The Novel That Never Will Be

(Note: This is an obligatory first paragraph, because Facebook in its infinite wisdom has decided to preview only the *second* paragraph of linked blog posts. I'd imagine there's a reason for it, but instead attempting to divine that reason, I'm going to include these words so that your first look isn't quite so confusing.)

Do you ever have that dream where you go to your local music store (and here I'm assuming that you know what those are) and find a trove of rare, possibly imported, material that you've never heard of by one of your favorite artists? Have you ever experienced that thrill?

Well, that's how I felt -- and I assume I will feel again when it actually happens -- when I heard that Twin Peaks was going to return to TV in early 2016. As fraught with peril as the idea of a continuation of one of my favorite televised stories may be -- even though it will be helmed by many of the same artists that created the original -- I can't help but be excited by it.

At the same time, it's also stuck a pin in a project that I had been amusedly musing since the original show went off the air in 1991... my imaginary sequel novel. You see, Twin Peaks, while enjoying immense success in its first limited-run season, really fell off in the second. It was canceled twice, brought back through some of the earliest fan protests that utilized the fledgling Internet, and eventually was scheduled for final demolition at the end of its second season. At that point, original creators David Lynch and Mark Frost -- who admittedly had stepped back somewhat and bequeathed the wheel to other creative minds -- returned to steer the project back into the harbor, and left us with a confounding series finale that included explosions, demonic possession, adventures in other dimensions, and left no less than six major characters in unresolved mortal peril. Not only that, it took a break in the middle so Little Jimmy Scott could sing a slow jazz number.

It was material just begging, if not outright daring, to be continued. After a decade of thought, I felt I could bring a unique resolution to it. And so, now that the actual conclusion is pending, I thought I would put down some of what my novel would have entailed. This way, my theories can either be proven right or wrong by the minds that the source material sprang from. Bearing that in mind, be aware that spoilers abound in what follows.

Let me say a bit more about why I liked Twin Peaks: it gets rhapsodized over time and time again, but it really was unlike anything that had been on TV before. It was a prime-time soap opera, yes, but instead of focusing on how even rich people are messed up (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, etc.), it dealt with a small town and the lurking horror that lies underneath its all-American veneer. Its pioneering skill as a show was in juggling a multitude of tones and genres at once. It was sad, surreal, funny, sexy, and frightening, often in combination. The central mystery of the murder of prom queen Laura Palmer was brutally raw and tragic at first, and then got weirder and weirder, descending first into the dark secrets of the town's denizens, then into a neo-Lovecraftian mindbender of worlds beyond.

But the thing that was truly mesmerizing for me about Twin Peaks -- what made me tape it and re-watch it relentlessly -- was that everything seemed like a clue to a deeper mystery, and more often than not, everything was. It all hung together with the same kind of logic that a dream seems to make perfect sense right after waking. And the atmosphere, thanks in great part to Lynch's odd creative choices and Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score -- gave the whole thing an simultaneous sense of the alien and the familiar that really sucked you in.

Now, when we left FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper at the end of the series, he had solved Laura's murder and had gone on to grapple with his nemesis, a rogue fellow agent named Windom Earle. Together they had gone into that space-between-worlds called The Black Lodge, where they confronted Laura's killer, a demonic spirit named BOB, in its lair. After witnessing BOB kill Earle and becoming possessed himself, Cooper came back into the real world. In the closing moments of the finale, no one seemed the wiser that he wasn't quite himself anymore. The third season I invented in my head centered on defeating BOB once and for all, and recovering the real Cooper from the Black Lodge.

In my story, the possession doesn't remain a secret for long. It's clear that Cooper is not himself. The real challenge for Sheriff Harry Truman and his team is not letting Cooper know that they know he's not really him anymore. This is tough, given that they have new investigations to make at the hospital. There are many new patients, including Audrey Horne, who survived the explosion in the bank, thanks to the fact that she was chained to the vault door at the time; Benjamin Horne, who survived getting his head bashed against a fireplace mantel by Doc Hayward, but who now has a full-scale freak-out when a chest of drawers with many pull-knobs gets brought into his room; and Leo Johnson, who is being treated for multiple venomous spider bites but miraculously regains his speech because of them.

