WHY I WRITE!

WHY I WRITE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 28, 2014

 

REFLECTIONS THIS MORNING:

To all of you who read my blog, and you are on every continent of the globe, my general comment to your question of why do I write is that I write because I can.  As long as my mind works, I will continue to write. 

I don't know how my work will be received.  Notice I say in the future tense.  I’m living in the past imperfect and will not be around for the future perfect tense. 

Ergo, the reader decides in this present past imperfect world what value my words and ideas have to him or her. 

If my writing doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you.  Go on to something else. 

I'm hearing from some that my books are difficult.  They are not meant to be difficult. 

True, some might be less taxing if the reader knows a little Freudian psychology.  But I sense that is not the problem.  The problem is people don’t want to get under the hood of their existence and look at how dirty and poorly maintained is that engine.  I  have the hood up and am always looking underneath at its corruption, wondering how it manages to turn over much less run.

Yes, I am something of a fan of Goethe, Camus, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Isaiah Berlin, Emerson, and others, but my ideas come out of my own life and experience, and are the foundation of my works.

I don’t like injustice, and I know a lot about it because I was reared Irish Roman Catholic and born on the wrong side of the tracks.  I am "shanty Irish" as opposed to "lace curtain" Irish.  By the accident of my circumstances, I rose rather high in a couple of Fortune 500 companies, but never joined the club.

One of the things I’ve never quite understood is this:

Why do successful people still have to bully people who have no power? 

When they do it in my presence, they have an enemy for life.  I identify with people who have no power.  They are my people.  I come from them.  Yes, I've had the titles and the perks and the privileges, but I have never left my roots.  

I have tried to establish with my works the foundation that leads to thought.  I have never been interested in creating "answer books."  I have no answers.  I am not you and am not privy to your life or experience, but you are.  I can tell you what I've learned and perhaps it may resonate with you and your experience.

Stated another way, I am not in the business of winning friends and influencing people, but again, hopefully, getting others to think in terms of their own experience and lights. 

Today there is a disturbing column in the newspaper on the incredible poor return to many college graduates on their investment in higher education.  The writer looks at the bottom feeders not the cream eaters at the top. 

The writer suggests it would have been better for these people to put their money in the bank or stock market, at least then the “Return on Investment” would be somewhat positive, as the evidence he cites indicates negative ROIs.

We have made two major wrong turns when it comes to a college education:

We have insisted, as a society, that everyone should be a college graduate.

We have made a college education the equivalent of vocational job training which has nothing to do with enlightenment other than as skills training for the Information Age.

One hundred years ago, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, public education was made compulsory so that workers could read and write and do simple mathematical calculations.  It had nothing to do with cultural enhancement. 

It is clear that we have never escaped this mechanistic model of society much as we protest, much as we shout about the best and the brightest, and so on.  Consequently, you can be making $1 billion a year and you’d rather see an NFL game than go to the opera. 

My writing makes no reader comfortable with this disposition.  I do this by profiling the contributing elements to the coarseness of our society.  By our cultural programming, we have developed a vicarious appetite for violence in all its imaginable forms. 

We love murder and mayhem in our novels, television and films, and the gorier the better, and then we wonder why we are the way we are.  Even our comedic novels, television and films follow the same format, mechanistic. 

My writing attempts to be transitional and transformational.  Whether it succeeds or not, only the reader can decide.  Take my recent novel.

GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is not about murder and mayhem, but about life and sex and religion and work and betrayal, all that business under that hood I mentioned earlier that isn’t mechanistic but intuitive and counterintuitive, where slimy reality lives and the human spirit breaks down.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Devlin tests that theory in Green Island with his personal and professional life on a collision course, showing every sign that he is able to function at a high level, only to have the denouement of the story suggest otherwise.  If you read it, let me know what you think. 

Incidentally, Fitzgerald’s boast proved suspect as his own life was cut short due to his inability to manage his addiction to alcohol and maintain his writing career as a novelist.  He died at age 44.