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Influences
My interest in creative writing began in primary school, but even then, the influences which steered me towards philosophical literary fiction had already begun to work on me.
To me, a writer is no more or no less than an evolving human being with a propensity for reflection, an imperative to truth, and a voice. And the evolution of the writer comes about exactly as it does for every other human, by experiential living. The difference for a writer (or indeed, for any other type of artist), is that the writer reflects on that experience, finds the truth in that experience, and uses their voice to speak that truth. Maybe that’s how it is, or maybe that’s just how it seems to me, but that’s essentially what I try to do.
But not all experience leads to deep reflection. There are some aspects of our environment which affect us more profoundly than others. Some of these we encounter by just living, and others we encounter by living in a specific way. Those that lodge in our memories are those which mean something significant and unique to us, and these are the markers of experiential living and existential change.
Such markers vary widely: perhaps a piece of advice from a teacher, a poem or song lyric, a book or a movie or a painting; a trauma, an unexpected joy, a spiritual event, a new country, a breakup. All our experiences can shape us, but not all do, and only a few do most of the work. Here’s my best guess for the life experiences I believe shaped me most, and the creative experiences that most vividly caught my attention.
Structural Influences
By ‘structural’ in this section I mean the broad movements in the structure of my experience, rather than specific incidents. The former are generally visible only in hindsight, and do not generally form specific meaningful memories. The shaping or influencing is performed gradually, and is not necessarily linear, consistent or constant.
Looking back now, I see the three structural influences which have most affected my writing are my education, religion and military service. They overlap one another considerably, but the following paragraphs try to separate them for clarity.
Education
At high school, I studied English, French and science. I loved English, as I had done since primary school, and I suppose the main attraction was the opportunity to express my opinion in a way that made sense to me. Back in the early 1970s, teenagers weren’t often asked for their opinion about anything, or if they were, there was no expectation that anyone would listen to them. It was in high school English classes that I began to find a voice.
My next love was Pure Mathematics. The connectedness of mathematics blew my mind, primarily in the way that the most complex abstract ideas could be reduced through series of proofs to basic arithmetic operations. I would often spend hours of my Christmas holidays ploughing through pages and pages of algebra exercises, the order and certainty of the practice soothing and calming, though in hindsight it’s probably a little sad.
My third most favourite subject was Chemistry, and the attraction was a dualistic one. There was the (literally) atomistic order of the periodic table and the precise properties of the elements which were characteristics of an orchestrated, designed universe. But the combinatorial chaos of chemical experimentation provided a theoretical creative outlet. I can remember back to when I was four or five years old, I had a recurring dream in which I was in an enormous cave, the walls of which were lined with shelves of tiny bottles of every substance in the world, just waiting for the right combination (for what I don’t recall) to be devised. The echo of that recurrent dream almost tipped me towards a career in chemical research. But not quite. (A version of the dream is narrated by Mark in the middle of In Living Memory).
After graduating from high school at the tender age of sixteen, I joined the Royal Australian Air Force as a Business Studies cadet. At that time (the 1970s), the Defence Department owned and operated the largest and most complex computing environment in the country, but IT professionals were scarce and generally imported. So, the Air Force had found what they considered the best practical IT course to grow some organic capability, and that’s where I found myself.
I double-majored in Data Processing (what IT used to be called) and Quantitative Methods. The former led me into the beauty of logical structures and the wonder of converting propositions through syllogistic forms, but it was the creativity of programming that really hooked me: creative writing in a language other than English. The remainder of the degree introduced me to the notion of simulation as a mechanism for structured imagining, and to the application of psychological techniques in industrial and business environments. These were all revelatory ideas to a young man sheltered through high school within a cocoon of physics, chemistry, mathematics and language.
A few years after graduating with my Business degree, I began an external Arts degree, wanting to explore further my interest in mathematics and language through the study of Formal Logic, primarily through the propositional calculus, and later with the predicate calculus. I rounded out the major with introductory studies in Metaphysics and Epistemology. I sub-majored in Psychology, getting a reasonable foundation in brain/central nervous system anatomy, cognition, memory, perception and behaviour.
But what really stunned me at the time was an introductory course delivered by Dr Brian Birchall (see later) on the philosophical foundations of Existentialism, and the writings of Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre. I remember feeling like I had spent my life up until then half-blind, unaware that there was a coherent notion of truth other than that provable by logic and represented by correspondence with reality, or a concept of the absurd based in un-reason and il-logic, or a definition of faith as the sincere belief in what is not objectively the case. Wow.
In late 1985 I moved to the UK to undertake a Master of Science, in Information Systems Design. While it was quite a technical degree, there were two areas which I found especially fascinating. The first was the notion of a soft systems approach, which analyses complex organisational processes as human activity systems. This is done by combining logic-based process analysis with cultural and political analysis of the human decision structure surrounding the process. To me, this confirmed the practical application of the dialectical form.
The second was my introduction to cybernetics, and particularly how organisations deal with uncertainty, how systems must interact and evolve with their environment to remain viable, and the notion of recursion, systems within systems within systems, and how communication and control needs to be shared within recursive structures.
Each of these ideas seemed to me to be philosophy being played out in real life, in a practical phenomenology of people and systems and organisations and widgets, separate from but an instantiation of the same idea drawn from a conceptual phenomenology, and that confirmed to me the value and validity of reading and writing philosophical fiction.
Soon after returning to Australia, I began work on In Body, In Mind. At first it was little more than a page of ideas and a disjointed collection of notes, but it seemed to me the perfect way to concentrate on a selection of the themes and issues that most interested me, and to construct a narrative that could help me make sense of the similarities and differences between them. Little did I know it would take me thirty years to complete it (see also entry on In Body, In Mind Origin Story).
While thoughts for my novel bubbled away in my head, I began a Master of Letters degree in Aesthetics, writing a thesis on The Becoming of Meaning in Literature and Philosophy. Over two years, this work helped me get my thoughts in order about phenomenology in general, and the phenomenological preconditions for the emergence of meaning, in particular. In the course of many discussions with my supervisor, Brian Birchall, I took a few tentative steps towards his idea of Objective Idealism, a notion he later developed in The Importance of Being Obscure. I also began to use the mechanism of a phenomenological dialectic which turns on modes of experience as an alternative to the unhelpful alternation which has stymied progress in many contemporary philosophical debates, and I have found this approach enormously helpful in all my philosophical reading since.
Another three years in the UK followed several years after that, and the role I had there involved quite a lot of travel, so this afforded me plenty of time for reading and thinking about my slowly emerging novel. Returning to Australia again, I completed a Graduate Diploma in Strategic Studies, and then began a visiting Fellowship at the Australian National University, before retiring from the Air Force in 1998.
After finishing high school in 1974, over the next thirty years I completed five years of full-time study and more than ten years of part-time study. Sometimes it was a drag, and often it was inconvenient and restrictive, but I can’t imagine just how different a person I would be without having been exposed to all those ideas. And I doubt that I could or would have ever have attempted to become a writer without having experienced the discipline and focus required for continuous learning. It saddens me to hear of people who finished their schooling and stopped learning. I know I can’t help thinking what a different country we’d live in, and in what a different world, if broad and liberal education were to become entrenched as a lifelong passion for everyone.
Religion
It was in the early eighties that I began to re-examine my relationship with religion. I had grown up in an Anglican household – not particularly strict or overtly devout, but with an atmosphere coloured heavily by a sincere belief in traditional Christian values.
Religion became a point of stability for me. Because I grew up in a military household, we moved every two or three years. The fellowship of the military church community was, however, consistently welcoming and procedurally standardised. I didn’t have to learn anything new, or make new close friends or change anything about my religious practice moving from base to base – when everything else around me was changing, this was a constant.
For many years I attended mainly military churches, chapels really, and was always impressed with the no-nonsense, matter-of-fact wisdom dispensed by military chaplains. Those guys (there were no women chaplains back then) had seen it all, heard it all, and often done it all prior to their calling. I found no false piety or pretentious religiosity amongst them, but rather sincerity and a desire to offer practical help, advice and advocacy.
I’d sung (badly) in church choirs, and enjoyed the coffee, biscuits and arm’s length fellowship of the church community. But less than a decade afterwards, my reading, particularly of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, led me to experience considerable internal disquiet about religion, though for a while I was unable to identify it.
Around the late eighties and early nineties my earlier unease with religion resurfaced. It was most probably the Middle East conflict and the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland which led me to doubt the assumed legitimacy of organised religion. Almost anywhere I looked in the world, there was violence, persecution, discrimination and alienation being thrust upon the innocent in the name of one religion or another, and this seemed to me at the very least hypocritical, and at worst despicable.
It seemed to me that, from the human viewpoint, the function of religion, or any spiritual belief system, is to provide meaning. That’s it. Phenomenologically, it seemed to me that religion belongs to a completely different mode of experience than that in which hierarchical, acquisitive businesses (that is, churches) operate, particularly when those businesses constantly compete with one another for market share. While I knew and acknowledged that most religious organisations do wonderful work, and almost all the individuals who work in them are caring, loving, generous people, the institutional hierarchies often behave as if they’re more about money, power and political influence than they are about belief.
