The Plot Goes on the Atkins Diet

It is a truth universally acknowledged that for all but a few holdouts living in remote farming communities or fishing villages, life has grown quite complex and continues to proliferate in ways that vex, frustrate, and disorient us.

Another truth universally acknowledged is that there are precious few defining moments; life seems to unravel like a Bayeux Tapestry, the edges crammed with events, and no serious pattern. To be a bit crude about it, life rolls forth as though it were an endless supply of paper toweling.

Thus comes story, neat, predictable, with such decadent luxuries as beginnings,middles, endings. Story is life reduced to determinism; story is the triggering effect where there is some sense of logic or at least some visible momentum. Story is what we were looking for in Viet Nam; story is what the neocons invented to send us scurrying into Iraq. Story, alas, is part formula, part archetype; it helps us through the uncertainties and surprises and sudden turns of real life. Story leads us to expect resolution. The amusing and simultaneously terrifying thing about this is that there are just enough congruent elements in life and story to allow us to think that just this one more time, maybe life will work out to be a story.

And so, to paraphrase Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, we beat on, oars against the current, borne ceaselessly back into story, which is to say a hope for an ending that is convincing and shows us what to do. The convincing part is fine--we don't mind being convinced that the story is over--but when stories begin telling us what to do in some specificity, we begin recalling all the Sunday schools we bailed out on, all the too-pat endings we scoffed at.

Depending on where we are on the spectrum of rootedness within a culture and time, we chose our art in direct ratio to our feelings about time--our time--and place--our place--in the universe. We are walking happy endings or we are as firm and resolute in our aloneness as the character Anna, portrayed by Alida Valli in the Graham Green screenplay, The Third Man.

Green, by no means an optimist, wanted that story to end happily with Anna ultimately opting to find a new life with the character Holly Martens, a writer of Westerns. Yes, I suppose I have spoiled some of the story, but there are, I argue, enough other surprises, including the famed cuckoo clock speech from Orson Welles, to make up for my disclosure.

One of Rembrandt's final self-portraits was a warts-and-all close-up, stark, stately even, surely something to aspire to, but not a happy ending, certainly not the happy ending type that sentimentalizes old age.

A letter to the editor in today's New York Times complained bitterly because an educator was forced to cut part of her school outreach plan and said, in a public forum, "It sucks that I have to do that." The complainer wanted the educator to use nice language to express her disappointment. (Latin, perhaps?) Entitles as she is to object, the letter writer illustrates her point that a show of emotion, even an emotion wrapped up in disappointment, should be dignified. I can imagine how the splendid Philadelphia photographer, Zoe Strauss would respond to that. Or to put it another way, dignity is all well and good when all is well and good. There are those who simply have to fuck dignity to appropriately portray their sense of disappointment or outrage.

Happy endings, any endings at all, are products of a mentality that needs to tidy up the museum in which the artists perform or display their work. Beckett didn't seem to care much for tidied up stages or for neatness or for happy endings. Shakespeare, in his serious plays, didn't have a group marriage scene, in fact, if you look at Hamlet.

We carry with us in addition to our biological DNA our artistic, dramatic DNA; it forms the sounds we hear, the visions we see, the emotions we feel, its clock might just as well be rated in MHz the way our computers' clock is because it is our time, our sense of it coming and going. We work for some considerable time to find our voice, our vision, our articulated sense of the way things are. From time to time, we encounter men and women who have a skewed picture of their vision and how best to render it. They are, in effect, trying to say fuck dignity, while clinging to the parental cloak of good taste. Hearing one's artistic and dramatic DNA takes us beyond all thoughts of taste and into a world that is real, a world that is of its time and the times to come for some time to come.

I have for some many years now had readers react to my work; as a teacher I have heard untold hundreds of responses to the work of others, as an editor I have had to call some one's attention to places where the work doesn't work. I know the signs. When the first comment is, What lovely, beautiful writing, I know we are at some kind of beheading, some Marie Antoinette is about to be rendered in two distinct pieces, the beautiful head rolling around, detached from the misstated body.

There are only two standards we can go on, the standard of what works for me as individual, and the standard of what I need to do to get it there. All else is phony dignity, and you know what Zoe would say about that.

