Impact

Xandra is talking about impact while hosting the November 2024 IndieWeb Carnival. She’s suggested tackling questions like the following:

• has someone made a profound impact on you?
• what impact do you hope to make on this world before you leave it?
• have you ever reflected on the impact you’re making before? if you have, what’s changed as you've gotten older?
• what has made the biggest impact on your personality? your hobbies? your perspective on life?

As flippant as this might sound, I’m not stoned enough for this. This is a topic that ought to be handled after smoking some good cannabis or partaking of some organic peyote (it means no worries!) in the presence of close friends. Nevertheless, I suspect that Xandra might be disappointed in me if I didn’t make an attempt despite the disadvantage of sobriety.

Then again, I didn’t even have catnip when I took on suicide back in September. So, the best I can do is fire up some Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, or maybe Hawkwind’s 1975 album, Warrior on the Edge of Time, since the first song quotes Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life in its lyrics.

Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;

One Line in One Scene

I often mention Catherine, my wife of twenty years, but I don’t talk much about my first serious girlfriend, Naomi L---. She wasn’t Hollywood beautiful, but she was smart and funny, she was into heavy metal, I could listen to her for hours on end even if I couldn’t understand the French or German she also spoke, and she was into me. I thought she was gorgeous; she had chestnut hair that she’d wear mostly loose, but with plaits, she had these arresting blue-gray eyes, and one of them was streaked with orange. Naomi was English, rather than Australian, and I had met her online when I was in college. (I plainly have a type and a pattern.) Her family and friends called her “Nims”, which I thought adorable, but I never called her that myself because she claimed to dislike it.

We obviously didn’t work out (and I don’t remember handling the end well) and I have no idea what sort of life she had made for herself, but wherever she is I wish her well. But while we were together, she had certainly had a profound impact on me. I can’t listen to Type O Negative’s October Rust album without remembering how she’d kiss me. She had introduced me to C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine saga and James O'Barr’s The Crow. And she had asked me for a favor after reading some of the fiction I had written.

She wanted to be a background character. Just one line in one scene. It seemed an innocent enough request, easily done. Because she lived in a house called “Bradleigh”, I called the character “Naomi Bradleigh”.

The damnedest thing happened, though. I didn’t get rid of the character after we broke up. Maybe because I wasn’t getting writing advice from my bicycle? Instead, she had taken on a life of her own like my mother characters. She wasn’t content with one line in one scene.

She started showing up elsewhere, wearing a sword on her hip. And instead of being a grey-eyed brunette like her namesake, she was frost blonde and scarlet-eyed, a six-foot tall Amazon who could fight my protagonist Morgan Cooper to draw if she had to, even though he was a bioengineered demon killer. She somehow became the daughter of the ‘dark lord’ in my fiction, but she wasn’t bad; she wasn’t even drawn that way. Nor was she the sort who needed to be rescued, but had instead become a swashbuckling soprano years before I had ever heard of Julie d’Aubigny, though as far as I know the Naomi Bradleigh from my fiction never burned down a convent to score some pussy.

And I suspect that she has come to resemble my wife Catherine more than she did her namesake, Naomi L---. Another character, Christabel Crowley, had gotten the original Naomi’s hair and eyes, and became a foil to Naomi Bradleigh.

She was a major supporting character in my 2009 Starbreaker draft and my 2013 novel Without Bloodshed. In 2016 a younger version of her was the protagonist of her own novel, Silent Clarion. And her friends call her “Nims”.

Naomi Bradleigh has even shown up in my gaming life; whenever I play a RPG that has custom character creation, she’s one of the characters Catherine ends up creating for me because when I mess around with character creation unsupervised, I tend to create an avatar that resembles my wife. This is why, if you play Final Fantasy XIV on the Dynamis data center, you might find an atomic blonde manic pixie nightmare catgirl in your party.

They say people never forget their first loves, and I might have taken things further than some. I don’t know what I’d do if the real Naomi showed up again. I don’t think I’d leave Catherine for her if she was interested in giving the two of us another go. Even in our time together we weren’t a perfect fit for each other; she was getting deeper into Goth culture, but gave me grief for being into Iron Maiden and Judas Priest because they were “too theatrical”.