It was around this time I eventually came to terms with both Martin Buber’s theory of relations and Kierkegaard’s paradox of personal faith, while deepening my distrust of those who claim spiritual certainty, and of organised religion. It hit me then that faith and spiritual belief could indeed be secular – there is no need for them to be branded with a religion.
And for the almost forty years I’ve been writing, themes of faith, spirit, suffering, despair and sacrifice have cropped up as some of my characters have struggled with doubt and confusion about what they truly believe. As I try to untangle their thoughts and understand how they can find some peace with their spiritual selves, I do find moments of clarity that resonate with my own experience. I find my ongoing collaboration with characters is a good thing for all of us. Maybe none of us will ever get it straight, but we’ll at least have tried.
Military Service
During my twenty-three years in the military, I’d written a lot. There’s a discipline which surrounds the way writing is meant to be practised in the military: service writing, it’s called. And now, twenty-six years after leaving the military, I remain thankful for the experience of service writing.
The discipline requires focus primarily on aspects of writing form: spelling, grammar, punctuation, tone, understanding one’s audience, formatting, degree of formality. Obviously, these are important aspects of all types of writing, but without the restrictions of a closed system in which a rigorous standard is applied and enforced, most of us get away with something less when we can.
While it’s true that service writing is meant to be clear, concise and dispassionate, there were, however, some practitioners who could completely ignore those requirements and write evocative, elegant and often highly entertaining prose, and they were secretly held in high esteem. I wanted to be one of those legendary writers.
In leaving the military for the IT industry, I entered an environment in which writing was considered an oddity, something to be scratched out with the minimum of care and skill, and only when it couldn’t be avoided. It was like landing on a new planet, but the industry and I eventually came to terms with one another, and we got along fine. I retired from the IT industry in 2008 to start my own business, and then retired from that in June 2019.
But the impact of military service on my writing extends far beyond the discipline of service writing. Military life is different from civilian life, and one of the key differences is endurance: even after military life is done, training endures, readiness endures, vigilance endures, respect endures, community endures, friendships endure. My military service taught me that people are capable of selflessness, of acting for the greater good, of forging bonds of fraternal love that persist for decades. In military service I saw glimpses of Nietzsche’s ubermensch or Higher Man, and as well as providing me with a template for the best of my characters, that also gives me hope.
Creative Influences
Looking back on the development of my writing over the past fifty years or so, it’s not surprising to discover that my practice has also been influenced by the creators of the works that interested and absorbed me, from the realms of literature, music, cinema, art and comedy. Many of them pop up regularly in my writing, their work being reference points which help ground my narratives in space and time. Often, I can see the connectivity between them, as if each one is an element of a larger design, but that’s more likely a Gestalt trick my mind plays on me.
It’s almost certainly true that every writer, musician, philosopher, comedian and filmmaker whose work I’ve experienced has influenced my writing in some way. It’s been quite an interesting exercise to identify my primary creative influences, and how each one has affected my development as a writer.
This is the list I came up with:
Isaac Asimov
As a young teenager, I was mesmerised by Asimov’s Foundation series. It was likely the first book series I’d read in which I’d noticed a defined recursion of stories, even though I didn’t know then what it was called. There was the vast backdrop of the rise and fall of galactic empires within which there was the development of psychohistory and the Seldon Plan within which there was the establishment of the two Foundations within each of which there were several planetary sub-plots within which there were several protagonists trying to achieve various outcomes, all of which related to the global themes of future history and individual action/personal responsibility.
This structure played out over seven books, and, depending on which level of recursion you looked at, the series was simultaneously continuous and discontinuous. In the series which begins with In Body, In Mind, I’m trying to achieve something similar, although on a much smaller scale. In Living Memory and In Absentia Lucis operate mostly at the level of recursion below In Body, In Mind, and In Medio Dierum at the level below them. While I’m still planning book five, I know it will return to the same level as In Body, In Mind.
To read more about Asimov’s contribution to the science fiction genre, Michael White (remember him from the Thompson Twins?) wrote an excellent biography, Asimov: The Unauthorized Life (Millennium).
Stafford Beer
Stafford Beer was one of the founders of management cybernetics, an operations research approach to communication and control within and between organisations.
The bulk of his work was primarily documented in two large, complicated and sometimes impenetrable books, though the main elements of his theory were simple. He described systems existing at different levels of recursion, interacting within and between themselves and their environment via feedback loops; he insisted that adaptation to a changing environment was necessary for any system at any level of recursion to remain viable; he described a necessary function of any system was to attenuate variety and thereby reduce uncertainty. At the philosophical level, Beer’s cybernetics echoed so many of the ideas I’d encountered in the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Birchall, Perlman, Husserl and Sartre, and so the attraction was instantaneous.
A large section of my Masters dissertation in the UK was a cybernetic analysis of an organisation under study, the approach having been based on an amalgam of Beer’s cybernetics and Peter Checkland’s soft systems methodology. Beer was a larger-than-life, eccentric figure, another thinker with a military background, and I was fortunate to have had lunch with him at Manchester University in 1985.
The structure of the series of novels which In Body, In Mind begins is loosely organised as a cybernetic system, with each novel occupying a level of recursion within the overall structure. I say “loosely”, because it wouldn’t pass a cybernetic audit, but the main principles have been applied reasonably consistently (so far, anyway).
Brian Birchall
Dr Brian Birchall was a Senior Lecturer at the University of New England (UNE) Philosophy Department when I began my Arts degree in 1981. He was a colourful, unconventional and irreverent figure, but it was his course in Existentialism that changed my life. He took inspiration and distilled lessons from a broad range of sources, remaining a dedicated philosophical maverick, difficult to categorise or pigeonhole in a philosophical -ism. He was an Associate Professor when I returned to UNE for my Master of Letters, and he supervised my thesis. It was in discussions with Brian that I first appreciated that literature could be philosophy, rather than merely philosophical, and that’s what I argued in my thesis.
Brian’s breadth of thought included the transmutation of Body as Spirit, the becoming of meaning, and the phenomenology of time, elucidating the notions of linear time, cyclical time, future history and essential history. His published work, The Importance of Being Obscure, is at the heart of In Body, In Mind, and so it seemed a fitting thing to do to cast him as a character in the book. I think I’ve captured the essence of his brilliant quirkiness, and hope I’ve done justice to his philosophy.
Unfortunately, Brian died in 2010. The following is a link to his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/philosopher-plucked-fruits-of-obscurity-20100901-14ngf.html.
Gavin Bryars
I first encountered the work of Gavin Bryars in 1986, when living in the UK. I bought the CD of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet because it looked interesting, and I was spellbound. At the time I was reading about chaos theory and fractals, and this work seemed to me to be a musical instantiation of a fractal pattern, based on the recursion of a self-similar motif through an ongoing (although finite) feedback loop (see also the entry on Stafford Beer). The work also had echoes of the question of eternal recurrence in the writings of Camus, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
The work’s almost subliminal use of a homeless man’s voice as the central motif I thought was extremely poignant, metaphorically suggesting that if we listen hard enough, we will hear the plaintive cry of the poor, the homeless, the neglected and outcast in our society, because it’s always there at the edge of our perception, repeating through time. It’s no accident that Bob, the old homeless man in In Body, In Mind, sang this song. I hadn’t realised when I bought the CD that the vocal contribution was provided by Tom Waits, but that added an additional resonance to the work (see also the entry on Tom Waits).
Bryars’ Cello Concerto Farewell to Philosophy is also on the In Body, In Mind playlist. As well as being a piece of incidental music being played in the background, this work inspired Sam’s recollection from his boyhood, hearing a cellist playing in his grandmother’s drawing room. The work was commissioned by Philips Classics for Julian Lloyd Webber, and was written as a companion piece to be played alongside the Haydn symphonies, The Philosopher and The Farewell. Bryars is a Philosophy graduate from Sheffield University.
Martin Buber
I was introduced to the work of Martin Buber while researching my MLitt thesis. His most famous work, I and Thou, outlines a theory of relations and proposes of notion of love based on the type of relation which exists. At the time, I thought it was too hard, but looking back on it now, the problem was probably that I didn’t have the life experience to provide context for what he proposed. It seems rather ironic to me that this wonderful book which contains so much wisdom about the nature of love, is not really accessible to the young, those who would otherwise have the opportunity to make best use of it.
Coming back to I and Thou when researching for In Body, In Mind, it made much more sense, and hence it plays such a significant role in the novel, both as an inanimate character, and a thematic influence. I recommend it to anyone who has the patience and commitment to get through it – it really is a remarkable book.
For a brief but interesting introduction to Buber’s I and Thou, try the following link:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/03/18/i-and-thou-martin-buber/.
Albert Camus
I was a relative latecomer to Camus’ The Outsider, it having been set as recommended reading for Brian’s Existentialism course. Since then, I must have read it another thirty times, and I still pick up new aspects of meaning almost every time. I especially love the second half of the book now because it conjures so many echoes of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, Kafka’s The Trial, and Joyce’s Ulysses, that it can seem like I’m reading them all at once. By the way, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (Oneworld Publications, 2015) is an excellent read as a postscript to The Outsider.
