SIX KEYS TO WRITING - THE SIXTH KEY

THE FIRST KEY

My latest novel The Sixth Key is published and in bookstores and now, as I bask in the warm afterglow of past labours, I find myself turning philosophical. You see, it's my habit to retrace my steps, to search beyond those numerous drafts, sleepless nights, moments of self doubt and, of course, the usual last minute panic, to find the impulse that led to the book: the epiphanic moment – the birth of the idea.

James Joyce was the first to apply this word epiphanic to literature – a moment of insight which briefly illuminates the whole of existence and makes time stand still. For me these moments always come in the middle of life: while I’m on the way to driving my daughter to the mall or when my son is physically moving the house with music - everything is normal one moment, and the next - Eureka!

So what was the epiphanic moment that led to The Sixth Key? It came the morning I had a meeting with my agent and publisher. I was locked in dense Sydney traffic, and all at once the world faded away and three things popped into my head: Hitler, the Grail and the Apocalypse - I had my book!

In reality such a moment is only the tiny peak of an enormous iceberg and the very first key to what lives in an author just waiting to bubble up as an epiphany. As a literary device I will say there were six keys to writing The Sixth Key and in the coming blogs I will explore them with you. Are you ready for an adventure? Bring your rope and your flashlight, because as my protagonist Otto Rahn says, one has to dare to travel to hell if one wants to find heaven – I dare!

Confessions of an Author: My muse, and how the Rolling Stones got it right.

All artists know that enigmatic, mysterious, exhilarating and annoyingly indeterminate moment when inspiration lifts the soul out of the dung heap of mediocrity. 


One can be toiling away for days, weeks, months, years, writing utter rubbish (unfortunately often when a deadline is looming) and then, quite unexpectedly, seemingly undeserved, a word enters into the mind like a whisper, or one comes across a book lying around or someone says something at a supermarket check out that suddenly works like a white brand of light out of a blue sky, shattering the fabric of your world, shinning a light upon the path that you must tread to creative excellence.  


The Goddesses responsible for these moments of inspirational bliss were known to the Greeks as muses, and all good poets, writers and musicians have acknowledged their valuable help. They were ethereal creatures that increasingly embodied real women: the Florentine  Dante had his Beatrice, Orpheus his Euridice, Shakespeare his Dark Lady, Novalis his Sophie, Scott Fitzgerald his Zelda, Ezra Pound his Olga...I could go on and on. 


My muse has, over time, become as tangible and real as a friend,  but there are moments when I, the mortal that I am, have lapses of forgetfulness; moments when I'm too busy with my own thoughts to listen to my friend's gentle urgings.


Last week I experienced such a lapse and this is my confession.


I was going quite mad looking for a book I thought I needed to continue writing the sequel to THE SIXTH KEY. In my heart of hearts I felt that the book was not in the house but my head would not listen! 


Looking for a book is a tiresome activity that, due to my tenacious nature, leads inexorably to a process that must run its course. Firstly I must tear up of the house looking for it. Next there is much blaming and finger pointing, after which comes the inevitable denial of any responsibility on my part, followed by a period of incertitude and palsy that lasts until something happens to break the miasmic spell. 


In this case it was an idea. 


I woke up one morning - 3am -  with the idea that the elusive book must be on our little boat (where I write on and off). So the next day I set off with the uncharacteristically choleric walk of a hunter in pursuit of a valuable prize that must be procured at any cost. But after hours of searching through a wilderness of previously unseen nooks and crannies, I had to sit back defeated, with only a glass of mineral water and the gentle lulling of the waves to calm my nerves. It was over, the hunt for the book had come to grinding halt and I would have to find my way home empty handed, humbled and broken.


During moments of despair, if one is quiet, one can discern the gentle voice, the soft suggestive whisper that speaks in the ear and says: Look!  And if you are obedient as I am when completely deflated, you will do as you are told. I looked but I did not see the book I wanted alas (!) I saw another book that I had quite forgotten about lying around. I grudgingly opened it to any page and on closer inspection was shocked. Elated. Grateful.  


