this world is not composed of separate things but is instead a tapestry of interacting threads. This truly is one world, and there is one God, no matter in what culture He appears or by what name He is worshipped. The highest form of religion is to transcend forms, as mysticism does, and realize the importance of the Object rather than that of the path that reaches Him. My music project, Fleur D'Amour, The Flower of Love, pulls together all of my interests and is highly influenced by troubadour philosophy and aesthetics. The European mystics and artists also had a reverse influence on Islamic thought, as well, in a circuit of social interaction. A book I recently mentioned in this blog, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin (a French scholar also enamored of Eastern mysticm), had extensive commentary about Sufic fideli d'amore, the devotion to the path of love as the highest route to spiritual realization. That's an Italian term, and Corbin also used it to refer to the social and artistic milieu of Dante Alighieri, whose life falls into the time period of the height of courtly love. The middle ages are thought by many to be an era of barbarism and backwards thought, but there was a great interchange of cultures occurring in both the East and West that generated awe-inspiring cultural achievements. Alchemy, the spiritual practice of self-development as symbolized by the creation of gold from lead, began life as an Arabic discipline (al-kimiya) and was widely adopted in Europe. Jewish, Muslim and Christian thought interacted particularly in southern Europe to create such treasures as Kabbalah and the writings of Teresa of Avila. We could do a lot worse than to look to our own history for an example of how to communicate well with the Middle East. There have always been those men more interested in power than in wisdom who followed a path of conquest and strife, but there have also always been examples of mystics, scholars and artists who were happy to meet strangers from afar whose different sensibilites breathed new life into their own culture. My art is all the richer for having learned more about this gorgeous interplay and it makes more sense to me now that I have learned why I was drawn to seemingly disparate things. They really aren't disparate - Persia communicated with Paris long ago, and produced a context that generated such glories as Le Conte Du Graal. Those people managed to create that exchange in a time where travel between such farflung regions took years of dangerous effort - what a cultural and spiritual Renaissance we can look forward to now if we fully use this incredible tool, the internet, that connects mankind without boundaries. I put Sufis into the very heart of the Grail fellowship in my Holy Grail book, because they belong there. The Grail account may be descended from a Persian story called The Cup of Jamshid, and even if the stories are not directly related, they are archetypally so, at the level of the universality of human experience. Courtly love is itself an archetypal manifestation of anima and animus, expressed in the devotion of one sex to the opposite one in the ongoing application of unconditional love without expectation of material gain. It's a lovely model for unselfish devotion to the good of another as the path to supreme attainment, another pattern of so-called primitive medieval behavior that the modern world would do well to adopt.

The Day After

It felt amazing to wake up this morning and realize that I am finally completely done with my first book. It felt great when I originally finished writing it in 2004, and then in 2006 when I thought it was done and sent it to the copyright office, but now it feels REALLY done, and I feel whole within myself in a way that is awesome. I skimmed through it again last night just to make sure of the final manuscript, and there is nothing at all that I want to change. As soon as I finished that, I gave a copy to my housemate Ryan Wartena, a scientist, artist and all-around Renaissance Man who has been highly supportive of my books. He told me later that he read some of it out loud, and could tell that I had really strengthened it with my hard work editing it the last few months (he had read part of an earlier version so he had at least a little of a benchmark with which to compare it). He got excited about it originally because he said he could hear music in it, and said we should make that real by composing something around it. I was like, it's 150 pages long, good luck with that and let me know how it turns out, but I was doing research recently on the topic of troubabour poetry and music for my next book, and was reminded that very long epics in the Middle Ages were, in fact, sometimes set to music. They were easier to sing than to recite, and I had Gawain sing a little in this book when he got up to read an epic poem, so it's not as far-fetched as I thought when Ryan first mentioned it. Thinking about it makes me tired, though. I'll ponder it more, but later; for now, I'm just glad it is ready to put out as a stand-alone book. I also told my other housemate Evonne Heyning, an artist, Second Life developer, web guru and non-profit arts foundation officer, that I found absolutely nothing to change in my last two read-throughs of the book, and she said, "Good! It's done then." And it is. It should be live online tonight. The only remaining things will be to promote it and either print copies at some point in order to really self-publish it (complete with cover art commissioned by me from Osvaldo Valle, my amazing artist friend and web developer in New York City), or maybe get a publisher, whatever seems like the best course of action.

There.

I just finished the final draft of The Flower of Knighthood. It's proofread, edited, polished and ready for the conference. I am sending it to my web design friend shortly so he can post everything hopefully tomorrow. He's been working on the download/Paypal page for the last few days and I already sent him the free sample file, and now he will have everything he needs. We wanted to get it all up and running last week, but as usually happens, it took just a little longer. I still have three days until I leave in case of any issues. I am very excited, both about finishing the book and about my trip. I have everything planned down to a science and I fly out on Friday morning. I am packed and have all my travel documents and notes in order, and I printed up a bunch of the book samples to hand out to anyone who is interested. I also ordered special business cards specifically for the book to direct people to the download page, but there was a problem with the order, so I improvised by printing stickers with the same information and putting them on the back of my regular editorial business cards. I would have preferred the custom cards, but these are essentially free, since I already had a few hundred cards and stickers on hand. I will print several copies of the complete manuscript to take, too, to give to several people in the organization that might be interested. I want to make contact with someone at the Rennes Tourism Office in Brittany as well. I set some scenes in my second book in Rennes before I ever heard of this conference, and I think they might find that interesting.

I have one other note of profoundly happy news: I started the writing process again on the third book in this series, The Engagement of Sir Gawain. That really surprised me. I was planning to just go right into editing Parsifal as soon as possible but three nights ago I was sitting in my bedroom sorting out my bags for the trip, and found that I had packed two spiral notebooks when I only meant to take one. I sat for a while with the extra one on my lap, and suddenly got the urge to write. I wrote part of one scene, then flipped the book around and wrote part of another scene. I wrote the beginning and end of that book already several years ago, put it down to focus on the others that were closer to completion, wrote another scene for it about two years ago, and then put it down again. I knew that that one would be the next one that I work on, and I have been thinking about some ideas for it, but I did not think it would start up so soon. The last few days I have been working on three books at the same time, editing TFOK and getting ready to publish it online, editing Parsifal and now writing TEOSG. That is part of what put me behind schedule with the last edit of TFOK, but I am not complaining. I think this is probably part of the energy of this trip. I am very excited to go to France for the first time, and I think the book is coming from that. It's also going to be a great way to spend some of my free time while traveling. Where better to write a book than in Paris, or on a train rolling through the French countryside, or while looking out at the English Channel from the walls of a medieval city?

I went to the downtown Los Angeles library the other day and did lots of research on travel magazines, so I have a much better idea of the best ones to send pitch letters for a piece about the trip. I also looked over some travel guides for Paris and Brittany and found a few more interesting things to to do. Did you know that there is a museum of Romanticism in Montmartre in Paris, and that it has free admission? I am so there.