Most readers will have noticed that, within the narrative of In Body, In Mind, the recounting of Rachel’s mother’s death, the aged care home called Marengo, the vigil, and the funeral procession are all an homage to The Outsider. There’s Sam’s lecture too in which he describes Camus’ insight into the acceptance of personal responsibility. Many will also have recognised that Sigrid’s litany against weakness was a quote from the last section of the book. And of course, Noah’s reading the book to Sam rounds out the references.
When I set out to write In Body, In Mind, I thought I would try to imitate the sparseness of Camus’ prose, especially as it is rendered in the Laredo translation. But it was never me, and I abandoned that idea almost as soon as I began to experiment with style. But I did take with me how much the first-person perspective allows the reader to get into the protagonist’s head, even more than the third-person omniscient perspective used in Crime and Punishment (see also the entry on Fyodor Dostoyevsky). So, because I didn’t want the novel to be confined by the strictures of a first-person narrative, I hit upon the idea of using excerpts of first-person internal dialogue whenever a character’s thoughts could expand upon a theme or idea in a way that they wouldn’t naturally show through speech or action. I tried to make these dialogues sparse, but never approached the minimalist elegance of Camus’ work.
Camus was believed to have been significantly influenced by the writing of Dostoyevsky, particularly in The Brothers Karamazov.
For an interesting article on Camus’ thoughts on happiness and despair, try the following link:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/30/albert-camus-travel-lyrical-critical-essays/.
Nick Cave
The sound of Nick Cave’s angry, discordant, adolescent rage was way beyond the boundary of the music I listened to in my teens and twenties. It was through Wim Wenders’ cinematic masterpieces Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close (see also the entry on Wim Wenders) that Nick Cave first came to my notice in the late 80s and early 90s. It was then his epic Murder Ballads and the surprisingly tender The Boatman’s Call in the late 90s that drew me into the power of his lyrical creativity. I borrowed a friend’s copy of Ian Johnston’s excellent biography of Cave, Bad Seed (Hachette Australia, 1996), and learned the story of his youth in country Victoria, of his drug-addled years of filthy squalor in London and Berlin, and of the emergence of a flawed genius who unexpectedly survived his demons.
The following link is a beautifully written essay by Mark Mordue, describing Nick Cave’s formative years in Wangaratta:
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/nick-cave-wangaratta/.
Cave’s influence upon my writing manifests in several ways. Firstly, he’s a strong advocate for working at one’s craft. When writing, he dresses up in his suit and sits at his desk, putting the hours and days and weeks and months in, not always with reward, until he comes away with what he needs. I’m more sartorially relaxed, but otherwise I couldn’t agree more. When the word or the sentence or the idea presents itself, the best place you can be is where you’re ready to accept it.
Secondly, Cave has a masterful ability to combine lyrics and music to tell a story as a sensory phenomenon, in a way that allows the music to work on us sublingually while the lyrics engage us intellectually. I challenge anyone to listen without distraction to O’Malley’s Bar and fail to form a clear and vivid image of the scene. It’s for this reason I try to create a background soundtrack to my writing, with occasional lyrics or pieces of music coming to the foreground. The balance to be managed is keeping the music liminal, most of the time, anyway.
Finally, I owe a debt to Nick Cave for his intellectual honesty. He sees the world from the perspective of both an artist and a scientist; he’s both a realist and an idealist; he embraces mind, body and spirit; he’s both humanistic and spiritual, secular and religious. He acknowledges that there are conflicts and inconsistencies in his worldview, but doesn’t let that stop him expressing himself in a way that makes sense to him. It’s a stance I try to emulate when I write, although I struggle with it, as I imagine he does sometimes.
The following link is to Nick Cave’s very entertaining Q&A blog, The Red Hand Files:
Giorgio de Chirico
In the early 1990s I lived in Canberra, just a couple of kilometres from the Australian National Gallery. Whenever there was a major exhibition on, I would try to get there. I remember going to an amazing exhibition of the Surrealists, in which were several de Chirico paintings, as well as many by Dali, and Albert Tucker’s The Possessed.
What struck me most about the de Chirico works was his use of liminal images, often a small, spiralling column of smoke at the edge of a canvas suggesting the presence of a train which had just disappeared from within the frame. I hadn’t seen that device used before, and it intrigued me enough for me to begin to study the Surrealists, reading what I could find and attending documentaries screened at the Gallery.
Not surprisingly, I discovered that de Chirico had been greatly influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and particularly the necessity of escaping the restrictive containment of rationalism by encountering the irrational as a liminal mode of experience. Heidegger went further to insist we progress further into liminal space to its extension, nothingness, but that’s another story. De Chirico’s metaphysical work shows the irrational side of liminal space, usually with a transitional device departing the edge of the canvas, back to the safety of the rational. The effect is meant to be disquieting, unnerving even, and perhaps it was this response that initially drew me towards de Chirico’s work.
De Chirico inspired many other artists, including the inimitable Sylvia Plath, who wrote one of her poems in response to de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses (see also the entry on Sylvia Plath).
Finally, I can’t listen to the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb without thinking of de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet:
… When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child has grown, the dream is gone …
Leonard Cohen
I can’t remember the first time I heard Songs of Leonard Cohen; it seems like that music has always been with me, but it was probably when I was in my last years of high school, and I borrowed some records belonging to a neighbour’s daughter who’d gone off to uni somewhere. I know I didn’t buy the record until I was at uni, finally earning a bit of money.
Once I owned the record and began to play it, I was astounded that most people I knew thought Cohen’s songs were dull and miserable. I mean, hadn’t they listened to the lyrics? To me, his lyrics were poetic, simultaneously enigmatic and relatable, not the usual boy-meets-girl-meets-boy tales or laments of lost love or superficial tear-jerkers which dominated the charts at the time. They were darker, more intense ideas communicated using devastating word combinations which pushed emotional buttons rather than relying on the hum-ability of the music. Cohen’s was music to listen to rather than hear.
I was particularly intrigued by his use of the second-person perspective in so many of his songs, giving the impression that he knows what you’re thinking and feeling, and he’s telling the world. What better way to establish an emotional connection than to assume a psychic connection already exists?
Cohen was greatly influenced by Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, and in turn influenced Nick Cave; one of his final songs, You Want it Darker, giving a nod to Ginsberg’s Kaddish, is a retelling of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (see also the entry on Søren Kierkegaard), the story of Abraham and Isaac.
In Body, In Mind contains lyrics from Suzanne and Tonight Will Be Fine, and, if I’d been able to afford the cost of permissions, would have also contained lyrics from One of Us Cannot Be Wrong and If It Be Your Will.
Salvador Dali
Like many of my generation, my first encounter with Dali’s work was most probably a poster of his The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which hung on almost every uni student’s wall in the mid-1970s. Looking back now, it does seem odd that poster producers would have marketed this work rather than any number of his more flamboyant or rebellious works. But what set Dali apart was his hyper-realistic technique, creating what he liked to call ‘hand-painted dream photographs’, visual representations of metaphors as though they were captured in the realisation of possibility.
Dali was my inspiration to make my narratives as realistic as possible, while still incorporating occasional elements that expand the notion of reality to be more representative of human phenomenology. Dali understood that, much like the best food incorporates elements that connect with all the constituent parts that form the sense of taste (sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami), the best art incorporates elements that connect with all the constituent parts of the human experience (body, mind and spirit).
Within the narrative of In Body, In Mind, Dali receives several mentions, primarily as a major influence on Noah. Noah has a disturbing and recurring dream which, suggesting a kind of Freudian displacement, fuses his mother’s likeness and voice into the composition of Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936). This painting is one of horrific and tragic violence, and was possibly inspired by Francisco Goya’s etching Up and Down (circa 1799), one of the Caprichos series.
For further details, Paul Moorhouse has written a brief, but quite good biography, Dali, (PRC Publishing Ltd, 1990).
Bruce Dawe
Bruce Dawe was a lecturer and the resident poet at the first university I attended. I had recently joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), and Bruce was an honorary member of the Officers’ Mess. I knew him a little, and was surprised to learn that he was ex-RAAF. I doubt that it had ever crossed my mind that a creative life might ever follow a career of military service, let alone a creative life which might take someone to being one of Australia’s most influential poets. Perhaps that realisation planted a seed which led me to attempt a novel towards the end of my military career.
The poetry anthology we had set in high school contained several of his poems. One in particular resonated with me: The Flashing of Badges. In it he identifies the small tethers upon dignity and self-worth that somehow sustain the homeless, the down-and-out, vagrants and drifters. He implores us to respect their vulnerability, echoing the likes of Tom Waits, Robert Heinlein and Gavin Bryars (see also their entries). Dawe had himself been born into humble circumstances, and in the process of working and studying part-time to achieve the success he did, he must have seen plenty of poverty and the raw underbelly of urban society.
