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#3631 - Friday, August 21, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The following is from the publisher's website:
The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility weaves together the disparate lives of ordinary people as they stumble through tiny everyday epiphanies on their way from confusion and loss toward redemption. With structures both traditional and experimental, these thirteen linked stories explore the bonds of family... the impacts of religion... our intertwined struggles with grief, love, and addiction... the intangible circuits of influence that link us to strangers... and the blind but determined striving for consciousness that is common to human experience.
Stories in the collection have been published in a variety of journals and have won a Short Fiction Award and an Honorable Mention from Chronogram Magazine, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.
~~
Subtlety ought to be on an endangered literary species list, but
Brent Robison brilliantly makes the case for its essentiality in
this exquisite collection of webbed stories. These stories argue
that everything is a facet of the same jewel and we touch each
other’s lives in unfathomable ways. To read them is to
heighten one’s bond with strangers.
---Djelloul Marbrook
Far From Algiers
2007 Wick Poetry Prize
~~
Rich, layered, images take us deep inside the lives of Robison's
characters, their stories weaving together a tapestry as textured
as it is beautiful. Brent Robison's stories are reminiscent of
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio -- stories of ordinary people
caught in the crosshairs of circumstance, sometimes of their own
making, sometimes not. All of them heroic in their honest
struggle to find meaning and ultimately love. A gorgeous timeless
collection about longing.
---Susan Richards
Chosen by a Horse
NY Times Bestseller
The following is from Brent's blog: http://ultimate-indivisibility.com/
How is Unity expressed in story?
Brent Robison
I love the unanswerable questions. And I love to learn as much as
my subgenius mind can handle about everything we humans have so
far come to know in our pursuit of answers to the unanswerable.
Parallel passions--science and metaphysics--gradually led me to
glimpse a perfect interweaving of current knowledge and ancient
wisdom. Quantum physics intertwined with Advaita Vedanta.
Spacetime as a metaphor for Oneness. Superstrings pointing to
Nonduality.
Meanwhile, I labored away at writing stories. Imaginary characters with lives and hearts and pains all their own kept jumping up and asking to be acknowledged. Inspired by literary realism, postmodern and classic, lush or minimalist, I worked at exploring psycho-spiritual states and getting something both meaningful and beautiful onto the page. Then out of all that jumble rose the challenge that got my blood pumping at a whole new rate....
If everything is One, how is that expressed in story?
Well, it's been done, with various degrees of success, in all kinds of ways:
--exegesis of various cultural mythologies
--allegory or parable with a "moral"
--stories from the lives of famous gurus or holy men
--the conundrums of time travel (see my friend's book The High
Priest of Prickly Bog)
--fanciful alternate realities like those of Italo Calvino
--narrative thought experiments ala Jorge Luis Borges
--straight science fiction: on other planets, things behave
differently
--variations on the sword and sorcery genre
--human encounters with angels or extraterrestrials
--magical realism
--etc.
Trouble is, none of these appealed to me. Or rather, they were not what I was doing as a writer. I wanted to write literary short stories, about us, ordinary people, our everyday tragedies and existential crises, the mundane epiphanies that move us all incrementally forward. Real life.
It was my invented characters themselves who offered me the key. Of their own accord they had began lurking on the edges of each other's stories. But I wasn't sure what that meant. Then one day as I surveyed the whole array of stories and fragments, a complex web of faint shimmering lines seemed to materialize before my inner eye. These people, like all of us, were connected by invisible threads, coincidences, ephemeral glancing touches, by which subtle influence was being exerted, life paths changed in seemingly tiny, but possibly powerful, ways. We were like cells in one giant body, all going about our business transporting enzymes from one place to another and effecting change on other cells, but with rarely a glimmer of awareness of our own impact.
To suggest this newfound truth seemed to me the best way I could express Unity. Still, just as in this thing we call "reality," the needs, hopes, dreams, heartaches, addictions, and loves of daily life are the foreground. To see the background is another level of perception altogether.
I'm entirely a beginner on the road toward Unitive Consciousness. But that vision of all human beings interconnected by a vast intangible network of influence, invisible energy lines weaving us together, became the engine driving the finishing, assembling, and publishing of my story collection.
So, does it work? Does it matter? Does The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility say anything useful? Can this odd combination of literary realism and esoteric philosophy create its own public? Or is it all a big illusion (delusion) in my mind? I really don't know. I hope you'll read it and tell me what you think.
~ ~ ~
The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, by Brent Robison may be ordered via the links at
http://ultimate-indivisibility.com/
The download at lulu.com is only $5.