I come here to write my next novel. The café’s patrons are an eclectic community. Surfers hardly dressed, listening to iPod songs. Bikers stop here too on their hog rides from beach to beach. College co-eds hang out here, wearing their pants below the top of their beautifully tanned bottoms clad in colorful thongs. Even the eternal mermaids come to sip the Nicaraguan Nectar, singing each to each.
You can order up any kind of beverage here so long as it’s the thought twisting brews from dried plants ground up into magical powders. The triple shot Cappuccino enables me to connect with my characters in unusual ways. But I especially like the Raging Rwanda Roast. It kicks my optic nerves into high gear. It crawls up my nerve fibers and opens my chakra channels. It persuades me of my methods. Then the angel carries me away in the Spirit. Yes, now I see a biker ride off, a woman sitting on a scarlet beast covered with blasphemous tattoos; it has seven heads and ten horns.
I see my characters in my book, hear them talk to me, we argue. They persuade me. Sometimes their behavior scares me. They carry out the story and I am merely their interpreter on this side of their remote spiritual realm.
I see so clearly from this high ridge of Rwanda Roast Revelations. Virgil guides me through the dark forests of Purgatory, through Hell and back to Heaven. I must get back to my novel. It’s what’s real. Life is not.
I’m sorry. I slipped up. I used a couple of metaphors, poetic images. It’s that Psychedelic Seattle brew that the bikers sip at the next table; a mere whiff of it opens up my spiritual portals to channel more closely with my characters on the far side. Just its aroma affects my writing. It persuades me to use symbols, beasts with seven heads. I drink the concoctions as easily as pouring out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on earth. Don’t take the metaphors literally. God, Evil, Heaven, mean different things to different people. And for me the meaning changes at different times.
Through history, religious authority figures, fundamentalists, have succeeded in using these images to frighten people into believing a particular moral code, dogma. It’s one of the oldest, most effective methods to persuade people, to control their behavior. Fear! Until the Age of Enlightenment, this method, although arbitrary and corrupt, was part of government, effective in maintaining social order. For the most part, this means of persuasion still works well in the Muslim world, especially the Middle East. But then, when watching the TV evangelicals, members of the infamous 700 Club, one wonders how well our own society is free from these archaic ploys for persuasion.
TV evangelical Pat Robertson used this type of persuasion recently in one of his fire’n brimstone lectures. He told people in a Pennsylvania town that God will not help them if a disaster strikes because they voted against teaching intelligent design during science classes on evolution. He writes persuasive sermons like a raging pope from the Dark Ages. He and I, we probably share the same Psychedelic Seattle visions, maybe even connect to the Spirit through the same spooky channels.
I believe that all writing intends to persuade…to an opinion or at least a point of view. It’s a tradition that comes to us through thousands of years of refinement, since before Aristotle’s classical rhetoric.
Consider modern novels. John Updike’s rabbit, run establishes its argument in the first pages. If a novel, movie or essay doesn’t do this in its earliest part, it’s bound to fail. In Updike’s novel, the premise: if you’re not doing what you really want in life, you’ll be miserable. Rabbit hears this wisdom from TV cartoons that his wife watches.
Bukowski’s novel, Post Office, establishes its premise in the first page…a philosophical principle about living life for the moment’s pleasures; find whatever means it takes to obtain immediate gratification. Working as a mailman, it’s a great means to meet lonely women ready for playing the rolling double backed beast.
If a published piece of writing or film, poetry or whatever doesn’t aim at persuasion…then what’s the point? That’s what I look for. As a consumer, I demand it!
Okay. The coffee here at Laguna Beach is far too much for me, makes me imbalanced...too much blood rushing the brain...
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a documentary…objective? Yes and highly persuasive because it piles up evidence in a clear and logical manner. One is bound to draw a clean and clear conclusion. The most successful non-persuasive book in the world is the phonebook. It’s a database of information…of that fact it’s entirely irrefutable.
Fox News Channel is persuasive, always pumping out that particular neocon rhetoric in a gushing force of a fireman’s hose. Repeating the same ol’ party line about how the W Admin is the most American thing since, well, the KKK.
Anyway, back to my novel writing…the caffeine buzz is still there…making huge progress…gotta take advantage of this inspiring Raging Rwanda Roast high.
Mark Biskeborn is a writer.
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