Dawe’s war poetry was almost all anti-war, but never anti-military. Two of his best-known poems, Homecoming and Weapons Training are poignantly sympathetic to the plight of the ordinary soldier, sailor and airman, their lives gambled upon by others from the safety of great distance, and often towards an unworthy or futile objective. The more I see of political decision-making, the more I agree with him.
Bruce was a gentle man and a gentleman. Sadly, he died in 2020.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was introduced to the work of Dostoyevsky when undertaking my first Philosophy degree. His novel, Crime and Punishment, was held to be a master work of psychological comprehension and an almost forensic examination of the dynamics of moral choice. Even though his narrative uses the third-person point of view, its omniscient, psychological perspective allows us to get into the heads of his characters, and especially into that of the protagonist, Raskolnikov.
Set against a backdrop of nineteenth century St Petersburg, much of the narrative is about ideas which permeated political philosophy at the time, and it examines the logical outcome of nihilism and the moral freedom in which everything is permitted. This work became a kind of template I had in my mind when I began thinking of In Body, In Mind as a philosophical novel, in order to lay open the thought processes of my characters (see also the entry on Albert Camus). Noah’s mention of the work early in In Body, In Mind is a nod to the debt owed by the story to Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece.
The character of Jean-Pierre Kane was inspired by the character of Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, how I imagine he was as a child. The conversation between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov about how the happiness of all mankind might be brought about by the death of one small child is referenced directly in Noah’s internal dialogue.
Dostoyevsky’s work influenced many of the writers and thinkers who have influenced my writing, including Camus, Sartre, Joyce, Kafka and Murakami.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is by far my favourite contemporary work of philosophical fiction. This intricate work (of which, to me, Dan Brown’s The De Vinci Code still seems a flavourless, pale facsimile) and its much more famous cousin, The Name of the Rose, represent, to my eye anyway, the modern standard to which any European-style philosophical novel should aspire.
The lesson I’ve learned from reading Eco is a fairly prosaic one, which is rather ironic given his mastery of semiotics and complex, nuanced narrative; the lesson is this: there is a market for philosophical literary fiction. In fact, it’s more than that.
Modern publishing has driven writers into tailoring their works to a ridiculously restrictive idea of a reading public with the following characteristics:
- a short attention span, unable to be captured by a work longer than 100,000 words;
- a need to be instantly gratified through a first page that grabs maximum attention;
- a reading age of nine to ten years old;
- an inability to cope with a foreign spelling regime;
- a desire to not have to think too much; and
- a desire to be entertained rather than challenged.
Of course, we all know novels that have been written with a much more realistic audience in mind, but the sad truth is that first-time authors are faced with a different reality: if they fail to meet the requirements of the industry template, their work will never be considered for publication. The result is that over the past thirty years or so, what’s available for the reading public is so much less rich than it could have been.
But Eco’s commercial success showed me that the publishing industry is wrong about the reading public. While I’m sure the above description applies to a minor proportion of the reading public, I think most readers are much more capable, patient, intelligent and inquisitive than the publishing industry paints them to be. And if I’m right, some of them might read my work.
Here’s a link to an interesting article about Umberto Eco:
T.S. Eliot
I was first introduced to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Hollow Men at high school. To my mind, The Waste Land was a modern saga, and as I read more about it, the more I was amazed at how it evoked different voices, different times, different worlds, even different languages. It was both classical and avant-garde, deeply lyrical and profoundly symbolic, even though at the time most of the symbolism was beyond me. I’ve returned to it every few years or so for the past forty-five, and I never tire of it, especially the fifth section, What the Thunder Said. It’s no coincidence that towards the end of In Body, In Mind, this is the section highlighted by Sam for Noah. The barren, hopeless atmosphere of the first section informs Hugo’s address on despair.
Likewise, The Hollow Men was a source of fascination for me as a teenager, full of existential angst about the plight of the spiritually dead. At that stage I hadn’t read about Dante’s deepest place where the sun is silent (l sol tace) in the Inferno, but I’d already collected a few literary views of the descent into Hell, including John Cowper Powys’ Morwyn, Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the early 1970s, the whole mystery of death was a culturally taboo subject for polite conversation, so of course I wanted to know more. I do recall using the expression ‘Stygian Gehenna’ in a poem around that time – ouch.
Eliot’s work led me to explore the darker themes of literature, and that in turn led me to many of the artists listed here as my influences. It also convinced me that good literature, or indeed any art form, shouldn’t be saccharine. Themes of death, despair, abandonment, isolation and grief run through our lives, so should they not also be reflected in our art?
Emerson, Lake and Palmer
Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s music was the artistic vanguard of progressive rock. And of the progressive rock superstars, I’d argue theirs (perhaps along with Yes) was the most successful fusion of classical and modern music. Also with Yes, they produced tightly integrated concept albums telling stories through thematic interpretations, with complex melodies and drawcard cover art. And they were serious musicians. Their music was never saccharine or trite. Early favourites were The Three Fates (see also the entries on Giorgio de Chirico and Sylvia Plath), and Take a Pebble (the lyrics of which are included in In Body, In Mind).
While their progressive rock cousins, Pink Floyd, wrote masterful lyrics to their music, with a few exceptions ELP’s lyrics were generally workmanlike at best. But those lyrics provided the bridge between their often-breathtaking musical ingenuity and their classical music heritage. Unlike more traditional classical music, this music engaged me because it had some lyrical content to ground it and situate the story being told. I guess it was a little like the records we had when we were kids like Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and The Ugly Duckling, which were narrated as heavily moralistic but accessible stories.
ELP’s music may have been where I first began to get comfortable with the idea of pauses. When the ‘song’ you’re listening to includes an awesome guitar solo (Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb or Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven), or piano solo (David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane), in most cases the solo fulfils a narrative role of some kind. ELP’s musical interludes were often long and virtuosic, but they usually told the same story in a different way. I try to achieve a similar result when writing by using pauses in the narrative to explore aspects of my characters (see also the entry on Wim Wenders). The temptation is to delete the pause by skipping forward in the narrative to the next plot point, but not always, because that’s more like how life plays out. For most of us, pauses between high points of activity are the rule rather than the exception, and if we miss paying attention to all of them, we miss being present for most of our lives.
Helen Garner
I lost track of Helen Garner after reading Monkey Grip in the late 70s. I remember admiring how sparse her prose was, mainly because mine never is. I’ve dabbled over the years with austere styles, but it doesn’t sit naturally with me. I’ve also come to know about Garner’s skills with close observation, and I envy her the habit of keeping a diary that she developed as a child. The following links outline some interesting aspects of Garner’s diaries:
https://lithub.com/helen-garner-on-court-burning-diaries-and-the-violence-of-love/
https://lithub.com/on-the-diaries-of-helen-garner-and-the-quagmire-of-the-fictionalized-self/
In recent years, I’ve read The Spare Room and Everywhere I Look and re-read Monkey Grip. Garner’s writing blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and it has taught me that there are no rules to say that everything in a novel needs to be a product of my imagination. Why shouldn’t I include events from real life? And characters? And places? If done with a sufficiently light hand, reality augments fiction by making it feel more like what actually happened rather than the disembodied product of an author’s twisted imagination. If the reader has the impression that the story they’re invested in is at least grounded in reality, then their reactions to it will reflect an even greater level of investment.
Lisa Gerrard / Dead Can Dance
I can remember the first time I heard Dead Can Dance, soon after the release of Piece for Solo Flute and Dolphin Dance, their collaboration with Tangerine Dream. I’d come to them through my love for Tangerine Dream, and I was surprised to learn about an Australian band I’d never heard of before mixing it with such giants of electronica. It was several years later before I collected my first Dead Can Dance album (probably Spleen and Ideal), and heard the beautiful voice of Lisa Gerrard.
From a literary perspective, however, it wasn’t Gerrard’s amazing vocal abilities that were most interesting to me, but rather, her utilisation of idioglottic lyrics, singing in an invented language she’d been using since about the age of twelve. She calls it ‘the language of the Heart’, and as a child she believed she was speaking to God when she sang in that language. With such a sublime voice, it’s hard to imagine God not listening.
The whole idea of an idioglossia struck me as fascinating, and it appeared to align with what I’d been reading around that time about the universal grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky. Had I access to Google back then, I would’ve been able to discover that the large Greco-Turkish community that Gerrard had grown up in, and her father’s Irish heritage of Sean Nós songs probably had as much to do with this language as any evolutionary biolinguistic competence.
Over subsequent years I learned of James Joyce’s development of an idioglossia for the telling of Finnegan’s Wake, and the Vonlenska (which means ‘Hopelandic’ in English, basically strings of syllables containing non-lexical vocables and phonemes) employed by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. It struck me that an idioglossia redefines the relationship between language and communication, which for transitive languages occurs via a notion of meaning, or at the very least, understanding. It therefore seems that not every language which has lexical meaning is communicable, and of course, dead languages and lost languages fit into this description too. This issue is at the heart of Sam’s attempt to decipher J-P’s transcription of Lisa Gerrard’s lyrics in In Body, In Mind. In the same way that meaning can be infused into a language at its origin, meaning can also be inferred in its interpretation, and in many ways, this is the same mechanism that operates in the development and performance of art. The question then arises: Is language art, at least sometimes?
