A "Cube" of Writing from "Christmas in Mecca"



A Report on Life-forms on the Third Stone Orbiting Sol: The Closed Case of Rover


Background

....Our team from Igramafore examined a representative sample of the carbon-based life-forms who live within the oxygen-rich, toxic atmosphere of the third stone orbiting Sol. Sol is a medium-sized star that continually cascades through the ten dimensions within an outer arm of a medium-sized spiral galaxy which resides in a cluster of galaxies draped behind the Great Fold of Space.


The Sample Subject

The sample subject responded when called by the sonic construction: Rover. The subject moves about on four pods within a gravitational field that exerts 42 omboms per hua per hua. It ingests the following: its fellow life-forms; oxygen; and two hydrogen atoms bonded with one atom of oxygen. It excretes reduced combinations of these items in solid, liquid and gaseous forms. The subject displays the characteristics of one half of a male/female coupling. However, examination reveals that the reproductive organs have been removed. Subject’s bloodstream carries substances foreign to its own physiology, suggesting medical interventions such as surgery and/or inoculation. The subject’s psychology is rather simple: most behaviors have the objective of obtaining items for ingestion. However, subject also expends appreciable effort in obtaining social and interpersonal interactions for the sake of interaction, suggesting emotional and/or communal needs. Mind-scan reveals a matrix of chemically preserved memories confined to experiences within only three physical dimensions. The totality of memories suggests a deep loyalty to the recurring personas within the subject’s life experience. Life experiences are strung together and artificially sequenced within omnipresent time in a fashion that would give the beholder a sense of linear time, a contortion of the Cosmos where one series of experience no longer exists and another series of experience has yet to exist, perhaps giving rise to fallacious constructs such as a past and a future in lieu of the actuality of omnipresent existence.


Conclusions

The life-forms on the third stone orbiting Sol are wholly engrossed in fulfilling their physical and communal needs. They have rudimentary skills in medical science which they use towards sterilization and inoculation. They are uncomplicated, loyal creatures who experience only three of ten dimensions, a severely truncated experience base nested within a contorted sense of past and future. Our team from Igramafore concludes that these life-forms are incapable, both intellectually and emotionally, of determining a true sense of space-time; understanding the basic nature of matter, light and physical experience; creating meaningful or uniquely expressive art; or waging organized warfare.


Our Message to the Supreme Council of Beings
There is nothing of deep interest or of imminent danger in Quadrant X69. We recommend no further research in this quadrant.

Death of a Character

4:17 a.m., the 10th of October. In a mix of moonlight, slumber, dusk and sleeping dogs, I came to a groggy conclusion: Allah Om Ilahi Elohim, the original (and fictional) author of Genesis, compelling as he is as a major character, does not fit into the tapestry of storyline in my second novel, Christmas in Mecca. Elohim is a diversion from what is evolving into the novel's central anchor, the plight (emotional, sexual and professional) of Dr. Harold Hawkins.

liberation..##.!

liberation..##.!

...from desires and needs…
--- passion and possessions ---
/fame…power…security…fortune/
need, oh blasted need!
let its blinding currents
rush, then
eddy, then
drip,then
drop,then
nestle…….
……slowly, and become Lost
in cool, green moss

Civil War Within the Alphabet, A Cryptic Excerpt from "Christmas in Mecca"

T lived in contented comforts; he hardly gave a fleeting thought to Z. Yes, T had personally witnessed the demise of R and S, had watched time’s dispassionate march and unfeeling boot heals trample S and R into transience before his very eyes. And so somewhere deep, T held an unknown knowing that Z would come. Once, mired in a bout of self-reflection that had been conscripted by a small, transitory personal adversity, T thought back on compelling words attributed to D, a fabled letter of yore. The story of D had been passed through the ages in cryptic parables that reached T through a series of retellings and translations by F, G, H and J, tales of sacrifice and heroism where D, in final feat, proclaimed that D himself, chosen before all others, would triumph at the coming of Z and that Z was indeed only the perfected reflection and anointed realization of the “new D.” Millennia after D, L is purported to have claimed that he was the Way, that he had perfected and completed the original message of D and that L and only L was a sole path to Z.

T wasn’t so sure about anything. T pondered Z many times, often in fear. In his mind and heart, T often denounced Z as a crafty saboteur, a thief, a robber.

Somewhere a universe had been born and had died.

