I’m a bad, bad Buddhist, Mr. Fire Ant

Well, actually, I’ve never claimed to be a good one, but the moral precept against killing would definitely stop me from reaching an enlightened state. Chalk it up to fire ants.

Actually out the four big ones (killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct) I’d probably fail on the last too, but that’s a subject for a different blog.

But fire ants, by Buddha, deserved to be eradicated from the face of the Earth! If you’re lucky enough never to have encountered them, take it from me they are the nastiest little critters on the planet. They are the seeds of sci-fi horror movies. Left to live, they will take over your yard, your house too, maybe kill your horse, and all the beneficial insects in the local environment, including all other ant species

First a flashback. When I was about 12 or so, I saw Naked Jungle, with Charlie Heston (I’ve seen so many of his b-movies including Omega man, that the dead actor and I are on first-name basis.) Charlie is a lonely South American plantation owner who forgoes all the courting and romance and orders a mail order bride from New Orleans. She’s a good girl though, maybe that’s the problem (cough, cough) but the first half of the movie is about, from what I can gather, what an a-hole Charlie’s character is.

Then come the commie ant hordes, and we escape all these complicated human emotions and get right down to war. It’s a great war too, with Charlie making heroic efforts not just to save his plantation from ants who are stripping all vegetation bare and eating his cattle down to bare bones before they can so much as go “mooo?”, but Charlie sacrifices himself to save his indentured servants, including his mail-order bride.

Now back to fire ants, think Naked Jungle in slow mo. Or stop motion. Worse in a way. The ants (Army ants) in Charlie’s movie sting at first crawl. Fire ants will wait until a hundred or so of their sisters are on you, then they’ll all sting at once. Sort of like a Blitzkrieg, the little nazis. (Okay, I also alluded to them as commies, but that was the ants in Charlie’s cold war era movie. Fire ants are more like some sort of entrenched hate group. Or, in the spirit of this blog, a zombie horde, mindlessly shuffling along, devouring all in their path.)

I keep thinking of the image of Buddha touching the Earth with one finger in affirmation of life and the middle way. I wonder if he would have been able to reach that point if he’d been sitting on a fire ant colony. Probably so, but then he was a bodhisattva, and obviously, I’m not. Now pardon me while I go to the hardware store to get some baited poison for my little friends.

Heros like us

Think of it as a kind of hiatus: Your writer (me) standing at the threshold of another novel, deliberating whether to go on, thinking I would make better use of my life doing something more appreciated by society, such adopting a highway. (You and I both know that as I have the writing disease, this is only so much crap, as I’ll keep writing these things until I die though I probably will never make any money at it. Just goes to show ya’; one doesn’t have to be undead to exhibit zombie-like mindless behavior.)

Anyway, it’s at this time, I always try to make an outline and fail. But I typically do a lot of reading,, some of it background, some of writers I’d like to be as good as. Currently, I’m reading something old and something new. The old thing is a work of fiction, “Parasites Like Us,” by Adam Johnson, and the something new (to me) is “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell.

I’ve read Johnson’s book two, maybe three times before, which makes me a fan, I guess. Several years ago, I found a hard cover edition of the book on the local B&N’s bargain table for like $5.95 or something. I read the first time in one sitting, and my only question was “why haven’t I heard of this guy before?” Moreover, he seems to be a one-novel wonder, which to me is a mystery — both the one-book thing and why the one-book, after winning a couple of awards, apparently didn’t sell well.
Johnson’s prose is at once dark, insightful and humorous, his story-telling compelling. More important, it’s one of those works that taps some unseen mystical place in my imagination. Yes, it’s a cliche, but the book speaks to me and makes me enjoy it as it does so.

I wasn’t sure why Johnson’s book is so effective a work until I began reading Campbell’s book. Now I’m enlightened. Written in 1948, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” posits how the great myths, from Grecian to Hindu, the world religions, from Christianity to Islam to Buddhism, fairy tales and fables, all share a common structure. The over-structure — or rather story line is thus: Separation –> Initiation –> Return. Each of these major divisions — think three-scene structure, is further divided by Campbell into subsections, such as the hero’s call to adventure, separation, atonement with the father-God, etc.

What’s was enlightening to me was 1) that this is probably the reason that Johnson’s book works so well,not just on a surface plot, but yielding sense of telling basic, fundamental truths about human nature. And more amazing, is that (2) as this structure is archetypical (in a Jungian sense) I realize that I’ve been trying, subconsciously, to reconstruct it in my writing. Moreover, when I look back on a novel, say Messengers of an Alien God, and pick out the places that I had trouble with, where the plot or the psychology of the characters just didn’t seem to ring true, that was where I diverged from the archetypical story line of Campbell’s universal hero.

More on this later…..