An Ideal Life: Composing A Fantasy Novel, and More . . .

“Soon I found that I was writing a novel, in which the central idea was, ‘What is the nature of human happiness, and is it even desirable—never mind possible—under any circumstances?’ The central character had evolved into someone other than myself, and half a dozen others had come in to keep her from trying to negotiate paradise alone.” Anita Sullivan

The Highest Cauldron

by Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—7/16/2012—In Book I of Plato’s Republic (as I recall without getting out of my chair to look it up) Socrates begins by sketching a fairly pure and ideal City that would function smoothly without corruption or complication, based on a few simple rules. However, the people he’s having a conversation with want something a bit more exciting (i.e. dancing girls, wine, the possibility of excess. . . .) Nine Books later, we stagger out into the sunlight of a much more complicated Ideal.

A similar thing happened to me a few years ago.

To avoid descending into a tooth-gnashing daily rant about the obtuseness of Government, Society, and (my favorite beat-up line) “Our Current Heartless, Short-Sighted, Money-Worshipping Culture,” I began to construct for myself an Ideal Life.

Although it began simply as “the house, the location, the daily routine,” my imagined world became, after a month or so, a welcome therapy and daily discipline, as it allowed me to escape into a parallel life that was not totally la-la land, but actually something somewhat plausible. However, in order to give the exercise sufficient heft and meaning, I found it necessary to do research in architecture, horticulture, psychology, mythology, history, botany and chemistry.

Soon I found that I was writing a novel, in which the central idea was, “What is the nature of human happiness, and is it even desirable—never mind possible—under any circumstances?” The central character had evolved into someone other than myself, and half a dozen others had come in to keep her from trying to negotiate paradise alone.

I’ll give you the basic outline of what I ended up with, in case you might want to try the process yourself. There’s no real danger of losing your grip on “reality”; all you have to do is go climb into your car with the keys in your hand.

This ideal life I was imagining was meant to be suitable for all humans but, of course, the Initial conditions had to be tweaked a wee bit.

First, there would not be 8 billion of us, most barely surviving as we compete for food, oil, water, drugs, weapons, beaches and places to pee without getting raped: instead, I assumed a global population in the millions.

In my ideal world, we are spread out in villages all over the earth.

My village is near the Mediterranean Sea, where I tend a villa I designed myself, with a walled garden full of terraces, pools, old crumbling statues and stone lions which occasionally come to life. My neighbors and I all garden and cook fabulous meals with ingredients we share, like garlic, olives, parsley, tomatoes, artichokes; we drink wine made from our own grapes, but never to excess, because our overwhelming desire is to remain clear headed and physically robust so that we can live out our days in high vigor and joy. This, I believe, remains the primary biological human intention, but one we seem to have laid aside somewhere near the beginning of history when we started living in cities.

We villagers play musical instruments, we dance, we do all our own daily physical labor, but we also have good indoor plumbing and computers, though no need for cell phones, since we have re-ignited our ancient skills in long-distance mind speech.

We have good sex, but produce very few children, each one welcomed with a great party enjoyed by every person in the village. We disagree a lot, like normal humans, but most of the reasons for deep anger and greed are absent, so we don’t need to make up dogmatic systems to keep order. Our daily lives unfold into interlocking rings of natural ritual, as I believe was the case in many early societies—every day is enormous and seething with possibility, which is the definition of what is holy.

We value our bees, and each village keeps hives. We know about the Bees of Sorrow who live somewhere in the heart of the industrial polluted World Behind, where they carry out their ancient appointed task of keeping hope alive, and we know the cost to them is constant and enormous.

Therefore, we regularly take turns volunteering in the House of Bees to stand for hours with tiny medicines and instruments, to repair their tiny battered bodies, mix their healing liquors and sing them back to health.

The whole premise behind my novel as a way of constructing and inhabiting an “Ideal World,” would seem to disallow any direct connection between this new one, and the World Behind. I must adhere to the mandate that wishful thinking is as far as I can go. I’m just writing a fantasy novel, after all.

But, wait a minute: ideal is ideal. Isn’t my real goal something besides a way to keep myself from the deep corruption of cynicism and despair? My real goal is—well, to do something for the ever-lovin’ world-that-is!

So, very quickly I allowed the plot to thicken. My friends and I began to devise a way to break out of our paradise into the World, and “the World” means everything. We simply expanded our wordless-communication skills into dream travel. We began to travel by dreaming, alone or in groups, and always taking our animals with us. In my case, the animal who accompanies me is a Basset Hound named Heloise who has the soul of a wolf.

Travel through dreaming involves some risk, and some sadness. We do not shun sadness, fear, or anger; even outright confusion and terror when it occurs. After all, we are still human beings and, as such, we must learn and grow or else we will become dry and crisp (or wet and slimy), and thus not much use to anyone.

As the plot continued to evolve, I and my friends discovered a Greek island called Ikaria, where characters from a variety of mythologies and folklores continue to act out their passions in a bewildering mosaic of overlapping worlds. Here we take some risk of misunderstanding rules of Old Magic that nobody has ever quite correlated. We make discoveries that sometimes fling us back and forth through time and space, and we find ourselves strangely attracted into the plot patterns of old tales, such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Gilgamesh,” “Heloise and Abelard,” “The Thirteen Clocks,” or those from The Arabian Nights or The Odyssey.

We are making up our own versions of these stories. We hope—though we do not know for sure—that these new stories will somehow circle back, like the Worm Oroubouros and seep into the World Behind, so the hype level over there will wind way, way down, and humans and other creatures can hope for a life of normal thriving again.

Photo by Anita Sullivan.