The sun rose in the east…

T pondered and searched and ritualized to no end, but he couldn’t seem to gather enough proof to embrace or repudiate D or L. Once, quiet by accident, T had come perilously close to the Truth about Z. But that moment of philosophical immersion shattered in the midst of an encroaching offense from S, an offense that prompted a necessary and violent response from T, a response that shaped the nature of U and was essentially a mathematically precise line regression to the self-preservationist impulses of the oceanic, gurgling existence of A and the grunted cave art of B, a response justified by the vengeful commandments of C and deaf to the forgiving restraints sermonized from the mount by L.

Time’s boot heals stomped left, then right, ashes and dust, and T’s eyelids now drooped and an insight unfolded from within…or was it a voice from outside?...that told T that Hitler and Gandhi are the same soul in different circumstances, so who can judge?

T’s eyes closed and he became the whole alphabet.

U’s eyes fluttered open with a cry.

"Waiting for Godot" - Samuel Beckett's Attempt to....What?

I just finished reading Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. Is this an avant-garde tribute to the theatre of the absurd?...a morality play structured around the quintessential themes of existentialism?...an angry cry born from the suffering pangs of inconsequential human experience?...

Whatever it is or isn't, Beckett's work inspires me to continue to complete Christmas in Mecca.

A Poem, a Cubist Piece of the Novel, "Christmas in Mecca"

Sun Dials

Time:
Stoic beard
Gray, unbegotten
Forever – pacing –

Leaping \\
>> Lunging
Streaming <<
// Crashing

Open ocean
Washing beaches
Bigger than we
Can ever know
No?

Virtual Book Tour, the Third (and Final) Q & A

I promised to post questions and answers from my recent virtual book tour. Here's the third and final installment on that promise. This Q & A comes from Austin Camacho’s blog, Another Writer’s Life, in Washington, D.C.


Libby asked:

Hey, speaking of your two new books what are they about? Your stuff's a bit weird and sometimes even strange but your book's people are like real people so sometimes I feel like you're telling me what happened to you today rather than I'm reading a book like the ones in English class. Do people ever think you're weird like your books?


Mohamed answered:

Dear Libby,

You’ve served me a well-basted roast of two queries and a side helping piled high with steaming commentary. Bon appetit.

Now to clear the plate.

Starting with your last question: Yes. Through these many years, quite a few people have commented that I sometimes come off as weird…introspective…sullen…isolated.

Are my books the same? Probably. They’re the intellectual progeny of my mind and, as such, they have a strong chance of inheriting my mental and emotional deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

Working backwards through your post, I’ll now address your comment about the “people” in my books. I’m elated to learn that you feel my characters are real. A novel’s “people” do not become well-written characters until they assume that third dimension of depth, that flawed and vulnerable humanity, that believable and recognizable voice. I’m fascinated that you think my books read like “I’m telling you what happened to me today.” That’s not entirely surprising. Vonnegut’s experiences as an American soldier in WWII are an anchor in the storyline of Slaughterhouse Five. Steinbeck’s experiences growing up in Salinas give generous contribution to the settings, images, characters and “feel” of his novels. Likewise, many of the scenes in Resolution 786 did happen to me, scenes like the debate regarding the meaning of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis while resting in bed; or the mysterious old man in a dusty Middle Eastern street grabbing onto people’s earlobes and handing them neon-green prayer beads (I still have the beads); and the beautiful and philosophically indulgent trek through the Utah desert leading to the Delicate Arch. So in all those instances, in a very real way, I actually AM telling you “what happened to me today.”

Now to your opening question: what are my two new books about?

Christmas in Mecca is a cubist novel about many things: the strategic tensions between the West and Islamic fundamentalism; our search for intelligent extraterrestrial life; the internal reconciliation of one character’s battered self-worth; the searing pangs of the unfulfilled quests in our lives and how we resolve to live with those disappointments as we journey between the womb and the grave.

Much of the book is traditional narrative. But the text also includes government memoranda, e-mail messages, and poems. Unlike the first novel, parts of the story in the second novel take the form of a play; others are dialogue structured in the form of a volley of instant messages. I don’t employ these alternate formats out of literary indulgence or as a gimmick. Chosen formats must fit and amplify the context and demonstrative power of the scene. In the case of the instant messages, I had come to a point in the narrative where two characters have a philosophically and personally revealing exchange of thought and perspective. Each character is introverted. Each is intelligent. Each is comfortable with and drawn to the written word. How best to frame such a dialogue, a discussion between two reclusive, bookish characters? I decided on instant messaging. This form of interpersonal communication preserves the informational and revelatory content of the dialogue. It also sets the conversation in a context that reveals the introverted nature of the characters, two people who prefer to exchange ideas while sitting alone in the privacy of a closed room.

