The Writing of...Cathedral Lake

One week after completing Narcissus Reflects, I was still struggling to complete Painting Godless Children. I couldn't help but feel that there were other stories to write. It is frustrating to be working on a project, and marrying yourself to that project at the expense of any other idea that might pop into your head. You want to be focussed on what you are working on, and there exists the possibility that entertaining new creative impulses could interrupt whatever flow you have developed on your current project.

However, I was pleased with Narcissus Reflects and my weekend story experiment--where I tried to start and complete a story over the course of a single weekend. It seemed to me that if I was going to work on a side-project while working on Painting Godless Children, the weekend story format was ideal. After all, I was limiting myself to two days a story. So, I was still devoting the majority of my writing time to wrestling the unwieldy beast of Painting Godless Children.

When I was working on a time-consuming project, I would often stumble onto some thought or idea that didn't fit with my current project, and when this would happen I would mentally file it away for future reference. Up to this point, my stories were coming to life from dreams or still images that spoke to me in personally profound ways. I had one vague clip, not unlike a film loop, of an older woman looking out a window, staring at a lake outside, brushing her hair. A simple image, but it had stuck with me for a long time. I guess it was just one of those pieces of the imagination that pop up and speak to you in just the right note, but the song is still uncertain. So, you just tuck it away and wait for the music.

I knew the image carried meaning, but I just wasn't ready for that meaning. In these situations, you know that if the image is truly profound then it will never leave you. The hope is that these ideas will open up to you again in the future and fall effortlessly into their proper place.

This particular image--this woman brushing her hair--opened up again for me and fell effortlessly into Cathedral Lake.

Cathedral Lake was the second of my Weekend Stories, and it was written on March 11th and 12th of 2000. It starts with a dream, and never fully emerges from that gauzy, uncertain world of dreams. It is an unashamed expression of love, and the universality of romantic love in the deepest sense. My only trouble with such content is the artistic perception of love in modernity. I have often thought that post-modernism should be a welcoming environment for reproductions of romantic love. After all, the reproduction of love, if done right, can truly offer emotional stirrings that can mirror that of the real experience. However, there is a perception in the arts that anything with a romantic hue is, by default, sentimentalized. So, I feel I must, as best I can, defend the romance.

It seems to me that there is a prevailing meme that romantic love can not be reproduced with sincerity, and so should not be sincerely approached by the consumer. There seems to be a faulty perception that all love stories are artificially produced for the purpose of satiating some desire for a saccharine unreality. But what if the people that produce these works are sincere in their expressions? What if the creators of such loveliness bring authenticity with them into every piece? Who is to say what is or is not sincere? Are you comfortable making those distinctions? I certainly am not.

It seems to me that there can be two reasons why this meme has taken root. It could be that those that reject all romance are rejecting it because they have known real, heightened love and feel that there can be no analogous representation, and therefore any attempt is belittling to the spirit of love itself. Or, and this is where I believe the critical angst comes from, these critics have never experienced a truly great love, and therefore find all attempts to represent this greatness to be a purely idealized fiction. This is often where cynicism is born, in blind, arrogant ignorance.

I suppose there could a third category of people that are made so uncomfortable by love that they have developed a pure and utter disdain for anything lovely. I'd prefer to think that these people don't exist.

I have always been reluctant to label a work as sentimental. To me, it is one of the most flippant and lazy criticisms. It is a cheap way to relegate any effort to the sidelines of seriousness without any genuine effort to challenge the work on its merits. I believe the onus is on the critic to expose insincerity, to prove the inauthenticity of the creator's intent when they charge sentimentality.

How is it that love has been made to be seen so cynically? Are we really a culture that cannot appreciate, or accept, the euphoria of one of life's greatest gifts?

Cathedral Lake is an example of the creation of a love story, nakedly earnest in its attempt to reproduce a feeling of great love. This attempt is nothing but sincere. I was falling in love with my future wife, Sarah, at the time this was written. We hadn't known each other quite two months, and yet our love was so intense that only a few weeks after I finished this story, I proposed marriage.

My journal entries from this time are full of me stumbling over myself, trying desperately to articulate my heightened emotional state during this time. Cathedral Lake, it turns out, was the greatest articulation of my love for Sarah in those early days. This story is not sentimentalized. It is an authentic translation of my feelings, and my thoughts, during a period where my life was being forever changed by love.

I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Cathedral Lake. It is not without its faults. As always, there were some some poor choices made. Some sentences run too long. Some sentences are poorly worded and don't seamlessly lead a reader down the narrative path. But the heart of the piece is strong, and I am as proud of this story as I am of anything I have done.

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