De-Toxing Fame

One final word on J.K. Rowling seems necessary, for though I've been critical of her involvement in what I call the "Cheney-fication" of her work, one overriding point to be made about her is that she has dealt admirably with an obscene level of fame.

Rowling has been dropped into a trap more perilous than devil's snare and has not just survived--she in fact stands as a living model of how to endure the assault of fame.

Nevertheless, no one truly thrives under fame's garish glare and noise, because it is, in fact, a poison to the living personality. A casual glance over the landscapes of Hollywood, professional athletics, and the mass media would be sufficient to remove any doubt as to the toxicity of fame.

Rowling's strategy on handling fame has probably been more instinct than calculation: she retreats, she stays in motion, she appoints guardians who keep the media and other hounds at bay, and she defends her private life like a mother bear protecting her cubs.

Though I am not, and never will be famous, I have learned something about fame from observation and inquiry. One secret to working through this issue seems to involve an inner affirmation of recognition over fame. Whenever we avoid the harsh glare of fame, we invite the softer glow of recognition, which is simply the acknowledgement of effort.

This, indeed, was Rowling's original quest when she wrote the first of the Potter books. She sought recognition for her work, and the chance to become free of that lower-middle-class treadmill of subsistence.

As she later admitted, she overshot the target in that respect, but not through any calculation of her own. Maybe a stock trader or a hedge fund manager would set out on his career with the notion of eventually becoming a billionaire; but not an author.

I can speak from experience to this: writers do not wish to be rich, only free. We ask only for enough critical and material recognition to allow us to keep writing, and to follow the star that has guided us through sleepless nights of work and the dark stream of three-line rejection letters from agents and publishers. Most of us sense that fame would only complicate matters and make the work itself hard, which it never is by nature.

So should fame ever be thrust upon you, as the old saying goes, that would be the time to thrust back. Reject it as far as possible, and then retreat as you can. Otherwise, the snare will wrap itself around your creative heart and eventually morph you from an artist into a mere celebrity. There can be no greater tragedy in the creative realm than this.

Friday Reflection: Felix Felicis

We finish our week of Potter mania on a personal note. The sound file (m4a, 10MB, click to listen or right-click to save) in the graphic is something that would get me sued by J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros., Scholastic, the RIAA, and god knows who else. But since I currently have $91.51 in the bank, I think I'm safe. The fact is, however, that I have recorded every single chapter of every one of the six Potter books. My daughter listens to them every night on her iPod to help her sleep; they have been bedtime stories for her all of these past five or six years. To make it interesting for myself, I tried on some of the characters' accents, both as I imagined them myself and as we heard them in the films. This part is one of my favorite scenes: the encounter with Mr. Ollivander in the wand shop of Book One.



The Outcasts of Hogwarts

There are many wonderful themes among the sub-stories and characters of the Potter universe, and one of my favorites has to do with all the marginal people and creatures who populate the wizarding world. These include:

Rubeus Hagrid

The House-Elves

The Centaurs

Professor Trelawney

Professor Lupin

Sirius Black

Luna Lovegood

Harry Potter himself

All of these characters have been fully ostracized from mainstream society or else pushed to the margins , either as individuals (Harry, Luna, Trelawney, Black) or by virtue of their connection with a demonized group (Hagrid / giants; Dobby / house-elves; Firenze / centaurs; Lupin / werewolves).

The question that comes up for the reader, and that Rowling surely had to work through herself, has to do with the path of return and growth that these characters must take to discover their identities, their true selves. Must they each take the solitary path of self-discovery through autonomy, or can they find themselves through a validation of their group, as many gays, women, minorities, and immigrants must do in our Muggle world?

The answer, of course, is that it has to be both. A group identity may be a necessary part of acculturation, depending on the time and circumstances of one's world.

Necessary, perhaps, but never sufficient. The self gains its internal unity, its connection to the undivided whole of life, through autonomy. The family, community, nation, or other group is best furthered when each individual who comprises it is allowed the full and free expression of his or her (or, in Hogwarts, its) autonomy.