That’s plenty on the first new book.

The second new book is my first shot at book-length non-fiction. It’s titled Creating Fiction: A Hands-on, Practitioner's Guide and it summarizes my literary lessons and techniques, the experiential by-products gleaned from the task of creating two cubist, absurdist novels.

Thank you for sharing your thoughtful observations of my writing and of my nature as a writer. There are many hardships to writing, things like self-doubt and finding the time. There are also many rewards. The greatest reward is to have readers like you, Libby.

Keep reading,

Mohamed

The End

About a year ago I mulled my use of “The End” following final text in my stories and novels. I decided that that phrase limits the contextual residence of my writing; it implies that an isolated universe is created within each piece of prose and that that world is immutable, irrefutable and final. It isn’t. I realized this when the draft of my second novel, Christmas in Mecca, evolved into both a sequel and a prequel to my first novel. Nothing ends.

My stories and novels depict fragments of experience that occur within the moment, but that are also nested within a dynamic sea of future and past. A focused lens into the past can provide valuable, revelatory insights into and about the present; a retrospective gaze from the realized future can redefine and more precisely account the broader implications of that same present. In the infinite plate tectonics of the cosmos, nothing stands alone, absolute, stoic and stone.

I am no longer comfortable using “The End” when I finish novels and stories…but what then to use, if anything?

I thought of “etc.” Etcetera. A literal translation from Latin is “and the rest.” Common meanings include “and so forth” or “and other things.” I think this better captures my sense of my writing…and the rest…and so forth…and other things.

Hereon in, my stories and novels will not end with “The End.” They’ll end with “etc.”

Virtual Book Tour, One Q & A

I promised to post questions and answers from my recent virtual book tour. Here's a first installment on that promise. The Q & A came from Inna Selipanov's blog, Onions and Tea.


Anonymous asked...

Hello Inna! I'm excited to be the first poster. :-) I'm a chemist and I believe that Mohamed has studied chemistry, as well. I was wondering how his background as a chemical engineer influences his writing, if at all.


Mohamed answered...

I have to start by saying that I absolutely LOVE your question. I’ve never really thought about it explicitly, but the truth is that my academic training in chemical engineering does indeed influence my creative writing.

I think I’ll answer your question along two dimensions. The first is structural. The second is topical detail.

Structural: My training as a chemical engineer entailed problem-solving through the use of linear thinking around the notion of processes and repeatable, predictable reactions. In that sense, I can see that in my creative writing, I tend to organize my themes and thoughts (and hence, my prose and plot) in ways that are consistent, integrated and logically cohesive. If you read Resolution 786 closely, you’ll see that many scenes, especially at the minute (molecular?) level, have an integrated set of details. For example, if someone cites an event or characterization in an e-mail message, many scenes later, a detail of description or dialogue will support that previous citation. An interesting permutation of my detail-oriented linear thought process is the fact that I use literary cubism as my overall architecture for telling stories, so data and storylines and narrative exposition are offered through multiple written venues such as e-mails, poems, dialogue, and legal documents and may appear, at times, to be non-linear. Still, despite what might at first glance appear to be an unorthodox amalgam of cubist writing, in the final analysis, as applied by me, becomes an integrated, internally consistent system of systems that, if successful, weaves an understandable story that has a unified theme and is told through the motives and experiences of consistent and believable characters.

The second way in which my training as a chemical engineer influences my writing is along the dimension of topical detail. Yes, my first novel and the partially completed draft of my second novel both deal heavily in themes of theology. But looking back through the prism of your question, I now see that topical details revolve around my training and experiences as a chemical engineer. Adam Hueghlomm is in Iraq to collect data to test the efficacy of a new mine-detecting technology; he carries a research notebook with him. Hueghlomm’s intense reverence for logic and literal interpretations is the basis for the legal indictment of the Lord in that first novel. Euclidian geometry and the mathematically infinite nature of pi are invoked in the title of the final chapter of the novel, a tip of the hat to my engineering training in mathematics. Moving from my first novel and into the second, here’s how a minor but frequent character in that novel is introduced:

“Aetch-to-oh.
Oh he loved his own kind, clinging to them in a square dance of loose bonds. His rotund torso held up two punctuation marks, small appendages that poked into the world in a dissolving, soft clutch, an ever open 104.5 degree arc of welcome. Aetch, as he often called himself, had been born in the early twilights, above a gurgling, empty ocean, on the tip of a crackling electrical discharge that shot from nothing to nowhere. He was a quite witness to the endless turn of wheels, the cycling infinity of death and rebirth. ‘Each one of them is a retold pun in a never-ending cosmic comedy,’ Aetch-to-oh often told himself, a gargled giggle.
Oh, the people he’d known. Oh, the places he’d been. Oh, the things he’d seen.”