Will the Real Los Angeles Please Stand Up?

Thinking about used bookshops in Los Angeles this past week, I was drawn back in memory to a legendary book store next door to the equally legendary Musso & Frank's Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. Pickwick Books was what Paradise would be like if Paradise had any sense at all. Owned and run by Louis Epstein, the paradigm of a book man, Pickwick existed on three floors, the top being current titles, the second level being rare and unusual books, and the third a catch-all for used books, remainders, bargains, and things Louis Epstein simply did not know what to do with.

A sincere, no-nonsense independent book store, Pickwick exuded a gritty, writer-oriented personality. The only thing remotely like it today is the ambitious, personable sprawl that is Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon.

Long before I came to see Pickwick Books as a microcosm of the entire American Book Trade, I spent enough time there to befriend its two mainstay sales persons, the elaborately mustached Guy Thompson, and the ruddy-faced, bow-tie-wearing Lloyd Harkema. In a complex set of arrangements, Thompson, a splendid amateur magician, got me an associate membership at the equally legendary Magic Castle. Harkema confessed to me one of the sadder stories I'd heard about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Dividing his time between the bar at Musso & Frank's and The Garden of Allah, Fitzgerald drank his way through the frustrations and humiliation of his life in Hollywood, lurching in to Pickwich one afternoon in search of a copy of arguably his best work, The Great Gatsby.

The salesperson did not recognize Fitzgerald and thus, when asked if The Great Gatsby were in stock, shook his head and said, "We don't stock the work of dead authors on this floor. You'll have to try upstairs."

Harkema shook his head, still sad at the memory. "I was that sales person."

I learned later what a disastrous effect being thought dead had on Fitzgerals. Some years later, through Lloyd Harkema, I was sent to The Garden of Allah along with a dear chum, Bob English, a preternaturally impish and fast-on his feet editor of the humor magazine at UCLA. We spent the afternoon with a man named Ted Paramore, who claimed close personal ties to Fitzgerals, and who told tales of drinking, revenge, and Hollywood excesses that seemed so absurd we began to suspect Lloyd Harkema of having us on.

Reeling out into the late Sunset Boulevard afternoon, our senses of balance and perspective impaired by the scotch whisky Paramore had finessed on us while taking none himself, we headed to Pickwick, where Harkema gave us each paperback copies of The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald's follow-up novel to This Side of Paradise. There, among the names of characters who appeared in the novel, was Edward "Ted" Paramore, Jr. Our informant may have stretched some truths here and there, but he just as well may have not; he certainly knew Fitzgerald and provided us with yet another link to a man both English and I admired.

Years later, when I was editor at the Los Angeles-based Sherbourne Press, both Louis Epstein and his son Aaron reminded me of the tradition in New York publishing houses where any editor who hoped to advance in the trade worked at least two weeks a year at a book store. I tried to counter with my years of having been a shelver at the Beverly Hills Public Library, but neither Epstein considered that sufficient. And so my evenings and week-ends were taken, but even more, so also was my sense that the magic of books was a lifelong affliction.

There are not many independent bookstores left, even fewer of the likes of Pickwick, where Fitzgerald was presumed to have died, where such as Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, the sadly forgotten John Fante and John Sanford went to buy their books, and where, to my great sense of satisfaction, an occasional window display featured books I had acquired, edited, and brought to the same kind of reel and stagger Bob English and I experienced that late afternoon coming out into the parking lot of the Garden of Allah.

Gregor Samsa, Mon Semblance, Mon Frere

ONE OF MY favorite aspects of story telling is the terrain between "framing," the use of a plot pattern already familiar to the reader, and "point-of-view," the perspective or multiple perspectives from which the narrative is related.

Just to supply some basic reference points, let's look at a nonfiction/historical application, the war fought in this country around 1865 between the Union and the Confederate States of America. If you started your schooling in California, as I did, your text books would call that epic confrontation The Civil War, but were you to have begun your studies in the East, as I later did, your text books might well have called that confrontation The War of Southern Succession. Moving right along, as TV hosts and panel discussion moderators are wont to say, you could have been a student at, say, Central Beach Elementary School in Miami Beach, Florida, as I was, discovering as you leafed through your history texts a reference to The War of Northern Aggression. Thus you have the war, a treacherous bit of business, as being seen from various regional perspectives, each of which behaves as characters in real life, history, and fiction do, which is to say each character believes in the appropriateness, the rightness of his cause.