When self-rule becomes the guiding principle within the individual, then government happens as if by itself; there is no effort to it, and order becomes as natural and ordinary as breathing or walking.

This occurs through the influence of one of the universal principles of the mind and of democracy: equality. When self-government happens within the individual, heart and brain; body and mind; feeling and intellect all work as single, undivided, co-equal functional units. The remoteness and the medieval prejudices of hierarchy are unknown to such an ordering of the personality. Lao Tzu expressed it this way:

Equality is the Cosmic Way:
Good and evil are born of fantasy.
The Sage is neither partisan nor punishing:
No one is special, no one excluded.

Consciousness breathes,
Expands and contracts.
It never varies, and each moment is unique.

Now when Lao Tzu referred to "the Sage", he meant the quantum teaching energy of the cosmic consciousness. The Sage guides each of us to the right action in whatever line of work we're cut out for. It manifests itself in everyone, uniquely in every person, but the Sage is always there.

To make such an affirmation in a culture like ours is to risk the same kind of marginalization as Luna Lovegood endures at Hogwarts. Now since I've never seen or felt a nargle, I can't comment on her experience; but I can tell you something about how I and many of my counseling clients have experienced the Sage.

The Sage is not a Lord or an executive type of God. It does not demand obedience, but inspires trust instead. Can you see the difference? Trust arises from love—the attraction between equals. Obedience is born of fear.

So religions speak of cultivating the "fear of God." This is not the way of the Sage. The Sage works through the force of attraction—quantum gravity, if you will, in the field of Mind—and inspires trust. It never asks either faith or obedience of us. If you can understand this with your mind and feel it in your heart, then your Sage is alive in you.

How we make equality breathe within ourselves is very much an individual matter: each person's experience will be unique. How we make equality breathe within our nation arises from the path that each of us travels, and from the vision and planning
of leaders who never cease in the search for honesty, accountability, and above all, humility in their actions. But whenever, as now, power becomes either the means or the end of such leaders, we must call them down and demand that they cease using power, or else leave.

Back at Hogwarts, we find that whenever Harry and/or his friends must make a great journey or perform a particularly difficult feat, they are helped by some object or energy that dissolves the hard shell of form and its resistance. A web of light may form to protect Harry during an encounter with Voldemort; a magical bowl of gaseous light may take him through time and space toward a great realization; or the characters may wrap themselves in a cloak of invisibility.

In the closing paragraph of The Tao of Hogwarts, I ask the reader to don the invisibility cloak within, and feel himself as both form and light:

Think of yourself again as energy: the ceaseless movement whose order and disposition define the seeming matter of your body, and indeed of all form. You breathe out your excess into the Whole from which you came and to which you will return; you gently inhale the nourishment of renewed life-force—what the Chinese refer to as "chi". You can feel waves of movement, as of water or wind, passing through you with each breath—gently dissolving what is manifest but only derivative, while the energetic core of your personal inner truth is gradually revealed and strengthened. You are not, after all, your race, your gender, your occupation, your material possessions, your marital or family status, your sexual orientation, your socio-economic class, your political, national, or religious affiliation; nor are you what the voice from a television says you are. All these ingrained self-images dissolve with every breath, as the life-force enters and moves through you—dispelling the false, peeling away the appearance, revealing the core and center of your being, whose inimitable perfection dances in joyful separation from the realms of pride, guilt, and opposition.

If you're in Brooklyn tonight, stop by the Community Bookstore on 7th Avenue and say hello. On this lovely evening, I have one wish for all my fellow Potter fans (and the rest of you as well): Felix Felicis.

Report from Midtown Manhattan

Here's an update from midtown Manhattan, where I work, and where we had an explosion last night. So far, one person has died and 30 are injured, two critically. The following streets in the area remain closed:

Lexington Avenue from 34th to 57th Streets
Third Avenue from 38th to 42nd Streets
Park Avenue from 34th to 54th Streets
42nd Street from Park to Third Avenues
Vanderbilt Avenue for its entire length from 42nd to 47th Streets

So, what happens when you start a pointless war that increases global terror, alienates former allies, kills and wounds tens of thousands of your own and hundreds of thousands of innocents in the nation you attacked and occupied?