Who is Aetch-to-oh? He’s a water molecule who has been floating about the earth since the early twilights of creation. That’s right. A water molecule is a character in “Christmas in Mecca.” I believe this, too, is an observable manifestation of my training as a chemical engineer. Who else might include a water molecule (complete with his 104.5 degree molecular geometry) as a character in a novel?

Apologies for the rather long answer. Here’s the short version:

Yes, my training as a chemical engineer influences my fiction. It forces me to have a logical and internally consistent storyline despite my seemingly unorthodox literary style of cubist writing. It also provides me background material that helps me create the details of scenes, settings, characters and chapter titles in my fiction.

Hitchcockian Moments

Remember how Alfred Hitchcock seemed to manage a cameo in many of his movies? I call those spots Hitchcockian moments. There’s a scene in Resolution 786 where the soldiers of Platoon 110 destroy a warehouse full of enemy explosives. One of the soldiers directed to “Put your grenade launchers on the warehouse” (reference page 84) is Mughal. That’s my Hitchcockian moment in Resolution 786. After writing it, I promised myself a cameo in each successive novel.

Last night, the evolving and creatively tortured draft of Christmas in Mecca finally got its cameo: Becca Gowetski is milling about in Alan Weinstein’s astronomical observatory, a recurring setting named the Octopus. She sees a loose stack of journal articles strewn across Weinstein’s many working tables. One of the articles, sitting wrinkled and ajar, winks its title and author in conservative, bold black font – “Biological Terrorism: Practical Response Strategies, by Mohamed Mughal.” Becca lifts the sloppily stapled sheets before her face, scrunches her small nose and carelessly tosses them back to the table muttering, “Oh, the pathetic way some men make a living.”

My second novel’s Hitchcockian moment is set and in place. Now to finish the damn book!

Christmas in Mecca

My second novel, Christmas in Mecca, has been slow-going these last few months. I'm eager to get it finished in 2010. Like the first novel, the storyline has a cubist structure that mixes multiple media of written text. Here's a memo that contributes to the plot; it also highlights one of the thematic tensions of the novel.

As always, I'm open to any commentary or electronic rotten tomatoes that you might want to throw this way :)

The fictional memo:



MEMORANDUM FOR: The United States Secretary of Defense

Subject: A Malthusian Paradox and its Implications to Long-Term American Strategic Defense Policy


Situation

Almost twenty-five percent of all human beings are Muslims. Many live in the world’s underdeveloped regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, areas with relatively high total fertility rates that range from 3 to 5.5.

By contrast, only about five percent of all human beings are American. We have a fertility rate of 2.

There are many more of them than there are of us. Given relative birth rates, the disparity will widen significantly in our lifetimes. This demographic certainty will induce a global transformation in the coming four decades that will result in a re-creation of humanity’s profile, a new reality that will have enormous implications to the lives of our children and their children.


Further Data-Driven Comparisons of “Us” vs. “Them”

As the world moves into the near future of the 2020s, the U.S. is graying. The percent of our population aged 65 and over will rise from 12% to 18%. They (in the context of this paper, “they” refers to the world’s Muslim population in total) will see a resurgence of youth in the same decade. The increase of those aged 15-24 in Algeria is projected at 32%, in Libya it is 29% and in Iran it is 30%. They are growing and they are getting younger. We are effectively shrinking and we are getting older. These effects have already begun and will continue to manifest in our immediate future.


A Conclusion, a Safe Assumption, the Million Dollar Question

The author concludes that, in the long run, we cannot beat them physically, one-against-one, head-to-head. Given the relative certainty of population demographics, we can safely assume that they will not go away. Our question now becomes: might we?


A Recommendation

Accepting the mathematics of demographic trends and accepting the associated conclusion, assumption and question in the preceding discussion, it is in the best interest of our nation to find a means to exist in peaceful stasis with the world of youth and vigor that is growing around our aging populous. Our short-term military skirmishes fail to create long-term solutions. They soak our dwindling fiscal resources and create the irretrievable loss of American lives. They exacerbate our relationship with a growing and youth-full enemy and they provide the enemy a windfall of facts and images that feed their sophisticated networks and outlets of propaganda. Given these facts, the U.S. should refrain from expeditionary military exploits while retaining adequate military defenses for protecting our homeland. We must simultaneously and surreptitiously use a wide range of non-military means in the long-term to transform the growing youth of the enemy.