This was exactly what I had been looking for! 


When I got home I took the new book to the bookshelf and inexplicably found the other book I had been looking for sitting on the shelf quite happily! I had not seen it  because it was the WRONG BOOK!


In the end I could have saved myself a lot of trouble just by listening to my muse and trusting that when she doesn't give me what I want it is because she wants to give me something better - she wants to give me what I need!

The Alchemical Dew and Assorted Trials!

For me writing is an Alchemical process which is not too dissimilar to baking a cake. Yes! And I am going to share a slice of mine with you over a coffee. Ready?

The deconstruction of my darlings, spoken of in the last blog I call the 'solve' or dissolving aspect of the work. It can take from a week (rarely) to a few months (commonly)! And even when it is over I am by no means on my way to making the ideal - the delicious concoction that will not only engage, but educate, not only thrill for a moment but hopefully enter into the hearts of its readers for a while making them see the world differently.

At this point, sad to say, I have merely turned the oven on and cleaned the bowl in which I will combine the ingredients.

Before I begin to create I have to ascertain what sort of creation it will be, and this is a process of building - 'coagula' - and deconstruction - 'solve' again. This I liken to the making of the shopping list and it has to do with a monumental number of possibilities because the recipe or various combinations of recipes are made up of any number of ingredients. All my research, the endless prevarication, procrastination and conversations have led me to a number of characters and plots that now appear on the list! They take turns at trying to out do one another in order of importance. I ask myself:

How many characters will I have? Which one is the protagonist? Will I use a God voice, first person or third person voice? Will it be in past or present tense? What is the structure? What location will I use, what country, what nationality? What relationship to true events? What plot will be the best vehicle for what my characters want to say - what I want to say - what the cake maker wants to say!

What tone, substance, quantity, qualification, relation, place, time, attitude, habit, action and passion?

After the peace of deconstruction one is compelled to put one's head inside an anthill again, meanwhile attempting to live day to day with family, friends, dogs and parents as if one is perfectly normal and not a   nutcase with a million recipes and combination of recipes and their assorted ingredients competing for space in their brain. At this point (labour pains come to mind), I want to scream:

WHAT IS THE BIG PICTURE!!!!

This is how I deal with this moment, where one is on the verge of creation or utter ruination - without going completely mad and driving everyone else mad with me. In the day I write down everything that comes to mind on a big pad. I doodle all the time! In the night I review everything again. I take all of the possible ingredients, everything from characterisation to plot into my sleep and I allow it to die away until there into nothing. Another 'solve', another mini deconstruction! Is this difficult? Yes because once again I am creating darlings! Is it possible? Most of the time! There in lies the rub! Ha ha - a maniacal laugh.

However the upside is that in the morning, if all goes well, the myriad of possibilities that I have let go of have been cleverly and conveniently distilled into a drop of very concentrated essence I call the Alchemical Dew - the 'coagula'! If I haven't been rudely and inconsiderately bounced out of bed by anxious dogs, hungry children, husbands late for work, phone calls from my mother to see if I'm awake yet, and alarm clocks that I have forgotten to turn off, I notice it. If I am dragged out of bed with  no time for that peaceful moment to occur, I notice it later as I go about my day -  I realise that a mysterious process has occurred in the night. I have woken up feeling that something has been placed in the crucible of my soul! A little present from the elves!

I see only two or three ingredients at first, only the ones I am meant to combine at this stage, like butter, sugar and eggs. The interesting thing is, that as I bring these together, the process itself begins to dictate what needs to come next - dry ingredients, milk so on - for the proper order of ingredients will create either a sponge cake or a mud cake, a thriller or a love story - it is up to me! I am always free, I can change the recipe at any time. That is the science and the art of it!

I know I'm on the right path when I can follow the recipe, while always trusting that the great cake maker who wrote it - me - knows what kind of cake it should be in the end.

So...where am I? In my bowl I have found my protagonist! Yes indeed.  So it is 1888, the world is on the verge of war. I take a book dealer whose name I don't yet know and I combine him with a cemetery in Paris, a mysteriously locked box,  and I add a conversation with Conan Doyle about the death of a colleague and the disappearance of seven boys connected to his psychic work in London.

