Free-fall

Several years ago, I had the great thrill of going skydiving, in what's known as an Assisted Free Fall jump. This is not the skydiving where you're strapped to the belly of another skydiver. In AFF, you jump out of the plane, flanked by two experienced skydivers. They're there to yank your ripcord if you pass out, or panic.

But once you pull the ripcord, you're on your own; floating over the landscape like you're in a giant swing suspended from the sky. In my case, I looked down and--with my really flawed sense of direction--and had no idea where the airport was. Suffice it to say, I found it and landed safely, but not before some very anxious fantasies of landing in someone's swimming pool in Taft.

This, though, is about the free fall. When I jump off of anything higher than a shoebox, I get this stomach-in-the mouth feeling. One of the most interesting aspects of the free fall in skydiving was that I didn't have the sensation of falling. Instead, I felt like I was floating. Floating with a 140 mile-per-hour headwind, but floating just the same. I started the jump at 13,000 feet, and there was no sense of the earth rushing up to meet me and splatter me all over its face.

Not that I wasn't aware that before too much time--a minute or two at most--I would be, well, let's not sugarcoat it: DEAD.

In any event, even with the blasting wind, and the knowledge that I was falling at a velocity that was or could be terminal in several senses, there was a certain calmness that prevailed during that free fall. I'm certainly not the first to observe that extreme danger has a way of focusing the mind, and despite all of the safety precautions, I was keenly aware that there was a very thin line between being a functioning, conscious human being, and being a pile of broken bones and smashed organs. Really, death is always just a moment away. None of us knows when our time is up. We are just not conscious of that most of the time. Plummeting toward earth, I knew that life was precious and fleeting.

The free fall lasted 20 or 30 seconds, I think. It felt like a lot longer, and not in the way that having the dentist drill your teeth feels like longer than it is, but in the good sense: time stretched out. I was aware of everything, and in that way felt connected to my body, to what I needed to do, and to the experience itself in a very exhilarating way. This is a feeling that might be described as being in harmony with nature, and perhaps even with the cosmos, but above all with Life itself.

It is the feeling that I had yesterday, as I worked on my new novel. I was sitting in a cafe, so (as far as I know, regardless of the strength of the coffee) I wasn't in physical danger. But, however briefly, I achieved what contemporary thinkers call "flow;" complete connection with what you're doing. It is the same sense of bliss and mastery that a painter has when the paint is flowing, or that a musician has when the music carries him away.

You need to know a little about the book to understand why this was a magical experience. I won't attempt to describe the plot entirely, because that is an evolving thing. But I will describe a couple of the elements of the story.

The book that ultimately became The Pyongyang Paradox features Tom Huttle, the hapless writer who has been at the center of the other three books in the trilogy. Yes, I know that a trilogy is a collection of three books, and Pyongyang Paradox is/ will be the fourth. It's a JOKE! 

Anyway, in the version I was working on at the time, since revised, re-directed, and otherwise vastly changed, Tom knows he's been in those other books. As a result he is very resentful of someone named Chris Westphal, the author of the books. Tom feels that Chris Westphal has, in writing about his various misadventures, humiliated him.

For years, Tom has tried to write an adventure novel: The Pyongyang Paradox, an espionage thriller. In the now abandoned version I was working on at the time I originally wrote this essay, Tom had adopted a the nom de plume: Colonel Cyrus Horton, USAF, Ret.  Tom believes that an author with a military background will give The Pyongyang Paradox the gravitas that it needs to succeed.

Tom creates all sorts of background information about the good Colonel, using various blogs, etc., to establish his credible existence. And, to Tom's extreme surprise and delight, The Pyongyang Paradox is a smash hit. I had some ideas as to why that might be so, but for now it's not really important.

Now, remember that Colonel Cyrus Horton, USAF, Ret., is the fictional creation of a fictional character, who is himself the creation of a fictionalized Chris Westphal. I don't--as my eponymous character does--believe that Tom Huttle is real.

But I was fascinated by Col. Horton, and wrote a chapter from his point of view, as though he had, indeed, really written The Pyongyang Paradox. For Tom Huttle, writing a novel is (as is the case for me) a very difficult process. One might describe it as arduous. For Colonel Horton, it was a couple of weekends in his spare time.

