ATHOL DICKSON

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When a Cure is not Enough

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Front Cover - The CureWhen The Cure was first published, some people were left with nagging questions about Riley Keep’s decision at the end of the story. Why would he do such a thing and why would I present his decision as if it was a good thing?

For artistic reasons, it’s usually best to let a novel speak for itself. In this case however, with apologies to literary purists everywhere, I think maybe a few words of explanation are in order.

All around the world people say “nobody’s perfect” as if it were a law of nature or a self-evident fact. Some of us may seem less morally flawed than others, but the difference is only a matter of degree. No matter how kind and caring and good we may appear to be, from time to time we all deliberately choose to do something that we know is wrong.

Most religions claim we can live moral lives if we so choose. But if that were true wouldn’t somebody, somewhere, choose the right thing every time? “Nobody’s perfect” is true the same way “what goes up must come down” is true. Like gravity, and like the urge behind Riley Keep’s alcoholism, when it comes to morality there are forces at work beyond our control. Nobody chooses goodness all the time because nobody can.

Much as a drug-addicted mother will give birth to a baby addicted to those same drugs, we are all born addicted to bad choices. Take two toddlers and put one desirable toy between them. Will you see a demonstration of selfless generosity? Will one of them offer the toy to the other? Not likely. Innocent though we’d like to think they are, the bigger, faster toddler will end up with the toy and the other one will throw a fit, as every parent knows.

When I wrote about Riley’s alcohol addiction, all of this was on my mind. The Cure is not just about one man’s struggle against alcoholism. It’s about every person’s struggle against the addiction to self-centered immorality that afflicts the human race.

Most religions focus on the symptoms of our addiction. The assumption is, if one can control the behavior, one has solved the problem. To be a good person, one has only to act like a good person. But every alcoholic knows that isn’t true. The addiction remains, whether one drinks or not.

We also try to sole this problem with science. From time to time the headlines announce cures for various addictions, but there is no such thing. There is only the replacement of one symptom with another. Nicotine patches instead of cigarettes. Methadone instead of heroin. We can “cure” gluttony with stomach stapling; we can “cure” a pornography compulsion with filters on computers, but no human invention could cure us of the reason those addictions exist in the first place.

For that, we don’t need religion, and we don’t need science. We need a miracle.

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This is an excerpt from the new afterward to The Cure by Athol Dickson, soon to be re-released in both eBook and print format.

The Professor and the Madman

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"Here’s a post that I found very interesting by my friend Tim George. It opens up a lot of questions about the nature of insanity. That’s a topic I’ve wanted to write about for years, and I have tried, with two completed but unsuccessful novels to show for it. The problem is, I wanted to explore what’s happening inside an insane mind, but to reveal a person’s thoughts in a novel the first person point of view is usually required, yet first person from an insane point of view is nearly impossible for a reader to understand or follow. After all, If one could fully understand a crazy person’s thoughts, that would mean one was also crazy.

"Dostoevsky learned this too, when he wrote Crime and Punishment, which was originally written in first person. It was a total failure, so unsuccessful that he burned it. Then he converted it to third person, and of course it became one of the great classics. Maybe some day I’ll do the same thing and resurrect those two unsuccessful novels in a different format. Even so, insanity is a very difficult topic for a novel, but in this post Tim has offered us a fascinating glimpse into the fact that madness doesn’t always look like what most of us expect. Enjoy!"

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In The Professor and the Madman, author Simon Winchester tells an amazing tale of two men born worlds apart but brought together by their common love for words. One was an uneducated bank clerk whose love for words eventually made him the driving force of the seminal reference work for the English language. The other was a highly educated Civil War Surgeon whose descent into madness left him with little else but his love of reading and one outlet to share that love with the world beyond his asylum’s walls.

James Murray – Professor and Editor

Born in 1837, James Murray was the oldest son of a tailor whose formal education went no farther than his 14th birthday. In spite of this, by the age of 20 he was headmaster of a village school. School was soon left behind as he had to move to London for his sick wife. In spite of this, he never lost his thirst for learning. Though he worked as a bank clerk Murray became somewhat of an expert on the English language. Self taught, he was proficient in a number of languages and soon was lecturing on various literary and philosophical topics. It was in these circles that the bank teller who never went to college came to be recognized by men with Oxford credentials as the logical choice for the monumental project they had in mind. So on April 26, 1878, James Murray was tasked with overseeing a project that would outlive him many years over – The Oxford English Dictionary.

image thumb9 The Professor and the MadmanWilliam Chester Minor – Wordsmith and Madman

Unlike James Murray, Minor was Yale educated and became a doctor. Raised by his missionary parents in what is now Sri Lanka, Minor was beset by inner demons he managed to somehow keep under control throughout his teenage years and medical school.

It was only when he entered the Union Army half way through the Civil War that the demons finally broke their chains. North and South had been at war 800 days when William Chester joined the Union Army. A few months later he found himself a surgeon during the Battle of the Wilderness, America’s first and only experience with systematic destruction. Weary of war, General Grant abandoned age old methods of prisoner exchanges and sanctioned Sherman’s “March to the Sea”. This was war on a scale and with results neither side had ever seen before.

The horrors William Minor saw left him a broken man. His paranoia and obvious mental instability eventually caused him to be discharged from the Army after which he traveled abroad in the hope that he would find a cure. Sadly, his anticipated cure never materialized. Instead he murdered a man in a fit of paranoia, thinking that someone was trying to break into his room to murder him. Before long he was sentenced to an institution for the criminally insane which would be his home for many years to follow.

The Professor and the Madman

When work on the Oxford English Dictionary began, advertisements were placed in various periodicals for readers everywhere to submit entries for the work. The idea was not to just give a definition of the word but rather to also add uses of the word in literature and common language. One applicant that ultimately caught James Murray’s attention was a Mr. Minor from the countryside of England.