Transformation Options

Transformation will be a long-term, multi-generational task involving multiple prongs of consistently applied effort. Islam will continue to grow no matter what we do. Rather than fight its inevitable growth, we must work to transform that growth in ways that serve American security and interests. Our primary objective must be to work to establish and legitimize a liberal or reform branch of Islam that is packaged in the appealing iconography of Western popular culture. This packaging will have maximum appeal to the growing youth populations in majority-Muslim countries in the 2020s. They, the youth of those populations, the inheritors of their cultures, can be transformed into citizens who are more tolerant of and more apt to peacefully co-exist with our America.

Although wary of dichotomous thinking that espouses black-and-white options and conclusions, the author believes that our choice with regard to these growing youth populations is binary: fight them or transform them. It is a certainty that our one nation of fewer elderly cannot successfully wage long term and successful warfare against many nations of many youth. Accepting that , our choice is made: we cannot fight them; we must transform them.


Mechanics of Implementation

The U.S. Government must establish one surreptitious and well-funded office that will publically operate as part of the State Department’s existing global outreach infrastructure. In fact, this office will be led by the Director of the Psychological Operations Unit of the Office of Civilian Support to Military Operations in the Department of Defense. The office will have the primary and long-term objectives to:

1. Introduce the iconography of the West’s popular culture into majority Muslim regions with a target focus on the youth in those regions.
2. Create and maintain globally available broad-based media outlets so that those images and iconography may continue to flow to those targeted populations in a steady, easily accessible and uninterrupted stream.
3. Create and promulgate a branch of liberal Islam that blunts aggressive or oppressive elements of the original theology and that accepts and perhaps even embraces and uses the iconography of the West’s popular culture. This branch of “reform Islam” must include philosophies and precepts for maximum appeal to persons in the 15-24 age range. Youth-appealing components include tolerance and acceptance of all forms of creative, social and sexual expression.

In order for this strategy to be effective, this office must be established immediately and must operate uninterrupted and with the above three stated objectives through at least 2050.


Next Step

Request that the Secretary of Defense provide interim approval of this strategy. Upon receipt of interim approval, this office will develop detailed plans for implementation of the policies recommended herein.

Sun-Tzu offered martial wisdom in his chapter on offensive strategy in The Art of War. He noted that standing victorious in one hundred battles is not the apex of strategic skill. The apex of strategic skill is to subdue your enemy without engaging in battle. The strategy outlined herein is consistent with Sun-Tzu’s long-true axiom.



Respectfully Submitted,


Harold R. Hawkins, PhD
Senior Analyst
Office of the Director, Psychological Operations Unit
Office of Civilian Support to Military Operations
Department of Defense



Approved,


Cyrus Cahaba
Director, Psychological Operations Unit, Office of Civilian Support to Military Operations

Dr. Mohamed

I created a comic strip titled Dr. Mohamed in early 2006. The strip's focus and central character was an American Muslim engineer with a philosophical disposition, a bi-sexual Jewish girlfriend and a dog named Buck. The satire included themes of social and religious commentary with side helpings of quantum physics and special relativity.

I completed 24 episodes, then set the project aside. What's interesting is that many of the strip's punchlines found a home in the scenes, dialogue and circumstances of my first novel.

I suppose Dr. Mohamed wasn't a net loss. I might even get back to it after finishing Christmas in Mecca.

Literary Cubism: Liberation from Stricture

It was bound to happen; after all, literary cubism eschews convention, rejects stricture.

Deep in the creative fog of writing Christmas in Mecca, I stumbled into another form of expressive structure that serves to tell the story: instant messaging. I had come to the point in the narrative where two characters have a philosophically and personally revealing exchange of thought and perspective. Each character is introverted. Each is intelligent. Each is comfortable with and drawn to the written word. How best to frame such a dialogue, a discussion between two reclusive, bookish characters? I decided on instant messaging. This form of interpersonal communication preserves the informational and revelatory content of the dialogue. It also sets the conversation in a context that reveals the introverted nature of the characters, two people who prefer to exchange ideas while sitting alone in the privacy of a closed room.

And so now I have a vignette written solely in a series of instant messages. Gosh, I love literary cubism! :)