In any event, I feel I wrote a pretty compelling chapter, in which the good Colonel gets a call from his agent--who is, also, Tom Huttle's agent--wanting to book an appearance for him on The Daily Show. 

I won't give away any of the other nuances of the plot right now, but the exercise of creating Colonel Cyrus Horton, USAF, Ret., consolidated some themes, and current interests of mine. I'm fascinated by quantum mechanics, and by the theories supporting what astrophysicist Brian Green calls "the multiverse:" multiple dimensions of reality. A favorite book of the past couple of decades is The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman, which explores some similar ideas.

My particular take on it was to wonder this: what if fictional characters--such as Tom Huttle and Colonel Horton, and everyone else populating my various novels--actually exist in some unseen dimension? The actual theory of the multiverse allows that there could be millions of versions of us, each taking different paths, with the branching multitude of life's possibilities developing therefrom.

For example, in one of these universes, there may be a "me" who went to Japan at 21, as my father offered me the opportunity to do. There's a version of me who continued working as a reporter. Another whose television writing partner didn't destroy his TV career. Another who went to law school, but probably dropped out. The variations are endless. Fiction comes into play in this way: all of the choices I didn't make in life leave a certain residue. I call it "thought energy."

The law of the conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changes. So, does thought energy manifest somewhere as a version of reality?

Why not?

Physicists know, I hasten to add, that the "observable universe," that is, all of the matter and energy that we can detect either visually or electronically or by other means, comprises only about 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is a mystery, called Dark Matter and Dark Energy. No one, including Stephen Hawking and Brian Green, know what it is.

Consequently, there is plenty of room in space and time for multiple versions of all and everything. Even me. Even my fictional creations. Even the fictional creations of my fictional creations.
So that's what's happening in this book. Somewhere--I don't yet know where, but I know it will happen--they will meet and something will happen. I hope it's something funny, as well as at least a little insightful.

I would like to claim that I had this idea to start with. But I arrived at it only by writing about 200 pages of narrative in which I really had no idea WHAT was happening. I should say that action was happening, conflict was happening, and scenes and characters were being developed, but the unifying theme--what the book was about--was elusive to me. I just knew it was there if I kept moving forward. That's why yesterday was so exciting.

By the way, I'm not pretending that I'm the only writer who's ever explored this territory. The Paper Men, by William Golding, is a wonderful book, in which a writers characters come to life and plot to kill him. I'm sure someone did it before Golding, too. And he won the Nobel Prize.

Anyway, every plot has been done, so I feel no shame in that.

And I am writing it my way, with my characters, and my take on the nature of humanity, and of reality. It is a lot like free falling, in the most exhilarating way. 

ADDENDUM: I modified this post a little, but further explanation is warranted. I'm writing this addendum in January, 2020, and I see that this entry was originally posted in June of 2014. It took me six more years to finish the novel referred to here. In the interim, I also wrote another novel, but let's not worry about that now. My original title for the book was Huttle on Fire, but over time it became The Pyongyang Paradox, and it evolved vastly from where it was in June of 2014. Col. Cyrus Horton, Ret., was jettisoned. Tom's belief that Chris Westphal was maligning him is no longer a part of the story. However, the plot that ultimately developed incorporates a lot of the ideas I was batting around six years ago. In the now finished version, Tom is writing an espionage novel, The Pyongyang Paradox, that features a swashbuckling, bigger-than-life hero, Buck Samson. Through a confluence of electromagnetic forces, Tom switches places with Buck as he is in the midst of one of his missions. Hilarity ensues, and I'll leave it at that for now. On a final note, though, reading this entry from six years ago, I absolutely marvel at the twists and turns my mind took during the creative process. I followed many, many, many tangents that led nowhere. However, all were important, because distilled from them (pardon the mixed imagery) emerged a coherent plot emerged. Consequently, I can't say that any of the perhaps six hundred pages I wrote and discarded were wasted. I simply needed to pluck from them the elements that supported the story I wanted (perhaps entirely subconsciously) to tell. The final draft is four hundred pages long. I suppose I wrote a thousand or more pages, all told. A viability ratio of 4/10.