Well, one thing that happens is that you spend up to a trillion dollars on this war, and have nothing left to spend on your own nation's infrastructure, which in turn rots and then does some of Uncle Osama's work for him.

Harry Potter Meets the Starfish Phenomenon

It would take a lot, admittedly, for me to reach a saturation point re. Mr. Potter of Little Whinging. After all, I've written a book about it, which still isn't done yet (by the way, the pdf file of the entire text is now back, at my other site).

What may be conspicuous to the reader is what we've overlooked—specifically, the news that's being reported about scanned pages of Book 7 appearing on the web (though Kakutani of the Times has already read it and given it a respectful, nearly reverent review, and Barack Obama's waiting his turn).

The point of this omission is not to avoid "spoilers," because I don't think that knowing what will happen will spoil anything: as I wrote last month, plot is so small a factor in a work of literature. Character, setting, dialogue, and all those other indefinable aspects join with plot to create meaning in a novel; and that's what matters, if a work is to endure.

So I actually have an objection with the cult of secrecy that has grown around this body of work: the whole stupid drama comprises a petty act of Cheney-fication. Rowling (to the extent that she was actually involved in this chicanery) and her publishers should be ashamed of themselves for creating hype and then scolding people for getting excited. It's the old feed-the-kids-sugar-and-then-spank-them-for-acting-out scenario. Total bullshit, especially when you factor in the oppression involved in forcing printshop workers to labor in the dark and be basically strip-searched on every shift.

Guess what, then? The workers rebelled in the only way they knew how—by finding a way around the Orwellian crap being visited on them. There is also a lesson in this for all institutions that would punish people for their enthusiasm. The RIAA could tell you all about it, because they're making lawyers rich and themselves silly by chasing after housewives, students, and grandmothers for downloading music illegally. That book I reviewed last month, The Starfish and the Spider, talks about this side of the issue: when you enforce obedience, you inspire the creativity of rebellion. The creator of "Dumbledore's Army" should know this better than anyone.

So if you're reading along here, Ms. Rowling (yeah, that's likely), my advice is this: let go and move on. You're done; it's been a massive, marvelous accomplishment, and your place in literary history is already assured, if that matters to you. Put this behind you now, and grow. But if you go on playing policewoman to your first creation, you will find yourself under the oppressive weight of writer's block, and we will have a very long wait to see anything fresh and new from you. For now, spend time with your family, take a break from the typewriter, and let Harry fade into your past. That way, the next great story will arise within you as naturally and easily as this one did, on a train ride from Manchester to London some 17 years ago.
______________________

As we near the end-point of the Potter tales, I am reminded that we're also near the end for this blog. In about two weeks, we'll be done. The archives will be moved to a blogspot URL (hosted, that is, by Google), and the original domain name is now officially up for sale. If you could do something with dailyrevolution.net, and you can make a reasonable offer, it's yours—write or give me a call.

As for The Tao of Hogwarts, I'm hoping that its audience will soon arrive. It has been my experience in life that real inquiry and true discovery only happen after everything has been revealed. We see this principle in government, in legal affairs, and I hope it applies in literature as well. Perhaps once the end to the Potter story is known, people will begin to ask themselves, "what does it mean—to me?" That may be the time when some editor for a publishing house will see the potential in a book like The Tao of Hogwarts.

Meanwhile, it will soon be time for me to take the advice I'm so quick to offer others, and move on.

If you're in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn Friday night, you can find me and my daughter at the Community Bookstore on 7th Ave. (about eight blocks north of where the really big crowds in that neighborhood will be, at the B&N store by Methodist Hospital).

