Finding the California Compromise

Image: “Paddle-steamer in a Storm” c. 1840 J.M.W. Turner. [PD] via Wikimedia commons

The first phase of writing a novel is like preparing to set sail on a voyage around the world and asking what to bring, what to discard, and what can be found along the way. Will it be dangerous, exciting and life-changing, or will everyone stay behind the safety glass? I wonder if I can apply my well-tried techniques to make this new fictional world or if I require new skills and better tools.

The novel opens in the way a great clipper ship, contrary to its design, can hold the lee tide, balancing wind and current at the edge of a continent.

     With orders to work quietly through the early morning, the crew of the Blue Witch stand at ease, awaiting commands from the ship’s mates. There is no signal to drop anchor. Sails are furled on the yards. The helmsman strains to find the lee tide to hold her still.

I am starting the novel in third person and present tense. Third person gives me more possibilities for close, distant, or omniscient perspectives. Present tense is immediate. It keeps me away from slower story-telling that infers psychological distance. These stylistic features will let me experiment with new colors on my palette. This is still historical fiction, and my reason for writing this genre are the same. I want to communicate the power of the moments in our lives; those that change history are layered with the moments that change us.

     Barking seals are distantly audible. On the quarterdeck, the captain studies the hazy signal fire on the easternmost Farallon island. A single Russian merchant ship is anchored near the Kodiak camp. She has not raised her national colors and rides low, likely sailing from the Mexican Port of Manzanillo. The captain scans the mist for lurking masts of a frigate, Mexican, British, or Russian.
     A merchant ship, the Blue Witch was built to outrun, not outfight. Under a different name and captain, she outran the USS Shark when her cargo was human contraband. Chosen specifically by Commodore Perry to be unseen and then forgotten by history, the schooner is to deliver an American dignitary to Yerba Buena. 

Mr. Knox, the American dignitary, knows that war with Mexico has been declared, yet word of this declaration has not arrived on the west coast. This is one of many secrets that are revealed on the three-month voyage. Much will be found along the way. For now, I ready my writer’s tools and materials. I read, research, and test ideas. I explore metaphors.

Discovering Interactions

British painter, William Turner (1775-1851) must have discovered what his materials and conditions could do by being attentive to their interactions. Painting must be such a practice. What is there and not there together imply the direction of light and each texture’s reflection of it, the feeling of each momentary event.

The watercolorist cleans the brush and daubs the paint to mix new hues. That seems intentional, but water, air, and temperature meet the paint and change rapidly. The brush strikes the page with color and form. The paper is wet and alive. Surprising or treacherous, creation exceeds intention. Sailing into a storm might turn into a burning ship. Arriving in the cove could become the last possible moment to breathe. Our creative power is among the dilemmas we carry around and ignore.

Natural Supernaturalism

The arts, past and present, also interact with one another like molecules. I may have late 20th/early 21st century interest in the ideas of the 19th century: philosophies like transcendentalism, the psychological impact of harnessing electricity, the sublime in painting, and the experiential practice of spiritualism. I imagine and let them interact in my psyche.

Natural Supernaturalism is interpreted as “the supernatural found latent in the natural, and manifesting itself in it, or of the miraculous in the common and everyday course of things . . . a recognition at bottom, as the Hegelian philosophy teaches, and the life of Christ certifies, of the finiting of the infinite in the transitory forms of space and time.” The Nuttall Encyclopedia (1900) quoted in Wikipedia

In the Romantic period, literature can be understood by the concept of Natural Supernaturalism. For my M.A. thesis (1997), I used the book by that name written by the literary critic M.H. Abrams (1912-2015). I described Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, which was first published in 1850. Abrams was drawing the term from the philosophical writings of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1891). Natural Supernaturalism holds that “existence itself is miraculous, that life contains elements of wonder that can never be defined or eradicated by physical science.” Furthermore, wonder is not the antagonist of reason but at its foundation. It can drive creativity and precision. Some scientists and writers agree, though they have been known to fail, horribly, and then work to correct themselves. Their wonders should become still more wondrous when they collaborate with and dignify humanity.

Landfall

Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, describes the sublime in his novel of historical fiction, This Other Eden (2023). A powerful storm hits an island in 1815 and his precious characters miraculously survive. Melville’s Moby Dick swims through his imagination, like “an ancient great white shark cruising through a schoolhouse,” before returning to its “proper abyss.” Humans cling to each other and the tree of life. Reality is restructured by fiction.

Harding’s storm also reminds me of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610) in which a new generation must join up in an altered reality and begin earthly society anew.

I write. I test and try each phrase so that what is assumed could enliven the senses of readers. Enlivenment does not seek to overwhelm, to strike terror, or to call out hate or awe, or to profit from the suffering of history. When I am satisfied, the prose will require a living soul set sail in quixotic seas. Then the ship reaches land. The reader ought to keep her footing and trust that stepping into the constructed wilderness of a novel is an opportunity to learn about tierra firma.

Done Crushing’ Your Pride

I look for novel story elements and styles of dialogue and description. I bring together characters who do not share background, information, or goals and yet they become increasingly interdependent. This could be the primary role of fiction in our culture, but going forward into writing can feel dangerous. I nock the arrow and pull back the bowstring. Everything I have is behind the assertion that I can tell this story, and I am still underwater. The current of revising history is powerful. I try to find the sill point. Then I seek to use and redirect that force as in a battle.

I may be an unconvincing Prospero holding my staff and book, but I do have narrative tropes, spirits like Ariel and Caliban, to help my work: “To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled cloud, to thy strong bidding, task Ariel and all his quality.” However, in my story, spirits do their own bidding and like a medium in a seance, only they can understand the “garbled dark.”

My central stage is a ship that is haunted by its past, a microcosm where events intersect and the chains of cause and effect become webs. The ship’s hull is a bardo for spirits who wind their destinies with the living. In the novel’s second scene, a ghost named Ginger speaks to her sleeping friend, Mariah.

     "We’re holdin’ still despite the tide and the wind. What’s he waitin’ for, Doomsday?”
     Mariah turns her face and flutters her sleeping eyes.
     Ginger scowls. “Westerlies’re risin’, meanin’ land, just off starboard. Land you can walk on!” 
     “I know, I know,” whispers the girl. “But I got no legs to go forward on land.” 
     “But you got good legs. It’s me got no legs,” says her friend, teasing. Ginger touches Mariah’s hair tenderly, and wraps a lock of straight black hair with a lock of her own copper coil. “The sea’s done crushin’ your pride. I declare, its sins go deep, but they ain’t all yours to suffer alone.”

Writing into this wilderness of possibility requires a theory that your thoughts and feelings are like mine. My tentative, sometimes cowering words may eventually stand up and strike you with the force of shared experience and reveal hidden tenderness. Otherwise, we ask if this an appropriation of your suffering for my aesthetic pleasure or your appropriation of mine. It may even twist intentions to trivialize or pathologize. Frail and naked is the writer’s faith, that stumbling forward into one wilderness will invite you to stumble into yours. It takes for granted that we are made of the same stuff, share some collective pride and heartache, and that with luck and sympathy a story might defy what divides us. So let’s begin.

     The Blue Witch pivots east and plows toward Yerba Buena. She is flanked by a pod of dolphins leaping among whitecaps brightened by the sun. Sailors call from the rigging. The helmsman finds the center line between the southern and northern arms of the bay. As far as the eye can see, the coastal bluffs are alight with poppies. The passengers reach out to one another to wave, cry, and cheer the Golden Gate. Dolphins peel off in laughter.