Moving to the drama of fiction for an example, we come to a remarkable point of view shift I discussed recently with my observation of how differently Hamlet might have worked its way to denouement had the protagonist not been the moody cheese Danish prince, but rather his uncle, King Claudius.

Meet Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman protagonist of Franz Kafka's simultaneously provocative and evocative, The Metamorphosis.As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard--as it were armor-plated--back and when he lifted his head a little, he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of cloth was unpacked and spread out--Samsa was a commercial traveler--hung the picture he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished. Gregor's eyes turned next to the window and the overcast sky. One could hear rain drops beating on the window gutter. It made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition, he could not turn himself over. However violently he forced himself towards his right side, he always rolled onto his back again. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never experienced before.

Now that you have the beginnings of the implications to Gregor Sama's situation, I ask you to consider framing things a bit differently, and from a different point of view. Suppose he liked what had happened to him. Suppose that this was neither some cosmic punishment or even an evolutionary step with the happy ending of his transmogrification into another, more glorious life form than human.

We homo sapiens like to think of ourselves as being spiritually, morally, and biologically at the top of the life pyramid, a thought that for me opens the terrain I spoke of at the beginning of this piece. Or, to shift point of view, let's look at the point of view of that gigantic insect now riding shotgun on Gregor Samsa. Ah, at last, free to run the show for a bit, free to get out on the town, find a nice lady insect and boogie down, as it were.

Ontogeny--the growth and development of an organism such as man--recapitulates phylogeny--the evolutionary history of a species. Close, maybe, but no absolute cigar. Yet the concept has the merit of leading us to think of our process from sperm cell through fetus-ification, swimming through the amniotic fluid correlative of the pre-Cambrian sea, into birth and land, then subsequent cellular development to what we are now. It is nice to think of our species "evolving" through this ascending order until, suddenly at maturity, we begin to envision ourselves on the decline.

In brief, it is one thing to feel the absolute frustration Gregor Samsa felt at the awareness that he had evolved to his insectness, to have turned for no apparent reason into something other than his own form. That one thing for him to have felt is a kinship with the entire concept of Kafkaesqueness, a state of suspended being in which one is wrong in every sense, an outsider, a misfit, an undifferentiated wrongdoer as, indeed, Kafka characters tend to be. The other side of that coin, the shift in point of view to the insect, is a celebration of the return away from mankind, back to insect essence, for which there are betrayals and conspiracies from fellow humans.

It is as different in outcome as the prospective scenario for Hamlet. It is the unthinkable come to pass before our very eyes, before our very point of view. Seen from one perspective, Hamlet is a story of revenge write large; from another it is a king with a bit of a secret, pursued by the then equivalent of a suicide bomber.

The Metamorphosis is a cautionary tale of a family that has been beset by a stunning, overwhelming problem--that is, unless you chose to see it from the point of view of an insect who got his mojo back.

The L.A. of the Mind, or Connection, Connection, Connection

Grades were due today and for reasons the University has not shared, the forms could neither be mailed or FedExed to the appropriate person, leaving the prospect of the hundred-mile trip from my driveway to that part of Los Angeles sometimes referred to as the Green Zone. Going to L.A. from anywhere else is somewhere between enduring a colonoscopy or root canal--there is bound to be some discovery that will cost you time, pain, or discomfort to be factored into the pleasures and surprises entailed in going to L.A.

While it is true that the environs has any number of grassy patches, swards, parks, and trees--the jacaranda are just short of a riotous bloom--the area surrounding the University is not called the Green Zone because of ecological or landscape reasons. Think of it instead as a kind of nervous solidarity with the Green Zone in Baghdad. Lest you suspect me of hyperbole, I will link to the next email from the Campus Police describing attempted and successful criminal ventures.