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl began as a call to arms for the Beat Poets, and it became arguably the most influential poem by an American in the twentieth century. It expresses the anxieties of a generation alienated from mainstream society, struggling to grapple with consumerism, economic inequality, and ideals of authenticity and identity.
Howl and much of Ginsberg’s poetry were works which could be performed in a certain style, with each line crafted to be delivered by the performer in a single breath.
Ginsberg influenced the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen (see also the entry on Leonard Cohen), and countless writers, of which Elliot Perlman was one (see also the entry on Elliot Perlman). I’m not entirely sure of how much or in precisely what ways my writing has been influenced by Ginsberg, although I’m certain my sensitivity to cadence is a debt to his work.
After having accomplished everything he’d wished for as a poet, Ginsberg tried to move sideways into music, collaborating with artists like Dylan and The Clash. Though the results were interesting, I don’t think they achieved the genius of his poetry.
In Body, In Mind includes some of the first strophes from Howl, as well as a couple of discussions between Sam and Noah about Ginsberg.
A fascinating and detailed resource for more about Ginsberg and the other Beat Poets is The Beats – A Literary Reference, edited by Matt Theado (Carroll & Graf, 2003).
Peter Greenaway
I was living just north of Perth in 1989 when Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover was released to great controversy. I saw it with friends at the Lumiere Cinema in Perth City and the experience has stayed with me ever since. Greenaway used tight integration of cinema with classical art and music (usually the music of Michael Nyman) as leitmotifs to simulate a thematic literary structure. He was not afraid to inject elements of formalism and sometimes unnerving symmetry into his work, both to provide a visual framework that speaks of order and predictability as a kind of psychologically convulsive backdrop to a scene of chaos and lawlessness.
In The Cook, the Thief Greenaway sets up the Thief and his cronies in the restaurant in an arrangement evocative of the Last Supper, more like Dali’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper than Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. There’s a lot of emotion and encapsulated meaning in the creative objects with which we interact, and it makes sense to me that such objects should be used as part of the vocabulary in which a story can be told. In In Body, In Mind there’s a similar occurrence of life imitating art when Sam is found in the university building in a scene evocative of Tucker’s The Possessed. As long as the technique is used sparingly so as not to create a kind of literary karaoke, then the creative objects bring with them layers of meaning and reference which can be aligned with the thematic, emotional and narrative flows of the novel.
Greenaway’s other work includes such films as Prospero’s Books, The Belly of an Architect, Drowning by Numbers and A Zed and Two Noughts, all of which are conceptually fascinating, visually lyrical and unusual. Greenaway is a great example of an artist who follows his instincts rather than the fashion prevalent in the industry at the time. He has earned much more respect than money in doing so, and that’s a worthwhile outcome.
Robert Heinlein
In my late teens I was introduced to the writing of Robert Heinlein, and it seemed like a natural progression from the work of Asimov and the other science fiction writers of my youth. I found that Heinlein’s work was a bit more than science fiction: it was philosophical fiction written around a series of protagonists which bristled with practical but unexpectedly progressive individualism. It didn’t surprise me to later learn that Heinlein had a military background, but it did surprise me to learn that in the early sixties, we lived in the same city, Colorado Springs.
Despite his Bible Belt upbringing and military service, Heinlein was progressive on issues such as race, gender equality and sexual orientation. In Time Enough for Love and I Will Fear No Evil, Heinlein was also the first writer I’d ever read who’d tackled the topic of gender fluidity. Much as his characters were individualistic, Heinlein was for many years committed to writing what he wanted to write rather than what the fashion was at the time.
One of the characteristics of Heinlein’s work that attracted me as a teenager was the wise-cracking dialogue. David Eddings in his fantasy works employed a similar approach to conversational character. When I last read Time Enough for Love several years ago, the dialogue annoyed the hell out of me, and almost ruined the experience. I suppose we often move on from what we found so appealing in our youth.
Within the framework of its multiple themes and plotlines, Time Enough for Love embodies the concept of future history (see also the entries on Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell), and was probably the work that reignited my fascination with time. This of course was awakened more and more with ideas of recursion, cyclical time and the eternal return (see also the entries on Stafford Beer, Brian Birchall and Friedrich Nietzsche). Also like Nietzsche, Heinlein was prone to creating philosophical aphorisms, as well as others more humorous or quirky.
Aldous Huxley
Huxley’s Brave New World was an optional English text for my final year at high school, and so I’m not sure of how many times I’ve read it. At the time it seemed to me like very grown-up science fiction, but looking back at it now it was clearly philosophical fiction played out in what was then a future dystopia, which looks rather like much of Western civilisation today.
Huxley’s predilection for philosophical mysticism and dystopia was a source of fascination to me, though I’ve yet to explore his other work. Brave New World was such a powerful work which came to me when I was a very impressionable age, I suspect it has shaped my future reading more than my writing. As I’m writing this now, I know I need to read it again.
Huxley influenced George Orwell (who was his student), and writers and intellectuals throughout the world since the 1930s.
James Joyce
I first encountered the works of James Joyce through Brian Birchall. Brian had studied Philosophy at Sydney university in the turbulent post-Andersonian years (John Anderson was the Challis Professor of Philosophy at the university for almost 30 years) and a lot of Anderson’s personal interest was focused on trying to extract every ounce of meaning from Joyce’s Ulysses) Brian regarded wrestling with Ulysses as a philosophical rite of passage.
Joyce was believed to have been significantly influenced by the writing of Dostoyevsky, particularly in The Brothers Karamazov. He influenced artists such as T.S. Eliot, with Ulysses and Elliot’s The Waste Land (see also the entry on T.S. Eliot) being published at the same time, both creating an avalanche of interest around the literary world.
In Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I was intrigued by Joyce’s tentative aesthetic, and this was probably the first encounter that I can remember of literature as philosophy. Although I’ve yet to satisfactorily conquer Ulysses, in my very first foray into its sometimes-impenetrable prose I became interested in Joyce’s use of first-person stream of consciousness. I dabbled with variations on this device until finally settling on first person inner dialogues with a minimum of internal punctuation.
I was also encouraged to read that for much of his writing career, most people around him thought Joyce was mad, or at least on a fool’s errand trying to become a writer. He persevered with the style and content he felt compelled to write, and ultimately achieved great success. It’s probably fair to say that he’s revered by other writers more than by the general reading public, but he’d most likely be OK with that.
Franz Kafka
In my late teens I was very taken with the work of Franz Kafka. He was the master of liminal dread: he created objects and motivations which were just out of vision, never grounded or discovered or defined, perceived only by the fear and anxiety they created in his bewildered and traumatised characters. I found his most famous works, The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial to be worthy of their status as masterpieces, even though Kafka never quite finished the latter two.
Kafka was believed to have been significantly influenced by the writing of Dostoyevsky, often claiming some kind of literary kinship with him. His influence upon the literary and broader intellectual world remains strong today, and extends to such figures as Albert Camus, Haruki Murakami, George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre (see the entries on them all).
Kafka’s influence on my writing extends into a few areas. Firstly, I’m comfortable with the idea that the reader doesn’t have to be told everything. If you choose the right things to withhold from the reader, the psychological effect of the reader having to fill in the blanks from their imagination can be much more effective than supplying the necessary detail.
Secondly, Kafka tackled psychological and existential themes from the inside out, lived through the lives and reactions of his characters, and I have tried to do the same. In essence, the minor story of Sam and the licensing authorities is a small example of the experience of faceless bureaucracy, as Josef K. endured in The Trial.
Finally, Kafka understood that every story has to have a kernel of recognisable truth for it to be believable. Even The Metamorphosis, with its protagonist transformed somehow into a horrible creature, relies on the fact that as humans, we all know someone who, through misfortune or poor choices or the influence of others, has become an object of self-disgust. And because we know such people, we also know we could end up as one of them one day. And that knowledge builds empathy.
Søren Kierkegaard
It’s probably fair to say that Søren Kierkegaard’s writing has had an extraordinary influence on my writing and thinking. I mean, more influence than one might expect from a writer from literally the other side of the world who died over a century before I was born. Brian Birchall’s Philosophical Foundations of Existentialism course introduced me to Kierkegaard, notably to his Biblical parable, Fear and Trembling, and his timeless discourse on despair, The Sickness unto Death. As an inanimate character, the latter work occupies a central place in In Body, In Mind, being the subject of Hugo’s conference address and helping Rachel to weigh up the state of her spiritual health. I believe it’s an important work that has relevance to the parlous state of mental health in the Western world, and probably elsewhere.
Similarly, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety is also worth contemporary examination, though for very different reasons. We regard anxiety as a negative condition, and obviously when it overwhelms someone, that’s true. But Kierkegaard’s idea that anxiety has a healthy threshold, and that it is a response to freedom and possibility, is one that strikes me as true. The following link is a good summation of this argument:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/06/19/kierkegaard-on-anxiety-and-creativity/
Much is made of the importance to Kierkegaard’s work of his relationship with Regine Olsen, and his sacrificing of that relationship in favour of his writing. Fear and Trembling plays that dilemma out in a parable about Abraham and Isaac, though it’s not clear to me that Kierkegaard’s intention was to use this work to tell his side of the story. This, of all his work (that I’ve read) is the most accessible and vicariously usable.