Annie, the third person in the Black Lodge with Cooper and Earle, lies in a coma. Cooper (BOB), after being reluctantly left alone with her by the sheriff, utters some cryptic phrases about how he'll make sure that she is eternally held between worlds so as not to warn everyone about BOB.

Cooper returns to the home he recently bought at Dead Dog Farm, and Deputy Hawk is sent to observe his behavior. What he sees is Cooper walking through the house obsessively, following a curved path that often causes him to bump into walls. Over the course of several days, he manages to break through them, and eventually carves a perfectly circular path through the interior of the house. When completed, he continues to pace this circle obsessively, stopping often to scream up toward the sky.

Meanwhile, Harry and Andy are doing research, and find in the town archives that Dead Dog Farm used to be called Dead Wolf Swamp before it was drained in a logging effort by the Packard Saw Mill almost a hundred years before. It was considered to be an especially haunted place by the local Native Americans, who believed it was the location of a Sounding Stone, which as close to a real-world location of The Black Lodge as there can be. Hawk believes that it is actually below the foundations of Cooper's house, and because BOB is in Cooper's body and thus unable to cross over and get back home, he is in torment.

But why is BOB so weak, when he was formerly so powerful a threat to the town? The answer is provided by Major Briggs, who knows more about BOB than he has let on. Thanks to his work on Project Bluebook, Briggs has inadvertently discovered clues to the existence of both the Black and White Lodges. (Remember, he is the only one who has glimpsed the White Lodge itself, during the period of three days he went missing in Season 2). He takes on the role of consultant for Sheriff Truman and his team now, telling them what he knows...

In the Black Lodge, as we've seen, time is mutable. In general, though, it tends to run backwards. Every time we've seen a spirit speaking in the Black Lodge, it's been in reverse. So while BOB has been haunting Twin Peaks for centuries, he is actually quite young by now, and relatively inexperienced. From this point of view, BOB's power has gradually been decreasing, especially since he killed Teresa Banks, which was the case that initially put Cooper on his trail. With this in mind, Major Briggs suggests that the best way to destroy BOB... is to *create* him.

Here's where my plotting got a little fuzzy. All things coming in pairs in Twin Peaks, I know there would be a White Lodge sounding stone mirrored on the other side of the titular mountains, most likely at One-Eyed Jack's, where the spirit named JUDY (I added the capital letters myself, to match BOB), who just might be the light side of BOB, has been trying to break through into our world to stop her evil twin.

It all ends with a group of people from the town (roster to be determined) breaking through the gateway into the Black Lodge, confronting their own dopplegangers, and JUDY finally combining with BOB to become the entity they had started out being in the first place.

Of course, along the way I planned to make a bunch of other stops... there's still the fact that Leo will want to kill Bobby Briggs for hooking up with his wife Shelly. Audrey will have to decide what to do when John Justice Wheeler comes back to town after hearing of her brush with death, even as she still has feelings for Agent Cooper. Ben Horne will reveal exactly what he saw in his vision the night the doorway to the Black Lodge opened for Earle, and what he knows about Josie's ultimate fate (was she really reincarnated as an end table?). I also wanted to see James ride his motorcycle all the way to Buenos Aires and find what strange portal Philip Jeffries discovered there (my guess is that it would lead back to Twin Peaks somehow. Or Philadelphia.). I also wanted to delve into the history of The Bookhouse Boys, that secret society that protects the town from evil. Cooper will have to figure out how he can keep part of himself in the Black Lodge so that he'll be there with JUDY to lead Laura into the White Lodge, when she arrives, after the aforementioned twenty-five years... And, of course, I'll want Ed and Norma to get their happy ending, finally. Because who wouldn't like to see that?

