Insane or Inspired?

The other day, my wife asked if I still considered myself a Neoplatonist. I cringed at myself when I heard the word. For me, I associate Neoplatonism less with the school of thought and more with my obsession during my undergrad at Thomas Aquinas College when I kept reading Plotinus, Iamblichus, Apuleius, and Plato for spiritual meaning, marrying it with St. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius. There exists a Christian tradition that believes the spiritual consists of something like Platonic forms that exist in the mind of God. In college, I loved that idea. Part of its core belief is that because the material world participates in the spiritual world, and our material actions have spiritual significance. This is what St. Francis, Rumi, and, to some extent, St. Thomas and Averroes held.

I thought about the question for a while. Three days later, I told her, “I guess I am a Neoplatonist.”

Sartre writes, “If I suspect that the hero’s future actions are determined in advance by heredity, social influence, or some other mechanism, my own time ebbs back to me, there remains only myself, reading and persisting, confronted by a static book. Do you want your characters to live? See to it that they are free.” His point is that characters can’t be robots. They must surprise. They must do the unexpected. In this way, belief in a soul is something that helps the Catholic writer to write interesting literature.

“It occurred to me, as I was about to begin La Fin de la Nuit, that Christian writers, by the very nature of their belief, have the kind of mentality best suited to the writing of novels. The religious man is free. The supreme forbearance of the Catholic may irritate us, because it is an acquired thing. If he is a novelist, it is a great advantage. The fictional and the Christian man, who are both centres of indeterminacy, do have characters, but only in order to escape from them. They are free, above and beyond their natures, and if they succumbed to their natures, here, again, they do so freely. They may get caught up in psychological machinery, but they themselves are never mechanical.”

I have a weird tradition as part of my writing process. Most of the fiction I write, I write during adoration. I sit in the back of the church with my backpack. I pray, “Jesus, let me be possessed by whoever you need to tell this story.” I pull my laptop out of my backpack and, giving myself to the muses, I write.

The scariest part about writing is the questions you get from your readers. “Why did you write this? Writers tend to be psychoanalyzed and diagnosed for the things we put on the page.” “Is this really how you feel?” “Are you okay?” This psychoanalysis, of course, assumes that what’s on the page comes from the psyche of the writer.

Sam Chang once shared an anecdote with our workshop. I hope I remember it correctly. She said that while she was at Stanford, a psychologist asked to speak with her. He had a theory that the average person had six voices in their head. He had interviewed a variety of people and wanted to interview a writer. “He said he counted something like fourteen voices in my head. I think he thought I was crazy.”

If characters and their actions come from our minds, then all writers are crazy. I had a similar experience when I workshopped a story that prominently featured necrophilia. One of my workshop participants asked, “Why would you write this?” I made up a reason, but the truth is, its existence justifies itself. Later, at dinner with this workshop participant, she said, “I love psychoanalyzing the writers with what they submit for workshop.” That love of hers, something I consider vicious, explains her need to ask the question. “Why would you write this?”

I don’t know. I’m compelled.

I am faced with a decision of belief. If my writing comes from my subconscious, then I’m insane. If it comes from the muses, then I’m a diviner, a necromancer, or a vessel.

The more I revisit Plato’s Ion, the more I realize Socrates was right. Or, the more I realize I want to believe Socrates was right. “If you’re a master of your subject, and if, as I said earlier, you’re cheating me of the demonstration you promised about Homer, then you’re doing me wrong. But if you’re not a master of your subject, if you’re possessed by a divine gift from Homer, so that you make many lovely speeches about the poet without knowing anything—as I said about you—then you’re not doing me wrong. So choose, how do you want us to think of you—as a man who does wrong, or as someone divine?”

When faced with this decision, I’d respond just as Ion did. “It’s much lovelier to be thought divine.”

I don’t know how my characters come to me, or why they do what they do. I know it often worries people. When I was in undergrad, I wrote a short story about a Hispanic man who left his white wife to be with a Hispanic woman. My girlfriend, now my wife, read it. One year later, I became close friends with a Hispanic girl, and my girlfriend was very jealous. She said, “It’s because you wrote that short story.”