I’m less sure about Either/Or – it seems to me that it argues against alternation, the act of choosing between A or B when presented with a seemingly impossible choice, instead looking for a dialectical resolution. This brings me to my favourite commentary about Kierkegaard’s thought and stylistic difficulties. In Pat Bigelow’s Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing, he articulates what he calls ‘The Kierkegaardian Gambit’:
“… both necessary and impossible to accept; both necessary and impossible to decline; both necessary and impossible either to accept or decline; both necessary and impossible neither to accept nor decline. But, what is the gambit? It is hard to say: to say what the gambit is about requires learning to unsay the saying that says that every saying is always a saying-about. Though all saying is inwardly involved with this gambit, though all saying testifies to this gambit and is a cryptic and decrepit documentation of this gambit, no saying could ever say what this gambit is about – for that there is this gambit means that there is a way of saying that is not about anything. Yet it is irresistible to try to insist that this way of saying is nonetheless about something, about, perhaps, what takes place both before and after thinking, both before and after saying. And this would be about a way of saying in which we say something about what no saying could ever say anything about, yet what every saying implicates. This way of saying would be about a way of saying that carries no reference, while simultaneously describing those phenomena that carry references to what is exterior to all reference. It is as if we all conspired never to speak about one particular thing, a thing that no one knows anything about, since we agreed never to mention anything about it …”
Either/Or also first introduced me to Kierkegaard’s wonderfully visual metaphor of risk as the state of being suspended over seventy-thousand fathoms. The following link is an interesting take on the work:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/05/either-or-kierkegaard/.
Krzysztof Keiślowski
When I lived in Canberra in the mid-90s, there was a fantastic alternative cinema in the middle of the city called Electric Shadows. Rather than playing the usual formula-driven Hollywood dross that the rest of the cinemas in the country can’t get enough of, they played European movies, South American movies, Asian movies, classic movies, and the occasional pearls garnered from the American, British and Australian offerings of the time. It was at Electric Shadows that I first saw Trois Couleurs: Bleu, and I was blown away.
The Trois Couleurs trilogy: Bleu, Blanc and Rouge revolves around a main theme of how identity is tied to the past, with each film characterised by a different combination of colours (blue, white, red), sub-themes (liberty, egality, fraternity), languages (French, French and Polish, French), locations (Paris, Warsaw, Geneva), and plot. The three films finally resolve in a representation of salvation. The trilogy seemed to me a sophisticated refinement of the art form, more layered and complex than Asimov’s Foundation series, more subtle and nuanced than Herbert’s Dune series. I distinctly remember thinking at the time that I wanted to create something like that one day.
Of Keiślowski’s other works, I’ve seen only La Double Vie de Véronique, and it was as enchanting as the Trois Couleurs trilogy. Parallel lives are played out in parallel plotlines, framed within an almost dreamlike world which suggests that our real lives are potentially more rich than we perceive. One of the most poignant moments of the film occurs when Véronique and Weronika almost meet in a perfect moment of liminal intersection, in which each exists just out of the corner of the other’s eye. Along with Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Véronique is the most poetic film I’ve ever seen.
Keiślowski’s work is drenched in symbolism and visual metaphor. He builds a very tight connection between the visual narrative and the music (usually the music of Zbigniew Preisner [see also his entry]), in a similar way to Peter Greenaway and Haruki Murakami (see also their entries).
I have in the back of my mind an idea for a series of short film scripts in a similar style. When the current collection of five novels is finished, watch this space.
Monty Python
I first became aware of the genius of Monty Python in high school, watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on the TV whenever I could manage it (my parents weren’t fans). It wasn’t until I was at university that I had the opportunity to delve a little deeper into some of the philosophical jokes to find out what made them funny. The humour had been lost on me because I had no idea who Bergson, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Descartes and Kant were, nor how their work related to the various Python skits. What I gradually learned from them was that a philosophical perspective can be very funny if used in the right juxtaposition with that which is superficially non-philosophical.
Another lesson I learned from ‘studying’ the Pythons was how vital specific wording is for comedy to work, wording plus timing if you can manage it. I’ve found it very instructive to note that there are some people who attempt to quote Monty Python, but who haven’t learned the dialogue by heart, and the result is never funny. Not remotely funny. It’s an echo of Nietzsche’s maxim that,
“… He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.’.
The Pythons’ influence didn’t extend to me attempting any Python-like humour in In Body, In Mind, though Sam does acknowledge the Pythons’ genius in one of his conversations with Noah.
Haruki Murakami
My introduction to Haruki Murakami was via his tenth novel, Kafka on the Shore. It seemed to me very Japanese, even though I’d never read a Japanese novel before, but I’ve come to understand that as a Japanese novel, it’s considered very Western. Perspectives, eh?
In delving further into other Murakami works such as Norwegian Wood, After Dark, Sputnik Sweetheart and 1Q84, I’ve come to associate his writing with cinematic description, a touch of magic realism, integration with music of several genres, quirky but often intentionally bland protagonists, and intricate weaving of plotlines. Like Heinlein (see also the entry on Robert Heinlein), Murakami has not been afraid to explore gender fluidity or taboo issues, and as he ages, his work is becoming increasingly connected to social and political issues.
Murakami was significantly influenced by the writing of Dostoyevsky, and it shows in his use of the third-person omniscient perspective and his psychological insights. His influence on my writing has been to validate several characteristics of my emerging style that we share, and that gives me confidence to stick with what feels right for me.
The following link is an entertaining account of how Murakami decided to become a novelist:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche wasn’t in my field of vision in high school; I had to wait until the first year of my undergraduate Philosophy degree to encounter his work, and until the following year, in Brian Birchall’s Existentialism course, to experience Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of my earliest encounters with literature as philosophy.
The central theme of my MLitt thesis was that the becoming of meaning does not occur easily within a phenomenology of rational literality. By applying ourselves to the Labour of the Concept, we can move beyond the ordered assembly of words into an aesthetic phenomenology in which we connect with the meaning in a more primal way, sublingually. Nietzsche wrote that:
‘If someone hides a thing behind a bush, looks for it there and indeed finds it, then such searching and finding is nothing very praiseworthy: but that precisely is what the searching and finding of “truth” within the realm of reason amounts to.’
This is developed in In Body, In Mind when Sam and Alex discuss the role of the medial pre-frontal cortex in the development of meaning.
Another of Nietzsche’s ideas that pop up in my writing is that of the Eternal Return. In In Body, In Mind, this doctrine is recast slightly into the idea of cyclical time. This theme also occurs in the work of Kierkegaard as repetition, in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, and in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
In In Body, In Mind, this notion also crosses over with the discussion between Sam, Hugo and Rachel on the notion of joy, connecting Schiller’s ode To Joy with Virgil’s Aeneid and the cyclical journey of souls to the banks of the River Lethe, where most are reincarnated to earth after drinking the waters of forgetfulness, and only the most fortunate moving on to the joy of Elysium.
The themes of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra play a pivotal role in the remainder of the series, especially In Living Memory and In Medio Dierum, both of which grapple with the meaning and significance of The Three Metamorphoses of Spirit.
J.P. Stern also produced a very good encapsulation of Nietzsche’s life and work for the Fontana Modern Masters series, as Nietzsche (Fontana Press, 1978).
Some interesting articles on various aspects of Nietzsche’s life and work are as follows:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/19/hiking-with-nietzsche-john-kaag-eternal-return/,
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/15/nietzsche-free-spirits/, and
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/15/nietzsche-on-difficulty/.
George Orwell
Orwell’s 1984 was an English text during my final years at high school, and in my political naivety, I probably didn’t fully appreciate its message. I was, however, very happy that I’d read it as I was able to weave together an essay comparing and contrasting its themes with Huxley’s Brave New World in a Higher School Certificate examination. It was probably more than a decade later that I read Animal Farm and then re-read 1984, and my eyes were opened to what I’d previously missed.
Part of Orwell’s genius was his understanding of human psychology, pessimistic and overlaid with prejudice as it was. He knew not only how people would behave given certain stimuli, but also had a keen eye for how they would feel, and the conflicts that would arise between their natural instincts and the responsibilities placed on them by class, education and societal norms. I suppose he had felt many of these conflicts personally. Orwell is one of the influences that has led me to philosophical fiction, so concerned as it is with the psychology of the human condition.
Orwell was certainly influenced by both Kafka and Huxley (who was his teacher), and the three of them formed an unlikely triumvirate as the masters of dystopian dread. While my writing has proceeded along a different path to a very different style, I still try to occasionally emulate their use of liminal images and objects to create tension or change mood (see also the entries on Franz Kafka and Aldous Huxley).
Orwell wrote a short, but revealing work called Why I Write (Penguin Books, 2004). In it, he explains the source of his imperative to write, both when he was younger and through the course of his eventful life. Raymond Williams also produced a really good encapsulation of Orwell’s life and work for the Fontana Modern Masters series, as Orwell (Flamingo, 1984).
