Thursday, July 10, 2003
Yesterday was not a good writing day (or even a good day, period), though I did read back over the last twenty or so pages of Chapter Five and added 38 words at the very end. Today I will begin Chapter Six, thus beginning Part Two.
This morning, an e-mail from Greg Kurczynski:
I've been re-reading Silk, and just having finished the scene where Spyder is prevented from committing suicide by Mary Ellen, I was struck by the similarities between that scene and the earlier chapter where Niki attempts to drown herself and encounters Jenny Dare.
I'm sure that Jenny is the ghost of Virginia Dare, or at the very least an hallucination brought about by Niki's subconcious knowledge of the history of the Lost Colony, and it made me curious. Is Mary Ellen also an apparition that is based in fact, just an old homeless woman of your own creation, or perhaps a combination of both?
Jenny Dare was one of those characters who seemed to come of her own accord. But yes, she was drawn from the legend of the first English child born in Virginia, Virginia Dare, in 1587 at the ill-fated Roanoke Colony. As for Mary Ellen, she all my own, as much as any character is all my own. Both characters serve much the same function, intervening at moments of crisis in the lives of Niki and Spyder. To quote Joseph Campbell, "For those who have refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass." (The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 1949). The scene with Jenny Dare has always been one of my favorite in Silk. Whether she is a ghost, or a subconcious manifestation of Niki's mind, or something else altogether, I've always wanted to leave up to the reader. I'm not even sure I know myself.
Months ago, I promised not to speak in this blog of the war in Iraq or President Bush. And I've kept my promise. I'd grown tired of the hate mail. So, I've sat here in silence, as we invaded and "won," and the media giants played the Administration's sock puppets, and the whole country went glassy eyed in a self-congratulatory, patriotic delirium. After all, maybe I was wrong. Maybe Bush and his Republican cronies were right about Hussein having great stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, maybe Iraq really was hiding primitive nuclear devices, and so on and so forth. But now, after 5,000-6,000 Iraqi citizens have died, after the deaths of more than 400 US soldiers and at least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers (how do we spell "lopsided"?), and the Bush Administration's failure to turn up anything remotely resembling the vast storehouses of mass destruction of which we were warned, I'm beginning to rethink that silence. Oh, and if you want to know how I came by those numbers, just e-mail and I'll tell you. On February 5th, Colin Powell told us that Iraq possessed "between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons . . . enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." So where are they? More importantly, why were they not deployed against Allied forces during the "war"? At this point, these aren't only fair questions, they're the sort of questions we should all be asking. Why has the Administration been unable to provide convincing evidence of the link between Osama bin Laden and Hussein? What about the apocalyptic figures Bush bandied about in a State of the Union address — 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin and 25,000 litres of anthrax? Where are they? To date, we have no WMDs. We have no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. We do have more than a hundred thousand dead people, a ravaged country, a bag of castor beans, and a few trucks that cannot conclusively be linked to the manufacture of bioweapons. More importantly, we are beginning to see admissions that the threat from Hussein was "hyped," that we were all lied to by the President, his Administration, and the Pentagon, to insure the war would be accepted by the American people.
I don't really feel like being quiet anymore, and I renounce my vow of silence.
So, there's this great film called Wag the Dog, starring Robert Di Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Oh, it's just a fantasy, nothing that could ever really happen, but, anyway . . .
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