Epically Alluring

If you've read some of my other entries ("Big Book Love", for example), you'll already know that I have a soft spot for epics. And recently, I seem to be taking them on even more often than usual. I don't know, there's just something about huge, multi-part sagas that I really enjoy. I used to think that, being a more introverted person, I liked the feel of achievement that comes from finishing them. It might be the same feeling a person finds at the top of a mountain, or the finish line of a marathon. But now I'm thinking that it's not quite as analogous an experience, that's there's something additional that draws me to the epic form. Especially when they're put together in the ways that the three artists whose works I've been experiencing lately have done.

It started when I decided to listen to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas ("Der Ring des Nibelungen", officially). I had heard a lot of peripheral stuff about it for a long time -- how it influenced The Lord of the Rings, how its use of "motifs" has changed how we listen to music ever since, and of course the Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", which I've seen probably a hundred times.

So over a course of weeks, I listened to all twenty hours of its length. I enjoyed following the story and recognizing where it has been echoed by other fantastic works, most notably how it all comes down to gods, dwarves, giants and men fighting for possession of one magical ring that gives the wearer nearly unlimited power.

But what struck me even more as I followed along with the translated libretto was how ambitious the whole thing was. At the same time, I had to keep in mind that this was all coming from the mind of Richard Wagner, a racist egomaniac who seemed to be fine with twins falling in love and having children together.

What he envisioned for his operatic cycle was to pick a small town, build a massive theater, stage four epic operas on consecutive nights, and conclude the whole festival by *burning* *the* *theater* *down*. It makes sense from a story point of view -- the story does end in a conflagration that destroys Valhalla, the home of the gods, after all -- but from a safety standpoint I have no idea how the whole thing would be pulled off.

But that's what grabs me most about the whole thing. This one tale, that encompasses generations, and presents locales from the underground kingdom of the dwarves all the way to the rainbow bridge that leads to the dwelling of the Norse gods, has been brought together by one man's uncompromising artistic vision alone. And now, there are people who spend their careers researching both the mythology and musicality of it.

Second, this summer I started listening to all seven Harry Potter audiobooks during my commute. I started a little before Harry's birthday (July 31), and heard Jim Dale read the last book's epilogue from disc 99 on my own (Nov. 14).

Again, you have to marvel at the scope and subtext of the whole thing. If the stories are true, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book in coffee shops while caring for her infant child. And as far as I can tell, there is nothing inconsistent in the magical world that she created during those humble beginnings that doesn't perfectly match with the events of the seventh book, which she wrote when she was a renowned world figure and a multi-millionaire.

There's such a clear thematic progression through the books as Harry and his friends mature and the threat to the wizarding world grows, and that clarity only becomes magnified when you go right from one book into the next. Every question you have gets answered, and many things mentioned in passing have payoffs three or four books later. Either Jo had an unbelievably detailed idea of this world when she first started jotting the story down on a legal pad at a coffeehouse, or she is the world's most adept plot-juggler, tying things together and making up magical rules and backstories on the fly that make perfect retroactive sense. Either way, I'm in awe.

Of course, it's almost pure luck that America really grew to love the HP books in the early 2000s, at a time when they felt threatened by dark outside forces, and had to back a government that wasn't entirely trustworthy, which is exactly what happens in Harry's world. But even if such strange real-world parallels hadn't happened, clearly the series will stand for generations as the right way to tell a human story set against a massive, fantastical backdrop.

The third artist I experienced was one that I've been following for a long time, although until recently there's been very little known about him. His name was Henry Darger, and he lived around the turn of the twentieth century in Chicago, By all accounts, he was a grumpy, eccentric hoarder, who worked as a janitor at various Catholic institutions most of his life. When he passed away and his one-room rented apartment was cleaned out by its owners, they found massive works of art, including three huge, handwritten novels (30,000 pages in all) and hundreds of watercolors and collages, some twelve feet in length.