Elliot Perlman
When I first read Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, I was fascinated to learn that the author was not a full-time writer, but a Melbourne barrister. It’s no surprise that this was around the time that I knew I had to get my finger out and finish In Body, In Mind, or put it away in a drawer. After all, if a successful barrister has time to write a substantial, complex and lyrical novel, then I should likewise have time to finish one.
Perlman’s Australia is a rich melange of contrasts and perspectives. His characters are unified by their profound differences from one another. His prose has a lovely cadence to it, and he uses it to dignify his characters, however undignified the situations in which they find themselves. While some critics contend that he gets a bit preachy, his passion for examining social justice issues in his work shows through.
I particularly admire Perlman as a writer because he refuses to be ‘writerly’. He doesn’t succumb to the allure of the literary bubble, but remains connected with the real world, with all its interruptions and inconveniences and inconsistencies. It seems to me that a writer with a day job has so much more opportunity to learn about how to connect with humans than a writer who taps away in complete isolation, or one who flits in and out of human activity systems for the purposes of research.
Perlman was influenced by Allen Ginsberg (see also his entry) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and presumably William Empson (who wrote the original Seven Types of Ambiguity). He often uses music, and song lyrics, in his work to convey an idea or mood, or to give a sense of who a character is. While our styles of writing are very different, we share several writing characteristics, and that in itself gives me hope.
Pink Floyd
I think it was Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive that first drew me to their music, because it was the music of their early work that I found the most remarkable – lyrically, they’d yet to find their feet. The release of their Dark Side of the Moon coincided with my last years in high school, and I remember listening to it over and over again, spellbound by the brilliant marriage of distinctive sound and deep, complex lyrics describing the liminal experience of madness in Brain Damage, the intersection of linear and cyclical time in Time and how the arbitrary hand of alternation assigns privilege, responsibility and tragedy in Us and Them. It even included Clare Tory’s haunting idioglossia to evoke the transition to death in The Great Gig in the Sky, This album became an unforgiving yardstick for my future selection of music.
Fortunately, later albums followed which were likewise masterfully scored, and full of poignant and meaningful lyrics. Pink Floyd’s lyrical strength lies in its ability to articulate a spectrum of experience around a central concept, providing a coherent variety of resonating perspectives to amplify the thematic statement they make.
The lyrics of Comfortably Numb (see also the entry on Giorgio De Chirico) are used in In Body, In Mind as an exposition of Sam’s emotional and psychological state as he balances on the brink of alienation and despair, while the potential remedy consistently escapes his gaze, hovering at the edge of his perception.
The lyrics of Wish You Were Here are used in In Body, In Mind, serving as an avatar of Rachel’s absence, an avatar which for Noah signifies abandonment, and for Sam signifies yearning.
Zbigniew Preisner
Like the symbiotic collaboration between director Peter Greenaway and composer Michael Nyman, Preisner’s long partnership with director Krzysztof Keiślowski was sustained over several films.
His style of composing is heavily based on use of melody, and allowing each featured instrument to emphasise the unique qualities of its voice.
He has worked with Tom Waits, Lisa Gerrard and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Like Gavin Bryars, he is a philosophy graduate who has made his name in music.
It was Preisner who first kindled the idea for me that simple motifs can connect disparate works and in doing so, create the virtual existence of a larger fictional universe. He does this with the E minor soprano solo from the Double Life of Veronique reappearing in Van den Budenmayer’s Song for the Reunification of Europe. For each film, the frame of the work is immediately drawn back to include the other, effectively doubling the reach of the arrangements.
Sylvia Plath
I was first introduced to the work of Sylvia Plath while in high school, a number of her poems having appeared in the poetry anthology set as an English text. The poem that first captured my attention was, unsurprisingly, Daddy. It is a powerful piece, and it took me many years to get the phrase ‘Bit my pretty red heart in two’ out of my head. Plath is both confessional and accusatory, capturing perfectly the complexity and hopelessness of her plight. The poem’s allusion to the Aryans calls to mind Nietzsche’s übermenschen, but it’s a correlation Nietzsche would dispute.
For me, both then and now, what marked Plath as different from most other poets is her ability to articulate complicated psychological phenomena in quotidian details, and in doing so drawing every reader in as a potential subject. Like Camus did in The Outsider, Plath asks each of us, “what if this were you?”.
Plath was influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico (see also entry for Giorgio de Chirico), and especially his use of and writings about timelessness and liminality. She named one of her poems after his The Disquieting Muses, and I recall reading somewhere that Plath rendered de Chirico’s threatening trio as a modern take on the Three Fates (see also the entry on Emerson, Lake and Palmer), existing out of time at the edge of perception:
“Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.”
Here is a link to a 1960s recording of Plath reading this work for a BBC program:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/sylvia-plath-reads-the-disquieting-muses-bbc/.
As a teenager, replete with my allocated measure of existential angst, Plath’s leaning towards the tragic and the dark side of the psyche provided an alternative voice to that which pervaded the sugary hedonism of the 1970s. I didn’t feel the heedless positivity I was meant to feel, and so gravitated towards artists like Plath, Eliot, Cohen, Tucker, Rapp, Poe and Kafka, and then later to the surrealists, Dostoyevsky, Camus and Cave. These were the voices that spoke a truth more like mine, and with the lens of hindsight, their truth was a much more representative take on contemporary reality.
The lessons I took from Plath were that writing is the perfect medium in which light can be brought to darkness and darkness to light, and that when the tragic is the most real of future histories, its portrayal becomes truth rather than artifice.
Here is a link to some excerpts from Plath’s journals which I think are very illuminating when you consider her work. There’s also an illustration of her literary influences:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/11/sylvia-palth-on-life-death-hope-happiness/.
Tom Rapp / Pearls Before Swine
One of my high school teachers, Phill Gaskell, introduced me to The Use of Ashes, the fourth album from Pearls Before Swine. It was 1973, and psychedelic acid rock hadn’t by then made huge inroads into the western suburbs of Melbourne, but a cluster of devotees arose at Werribee High School. The music of Pearls before Swine is primarily the music of Tom Rapp, the best lyricist you’ve never heard of. His lyrics were heavily allegorical, his melodies were delightfully psychedelic, and the resultant music was unforgettable. And moving.
Tom Rapp’s lyrics provide a salutary lesson that there’s beauty and magic to be found in the everyday lives of human beings. He was a close observer of human behaviour, and his rejection of the rock star lifestyle and the trappings of fame allowed him to maintain a close connection to the type of reality that most of us experience.
I had intended to use the lyrics from The Jeweler in In Body, In Mind, but unfortunately there were issues in determining who held the rights to grant permission. Next edition, maybe.
The following link is a terrific article from Gene Weingarten who describes catching up with Tom Rapp, decades after he quit his role as a music anti-hero. In many ways it’s sad that someone with such ability and vision fell by the wayside as an artist, and never recovered anything like the rewards, accolades and respect that were due to him. (It’s an echo of the story of Sixto Rodriguez – if you don’t know it, check out also the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, it’s an amazing tale).
Melanie Safka
Melanie’s Candles in the Rain was one of the first albums I bought with my own money. At the time (probably when I was about fourteen or so) and certainly influenced by Melanie’s music, I really bought into the whole hippie thing: peace, love, gentleness, incense, candles and exotic mysticism. My reaction played out mostly in the poetry I wrote, full of mystic images, dark themes and strangled language. I didn’t learn until later in life the extent to which the hippie dream also involved mud, head lice, exploitation and dampness, but by then the idealised vision had already stuck.
One of the aspects of Melanie’s music that fascinated me was her voice: it was childlike, yet combined with the insight of her lyrics, it represented for me an ideal of youthful wisdom. This is a characteristic which has been passed on to several of my characters: J-P and Ayla in In Body, In Mind, and Amina in In Living Memory. Each of these characters portrays the sense of being wise beyond their years, and hence affords child characters the capacity for agency, to take matters into their own hands and make decisions.
In In Body, In Mind, Sam had a fascination with Melanie, both as an object of sexual attraction and admiration, and as a serious lyricist, exploring many of the themes close to Sam’s heart: love, faith, freedom, joy, forgiveness. Sam’s connection to Melanie is characteristic of mine – an avatar of a youthful ideal which we neither grew out of nor rejected.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Though I had read bits and pieces of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work in my undergraduate Philosophy degree, and then more when researching my Master of Letters thesis, his Being and Nothingness was to have been a key text in the research for my PhD thesis, (which had the grand title, A Genealogical, Linguistic and Metaphysical Examination of the Concept of Nothingness in Western Existentialist Philosophy). It took me months to read it, and ever since I’ve been trying to convince myself to have another crack at it. But I haven’t been persuasive enough to convince me yet.
Of the three Sartre works I’ve read, Being and Nothingness was a hard slog, and I’m not sure I understood it to the extent that I needed to; The Imaginary was interesting and insightful, and enjoyable to read; but Nausea was a joy. Like Camus’ The Outsider and Gidé’s The Immoralist, it’s a classic French first-person narrative, and Sartre imbued it with a laconic sleepiness and sense of dejection. Nausea is archetypal philosophy as literature, very much at the philosophy end of philosophical fiction.
