SACRED SUN

My wife came home from work one evening, many years ago, to a quiet house, fearing I had taken my own life. I hadn’t, of course. I had drunk too much the night before (unusually) and had been sleeping it off upstairs. It disturbed me, however, that she could see me in such a light: half-aspiring, struggling children’s book writer who might inflict his own demise, cornered a little by life. She said that children’s books were not my calling and that I should try scriptwriting. I said okay.

Years earlier, I had read Sun, a short story by D. H. Lawrence, and I had not forgotten it, the way it rendered its woman character, bodily and in symbol, myth like, to her god lover, the sun; the dark sensuality of her sun intimacy, the reviving inside her of inner belief. I wanted to imbue a first screenplay with a similar meaning, and I took my imagination to the woods near my family home in England where I felt the sun, as deity on earth, might reside, or hide, among the leafy shadows.

The resulting horror-haunting, set in England, went on to be titled Muneca’s Wood, graduating me to the roster of a small literary agency in London. Mercifully, however, the script didn’t sell, being a long way from what it would eventually become. The agency set aside Muneca's Wood and left me to write something new, which turned out to be my gutter-humoured comedy, Voodoo Valentinos.

Nevertheless, I could not discard Muneca’s Wood. Picking the script up again, having read more D. H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature, The Plumed Serpent, Mornings in Mexico, The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence), I reinvented its fantasy in North America, retitling it Sacred Sun and setting it in the deserts and forested mountains of southwest U.S.A., where, in California, at Hollywood Hills and at Big Bear Lake, I had spent much impressionable time as a very young child (this after the summer, fall and winter of '63/4 in Pittsburgh, having arrived first at Boston by sea).

With the advent of Internet, I had begun also to take an interest in desert solar energy plants and Spanish-speaking Pueblo Indians (bearing in mind my refinery camp upbringing in outback South America), mindful of Lawrence’s association with, and writing about, Pueblo Natives, and his broad assertion of an America that cannot be born as a people, or peoples, as opposed to a nation, or nations, without the sloughing away of her European consciousness (her old skin) and her coming to terms with the hostile spirit of place that emanates (even to this day, furtively) from her own mystical horizons and Native inhabitants; a view that led to Lawrence’s premonition of a new and as yet unknowable American consciousness (her new skin), one that would be Native spirit guided.

This is what Sacred Sun is about; in substance, neither character-development-reliant nor single-protagonist-orientated. Rather a rarer thing, in rarer energy, a true, symbolic mystery, even in construct, in which ensemble characters ebb and flow in a driven narrative on the subject of a new beginning for America, expressed, ultimately, in dark dream. It is a dream darker than story. Dark, at least, as myth or meaning, and it asks of its readers their receptiveness to a new experience.

"The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," said Lawrence. "Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences, and it is like trying to use muscles that have never been used or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly. The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeonhole any idea. But it can't pigeonhole a new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger and the Americans the greatest because they dodge their own very selves."

The new experience of Sacred Sun, however, organically written and self-unaware (in guise all the more for this, even unto itself), requires no-one to have to avert, telling, by subterfuge, of a new, challenging truth for America, and of a new American 'being', and end to the 'American dodge', the overly-long-drawn-out sloughing of her old European skin which has been holding back the new.

That is to say, the North, to this day still, dispensing its business-evangelist credo, life-perfection ideals and picket fence morality, prescription like and theme park like, across a great continent, remote and mystical in origin, holding its spirit isolate. The Latin South, so long a cauldron for socialism, fascism, populism (so many 'isms', European), democratic ideal, rampant opportunism, 'religion of María' (gone cult), reducing to decoctions of fever. All to an onlooking world, askance, expectant and apprehensive, unable to cope anthropologically with the pressures of aggressive overcrowding and strains thereof upon human limits. A world investing its hope, ultimately, in the New World odyssey, uncertain though it continues, as much as the rest. More, for its rootlessness.

The above, counter wise, mirrored in the Natives, their energies so taken up in defence of their culture, their chance to truly live and develop in it eluding them, at least from the starting point of their former, integral, antecedent selves, from which long removed are the old tribal conditions and purposes, and from which there is no uncorrupted throughline to their modern being, nothing to make clear whom they might otherwise, in their separateness, have become, free from the interference of foreign colonizers, too many in number to resist. And there is no maintaining of traditional Native culture, hugely important though it is, can mend this distortion, nor bridge the impasse it causes. Cast out are the Natives, doubly displaced, as unreal to themselves as are their European occupiers, scattered from ancestral homelands, tied sorrowfully to a lost, forfeited past.

Yet it is the Native who is clue to the future, the time coming, sooner than later, when the ‘demon of America’ (her underlying, resistant spirit of place, brooding Native ghost) will, across all her lands, all the New World, in art-symbol, have to be atoned for, the wide tarpaulin of modern American life rendered permeable to what lies below (in spite of surface achievements and the innocence of today’s generations), before demon can be restored as god, and a new epoch begin.

And it is only in art-symbol that this can happen. Not in observant atoning, or in compassion, or in 'understanding'. Or in befriending, or in 'giving', or in tolerance. Or in ministry, or in principles, or in prayer. Or in ideology, or in advocating for Natives, or in 'being at one' with them. Not in apology. Not in contrition. Not in making amends. Not in positivity. Not in education or in intellect or in reflection; or in resolution, or in open-armed unification, or in 'the inclusion of all'. And certainly not in the rudiments of story hero structure, per se, in any form. In fact, not in anything that would be ‘got into the head’ consciously (common sense wise or morally). Not even in the ethnic or cultural mix will prevalent, underlying disconnectedness ever quite be countered without the inner potency of art-symbol, because only in art can a new symbol be given life. Elusive, hidden art, that does not announce itself, but that permeates the universal mind darkly. And in whose darkness, a symbol, cipher like and indeterminate, by art's inner secret, substantiates and manifests humanly.

Therefore, sits a great symbol in the air above America, palpably, around her people and in her interstices, awaiting its substantiation in art. Not that a symbol in its own purity needs art, but that a people does, especially a new people-in-the-making; because, though a symbol is nothing more than an unseen life instruction, latent, given shape in art (release and transmission), it becomes infinitely more, it becomes the living life, which is belief. It demands an offering here, in screenplay.

So Sacred Sun, its natural path and ambiguity. Its poise, prism like, between coherence and dream. Its nucleus, an art mystery, wherein distilled are spirit of place, atonement and original sacredness. Its quick, or trick (yielded in art-ending), an art-switch to a new consciousness ('the same, yet new'), and redemption thus, in art-symbol, of nation to a people, defined less by what it has done than by what it has become, guarded within by a spirit-indigene which, veiled in new purpose, has stood still in time. “The Red Nation shall rise again. It shall be a blessing for a sick world, a world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations, a world longing for light again,” Crazy Horse.

I had not, all those years ago, contemplated suicide. However, the incident I mention at the beginning did result in the demise, artistically, of an earlier, creative self: children’s book fantasist who, after all, had only ever been an uneasy self-invention, foundationless, speculative and unconnected, born of hidden despair (perhaps like the New World). Finding a truer self would be defining, as would be, said Lawrence, the ultimate truth of America, bursting Eos-like to a new dawn, a new humanity and greater day, in which Native and European Americans, in their deepest unconscious, would unite (without merging), in a great, unseen gesture, or symbol, of their own, separate creation, art-ignited, from which they would go on to unite the world. The destiny of a new people in a new continent, to draw the world, when most needy of it, into a new, living belief.