The paradox of achievement

Do you know the story of Thomas Alvah Edison? Uneducated, impoverished, got a job tossing bags in an express car, taught himself Morse Code and worked as a night operator. An idea occurred to him. Duplex telegraphy would double the traffic on a circuit. Then he showed bankers how to speed up stock tickers. Then voice recording, evolved into a wax dictaphone. Then practical electric light and the fixtures required for illumination. We still call modern lamp bases "Edison" sockets. Then a motion picture camera, one of the first in history. Edison was a terrible husband and neglectful father, went on road trips with Firestone and Ford.

No comparison of stature intended, but that's how I lived my life. I was kicked out of school at age 14. I worked in a shoe factory. I learned to smoke cigarettes, pot, and opium in cheap nightclubs and hippie crash pads. Then I discovered 16mm and began a lifelong romance with making films. Thousands of feet rushed through the gate, ran through projectors. I pioneered a burst-frame technique, cutting in the camera, multimedia shows, trick handheld shots.

All this would have been fine, except that I read Atlas Shrugged at age 22. Two years later, I defended myself in Federal Court, appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and went to prison. The experience damaged my moral character profoundly, which was never glued on very well in the first place as a libertine hippie, inflamed by the ideals of Objectivism. To make matters worse, I moved to Hollywood, determined to succeed as a filmmaker, a far more ambitious plunge into vanity and temptation. There were loves, losses, seductions, music clips, and movies as a brash young film director who wrecked everything he touched. At age 40, I had one last shot at success in London. Good show, an A-List cast and crew. No sales. It doesn't matter how the next ten years played out. There was a misfire at Columbia Tri-Star and little video projects, exile on a ranch, a year at Disney pushing paper, a nightclub in Nevada, and another assault on New York. I lived in Holland a couple years and Scotland a couple years, unable to earn a living no matter what I did. And then a funny thing happened. I started to write. My essays caught the attention of an editor.

Remember Edison? -- uneducated and impoverished, ultimately a successful inventor. I was similarly situated, with the additional handicap of radical Objectivism. A stint of publicity and privilege in Costa Rica challenged and freed me. I hit upon an idea, then another. Years flew by, probing the depths of a new career, convinced that I could succeed intellectually.

Cut to the present. Grinding poverty, real hardship, at all points of the human compass a life of constant humiliation, including colossal failure as a husband and father, unread and zero expectation of being noticed. When one is self-published, it kills any hope of being agented or published or selling film rights. Worse, my books are politically verboten, a neanderthal sense of life, irredeemably white male. At age 69, it's doubtful that I can continue. My life is ebbing away, and it's easy to conclude that I failed in every conceivable way. I will be buried in a pauper's grave, no one to mourn my death, no Wikipedia page.

And yet, the body of literary work is immense and original. Some of the fiction is excellent, and the ideas I propounded will survive and triumph. The paradox of achievement is strange indeed. If I had a conventional path, higher ed, and a prosperous career, I would have never conceived The Freeman's Constitution or defacto anarchy. Feeling the approach of a final season or two, I recorded a series of videos. Whenever I doubt my success as an inventor, I replay 'Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon: Part One, Part Two' and rejoice at its clarity, complexity, scholarship, and dignity. It was a life well spent.

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Men & Women

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Religion

When I was 11 years old, I told Rev. Boland that I didn't believe in God. He replied without criticism that "You're not the first one." I concluded that Rev. Boland didn't believe in God, either. He was a good minister who people listened to and admired. A couple years later, he quit our congregation and moved to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Quite beautiful up there and almost no Germans. I don't remember the replacement minister's name, but he wanted to build a new concrete block building for social activities, and he fired my mother, who played the organ in church a dozen years somewhat badly. God eventually caught up with him, disbanded his elderly debt-laden congregation, and later destroyed the historic Friedens church with a bolt of lightning that ignited its steeple and gutted the interior.

