I Have Chaos in My Heart

Graduate School and Tradition

After attending the first of several orientations for graduate school, I made my way through downtown Richmond, easing off the stress of the past few days. I'll be relieved when school starts, but I'll miss life without deadlines. With a deadline though, I know I'll write more and I'll write better. I always do under pressure.

One thing that is bothering me is that I didn't come up on a tradition like most of my fellow writers. I didn't read Joyce and Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck. I came up on Robert Heinlein, Phillip Pullman, Michael Chabon, Frank Herbert and J.R.R. Tolkien. I can guess how these writers are viewed, and it makes me worry. Alot. I just hope I don't look like a schmuck in my fiction workshops for not having read any of the classics.

Heroes and Lesser Men
"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

As I mentioned in previous posts, I've been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre. The most appealing, from a writerly perspective were Nietzsche and Sartre. Kierkegaard, at times, went off into weirdness, claiming God would rejoice in all our deaths. He was a Christian existentialist...which would seem to create a paradox.

Nietzsche's Overman is everything that everyone would ever want to be. He's powerful, he's confident and he's not bound by anyone's morality but his own. He lives his own life. The Last Man is the opposite: a mediocre conformist. He can't get beyond his own smallness and his fanaticism to small ideas. Sartre claimed that man is alone in the universe and is made by and responsible for his actions.

I think the heroes in my story (among them, my villain), are rooted in these concepts. I include my villain among my heroes, because most people pave the road to hell with good intentions, never intending evil. I admire that these misguided characters act because action, to me, is a heroic quality.

Holding the Line.
Bri