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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: May 2017

Hello, I’m Tom Cooper

11 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Tom Cooper in Seasons, Writer's Block, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

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Seasons, Writer's Block, Writing

My name is Tom Cooper. I am the director of a library in suburban St. Louis County. I have been writing for a long time. My publications to date include many book reviews in newspapers and magazines, chapters in books on library subjects, articles in library journals, and a book which I co-authored on the history of the town where I work. For most of my life I concentrated on writing fiction. Then it came to me several years ago that the only things I had ever published were works on non-fiction. I am not a fiction writer, I am a non-fiction writer.

I tell you all of this as a way of reintroducing myself, both to you and to me. For people who have read this blog regularly the arc of my life over the past several years is well-known. In 2012 I moved with my family from the suburbs, where we had long lived, to an 18-acre plot of land in rural Jefferson County. We had a barn and pastures for horses, large gardens, many fruit trees, and bee hives. It was a completely different lifestyle, one in which I spent most of my time working on one thing or another. When I wasn’t at my actual job I could be found cleaning horse stalls, mowing fields, weeding a garden, turning compost piles, or one of the thousand other jobs it takes to run a place like that. I learned as I went, I had triumphs and reverses. I found that the time one actually has to experience nature in that sort of environment is extremely limited. I found that I was right in my thesis that living on a farm, or a ranch, or whatever you want to call it, is not ‘getting back to nature’ in any real sense. Farming is a technology, it is not nature. That’s why the Garden of Eden, the oxymoronic garden with no effort, is a fantasy.

Then, beginning in early 2016, I experienced a crisis in my personal life. That is still ongoing, although one hopes for resolution soon. I now live in a small apartment in the city of St. Louis. I like the city, I like its vibrancy and the easy availability of interesting things. I have often said that I like city life and I like country life—it’s suburban life that  I find distasteful. But my appreciation for city life does little to ameliorate the stress of awaiting a settlement.

Amid all of this, both the endless round of work at the ranch and the anxiety of extreme life changes, I have lost my way in my writing. Many years ago, perhaps fifteen years or more, I conceived the idea for a book about the seasons. There were a variety of reasons I found the subject appealing. Finally, somewhere between 2010 to 2011, I started working in earnest on that book. I was making good progress on the research and the writing until we moved to High Ridge. At that time I was in the middle of the third chapter, the chapter about seasonal mythology. I spent the entire time I was there, nearly 3 ½ years, working on that chapter without finishing it. I made repeated attempts to revise the chapter into something manageable, I moved on to other chapters for a while, but the feeling grew that the entire work was stalled.

In the first several months after I moved from the ranch, I dithered and got nothing written. I could not concentrate, especially not on something that needed intense revision and good authorial insight. For a while I had been thinking about another project which grew out of my research on the seasons, namely a history of the New Year. I think it is a very interesting subject, drawing in more cultures and changes over time than many people know. I spoke with one of the co-authors I had worked with on the above-mentioned history book, and she was amenable to the idea of creating a book proposal. Both of us, I think, did good work on that proposal, but after most of a year, it is still not submitted.

Then I started working on a fiction project. I told myself nearly a decade ago that I am a non-fiction writer and began to focus on that, so why was I writing fiction again? Not only fiction, but a young adult novel with a science fiction theme. I don’t like and don’t read science fiction, so what’s the idea? This is when I knew that I was lost in my own work. Even my blog posts for a few years have been spotty, both in frequency and interest.

In the past week I have been rereading my early chapters on the seasons book, which bears the working title The Varied God, same as this blog. It comes from a poem by the 19th century Scottish poet James Thomson, in which he says the seasons are ‘the varied god,’ different manifestations of god throughout the year. I have a clearer idea of what I originally meant to do with the work, and I mean to get back to it. It will take deep cuts, deep revisions, and concentrated creativity. It is the kind of work that I think brings the work to life as well as the person doing the work. I think it is exactly what I need, and I only hope that I can do it.

 

Blaming the Victim

02 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by Tom Cooper in Natural Disasters, Seasons

≈ 2 Comments

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Natural Disasters

I wonder if we’ll ever get two seasons back to back with no threatening weather. In the past few years we have had blizzard-like snow and dangerous freezes, windstorms that took the roofs off of houses, and persistent rains that took every local creek and river past the flood stage. These were interspersed with mild winters and mild summers, which seems wicked, like lulling us into a sense of comfort before another calamity strikes.

There is flooding again now in much of Missouri. Every time this happens you see the news footage of people packing up their homes to get to higher ground, or of families sitting in high school gyms wrapped in Red Cross issue blankets. Inevitably someone will ask, why don’t they just move? How many times do they need to be flooded out before they realize they need to get out of the flood plain?

A friend of mine explained this to me a while back in stark terms. Okay, let’s move everyone who resides along a flood plain. That’s pretty much everybody along the Mississippi River system, the Missouri River system, the Tennessee River system, and perhaps dozens of others. But then what about tornadoes? Shouldn’t people in Tornado Alley also move? So let’s clear out everybody in north Texas, most of Oklahoma, portions of Kansas and of Missouri. And hurricanes? Okay, everyone along the east coast, from Florida to New York needs to move inland a hundred miles, and everybody along the Gulf Coast as well. Earthquakes? Let’s move everyone in southern California, and everyone in southeastern Missouri away from major fault lines. Wildfires? Again, we’re clearing out much of southern California and large stretches of other western states. Doesn’t leave much of the continental US, does it?

Yes, this is a kind of reductio ad absurdum, but it is an absurdity easily arrived at. There are many natural disasters, and given the climate change that is not happening, they are getting worse all the time. Everybody can’t move to the upper-central states. For now we are just lucky we have professional first responders, excellent relief agencies, and are resilient enough to recover again and again. Insisting that people affected by natural disasters should move is a blame the victim mentality.

Then again, there is another oft-noticed phenomenon. Whenever there is a flood or hurricane threatening, and evacuation of the area has commenced, you see interviews on the news with some old character who says something like, ‘I done lived here all my life, and ain’t no (flood, hurricane, etc.) done got me yet. I ain’t goin nowhere!’ Then, at the height of the disaster, emergency personnel risk life and limb to sweep in and rescue the idiot. This is the proper time to blame the victim.

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