Geek Wednesday: Harry Potter, Geek Like Me

Put down that Red Bull, geek! Try an Acai extreme instead. Whether you're a Senator doing an all-nighter or a Harry Potter geek who will need some juice to get you through the weekend ahead, you'll need to remember the basics:

Sleep during the day on Friday. If you have a job, so much the better. Bring a pillow to work and take an afternoon snooze under your desk. You can also nap while in line at the bookshop—bring a folding chair or sleeping bag.

Five minute breaks every hour while reading. All right, two. If you feel yourself fading, chug some of that acai stuff, or simply perform the Vigilimens charm (page 641, Charms for Geeks, by Flavius Wozniak).

Take Monday off. You'll be finished with the book by then, but you'll need a day to recover and come to grips with the Potterless reality of it all. I'm doing it.

Leave the PC off till Tuesday. You won't want to go online right away—the nargles take over the WiFi networks every time a new HP book comes out, everyone knows that. Instead, remind yourself that Harry still lives inside your own geek self:

Harry: Geek Like Me

Movie 5 is out, Book 7 is just days away, and game 5 is out (and being lambasted by the gaming press, which hates games that don't spread blood all over your screen). It's Potter mania, and we're in another grip of it. What does it all mean to geeks? Here's what Harry has in common with you, geeks. There's plenty, and the glasses are just the beginning of it.

DOM: it's only a Dept. Of Mysteries until you understand structural isomorphism. Then it's just the Document Object Model again.

The Dark Lord can read your mind, but fortunately lacks write permissions.

You can tell time and direction like a magician; you can write in languages that 99% of humans can't fathom. To them, it's all runes and glyphs. Your friends are all outcasts like yourself, bug-eyed nuts who read InfoWorld upside down. Your skin has a faintly jaundiced look (the fluorescent tan), as if you'd been hit with one too many Stupefy spells; yet you're strangely healthy and clear-thinking.

You know stuff that nobody gives you credit for and that most people think is useless; yet when someone's PC breaks down, who do they call? You're a walking Room of Requirement when it comes to that, and like Harry, this is when you can score with the ladies. Even the Muggle women are interested in you then.

That veil of death in the Dept. of Mysteries was what color? You guessed it: blue. BVOD.

You know that Jobs would have called his new feature in Leopard the Time Turner, except that HG Wells is public domain and J.K. Rowling is expensive.

Every spell you cast can be copied and adapted by anyone with the skill to do it. Harry, too, abides by the GPL: magic is all open source. You'd never buy an iPhone: it doesn't come with a wand.

Red Bull is made by Snape: "brews fame, bottles glory, puts a stopper in death." You don't own an owl; you are one.

That Patil girl is in Ravenclaw now, but before that she dropped out of IIT. You know the Triwizard maze, and you know how easily it turns upside down: it was your screensaver in Win95, the one with the rat (Peter Pettigrew?). That Sphinx at the end of it spouts algorithms.

Palindromes and anagrams, whether they come from Tom Riddle or a bigass mirror from your past: normal features of your world. You talk to paintings (in PS, anyway) and get answers; you walk through doors that no one else sees; you shoot fireworks with no flame (in Flash); you can remember the password to the common room from three years ago, or else could hack your way by the Fat Lady. If staircases stayed in one place, that's when you'd be puzzled.

You once owned a horcrux: it was made by Packard-Bell. Memory, you are sure, is never truly random; only evil is.

Take a close look at your forehead someday when you're doing your monthly shave. That mark--has it always been there? Or did Gates or Ballmer leave it on you? Just a thought.

Look at your PC: it's as big and medieval as the Monster Book of Monsters or a pewter cauldron with a half-melted bottom, but it's got a ton of information on it and you would feel as if you were being shot through the death veil at the Dept. of Mysteries if you had to give it up.

Slytherin = Redmond
Ravenclaw = Cupertino
Hufflepuff = Wherever BeOS was made
Gryffindor = Tuxville

You know all about divination: the I Ching can tell the future because it's 64-bit. Voldemort's power and Rowling's income double every 24 months. Moore's law. But you know it can't go on forever.