In college, I went to a splendid old Catholic church and asked the priest how it was possible to perform rituals that were obviously crazy? He said it was important for social control, to keep people from doing wrong. Made no sense. His parish was too rich to do wrong.

In Tripoli, it was almost impossible to shop for food. Minarets blared five times a day, and shops closed for prayers. There was one bookstore in downtown Tripoli. It was jammed with hundreds of Korans, all kinds of fancy bindings, no other books, no foreign newspapers. I pitied the guys who flew to oil rigs in the desert. Pilots in flight knelt and prayed. They used bungie cords lashed to their control column as an autopilot. Allah flew the plane. Muslims actually believe that everything happens according to the Will of Allah. Two plus two equals four because Allah wills it, and Allah could change his mind, make it humanly incalcuable.

I learned to be tolerant of friends and neighbors who attend church. They're good, decent people who have been kind to me, a sort of reverse toleration, which puts me in mind of the Maryland Toleration Act of 1680 or thereabouts (I forget the exact year). Catholic Maryland pledged to tolerate other sects of Christianity, particularly Nonconformists and Anglicans,  and to put atheists to death and burn their homesteads.

In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Engel v Vitale, the court held that we are a religious people and we have Christian symbols and slogans on our money, Congress prays before they begin each session of legislation, and the Supreme Court itself has prominent architectural features that pledge allegiance to the Ten Commandments, and therefore prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Atheists took this as a cue to tear down public Christmas displays of cows, sheep, and kneeling kings adoring a plastic Baby Jesus in a manger. Reindeer led by Rudolph with an electrified red nose are okay, I think, although strictly speaking, Santa is a religious figure, transmuted from an historic Saint Nicholas who threw gold through a window to save three daughters from imminent sale into slavery by an impoverished father. Santa became a jolly old fat man in red courtesy of Coca Cola advertising art. In Holland, "Sinta Klas" wears a white robe and red bishop's miter, accompanied by a servant, to give gifts on December 6th, unrelated to Christmas, which is a solemn ceremony, although scholars know that Jesus was born in springtime, and the DOB was moved to late December to co-opt pagan winter rites involving little fir trees, burning logs, reindeer meat, heavy drinking, and revelry.

My parents were partly pagan. I was born in late September.

Forgive me, just thought of something. Music is holy. My mind flashed back to Los Angeles in the late 70s. The Blue Note jazz club was on the top floor of a Hollywood office tower. The Baked Potato was on Cahuenga, a stone's throw from Universal. The Lighthouse was in Santa Monica, and there were headliner jazz concerts in Orange County. Over the years, I worked backstage at a bunch of big showrooms in Sydney, London, Lake Tahoe, and the Bay Area, never tired of music, always enjoyed multitrack mixing, working with choreographers and dancers, dozens of superlative musicians and shockingly gifted vocalists.

Amen.

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Pleasant memories

Taking my daughter to the theater, a truly excellent Celtic Women tour de force in Houston. Relaxed intimacy of the Regal in Subiaco to see a Disney musical, then a tribute to Sinatra. A day at the Aquarium to feed rays by hand and marvel at white tigers. Zoos and museums all over the world. White sand beaches, horse stables, and a butterfly dome. Driving her to visit kid friends, a hundred trips that were never dull. She tops the best of pleasant memories, too many to inventory. Watching her take off in an airplane, 'pilot flying' at age twelve. Hearing her voice echo in a storm sewer in conversation with her sidekick, an intrepid lad who was miles behind her intellectually. Two neighbor girls for a sleepover, making bed rolls for them on the floor and feeding them as generously as possible. A big list of honors and duties as a Dad. I carried her in my arms from Greenwich to Whitehall, sleepy and limp.