The longest of the novels (at 15,000 pages) is called "The Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal" and details a sort of parallel-universe version of the Civil War. In his retelling, seven young sisters are the leaders of a massive army leading a revolt against a nation of child slavers. The work is expansive and visceral, never shying from violence despite the innocence of its heroines. Some of the paintings depict the strangling and evisceration of children. This, along with the fact that the little girls are often depicted naked and with penises, led many to believe that Darger was sexually naive at best, and a homicidal pedophile at worst.

The truth, it turns out, makes much more sense. In the book "Henry Darger: Throwaway Boy", author Jim Elledge delves into the artist's past, and finds a cruelly mistreated boy, left alone by a deceased mother and alcoholic father, sexually abused and needlessly institutionalized for most of his childhood, compounded by confusion about his homosexuality. The novels and paintings, it turns out, were his way of working through all the things that happened in his life. It's no surprise, then, that the little girls have boys' bodies, or that "Sweetie Pie", a tornado in the shape of a child's face, spends thousands of pages obliterating most of the locales that Henry knew growing up.

He had been working on these projects secretly for decades, which is what I find so astounding about it. This endeavor made up nearly his entire life, and took his entire life. He did find love eventually, but never lived with his paramour in the thirty years they were a couple, and the relationship ended when Whillie (as Henry called him) moved south for health reasons. But of course, multiple versions of the couple appeared in Henry's books, always depicted as younger, stronger, and working together to help the oppressed children.

And that's what makes me think that there's more to epic storytelling than just weaving a complex, consistent story. Henry's tale is the most obvious example of how art can be a device to help you work through issues, to come to terms with your past and, hopefully, direct your future. If done right, they make it nearly impossible for the author to stop telling them, at least until they're done. And sometimes -- as you can see with Rowling's occasional Potter stories in the years since she concluded the series -- not even then.

That's what makes epics so fascinating to me: it's impossible to tell such a huge, sprawling story without putting more than a little of your true self in it. That's the kind of connection I find with these artists; even if I don't agree with or fully understand them, I can tell that there's something running profoundly deep under the surface. Whether it was Wagner's twisted ideology that cautioned against both foreigners and the lure of power, Rowling's boy wizard hoping to live up to expectations he doesn't really believe he can fulfill, or Darger's fractured psyche trying to make sense of itself, what impresses me about all three of these artists is the scope of what they committed to. You can't fake that kind of passion. They felt compelled to tell these stories, and would not stop until they were completed.

What It All Comes To

My father passed away just over a month ago. For a while before and a while since that day, I haven't had all that much to talk about. This regrouping time is natural, I suppose, but still weird to go through. I had been trying so hard to write regularly and keep momentum, but I was still disoriented by my lack of need to keep going. Now, however, I think I'm back to blather on about whatever's on my mind.

I did write down a few things about my dad, and I'll get to those in time, but I think the first thing I want to talk about on my return to the page is something I'd actually been thinking about for a while, and with this new sort of perspective that I have, I think I can now make enough sense of it to share.

It sort of came around through watching my dad go through his final phases. His passing was in no means sudden or unexpected, and I suppose it was as peaceful as we could have hoped for. But it made me think about the course of his life -- first off, he dealt with multiple sclerosis his entire adulthood. When he was first diagnosed in his twenties, he and my mom were afraid that what they were facing was a death sentence. That didn't turn out to be the case, but the disease did gradually wear away at his physical and mental capabilities over the following decades.

Eventually, medical science found something that seemed to help slow the disease's progress, but it also might have made him more susceptible to the type of lymphoma that he was diagnosed with early this summer. At the same time, other relatives of his generation are growing older and more infirm, and it leaves me looking around, and wondering what the point of old age really is.