The weather for the trip was a splendid, sunny, blustery day, sending much of the infamous inversion layer eastward, affording splendid views of the L.A. Basin on all sides. But there on 101 eastbound at Haskell Avenue, someone grew bored or lax, or perhaps was informed by road rage, or had simply grown tired of hearing about the inferiority of American-made cars and had decided to make a statement. Traffic suffered, and I made the connection of a native of L.A. who had fled north: No matter what your calibration of L.A., traffic is a factor. Regardless of your route, be it 101, or north/south on the 405 or 110; indeed if it is not on any freeway at all but rather the aisles of Ralphs' in Santa Monica or Gelsons in Century City, or How's in Malibu West adjacent Trancas Canyon, traffic is a factor
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Another factor to be coped with is the disorientation factor. For the native, the disorientation is the direct result of some landmark having been moved, painted an inappropriate color, or built over, a kind of geographical or architectural death blow to your memory. Maybe it did used to be here, but everything is just enough changed so that you wonder if you were ever here, and not in some other part of town instead.

Yet another aspect to consider is the sense that if anything in the universe can happen, it probably will happen in L.A., before it happens anywhere else. This does not seem remarkable until you look about you at all of the incipient events coming into creation. People are out there, in the streets, on their front porches, in their rented cars, embarking on things that could be momentous.

This all began with the intent of a retrospective appreciation of a used book store on Hollywood Boulevard near La Brea that I used to frequent in my teens and twenties, a magical place filled with magical discoveries and surprises. The owner, a short, balding man with an owlish expression enhanced by thick glasses, always wore a blue suit--probably his only blue suit. Anyone who browsed in his store for more than four hours was entitled to a free spaghetti dinner at a whimsical Italian restaurant on the north side of Hollywood. I "earned" any number of those spaghetti dinners, which were really quite dreadful, but they seemed to go with my plans for entering the literary scene. The spaghetti dinners, whether they were on the house from the used book store or whether one paid for them were remarkably devoid of anything resembling meat, but on at least two occasions my free dinner had two suspicious-looking objects I later learned were meatballs. "Manny (the book store owner) says you wanna be a writer," the elderly waiter acknowledged, setting the spaghetti dinner with meatballs before me. "Writers should get some meat once in a while."

After enduring enough bad spaghetti dinners, I decided it was time to move on to a place on Sunset near Crescent Heights I'd heard about--a place called The Garden of Allah, where a certain F.Scott Fitzgerald used to while away some hours and where, indeed, I made some contact with what passed for the literary scene. Some years later, while taking my laundry to a place near the Garden of Allah, I encountered Manny, who wanted to know if I was still writing. "I've got an investment in you," he said. "When I think of all the short story collections I sold you for fifty, sixty cents, that I could have got a dollar for--"

L.A. is as magical as a used book store, as watery as a free spaghetti dinner, as filled with incipient miracles as a holy shrine, peopled by those who could not wait to get here in order to get in on the miracles, and those like me who could not wait to get away from it, but who never seem to break completely free of its cranky traffic, the garish buildings on Ventura Boulevard and Highland Avenue, and the carousel at the Santa Monica pier, just a trifle flat.

Age cannot wither

There was the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Brass Age, all of which, as an emerging species, we seem to have come through without too many scars. There was a Gilded Age, an Age of Innocence, and there was even--Darwin help us!--an Age of Reagan. Now, before our very eyes, fighting it out as though they were Sunnis and Shia, two forces compete for the grand prize in the Name That Age finals.

The Age of Organization forces hold sway with Palm Pilots, Blackberries, and various USB sticks that allow them to transport enormous batches of information through the ether or, if you will, over wireless networks. These forces are always on time for meetings, send Power Point Presentations on ahead of them to lunch dates, and in their spare time, while many of us are frittering away at crossword puzzles, they invent new, creative things to do with spreadsheets. They are so organized that they can tell you where wrinkles will appear on items of clothing they have yet to wear.

The other Age boosters are a part of the self-improvement camp, literate in several disciplines including yoga and tai-chi. They have memorized at least two self-improvement books and are quick to see how the world would move more efficiently on its course if only the rest of us, the civilians, as it were, would stop using passive voice construction in our business memos.