My first real job, in a noisy factory, pocket money, learning craftsmanship at age 16. A dozen years later, riding the Main Line and the Broad Street Subway daily to another job, another craft. I would learn all the trades, blue collar and white, from ditch digging and demolition to custom electromechanical gismos that I designed, tested, aligned, and installed. The steely thrill of refurbishing a complex sound system with multiple zones and multiple triggers, to be heard over the din of slot machines, made possible with 1/3-octave measurement of the environmental racket to push announcements through a narrow slot of frequencies, heard clear as a bell. Installing sound bars and speaker systems that I built by hand.

I had a basement radio shack when I was a kid, listened to the world and chatted with grown men on CB. I soldered Knight Kits together with steady concentration, a delight when I threw the switch and it worked. There were Estes rockets and nichrome igniters.

Most of the films and videos were wonderful experiences, too many to list. Thousands of moments, hours, days, nights, and situations that were electric, monumental, unrepeatable, mine to savor because I made it possible and it succeeded as signature work. The stream of life on screen. The glory of cutting -- directing the editor with a snap of my fingers to mark the exact moment, one of the highest pleasures known to man. Standby, ready, snap!

I liked operating equipment myself when I could, an old Steenbeck, a Sony 800, or a clunky control track rig. I can't guess how many cameras I held in my hands. I adored mixing music, creating a stereo image and sonically shaping each input on a big desk. Every time I hung a luminaire and focused and gelled it, I felt the sweaty reverence of painting with light.

OMG -- the women!

Solemn admiration for Wright's Price Tower, Pei's Bank of China skyscraper, and the oils of Vermeer's Melkmaid in a museum. I was born in the era of passenger rail -- journeys on the Chicago & North Western, the 20th Century Limited, the Reading Line, British Rail, superwide Deutschesbahn, cramped Dutch inter-urban, and steam V&T. To be completely honest, I very much miss the L-1011, finest airliner in history. No brag, just fact, my 3-D video microscope and focusable fiber optic lamps diagnosed what was wrong with the L-1011 cockpit windows, a manufacturing defect in the gold film layer that defrosted it. I explained how to fix it. My pal Bud Alger did the main cabin video projectors. Lockheed was a local Burbank customer.

I suppose that the streets of New York were grand, but I was so busy that I seldom saw the skyline, although I shared a 3rd floor Midtown walk-up with a good view of the Empire State Building illuminated every night. Covent Garden and Wardour Street were nice. I spent two years in London and a couple more in Scotland. I learned to love the game of snooker. There is a rugged simplicity of Scots that makes one a better human being by osmosis.

And that brings me to the subject of literature. RLS has a place in my heart like no other, the simple tale of Kidnapped, a great gift that I often re-read, always fresh and inspiring. I own a volume of Hammett's novels and have a sharp recollection of Bogart as Sam Spade. Chandler said that the best Marlowe was Bogart. I would be hard pressed to say which of his movies was better -- Bogart opposite Kate Hepburn in The African Queen, or Bogart opposite Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, or Bogart fencing with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon. A thinking man's hero, ruthless, inquisitive, and necessarily stupid.

The human experience as I understand it is a string of blunders, the natural karma of heroes and heroines, the plot twists of Atlas Shrugged. Francisco -- oops ... Hank -- oops ... Galt as a final choice. The blunders in Fountainhead are infinitely worse. I think it's all of a piece, the pleasant memories and colossal disasters. I did not dislike carrying a loaded gun, safety off, ready to kill or be killed any moment. Prison was a memorable challenge. I think it may be necessary to suffer, in order to experience the heightened vista of joy.

Do you know what pure joy is? Arriving to hear the raised voice of a confident 1st A.D.,  who presses an electric bell to grab attention and shout: "Director on the set!" Too old to direct, I took up writing. Same sort of business, to make a movie happen in the reader's imagination. Same sort of pleasure, the magic of mise en scene, every page.



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Videos

In case of national emergency, break glass and distribute.