Is it really supposed to be like this, this slow accumulation of aches and pains and breakdowns, until there's really nothing else to talk or think about other than the imperfect workings of your own body? What kind of purpose does that serve? And if there's no purpose to it, then what does that fact in itself mean? Whether you believe in a higher power or not, does this eventual inward-turning of the psyche make sense?

Similarly, for a while now I've been trying out ways to articulate something about my new perspective of being in middle age -- which, by any measure, I pretty much have to admit I am now -- and how it compares to the one I had when I was younger.

Young people, at first look, seem to be the ones who are really experiencing the world. They're out there every day, drinking in the newest thing that's come over the horizon. They're socializing, going places, doing things. They have their hands and feet in the stuff of Today. Nothing escapes their insatiable need for the New. Their biggest complaint to the older generation is "You don't know what's going on Right Now! You're living in the past!"

But what I think they fail to see -- I know I definitely failed to see it when I was younger -- is that older people see everything new through a lens that's informed by what's already happened in the last few decades. While the young think they're living in a bright spotlight of NOW and that's all that matters, those of us who have been around longer are equally aware of everything that's outside that spotlight. We've lived through what came before, and learned more about the context of the modern world than they hope to can comprehend, at least not until they've learned that there's more to the world than just what's going on at the moment.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm prejudiced toward the world that I've lived through... there's more to it than that. If you're doing it right, your own storehouse of human knowledge and history keeps expanding in all directions, all throughout your life. But what I didn't realize when I was younger -- and which I think younger people *shouldn't* know -- is that your world is so small without that understanding.

Again, I say that younger people *shouldn't* have this perspective, that what they know is merely a small fraction of what the world is really about. If they did, they would be so humbled and bewildered by it all that they would never do anything, never blaze any trails because they'd already know that there are well-established ones that they could much more easily stick to. The only reason I even state this fact here is that, even if they read it, they'll never believe that it's true.

So, I've now got a better understanding of the world and how it works, what's come before. I know that's it's a much more inclusive, less insulated, and altogether more *right* than the way I thought when I was younger. And then I look at what I said before, about how old age can make us turn inward, necessarily make us obsess about our own thoughts and bodies. And I have to ask myself... who's to say that I'm not just standing in the brighter center of an even bigger spotlight, still unaware of things that it would be impossible for me to be aware of until I go through them?

The strange thing is that, while writing this, I just might have answered my own original question. I was asking, back at the beginning of this, what the purpose of all this end-of-life suffering could possibly be for. And perhaps I stumbled across it while thinking this through. Maybe the answer is this -- every day is a gift.

Let me back up such a thudding cliché with a little explanation. And mayhap you'll get a little view into how I view the world in the process... Everything breaks down. It's the nature of the Universe, the second law of thermodynamics. The instant any living thing stops actively trying to prevent itself from decaying, it falls apart. We don't think about it much, but we're assaulted from all sides by other living things that are trying to destroy us every day. They're incredibly tiny, but if our bodies don't repel their advances, then we're finished. It's a battle that happens every day.

Today, we've been able to use our collective gray matter to help our bodies fight this fight. Medicine and an understanding of how the enemy works has brought us to the point where the ultimate breakdown of the body tends to comes from its own internal structure. More and more, we're living long enough that it's the faults in our own DNA that are causing our ultimate downfall. Because the longer we live, the more likely we are to develop cancer, dementia, and all the other fatal illnesses that naturally grow more likely over time.

So maybe, when you're old and reflecting back on things, dealing with the everyday aches and pains and doctor visits, it's to give you a perspective on how glorious life is, even when you're no longer your young, healthy self. Maybe it's a transition from living a physically-based life to living a mentally-based one. The bill finally comes due on the wonders of the life you've been given, whether they've been big or small. It's the preservation of balance.

Maybe that's the lesson that will come nearer to the end of life... and I say that knowing that I can't (and probably shouldn't) fully appreciate it. Maybe all those around us who seem old and infirm know things that we younger folks just can't grasp yet.

And, of course, if they were to tell us, we wouldn't listen.