It was good while it lasted, but it ended years before I had met Catherine. So I would probably just be happy to see her again, and find out how she’s doing, but not tell her what sort of life her cameo had taken without her if she doesn’t already know. She might not understand. Hell, I don’t understand it myself, but my fiction wouldn’t be the same without a character that was supposed to get one line in one scene.

“Assault and Battery”

You should have known I’d return to Hawkwind soon enough. You see, I know the song whose lyrics quote Longfellow because it appears on Live Chronicles by Hawkwind, which was the stage show they had created in collaboration with Michael Moorcock to promote their album, The Chronicle of the Black Sword. I had found a copy in England while walking through secondhand shops with Naomi L---, along with stuff like First And Last And Always by The Sisters of Mercy, a Manowar compilation called The Hell of Steel, and Seduction by a German band called Dark; she had put this last band’s song “Love and Seduction” on a mixtape for me.

I like the idea of leaving footprints in the sands of time, even if I have not made my own life sublime. Though I've long since outgrown any hope of being famous — let alone kicking the pedestal out from under J. R. R. Tolkien — I retain the capacity to be pleased and flattered when a stranger emails me and says that they've been pulling my website’s RSS feed and enjoyed a particular post.

I try not to indulge in any particular expectation as to what sort of mark I'll leave on the world. Since Catherine and I could not have children, there’s no shortage of profoundly weird men who are congenitally incapable of minding their own business who might insist that nothing I have done with my life will ever matter because I won’t have descendants carrying my DNA. Well, my brother’s got that sorted, though due to family history I do not care to discuss despite its profound impact on me I am disinclined to play the eccentric uncle; while that is no doubt unfair to my nieces and nephews, my first duty is to myself and my own health and happiness.

Nevertheless, I am content to shout into the void, to shout at the devil, and see who ends up hearing me. One woman claimed that a rant I had written about the late Jake Seliger had given her the impetus to see a doctor and and get a weird symptom checked out; it turned that she had breast cancer. I have no idea if she’s still alive or how she’s doing, but maybe my words ended up saving somebody’s life. I hope that’s the case.

I sometimes think about the Ubuntu philosophy for which the GNU/Linux distribution is named. The idea seems to be that we make each other human, and that none of us could be fully human alone. I, if isolated and deprived of all human contact, might either become some kind of demifiend or — much more likely — descend into psychosis. After all, given how we dehumanize autistic people, I’m already a demifiend.

Perhaps that is all of the impact I need to make on the world: that I help make other people human. Even if my footprints fade from the sands of time, that’s fine. Everybody’s footprints eventually fade. Eventually for me might just come a bit sooner than it does for others. That’s death.

Leaving Scars for the World to Remember Me By

This may seem odd, off-putting, or even frightening to some, but when I was younger and angrier I wanted to leave scars on the world by which to remember me. I had wanted to write a literary rock opera, a science fantasy epic so thoroughly anti-Christian that it would plant a steel-toed motorcycle boot in the ass of a genre that I think still remains too thoroughly rooted in Christianity and its offshoots, like the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints. I wanted readers to root for the Antichrist and consider the possibility of justifiable deicide — that maybe, just maybe, God was guilty of crimes against humanity and should be summarily executed.

I’m not the teenage edgelord I used to be. Nowadays I just manscape with that edge. Besides, the whole “make 'em root for the Antichrist” ship sailed when Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman dropped Good Omens.

It’s kinda like that passage in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash where Hiro Protagonist accepts that he will never be the baddest motherfucker in the world because the position is already taken.

But nevertheless, I’m still trying to leave little scars, as if from cat scratches instead of deep, sweeping cuts from a big black soul-eating runeblade forged of antichristium, a stable transuranic heavy metal with an atomic number of 666 (the one for you and me). Maybe somebody will see what I've written about tyranny having multiple faces — church, state, capital, society, and family — and run with it.