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The goal of my writing

Hat tip to Rand, who inspired me to do something similar, no comparison of stature implied. I began reading her works in the early 1970s, kept at it until I found every syllable. I was luckier than most, because the University of Wisconsin and city libraries had collected quite a lot. In Philadelphia, I found LP recordings of her speeches and videos of her TV interviews. I was obliquely involved in multiple attempts to bring Atlas to the big screen during her lifetime, so I was privy to considerable gossip. Publication of her Journals and web chatter completed my appraisal of who she was. Others had personal encounters. I did not. Nor did I have any interest in or respect for The Collective, the Brandens, Peikoff, the Society, TOC, Sciabarra, or anyone else, however intelligent and industrious they were. I studied her fiction and drama. It seemed particularly contemptible that others made a career of restating her ethical ideas, which I deemed the least important aspect of her legacy. Not asking you to agree, speaking only for myself as an individual, a former filmmaker, screenwriter, legal theorist, and author of several novels and a pile of nonfiction books and essays.

I was ill-prepared to write anything, sketchily self-educated with little formal schooling. All schools infuriated me, especially higher ed. So, I read authors I liked -- RLS, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Gene Rhodes, Ray Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, with as much depth and passion that I devoted to Ayn Rand. It was a little tedious to study Grotius and Aquinas, but it paid off, gave me a good grounding in classical logic. I became aware in great detail that legal philosophy was beset with tiny errors that grew to fallacies writ large in constitutional law. Few men saw the genius of Paine's mature thought or the obvious truths argued by Otis and Lincoln.

Please forgive the digression. It was never my goal to be a legal scholar. I got pushed into it. One wonders -- however briefly -- why law students are exempted from studying Madison's Debates In The Federal Convention and Henry Steele Commager's Documents of American History. Our forefathers faced fundamental questions and flunked the test. It fell to me, an idiot in many ways, to repair the damage by writing a new constitution, another task that I got pushed into. One cannot build a free nation, unless it is secured by due process of law and an independent apolitical judiciary. Laissez Faire City died for want of common law courts. My work is often shunned without debate, because it asks men to think. LFC liked my soap opera serial The Good Walk Alone and published several of my essays on government, but drew the line at taking practical steps to transition from arbitrary dictatorship to civilian due process.

Dictators and their henchmen were durable antagonists in my fiction, beginning with a first novel set in the distant future on Mars. It's an enormous challenge to write a first novel, and it required several revisions over the years to straighten out and simplify the story of a brave man and a brave woman who changed the course of plausible fictional history. That's typical Wolf DeVoon, boy meets girl and they fall in love, defend each other and defy the threat of lethal force wielded by loveless hardened autocrats. It might be the whole of human history, a never ending passion of private action in defense of liberty and justice.

It's not my purpose to plug my work. I'm not difficult to find, if you care to read something I wrote. Recent work found an appreciative core of friendly reviewers. I'll speak about my last novel because it's the last one I will write. I'm old and sickly, and I don't want to repeat the death bed karma of RLS, proudly telling his wife that Katriona, sequel to Kidnapped, was the best story he had ever written. It wasn't. It's important to sense when it's time to quit, while the quitting is good. The very last story I attempted, a novellete, offended and disgusted an old friend. I tore it up. It's time to quit. Scott Fitzgerald died with unfinished work ("The Last Tycoon"). Chandler died with unfinished work ("Poodle Springs"). I shouldn't compare myself with Fitzgerald or Chandler, far better authors than I was. However, I'll say a few words about "Partners," a much admired swan song that was completed while I had the vision and power and momentum to conceive and execute a thrilling full-length novel.

I think it's fairly clear that most novelists are best if they write about themselves. Melville's seafaring tales, for instance. Hemingway's adventures in Spain and Cuba. Vonnegut's war experience. "Partners" is set in 1975 in Milwaukee, the locality and era of my hard youth. I remember it in sharp focus, and the main character is a slightly taller, better me. I knew the love interest, slightly brighter and braver than the girl who loved me. It's a story of triangles. There is a glamorous ex, maddeningly stupid. There is a professional killer who the main character is drawn to partner and understudy, pulling him away from the love interest who holds the key to his happiness. The background is another personal flashback, Cosa Nostra, hippies, and corrupt police. Drugs were cheap. Sometimes, life was cheap.

