Shadow And Light

Chiaroscuro is the art of painting using shadow and light, different shades of the same color for dramatic contrast. As a very prolific writer, I'd like to amuse myself with the thought that I do the same thing with words, painting in different shades of black and gray to paint a dramatic picture of my life as I experience it and as the lives of others are told to me by others. Indeed, it could be said that my entire writing (and possibly, my entire life) is a rather delicate dance of shadow and light. That's far too much to digest for one modest blog entry, but it is nonetheless a fitting comment.

A lot of people (and you know who you are) either complain personally to me, or to others, about the rather dark subjects I write about. Such dark subjects are not merely those I struggle with myself, but are also those topics that I am forced to deal with because of holding awkward confidences about other people that I have a difficult time dealing with. Without betraying any of those confidences, it can be safely said that those particularly unpleasant aspects of many of my writings are not based on what I have done, but are mostly based on what I know others to have done. Sometimes, though, to be fair, they are not always about what the people who are being written about themselves have done, if that makes any sense.

My fictional writing (and most of my nonfictional writing, to be blunt), with rare exceptions, is informed by the world I live in. For the most part, that is not a particularly pleasant world. The few plays I have that are not burdened by the real world share two notable characteristics in common--for one, they are often explicitly biblical in their writing (this would include just about all the plays of mine that can be said to be uniformly pleasureable, from "Ruth the Moabitess" to "The Biblical Reenactment Society" and "Keys of the Kingdom," the only play of mine to be set in some future time, namely the Kingdom of God). There is something to this. After all, it seems that I, as a writer, am only able to move above the rather grim nature of life in this current society (or past corrupt societies) when I am looking toward the world to come. There is a good lesson, or two, in this.

It is noteworthy to ponder how my nonfiction is quite similar. After all, much of my nonfiction also focuses on this world, and those works are often full of unfriendly commentary about class systems ("Servant Leadership and the Class System of the Church," "Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes"), generations ("Virtue and Value Are Not The Same," "Generations Study"), and so forth. In fact, it could be truly said that my writing springs from a desire to be true to life, to capture verisimilitude, at least how it appears to me (it should be noted that this may not be how others see the very same things, which can be the source of a lot of difficulty). There are also plenty of unintentional resemblances between my writing and the true character of the people who are being written about (though these are far too painful to mention in any greater detail).

So, how should my writings be viewed then? A large portion of how people view my writings depends on who they are. After all, some of my commentary about people in retrospect may seem rather ironic, when it was meant at first to be straightforward. Sometimes what appears to be an end is merely a new beginning, and sometimes what looks like a fresh chance is merely a dead end. The fact that my writing is part of a giant epic framework only complicates the matter further. There are, after all, family curses that extend over many generations, afflicting each in turn, events that occur that lead to other events over a century later (witness the unfortunate relation between "My First Mistress" and "Come Away With Me"). In other words, what I write is obscenely complicated (both words, of course, being worthy of far greater discussion than can occur here). In the various comings and goings of my characters doings, there is a sense of design, a purpose for all of the rather strange and sometimes unsettling occurrences. However, being true to life (or true to perception of life, which amounts to, in fiction, the same thing) often leads us to very unpleasant places. Those few characters of mine that are able to (largely) escape from the curse of Adam do so because of the grace of God, not because of any native goodness or cleverness on their own. And this is true for all of us in the real world--we are saved by the grace of God, not through our own efforts (and it is salutory to remember that).

It is my hope that someday a reasonably sympathetic (though honest) and erudite person will attempt to sort out (hopefully, after I am gone and my works are at an end) the rather convoluted nature of what I write. In doing so, there will have to be a lot of parsing out of various deeds. After all, not all of what goes in my writings is about me (I am not nearly that self-centered of a person). Indeed, the larger part of what I write is not about me, per se, at all, but rather about the world in which I live, a world which may bear only passing resemblance to the world in which other people live. And yet what I write so voluminously (few people have the patience to read more than a little of it), nay, even with a sense of logorrhea at times, is at the very basic level an attempt to communicate what is certainly a very odd world to other people that are perhaps less odd. It is also true that in much words there cannot be but at least a little folly. Perhaps the biggest folly of all is that I feel the need to say what is on my mind and what burdens me (which is far more than that which I have myself done), for rather we would all be better off if I did not have that compulsive need to chronicle life and those whose lives are proximate to my own. But, such is the subject of a rant for another day, perhaps.