I have found that the best American writers tend to have enough in common with the average man and woman in the English speaking world to connect in a specific way. From there they create formulas that take many people into fantasies that allow them to better escape from everyday life.
That is not me.
I find that my role is best served by being a Muse, a shaman, a very different point of view. One of my friends who has published many books once said of my writing, "You say enough on one page for me to write 20 books." In other words he was saying that I have really great ideas but that it would take someone like himself to develop them.
Another time I said the words, "Other people like me---" and his response was, "There IS no one like you, Fred. Because there is no one else like you that has shared the types of experiences you have had since birth, Fred."
So from him and others I find my role is to give a very different but equally useful perspective on life. And this perspective tends to inspire creative people like myself forward in multiple interesting ways. My life has been too different from birth for most people to relate to other than saying something like, "Well. That's interesting!"
Most people can't believe I actually lived the life I lived. My uncle once said to my parents when I was little, "Why are you raising your son so differently. How can you ever expect him to have a normal or easy life?" My parents, however, believed that raising their son in the 1950s in Seattle, San Diego and Los Angeles County to be a vegetarian, to believe in reincarnation, to not wear red or black, to not eat onions or garlic and to belong to a Christian Mystic Cult based in the United States that believed all this and much more. And most of all I was taught not to talk about my religion because usually it just wasn't safe to discuss it during the 1950s even in Los Angeles because it was just so different from the norm.
So, then I tried to move away from this religion but instead got childhood epilepsy so I need some kind of religion to survive this childhood disease without being allowed any kind of medicine. This struggle made me extremely psychic, even more than I already was, which eventually led to my being excommunicated from my church and moving in a direction away from organized religion while still making spirituality, spiritual teachers around the world and looking for the right path the core of my life's journey. I surrounded myself with other seekers, mostly well educated as well.
So, my life experiences seem best suited to inspire experimental writers and authors. Especially those interested in science and science fiction or psychic abilities or spirituality or various related fields like psychology, anthropology, philosophy, social science etc. as I tend to be interested in all these fields and tend to further educated myself about all these fields all the time.
What I seem to be best at is being a synthesist i.e. someone who is capable of bringing knowledge from many diverse fields into useful crosscurrents of knowledge and wisdom. Though some of you might see this as just Pop science, it is my belief that we have too many specialists and not enough people who can actually see the big picture and without more synthesists civilization likely will collapse over the next several hundred years.
I was watching "Son of Rambow" last night on DVD. I could really relate both to the Christian cult boy as well as the bully. I was more like the Christian Cult boy and I knew people like the bully. I told my parents what they wanted to hear. They were so different than the people in public school that I had an entirely different perspective of life and they(my parents) for the most part were oblivious to this point of view of mine. I think more than any other thing, watching that movie inspired this piece I call "The Muse".
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