Or maybe somebody will read my fiction and decide that Adversaries like Naomi Bradleigh and Morgan Cooper should exist in real life, and try to assassinate somebody who has allegedly abused their authority. They may be (flawed) heroes in their own setting, but nevertheless: kids, don’t try this at home.

That would be exactly what I need: to have my fiction placed on the same shelf as the fucking Turner Diaries. It would certainly test the premise that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Then again, how many millions of people have been killed over something some asshole read in the Bible? The wars people fought over religion in Europe are one reason why the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, meaning that Congress is not to establish an official Church of the United States.

I had started writing as a means of exploring philosophical questions through fiction, but ideas can be as dangerous a plaything as fire. Knowing this doesn’t stop me from releasing my ideas upon an unsuspecting world, but to put things in Moorcockean terms, I live in a world whose balance is tipped so far toward a corrupt and deranged form of Law that anything I write about needing to let Satan into your heart and make a virtue of defiance can’t tip the scales too far in Chaos' favor.

Not on their own, at least. Ideas and words only gain the power of subversion when they are read or heard, considered, and acted upon. Besides, knowing that my wife would sometimes read the lewder parts of my fiction in bed while enjoying a bit of self-indulgence when I’m away is all the impact I really need to make as a man.

Important Human Themes

The late Terry Goodkind, author of a series of fantasy novels beginning with Wizard’s First Rule in 1994, once caught a lot of shit for saying things like First of all, I don’t write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It’s either about magic or a world-building. I don’t do either. Of course, he (or somebody claiming to be him) weighed in on the Reddit thread I had linked with a long comment about what he had meant when he said that, and claimed that he hadn’t clearly conveyed his intended meaning. Fair enough, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking back on his Sword of Truth novels and holding the opinion that once he had knocked out a few bestsellers he began to write like the unholy bastard love child of John Norman and Ayn Rand.

I think that tendency was there even in his first novel, but I still remember Wizard’s First Rule fondly because of the titular principle:

For all of Goodkind’s flaws as a writer, he offered me a powerful tool for critical thinking, one that I should have been given in school but wasn’t — perhaps because critical thinking isn’t as highly valued in the populace at large as one might expect. Because of the Wizard’s First Rule, I am just a little harder to fool or influence. If I think somebody’s trying to sell me something, I ask myself, “Is this something I want to believe? Am I afraid that this might be true?”

It seemes trite, but remembering this rule has made it easier for me to see through a lot of propaganda. It helps me see through advertising intended to make me feel inadequate so that it can sell me an overpriced solution. It’s one reason I’m not a blind supporter of the Democratic party, but regard them as a lesser evil compared to the Republicans. It even helped me avoid becoming a full-on randroid when I had found some of Ayn Rand’s work appealing. For example, I would still love to say to Jeff Bezos, We don’t read Wynand, on the off chance that he might get the allusion and realize that he is not universally admired.

It doesn’t help that one of the major villains from my own fiction, Isaac Magnin, probably owes a bit to Goodkind’s Darken Rahl. However, as far as I know, Magnin doesn’t have any pedophiles on his payroll. Nor is he a vegetarian as Rahl was — possibly because Adolf Hitler was reputed to have been one — but an obligate carnivore.

Maybe Goodkind was right about how he was writing about important human themes. Or maybe he just wanted to write about magical dominatrices? There sure were a lot of those in his fiction, and there’s shit in there that almost exceeds Oh, John Ringo, NO! levels of US MIL-SPEC cringe.

Regardless, my wife has standing instructions to break every computer in the house if I ever publish fiction involving a chicken that wasn’t a chicken, but evil incarnate, or about my characters defeating Communism with a sculpture.

And I might have been better served if I had gotten my hands on a copy of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit instead of Terry Goodkind’s debut. Gotta read some real philosophy instead of fiction by wannabe philosophers, right? And you could say that Terry Goodkind taught me a lot about how not to write — or, at least, how I would prefer not to write.

Thanks again to Xandra for hosting the November 2024 IndieWeb Carnival. She’s already getting contributions that you should read.