Now we’re married. I’ve continued working on different versions of the same story, and now I have a version that I’m very proud of. This time, the ethnicities are reversed. The Hispanic man leaves his Hispanic wife for a white woman. I showed it to a close female friend of mine, a 21-year-old poet, and she said, “It hurts me to read because it makes me worry about your marriage.” I showed it to a different close female friend of mine, a 25-year-old playwright, and she said, “You need to make the woman whom he runs away with more sexually motivated.”

Those two different reactions come from two different writerly sensibilities. The poet is a confessional poet. She often writes about her feelings. The playwright writes about violence, blood, and insanity. They’re both Catholic. The poet hasn’t read O’Connor. The playwright loves O’Connor. I don’t want to diagnose either of them, but it feels to me that the poet feels her writing comes from her, while the playwright feels her writing comes from somewhere else. This feeling, of course, deeply affects craft.

Characters must be surprising. This is something I often struggle with, especially in first drafts. When characters act reasonably, plot doesn’t happen. I’m a strong believer in sin. In fact, without sin there is no fiction because sin is the stuff of conflict. Poetry has license to be sinless; fiction does not. However, I’ve heard many priests say, “Sin isn’t surprising. Grace is.” It’s taken time, but I think this is true. When I write about sinners - those who sin and keep sinning - their actions become predictable. The complicating element is the element of grace. My characters are less believable and clichéd when they’re sinners, totally unbelievable and clichéd if they’re saints; surprisingly, entertaining and believable when they’re sinners who encounter grace. This, as Sartre says, can’t be thought of mechanistically. You can’t take a story machine and plug in “sin and grace” factors to produce a story. However, I have experienced that in the ecstasy of writing as an act of prayer, my characters surprise me. The boy I was writing as a sinner breaks my heart and becomes a saint. The husband who mistreats his wife finds a way I’ve never encountered to repent.

Fiction writing is a distinctly human action. The act of writing fiction is the act of making sense of suffering, of ordering sin. Angels can’t write fiction because they don’t know sin. Demons can’t write fiction because they don’t know order. In writing fiction, the writer places themselves directly between demons and angels and uses their knowledge of order to properly order demon’s knowledge of sin. The blessing of fiction writers is our communion with angels. Our cross, however, is the encounters we have with demons.

I like to think I’m possessed when I write. If you see me writing in the back of church during adoration, you’ll see my face is strained, sometimes I’m crying, sometimes laughing. I must look manic. Coming down from that high, I walk the streets of Iowa City like a madman, smoking a cigarette I bummed off anyone who happens to be at George’s on my walk home. The fourteen voices in my head don’t let go so easy — voices which, I’ve come to believe, are demons and angels and souls in purgatory. Writing is a spiritual battle. One I lose more often than I win. This is why, I believe, writing good fiction is my path to sainthood. When my job is done as God has called me to do it, my story is a good little story, one about things I know nothing about. Pablo cheats on his wife. Lazaro and his son Artemio both fuck corpses. David, a character I’ve been writing for years, dreams of killing his mother. But you know what surprised me with David?

The last time I was at adoration, David once again dreamt of killing his mother. Once again, David decided to run away from home, because he felt that if he didn’t, he would someday kill her and everybody else who loves him. He went to pack up his backpack and steal his cowboy boots from his mother’s room. He was about to run away, when his mother saw him and said, “Que haces, mijo?”

You know what he did this time? This time, he told her, “I had a nightmare. Can I sleep with you tonight.”

Sometimes, the angels sink their teeth in me. I love being Catholic because I eat God. Every Sunday, every day if I can attend, I sit in a liturgy where I see my Christ give himself over to me, and I crucify him. I slaughter him with my sins. Then, he peels off his flesh, and says, “Now eat me. Eat the God you have killed, then, I will save you. Manducáte.” And I: “Domine, non sum dignus.” And I eat.

Sometimes, when I write in adoration, I can feel the blood and muscle fibers in my neck. I imagine these muscles being undone, the way my mother used to pick apart poultry for supper. I watch my sinners on the paper encounter grace. I pray, “God, for you to increase I must decrease.”

“Be perfect as your Lord is perfect,” says one voice.

“Christ set an example so you might follow,” says another.

I bleed ink for page.