I don't bother with business memos, can't in fact, stand them, and have to the best of my knowledge, enjoined my email server from accepting them, should somebody want to send me one. I like not knowing where I will be next Thursday at about this time, even though, now that I think about it, I will be right where I am now, pushing schedule on a book review that should go off sometime later this afternoon or evening.

Information is not to be sneezed at (I have enough sneezing triggers from the mid-Spring pollens) and I would hate to be without it. Self-improvement is a lovely concept and I set forth every day in hopes of accomplishing some of it, even if all that means is sneaking in a little writing or perhaps a nap. That leaves me, I suspect, in the minority of wanting to be out of striking range of these two evangelical forces where I can spend as much time as possible considering the ageless miracle of the small things afloat in the universe.

Since I began these vagrant lines with a nod to one of the Shakespeare plays, it is fitting and circular to close these observations on the uncivil war between the Informationists and the Improvmentalists: A plague on both your houses.

Blogs, newspapers, and messy hamburgers

In geometry, parallel lines meet in infinity; in narrative, they meet in the last paragraph.

A number of bloggers--Andrew Sullivan, for instance, and John Fox--are openly wondering about the effects of blogging on writers. Sullivan has suggested that blogging is more temporal, of a piece with radio news, undercutting the writing intent of a writer of, say, books or short stories. Easy for Sullivan to say; his most recent book tour was earlier this year, his platform a column for The Atlantic Monthly, and a conscience-driven stream of probing, intelligent discussions about his gayness, his conservative politics, and his error in the judgement of his earlier support of the Wolfowitz/Cheney/Bush concept that democracy can be spread over the Middle East as though it were margarine.

John Fox has a lovely blog I discovered toward the very end of this past semester where he appeared in my literary marketplace class, motivating me with its wide range of links and John's eclectic tastes to urge all members of class to begin blogging.

Newspapers, particularly the larger ones, are seeing a steady decline in circulation and ad revenue. As it stands now, only three, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times have separate book review sections (Sunday editions) and the L.A. paper, already in a serious flux, is thinking about merging the book review section within the pages of the Arts Section.

By the time most newspapers arrive, their prime stories have already appeared on line, often for the "price" of a sign-up for access to the online version.

I don't think I'm by any means alone in gleaning news from a number of on-line sources, including blogs such as Sullivan's The Daily Dish, and to balance out Sullivan's conservative view, Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and The Huffington Post. To be sure, time permitting, there are others, but with these three blogs, I move on to newspapers such as The Guardian and the Washington Post, to supplement the hard copy of The New York Times, which arrives first thing in the morning.

Book news comes from, John Fox and a few of his links, an email newsletter from Publishers' Weekly, and Alfred A. Knopf's occasional email.

That accounts for a considerable chunk of reading time, which is in its own way the real cause of the glue that holds these three lines, blogs, newspapers, and hamburgers together.

Messy hamburgers are absolutely the best. The ads for Carl's Junior a few years back had it right; a hamburger that does not drip does not rock, either, although even with Carl's Junior ads promising drippy hamburgers, that would not be my first thought for point of purchase. For a franchise burger, Carl's holds its ground with Wendy's but there you are--they are both franchise and they are both big contributors to the Republican party, a mystery of sorts until I factor the rate at which they pay wages and offer promotions to the profit margin dripping off each burger and landing on the franchise owner.

The jury is still deliberating on whether blogging is a culprit so far as robbing from the creative juices. Aylet Waldman, no slouch of a novelist, wrote--on a blog--that blogging was bad for her writing writing, and although I see her point and Andrew Sullivan's, it seems to me that musicians practice their craft regularly, precisely to hone their performance; actors run lines sometimes even while holding political office. It is only the wannabe writer, eager for publication and success, who seems to resent revision, editing, even spell checking--almost anything beyond the first draft seems like an imposition. (Some of their work reflects--unintentionally, I might add--their attitude.)

Writing requires a continuous input of sensory triggers to the imagination, reading, comparison-and-contrast, and research coming to mind as adjuncts.