Sartre was believed to have been significantly influenced by the writing of Dostoyevsky, particularly in The Brothers Karamazov. His influence on my writing has primarily been as an exemplar of a writer living and working at the intersection of literature and philosophy, exploiting (as did many of the Existentialists) the grounding of his philosophical perspective in human existence, and his literary perspective in phenomenological examination.
The following link is an interesting summary of Sartre’s contribution to our understanding of how the imagination works, including how it allows us to combine the foreground of perception with the background of knowledge of the world:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/06/21/sartre-on-imagination-the-imaginary/.
For more on Sartre, try Jean Gerassi’s excellent biography, Jean-Paul Sartre – Hated Conscience of his Century (University of Chicago Press, 1989), or Arthur C. Danto’s very good encapsulation of Sartre’s life and work for the Fontana Modern Masters series, as Sartre (Fontana Press, 1975).
J.R.R. Tolkien
I’m not sure why I didn’t read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings until I was about sixteen. Perhaps it was because we didn’t have copies of them at home. But when I did, I was hooked. I’ve probably read the latter fifteen times since then, and the close reading I’ve done has influenced my writing significantly.
The Lord of the Rings taught me a lot about layering of themes and parallel plotlines, and how to ensure each plotline is identifiable and focused. The narrative is also a great example of the combination of third-person omniscient perspective with internal dialogues.
When I first read The Silmarillion, I was amazed by the lengths Tolkien had gone to research and write a history against which to set his works. But the wisdom of it came to me when I started to write histories for the characters of In Body, In Mind – it allowed me to get clear in my head why my characters would behave as I wanted them to behave, and I needed to know that in order to make them seem believable. Up until then, there was no sense in the script I was asking them to follow.
Tolkien’s works have caused me to think a lot about our use of language. When The Hobbit was written in the 1930s, it was initially reviewed by a 10-year-old boy. Now it’s sold with a minimum reading age of 12, and I’d be surprised if many 12-year-olds would tackle it. With almost 90 years of advancement in education, how is it that reading has regressed so much, let alone regressed at all?
Tolkien was a philologist, and he began to develop the languages of Middle Earth while he was still at high school. He invented many languages for his fictional world, including Quenya and Sindarin for the elves and Khuzdul for the dwarves, and the Black Speech for the subjects of Sauron. All of these languages, for which he developed complex grammars, developmental histories and dictionaries, are technically idioglossia, as much as those of Lisa Gerrard and Sigur Rós. I like to think this is a wonderful metaphor for the writing of fiction: starting with language, stories form to inhabit the world such languages reflect.
I even enjoyed reading how Tolkien was much more a successful writer than an academic. Even though his Chair of Philology was much coveted and hard won, he was more interested in writing his fantasy fiction than meeting the requirements of his tenure. The imperative to write, for him, was strong enough that he let go of the career he’d always dreamed of having.
The biography by Joseph Pearce is very good, if a little slow sometimes. It’s called Tolkien: Man and Myth (Harper Collins, 1999).
Albert Tucker
I first saw Albert Tucker’s The Possessed at the Australian National Gallery, just a couple of kilometres from where we lived for some years. It’s quite a small canvas, so I’m not exactly sure why it stood out amongst the other amazing works in that place. But it did, and it’s long been one of my favourite paintings.
Since then, I’ve seen it many times, making a point of catching a viewing when I go to the Gallery (if it’s not out travelling). I therefore gratefully acknowledge the gracious permission granted by the Albert and Barbara Tucker Foundation to use the work for the cover of In Body, in Mind. It was such a buzz when they agreed, and I think it captures the theme of the work perfectly.
Of course, Tucker was much more an artist than is represented by one painting. He spent some years as a war artist, documenting returned soldiers at the Heidelberg Military Hospital, and after the war the destruction of Hiroshima. He was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (see also the entry on T.S. Eliot) to produce The Futile City in 1940, and then his own The Waste Land a year later. He despaired of the moral state of the world during and after the war, producing his Images of Modern Evil series in response.
Janine Burke has written a very good biography of Tucker, called Australian Gothic (Penguin Books, 2011).
Tom Waits
In my second year at university, way back in 1976, a good friend of mine introduced me to the music of Tom Waits. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and it took me some time to get what he was trying to do (it was a long time before Google and Wikipedia). Deeply influenced by his inner-city, working-class upbringing, Waits’ music champions the underdogs, the down-and-out, the homeless, the drifters and vagrants who exist at the edge of modern society, liminal beings who have no cultural domicile, no political coherence, and no sense of economic possibility.
Waits’ persona, his music, his instrumentation and even his voice seem at first to be thrown-together, unlovely and unkempt, and in these aspects, he seeks to reflect the shabby facades of those in the marginalised communities he describes. It’s only after the first glance, the first listen, does the warmth and dignity and complexity of his work emerge, and in this way, he entreats us to offer our more disadvantaged citizens a sympathetic glance, a moment of recognition, a helping hand and a second chance. (See also the entry on Bruce Dawe).
The original recording of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (see also the entry on Gavin Bryars) was one of Waits’ all-time favourite pieces of music, leading him to volunteer to sing vocals on the re-recording. He felt the piece did exactly what he tries to do in his own work, because it literally provides a pulpit for the homeless man caught on tape in a London laneway, singing an improvised song of hope and faith and gratitude.
In Body, In Mind uses the lyrics of arguably Waits’ most famous work, Tom Traubert’s Blues, as a backdrop to Rachel’s self-reflection. The effect is to amplify Rachel’s sense of being lost, drifting through unfamiliar circumstances, without a clear direction of what to do or where to go.
Waits gives few interviews, so it’s difficult to explore much more than the work he produces, but Mac Montandon has edited a collection of the few interviews he’s granted over thirty years in Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits: The Collected Interviews (De Capo Press, 2005).
Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders’ films Perfect Days, Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close, and to some extent Paris, Texas, showed me that plot doesn’t always have to mean action. Stillness, contemplation, architecture, prayer and silence can all provide depth and texture to a scene; within the right context, simplicity can generate an extraordinary amount of complexity. And pauses are real – they happen all around us, and sometimes they’re blissful, sometimes they’re annoying, sometimes, they’re restorative. Readers (and viewers) aren’t five-year-olds who must be continuously distracted with gewgaws and perpetual motion; the story can be propelled forward without much at all happening.
Wings of Desire is a movie I come back to every year or two, being one of my all-time favourites. I remember how surprised and fascinated I was to see the inclusion of a real-life character (Peter Falk) in a fictional narrative. To me, it grounded the story by giving it a touchpoint to the world outside the cinema, the world which real people inhabit, and in doing so, it transformed the narrative metaphysically, taking it from the realm of improbability to that of possibility. And that transformation in turn changes the way we, as viewers, respond to what we see. It provides the intimacy of reality TV without all the hysterics and plastic surgery. It’s a device I used in In Body, In Mind with the character of Brian Birchall (see also the entry on Brian Birchall).
Wenders’ use in Wings of Desire and its sequel of the Angel archetype builds upon a very powerful cultural metaphor which seems to resonate equally well with the religious and the secular. This idea of a spiritual advocate and guide is embodied in the In Body, In Mind character, Ayla, and in the In Living Memory character, Angel.
Tim Winton
I’m one of those rare beasts who has never read Cloudstreet. I leapt straight into Tim Winton’s later work with The Riders. At the time (the late 90s) I had heard of this Perth surfer-dude whose stories were deeply lyrical and his prose exquisite, and that’s indeed what this book turned out to be. While Winton is now emphatically a writer of international acclaim and profile, he established his career writing about Australia for Australians. What this has taught me is that Australian readers not only appreciate beautifully-written prose, with Winton producing work after superb work, readers now expect it. For my part, it’s a lead I try to follow, albeit with extremely modest ambitions for my ability to succeed.
It was a fortuitous time to read a work like The Riders, as I was still in the preparatory phases of writing In Body, In Mind, taking notes and writing outlines and timelines and character histories and the like. It taught me that in reading, sometimes you don’t get to find out everything, and that’s OK. An even more important lesson was that ambiguous situations keep your reader thinking, firing up the brain’s natural puzzle-solving (Gestalt) response; I couldn’t get that story out of my head for years afterwards.
Winton’s use of character voice is also masterful, and in The Riders it struck me how hard it must be to maintain an Australian voice in a foreign setting without it sounding harsh and dislocated. I’ve now attempted this in In Living Memory, and I found my characters’ voices constantly drifting towards the voices that surround them.
In my reading of Winton’s work since, Dirt Music, Breath and Eyrie, I’ve learned that you can’t write an Australian novel without incorporating the Australian landscape as a character. It doesn’t need to be the outback or the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Great Barrier Reef, but Australians are connected to the landscape whether they’re aware of it or not, and so for the work to be real, Australia must be both present and visible in the narrative. Our country is neither shy nor retiring, and so it will photo-bomb every scene in one way or another; as writers, our role is to frame its contribution to the work’s best advantage.