Crossing the Line

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The deeper I read into Descartes' Error, the more I appreciate how our brains are an incredible tangle of emotions and thoughts, impulses, warnings, memories, and assessments of our future options. Assuming that my own brain is more or less an average organ for a human male of my age and condition, I'm left with a sense of wonder, in both the good and bad sense of that term.

The good sense is appreciating what is probably unknowable. The bad sense is wodnering what went wrong somewhere along the way.

Since as a professional I have had to deal with the rational, the logical, the collective my entire career, as I've aged inevitably I've been drawn to the emotional, the personal, the individual parts of our consciousness, which is just another word for our brain.

There is another way to describe my journey and that is very typical for journalists, who end up not wanting to write yet another expose, but a novel.

Why, after a lifetime of building expertise in the factual, would we turn to fiction?

I have a theory. Even though we pretend otherwise, each of us journalists develop a sense over the years that our work does not really capture reality in the broadest sense -- we are constrained by many forces, some legal, some corporate, others ethical or moral in origin.

There's a whole lot most of us discover that never sees the light of day. Beyond all of that is our intuition -- that so much of the story remains hidden as we practice our craft that we might as well claim only the tip of an iceberg, most of which remains hidden from view.

It's my contention that this is the fate of any conscientious journalist, though many would disagree with me.

Anyway, fiction represents another, parallel universe to explore the types of things we devoted our professional lives to, as journalists.

That's why we all aspire to write novels, at the end. Few of us will, fewer of us will ever write a good one. The journalism will get in the way.

I've struggled with this problem for some twenty years now. I've started and stopped countless works of fiction. Of course, the problem with probing the underside of any iceberg is that it is very, very cold down there.

Without someone to keep you warm, hypothermia sets in. Still, the few great ones among us will achieve this almost impossible feat. Like sperm.

That justifies the efforts of all of us who fail.

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