Coagula!

I bring the spoon to my mouth...mmmm...this one tastes perfect so far!

More anon...

THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL - an Author's Confession!

Every author has his or her own way of coping with the immensely stressful, though potentially rewarding moment they are faced with a blank page or screen.  This moment, alas(!), is even more terrifying if you have previously written a best seller that has been well received and highly recommended, and if added to this horror or horrors you have a tight deadline and a well meaning editor calling you at odd intervals to ask how you are going.

Some of us work well under pressure. Others can become paralysed with fear at the sight of that blank,  endless, horizonless wasteland, one could liken to a blizzard that obscures an otherwise blue sky on the way to Mt Everest. The way up is your career, you have a contract, you have done well, everyone expects you to do it again, you can see the summit, your legs are taut, your head is clear, you are well prepare and then - blizzard! 

If you are a sailor like me, you will liken it to a white squall that comes from out of nowhere and hits you with all your sails out and your sheets flapping - suddenly the boom is headed your way and...you're in the water without a life jacket! 

What comes after the blank page is the dark night of the soul!

Dramatic? Yes! That is what this is all about! Drama!

Why do I call it a dark night? Because for me a new book can only come after a period of deconstruction. I have to kill my darlings! Blot them out! You see, I am so in love with my last book that I want to do it again and again and again, and so I have at least ten beginnings that are like the other book but are not right and it takes a lot of writing and feeling utterly bad about what you are writing to deconstruct! You have to do it until you are quite sick of yourself, until you realise that you can't, or shouldn't, try to build a new house on old foundations. Whether you like it or not you have to bring in the bulldozer and set to work demolishing that beloved construct of your mind to clear the way for something new one to come.

How do I deconstruct?

I spend a lot of time researching.  I tend to eat more than I should. I go for walks without noticing anything at all, talking to myself, asking myself questions - should I connect this with that and that with this and that again with something else? By no means am I a martyr who drowns alone, I have to bring everybody into the water with me. I call my mother annoyingly all through the day to ask her what she thinks, I confuse, mystify and frustrate my poor long suffering husband, I irritate my children, I bemuse my friends, I confound and tax the intelligence of my poor dog! I question my talent, I question my commitment, I question my questions!

Most nights I go to bed fretting, reading, thinking and then I wake up with indefinite ideas that sound terrific, edifying, fantastic and then fizzle out as the day goes by leaving me empty and bereft. I spend too much time on facebook, twitter, my website, rearranging things and making endless videos. I write long blogs about my frustrations (ha ha!) I decide to empty out my kitchen cupboards and rearrange the pots and pans differently, then I put them back where they were before I started. I decide to learn a new programme on my mac or to bleach all the linen in the house. I make sour dough starter and launch into a frenzy of bread making and cake producing that might be the norm in commercial kitchens but is rarely seen in sane households. 

Somehow, this procrastination allows for the deconstruction to take place, so that all the conversations, all the research, all the endless thinking, reading and thinking again can die away into nothing and be born again around an idea. When it comes I feel a strange equanimity, I walk around with a smile on my face, like an overdue pregnant woman who is about to go mad if someone doesn't pull that baby out. I know however, beyond the manic need for action, that if the idea is to become an ideal, if it is to be born healthy, I must not use forceps, or drugs, or epidurals or call for a cesarian section (unless absolutely  necessary). I have to be patient and wait for nature to do its work, naturally.

That is where I am now...I am in my living room, it is raining, the fire is crackling pleasantly in the hearth, the pool is about to overflow and flood the house, the dog is asleep and I'm taken with the wonder of it! I'm watching a group of characters and plots float before my eyes around that idea...which is only a question at this stage:

What if the first world war was meant to start in 1888?

Suddenly it is no longer night and the day has dawned, the sky has cleared. What do I care if outside the sea is pounding and the sky is coming down in a torrent, I have seen the light and can now face that blank page with all the courage I can muster! I have my first labour pains!

