explicating the origins

Today, my tank of inspiration runs at empty; if anything gets going at all, it will be through the faith of the fumes alone. This is my life coasting along. (How is that for extending the metaphor? Not exactly a well-tailored fit.)

Prelude to Human Spaces is posted on my website. I am happy with this version. (How could I have expected this back in ’94?) The genesis of this one makes for interesting telling. It is, as often is, the marriage between two inspired origins. In about ’92, I was developing a play about a young man who commits suicide. Post-suicide, this young man wanders through Hell, arriving deeper and deeper into this black terrain, discovering in this journey the worst and most base heart of mankind. Meanwhile, his abandoned and earthly lover begins her own quest to rescue him. I finished only one scene of this play, the remainder to be forever secure in some remote, dusty location of my mind.

The other origin for Human Spaces—in fact, the most direct lineage—occurred in ’94. The novel was originally titled Prelude to a Love Scene, which owed its source of inspiration to a John Donne poem, “Love’s Deity.” I began the story: “Behind the downfall of every man is the story of a woman.” I finished several thousand words before placing it in the fabled and metaphorical shoe-box. It would stay there till ’98. I was in California at the time and the whole thing studied on me a bit before it decided it wanted me to pick it back up. I resumed the story, but very little time passed before realizing this was a story altered from the original, in style and in character. I should not have been surprised, as I was a person altered, in style and in character, from the one who began to write it in ’94. The central characters became clearer, their thoughts more intuitive rather than routine. I chiseled out a great deal of that story during late ’98 and much of ’99, figuring out most of the details on the fly. Prelude evolved into Old Lover’s Ghost, a story about a woman who feels cheated in love and commits suicide—perhaps with very little rationale for her irrational act beyond the reader prejudice of love’s hardship. The great boon of this era I am convinced was in finding Jack, my anti-hero, my person on his errant errand to find his meaning, while destructive to other characters of the novel. Lastly, and the most interesting facet of the transformation, the tone of the writing became more metaphysical, more directly tied to the poetic times of John Donne than to our modern. (In the years since then, I would maintain this style as both milestone and millstone in this jungle of my writing.) But Prelude was still a story without a solidified purpose.

What I needed for it was to find its identity. Okay, let’s say, if I had the world’s ear for the length of a book, what did I really to want to talk about? Maybe I had always known. Maybe the idea rose out of some deep, historical part of me. Maybe I had been talking about it all along. I knew what it was, this theme, the message I always had wanted to deliver to people. It was what ever wandered the echoing halls of my mind; it was what had always a strong voice, even if I had a weak ear. I wanted to talk about how we can be so close to one another and yet celestial miles apart. I wanted to get into those human spaces. I wanted to uncover the secret life of intimacy. Do writers write about those things that creep and crawl on their skin? Here is something that always had been crawling on my skin. Here is this thing that always had made me an incomplete person. Here is my opposing pole. So here was born Human Spaces and if it will not make me complete, then at least I will be better informed.

John.