If someone had told me 20 years ago that all my ignorance, aspirations, global adventures, and years of experimentation as a novelist would result in the bittersweet tale of love and loss in "Partners," I would not have believed it. It was not on my radar. I poured everything I had into a four-part series, The Case Files of Cable & Blount, loved every word of it, adored Chris and Peachy, two years of writing full time, 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. The final volume of that series is a marvelous adventure in stereo, separated and searching for each other. But when it was finished, it had to be finished. I didn't want to repeat the mistake that Forester made, taking Hornblower into elderly decline. I had to leave Chris and Peachy in their active maturity, early 60s. I had no plan to write anything else. Suddenly, clear as a bell, the city I grew up in. A guy age 31, sitting at a cheap lunch counter, reading classified ads to find a job that he didn't want to do, because all jobs were the same. Not enough money, not enough challenge, every day exactly the same as every other. Fifty bucks in his pocket with rent due on an empty single apartment in a crummy neighborhood. A gust of fate taps his shoulder and sweeps away his long hair and mustache, puts a chrome .357 on his hip in icy winter.

The goal of my writing was unexpectedly fulfilled in a masterwork. Nice, but it's extremely odd that I quit writing, incapable of starting another novel, unable to conceive or execute a good short story. A switch has been turned off by illness and infirmity.

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Hayseed

Living in the wild is quite an experience. I just whacked an acre of tall grass and weeds, three more to go, just to maintain a little patch where it matters, so I don't lose control of it. Snakes in the grass is a real issue, and I've learned what "hayseed" means. Takes 15 minutes of effort with a whisk broom and then water to get clean, after an hour of beating back Nature. The invasive wild grape vines are a threat to life and limb, and every variety of broadleaf wants to eat the walkway, the barn, driveway, gardens, tool shed, and pumphouse. I'd poison them, but it would take a thousand gallons and I don't care to spray myself in the process. The primary purpose of whacking back profusely wild Spring growth is to announce to those who drive past my property on the county road that I'm here, mind your manners and stay clear, unless you're invited to visit. A half dozen folks stop by from time to time, nice people who care about me and my dog. We chat a few minutes. When I was ill, they were worried enough to bring hot vittles and broth. Sometimes they invent chores I can do for pocket money.

The butterflies are beautiful, five species, jet blue, orange, tiny little powder blue, speckled, and black P-38s with a long split tail. Ants everywhere and every size, a constant battle to keep them at bay. Huge hedgehogs and silly bunnies. Black bear and raccoon, serious threats. Neighbors have seen bobcat. Coyote packs threaten cattle herds. Spectacular eagles, equally grand hawks, giant turtles migrating to complicate road traffic, and whitetail bucks barking to marshal their females. Wild turkey, quail, loud choruses of frogs at night. Every sort of crawling bug and moth you can imagine. I don't want to talk about ticks. Let me repeat that. I don't want to talk about ticks.

Thunderstorm on the horizon. Big ones knock down limbs and uproot weak trees. "Windfall" has a specific referent, picking shit up after a big storm. I've been fighting the sycamore to keep it from eating a 7000 volt high line and fighting herds of wasps to keep them from eating me. On a cool day, there's firewood rounds to split with a heavy mawl, bank it in neat stacks under roof to provide heat next winter.

A finch has taken it into her head that it's her barn, her stack of wood to nest in. I walk in to do something or other, and she suddenly panics, a great fluttering of protest. If the male is nearby, he flies to the rescue, chrips loudly. Ooops. Another nest just outside my office door, teeny weeny chicks peeping when Mom or Dad arrives with a worm.

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