More anon...

THE SIXTH KEY Competition

VISIT MY WEBSITE FOR A CHANCE TO WIN A FREE POSTAGE PAID COPY OF THE SIXTH KEY:


http://www.adrianakoulias.com/ADRIANAKOULIAS/Competitions_and_Giveaways.html

Excerpt from Fifth Gospel - A Novel

Lea gave me her quiet, patient attention.‘You should know that when an army enters into a city, faith soon leads to murder.’  

‘Should I? Why should it be so…I have no idea!’

‘Think of it pairé, what you call faith is not really faith at all, it is only religion. Religion is only a short step from zeal, and zeal only a margin away from fervour, which is only a hair’s breadth from frenzy–the cradle of hate and murder. The truth is, pairé, that evil and good share the same small space in the soul.’ 

‘What makes one man evil and one good, then?’

‘How close he is to the good gods or to the evil gods.’

‘And what is the compensation for the atrocities committed against innocent people…children!’ I said with vehemence, for the memory of Bezier’s had come unbidden and was stirring up an anger I had not let myself feel all these years.  

She turned towards me and fixed her steady gaze on my face. ‘There is another way to look at it, pairé. It could be that destiny has brought these souls together to a place where they can suffer in order that in the future they can return again, together, for a good cause…’

This did not ease my heart. ‘I know we are told to forgive our enemies their sins…but what of God? Has he turned away from the innocent?’

‘God is just,’ she said.

‘But is that all he is? What of love?’

‘God is Love, and his wrath is also his love.’

‘How can wrath be love?’

‘Do you remember, what Buddha said to Jesus? Suffering leads to Compassion. When God spills out his wrath it causes suffering. But suffering gives us wisdom, it allows us to recognise the suffering of others, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, the memory of our own suffering is what allows us to understand and to forgive those who have done some wrong to us…this is true love pairé. Wrath seen from the other side, is true love; a Love that cancels out sin.’

I looked out of the window to the hard snow falling over the crests and peaks and valleys and chasms of our mountains. I realised more than ever how far I was from perfection. 

The Twelve Holy Nights - Pisces/Fishes

The Twelve Holy Nights 

Two festivals stand at opposite poles at this time of the year: Christmas and Epiphany. They mark two births.  Christmas celebrates the birth of the Son of Man - Jesus, and Epiphany marks the birth of the Son of God - Christ. We could say that the twelve nights are those nights that fall between these two festivals and which  mark, on the one hand, an earthly path from Jesus to Christ, and on the other, a Cosmic path from Christ to Jesus. Two paths, one of a man towards Godhood and the other of a God towards manhood.

From Jesus to Christ:

The man's journey is a veiled one. We know something of the birth of Jesus but not much is written about his life thereafter. Why is that? Because it was far too complicated. Only recently, since the Renaissance,  have we developed a consciousness capable of understanding it.

In order to understand the path that Jesus took to become Christ we have to know that there were two Jesus children. The first being of the line of Solomon - I call this child Yeshua. Yeshua was a native of Bethlehem and his birth is depicted in the Matthew Gospel.

The second child, which I call Jesus, is the younger child from the lineage of Nathan and a native of Nazareth and his life is depicted in the Luke Gospel.

We know these are separate individuals because not only do Matthew and Luke give different genealogies in the bible, but the Matthew Jesus and the Luke Jesus are shown to have had different experiences: the Matthew child was born earlier, in the time of Herod and is visited by Magi and thereafter journeys to Egypt; while the Luke child is born at the time of Quireneus and the Census and travels to Bethlehem where he is visited by Shepherds and thereafter returns to live a quiet life in Nazareth.

Rudolf Steiner was the first modern human being to recognise this mystical fact and he has many lectures devoted to the understanding of this mystery.

The younger years in the live of the two Jesus children are similarly veiled, but we do know that the Luke Child unites with the Matthew child when the Luke child is twelve and the Matthew child is around 14. This mysterious unification occurs at the Temple in Jerusalem and is depicted in the Bible in that part where Mary loses her son and finds him speaking 'uncharacteristically' to the rabbis. This is because her quiet child is now united with the wise child who subsequently dies.