Things aren't neat anywhere; they get messy when we try to Palm Pilot or Blackberry the parts of our life set aside for the attempts to bring disparate parallel lines together in the final paragraph.

Break This Commandment. Please.

I forget the age I was at--probably somewhere in the middle of high school--where the received wisdom in creative writing classes bade us to write what we know, a wisdom that seems as persistent as the rent collector in a cheap rooming house.

Over the years since I heard that wisdom, my irritation to it has grown in steady degrees to the point of outburst if not outright explosion.

My last explosion is bordering on being ten years old, dating back to the time when the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference was still being held at the now defunct and moldy Miramar Hotel. A dedicated writer had spent some time researching the racial phenomenon associated with Rosa Parks, ably abetted by the Rev. King, Rev. Abernathy, and a large, diverse cadre of modern American heroes. The writer I have in mind had as her protagonist a young black woman, torn by conventions, racial hatred, bigotry, and an intense desire for a better life. The work was set upon by the black caucus, demanding to know how the writer, a white woman, could possibly relate to the trials of being black in Southern United States.

I'm happy to report that there was a happy ending here. My explosion was intense and pointed. "How dare you bring bigotry in here?" I demanded. "You guys are here because you're writers, not because you're black. If we follow your dictum, Captain Nemo wouldnever have gone twenty thousand leagues under the sea, Tarzan would never have made it to Mars, and Becky Sharp would never have had voice because she was created by a man. I should never be able to write anything with a woman it in, nor in any other way stretch my imagination."

The happy ending came a year later when the same author read from the same project and this time was set upon by a white writer/critic, only to be shouted down by what used to be the black caucus but which was more properly the writing caucus.

I was reminded of this incident and its attendant fall-out because of the attack on Ken Burns, the filmmaker who is about to go public with his study of World War II. The attack came from Latino and Native American dissidents who are irked that Burns's take on World War II does not coincide with theirs, which is to say they do not feel sufficiently represented, which is to say that democracy does work by presenting a sampling and, indeed, a motion picture is by most accounts a collaborative effort. But look at the possibilities for mischief were Burns to bring in a diversity of ethnic approaches. Sometimes balance defeats art. Sometimes balance defeats the ambition for individual efforts. Sometimes a call for balance is best seen as sour grapes.

I for one am content living with the fact that I did not like Burns's take in his study of jazz, but I am also grateful for his having made it.

The thing I like a good deal about the writing of books, essays, and short fiction is that the writer is the one with the vision; editors and publishers are the silent collaborators, working to help the author give the clearest possible articulation to the author's vision.

Write What You Know! What absurdity! If the writer wrote what he or she knew, there would be no discovery, no perspective, no changing horizon; everything would be of equal importance and intensity, which is to say boring.

One of my current preoccupations with photography has to do with my excitement at the sight of quotidian things, ordinary things, viewed from remarkable perspectives, miracles of the ordinary I might not have otherwise seen. A remarkable photographer known to me only as pod, a man with an extraordinary eye, was awakened from a pleasant sleep recently by some clangorous activity outside his window. He took to the streets with his camera and, to assuage his foul mood, began looking for, finding, and photographing ordinary things that brightened his sensitivity to the joys of the world. A continent away--pod lives in Sydney--I see these images and am transformed to a sensitivity to the miracles inherent in the small things. To judge from the other comments on pod's blog site, I was not alone in my celebration.

You have two choices: find out exactly where pod lives and make noises outside his window if you do not fully appreciate his images; that or go take your own images.

Think about it. And don't be afraid to examine your intent while you are making noises or taking your own images. We take images to capture them as a record of our time here, analyzing what we see and what has meaning to us. We make noise outside pod's window if we are jealous of his eye, if we are rendered inchoate by our own feelings, or we simply can't stand to see anyone make an effective use of his imagination.

Toward the approaching end of his life, Leonardo da Vinci made a series of sketches related to the movement water, stunning sketches that were amazingly prescient of the way water is moving or is in fact not moving over our planet today. He closed his eyes and saw. Galileo closed his eyes and saw. Quantum leap forward: Charles Darwin closed his eyes and saw a greater truth than the great truth he thought he believed.

Think about it, and don't be afraid to examine your intent.