For seven years Mr. Minor contributed thousands of entries for the new Oxford English Dictionary – more entries by far than any other person on the planet. So many entries that 17 years later, James Murray decided it was time he met this most scholarly and dedicated wordsmith. But William Minor offered one excuse after another for not coming to London. Finally, James Murray took it on himself to go to the man who would not come to him.

The meeting that followed must have been one to remember for both men. For 17 years James Murray had received entries for the seminal work of the English language. He assumed they came from an elusive elderly scholar who loved his books too much to travel to London. Instead he found a man who had gone through years of cycles of brilliance and madness so intense, hope for a cure had been lost.

The professor and the madman had finally met.

A River Rising Over the Banks of Coincidence

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Cover art for the
re-release of
River Rising

The old woman and her grandson went to the house where he had purchased the camera, only to learn their family had no connection whatsoever with the people living there, and nobody living there knew anything about the birthday party in the photographs, and nobody could remember how the camera had come into their possession. It was just an old camera one of them had bought, or found, or been given too long ago to remember.

Of course, this was mere coincidence. It was coincidence when someone took that photograph at a party long before the young man was born, and coincidence that the photographer never had the film developed or removed it from the camera. It was coincidence that the camera was never thrown away, and coincidence when it passed from the photographer’s hands into someone else’s and eventually somehow into the possession of someone who offered it for sale. It was coincidence when that particular young man bought that particular camera, coincidence that the film had not been ruined with age, coincidence that he thought it might be interesting to have the film developed, coincidence when he sorted through the stack of old photographs and left one particular image on top of the stack, and coincidence when his grandmother happened by and for no particular reason decided to look closely at the people in the image, nearly thirty years after her son’s death.

Strange stories such as this lead to many questions.

Are these kinds of coincidences really all that rare, or is the rare thing in this instance simply that somebody noticed? In other words, although the odds against this seem incredible, could it have been merely a glimpse of a something happening around us all the time?

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This is an excerpt from the new forward to River Rising by Athol Dickson, soon to be re-released in both eBook and print format.

Narrative Science, Algorithms and the Mystery of Good Story Telling

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Athol Dickson on Narrative Science, Algorithms and the Mystery of Good Story Telling -

For the past few months I’ve been seeing stories about software being used by Forbes and others to write news reports. It seems some of what we read in the news media is already being produced by automated systems. The people behind this software predict 90% of all news reports will be automated in 15 years. Consider the following from Wired Magazine:

Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owner.

That got me thinking about artificial intelligence, and art. Could a novel be written by a computer?

The creators of the news writing software say it only works for stories that are mainly dependent on data (sporting events, financial reporting, etc.). Some novels are formulaic, in the sense that one could overlay the same basic outline on multiple plots. Much of the romance fiction genre, for example, and many “whodunit” style murder mysteries, tend to follow the same basic format, and in a larger sense one could say there are many “rules” which apply to almost every kind of novel. But I think it’s safe to say that the quality of a novel is inversely proportional to the possibility that it can be defined or predicted by an algorithm. To put it more simply, any novel we could automate would be a bad novel.

Here’s why:

There’s something achieved by all good art that transcends systemization. In fact, the quality of transcendence is one of the reasons why art matters. And there’s irony in the fact that the transcendent meaning and importance of any great novel is impossible to convey with words. One can’t isolate any sentence, paragraph or chapter of a great novel and say, “That right there is the reason it’s great.” One must experience the work as a whole in order to experience the value of the work, and even then it’s not merely the complete collection of the words which makes a novel great, but rather, it’s the experience of the work. The greatness in a novel is not found in the logic that organizes the words within the novel, and therefore whatever causes that greatness is something no machine can reproduce.

This is true in art, and it matters in art, because it is true, and it matters, in us.
Francis Schaeffer wrote in Art and the Bible: Two Essays, “He may have no gift of writing, no gift of composing or singing, but each man has the gift of creativity in terms of the way he lives his life. In this sense, the Christian’s life is to be an art work.” And this, it seems to me, is something to be considered both in the sense Schaeffer meant it (in terms of what we do), and in another sense (in terms of what we are, or ought to be).

Over at Don’t Eat The Fruit, John Dyer recently posted some good thoughts on the relationship between our minds and our bodies. Since the dawn of history, people have tended toward unnatural divisions between the two. And with the advances in technology we’ve seen over the last few decades, it seems possible that we might one day manage to completely divide one part of ourselves from another, either by implanting a human brain in a machine, or by totally controlling a human body with a microchip.

Some believe this would be a good thing. After all, it would eliminate our susceptibility to many flaws, just as novels written by computers would contain no misspelled words. But I think they’re in for a shock.

We were created with interconnected minds and bodies in order that the thing we call our “soul” or “spirit” might be fully expressed. (By “soul” or “spirit” I mean the thing that makes me “me,” the thing that you would know if you knew me, and yet the thing that you will never see while I’m alive, and could never find if you cut my brain and body open and looked inside.) Again, the most important qualities of great novels can only be experienced in the total combination of the words, yet those same qualities are impossible to contain in words. In almost exactly the same way, when you know “me,” you know something that can only be expressed by the seamless combination of my mind and body, yet I cannot be found within either my mind or my body. So any attempt to separate the mind and body, to view either one as somehow better or more desirable than the other, or to indulge one while ignoring the other, is nothing less than an attack on the human spirit.

It’s possible that one day soon we will read technically flawless novels written by computers, but we will never read good novels written in that way. There is no transcendental “me” in a machine, and even if there were it would not be human, therefore no machine could produce a good work of art. Art is only good when it reminds us what it’s like to be completely human, in body, mind and soul.