In his lectures entitled the Fifth Gospel, Rudolf Steiner gives an account of this mystery and the years that follow.

From Christ to Jesus:

The journey of  Christ through the spiritual world and His descent into a human being is also veiled.  There are various lectures in which Rudolf Steiner gives account of this journey - a journey that is sacrificial and encompasses the entire cosmos and various Zodiac constellations as he descends towards the earth and into the body Jesus of Nazareth.

During Christmas and Epiphany we celebrate Jesus' individual's outer journey in the physical world, the inner revolution occurring in the body and soul of a human being who is being prepared to accept a god into his body and soul, and paradoxically, a god's journey through the outer cosmos which is really a contraction of His heavenly nature and a sacrifice of His various exalted members through the regions of the 12 Zodiacs, in order that he might enter into the body of that prepared human being.

So, when we look at the twelve regions (the circle) of the Zodiac during those twelve Holy Nights we can find a memory of that momentous parallel path which forms a kind of cosmic ladder from human depths to spiritual heights and from spiritual heights to human depths - and for the man Jesus, it begins with the Zodiacal region of the Fishes.

    FISH/PISCES 
The first Holy Night

The path symbolised by the Fishes is the path taken by every human being who is born on earth. It is so because long ago it was taken by the first human beings who descended from the realm of the spirit to the earthly realm. They descended by  relinquishing their connection to the outer light of the spirit, in order that the unification with darkness might eventually teach them how to kindle, through their own efforts, the light within their own hearts.

This descent was experienced by the two Jesus children, who both entered into the womb of their respective mothers in order to be born into the darkness of matter - the physical world.

This descent was also experienced in a higher way, by the second Logos, the Son, who had much earlier journeyed from the heights of the Trinity into the realm of the zodiac and the Sphere of the Sun as a star. Thus was Christ born into the Spirit womb of the divine Sophia, the Sun as a star.

We can see how the two images are a wonderful unification of Christ with the realm of the Fishes and the realm of the Virgin which both stand at opposite positions in the starry sky.

In the future this unification will be a practical experience - a conscious one - undergone by the prepared human soul (Virgin/Fish) with the Spirit of Christ. This is what is mean by the Second Coming.

Within ourselves we have two fish - one swims upwards and the other downwards - one part of us is male, outward striving, individual, wise and fiery  like the Matthew Jesus, and the other part of us is feminine, inward gazing, communal, calm and loving like the Luke Jesus. The two must come together inwardly in the same way that outwardly the two Jesus'  children united in Jesus of Nazareth - if we are to find the inward and outward Christ.

It was understood in the age of the 'Twins', that is, in Persia, that the realm of the Fish and Virgin would one day unite to prepare two human beings (twins) so that they could make ready the womb for a God. For this reason the Fish has always been synonymous with Jesus Christ. He not only called Himself the 'fisher of men' but many of his disciples were 'Fishermen'. This knowledge was carried  in the soul of the early Christians who always associated Jesus Christ with the sign of the Fish until it was replaced by the Catholic Church with the sign of the black cross. On the other hand, the Vesica Pisces, the womb of the Fish, is the ancient symbol which signifies the birth of the spirit of Christ - Fish - into the womb of the soul.

John the Baptist was the initiator of the Fish initiate - Jesus. He initiated Jesus of Nazareth and facilitated the release of the Matthew Jesus from the Luke Jesus by Baptising Jesus of Nazareth with water. He could do this because he was an 'Aquarian' initiate, one who has been initiated from the region of the starry realms which was later called after him: Waterman. John the Baptist spoke of one who would come to Baptise not with water but with the Fire of the Holy Spirit. This is Christ.

So, when we look upwards to the realm of the Fish on this Holy Night, may we see what has been in the past as a sign of what is now happening within our souls so as to pave the way for what will be the experience of all men on earth - the birth of the child...the Christ within the human soul.