If you’re looking for inspiration sometimes it pays to look upwards, on a dark, dark night:

Lost in Light from Sriram Murali on Vimeo.

Too many novels these days are flat. Even the famous, the lauded, the best selling, the award winning books. Even the ones the literati love.

They are exciting, yes. Well crafted, well told, thoroughly efficient. They do a job.

But what are they about? Do you come away inspired? Or feel that you’ve just been in touch with some deep truth about the human condition?

Genre fiction is all too often focused on hitting the reader expectations, tweaking them a little but not too much. Paint by numbers.

Literary fiction, meanwhile, seems to have disappeared up its own rear end, obsessed with pretty sentences and experimenting with form – but with little or nothing to say for itself.

Where are the novels with big ideas, that set out to change the world – or at least the reader?

Some people live most of their lives in the past, mulling over memories.

Some folks live their lives in their heads, making plans for a future that may never come.

Dogs live in the here and now.

We can learn a lot from dogs.

(Even – or perhaps especially – from those that can’t talk).

In a book called ‘Instant Analysis’ by David J. Lieberman, in a chapter about people who have recurring fantasies of being a hero, and saving everyone from life threatening emergencies, this sentence made me stop and pause:

“Adults who feel neglected or shortchanged … may often retreat to their imagination.”

For some reason, I thought of fiction writers, caught in a feedback loop, unable to escape, creating ever more elaborate tales about heroes and their deeds, but no one noticing, or reviewing, or commenting …

… as they howl into the void …

Can’t think why.

The old man leant on his scythe in the hot sun and wiped sweat from his brow. He surveyed the grass he had mown already, and the field of uncut hay he had not yet reached, and the piles waiting to be moved and stacked. He sighed heavily. The task was endless.

And all the better for it.

Rain pattered on the temple roof.

“The self does not exist,” the Master said. “It is illusion.”

“But I sense it. It’s there.”

“It’s a waking dream.”

“But dreams exist,” the student said, “if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t happen. They wouldn’t have a name.”

“But they are not real and neither is the self. It’s a construct of your ego, of your thinking mind.”

“So it’s false?”

The Master nodded, sagely.

“But the self creates itself? How?”

“It doesn’t matter. Release is what counts. Liberation.”

The student bowed his head in submission to the Master’s superior wisdom, but in the solitude of his thoughts he asked himself, over and over: what kind of being can create itself?

In the Afterlife the souls – or ‘Selves’ as they are known – are disassembled into their constituent parts. The memories are broken into small chunks along with the likes and dislikes, beliefs and values. Everything is torn asunder, reformatted, sorted and stacked to be re-used.

When new Selves are needed they are made afresh from the recycled components but sometimes the cleaning process is faulty and stray nuggets of memory leak through to the new lives. These recollections are jumbled and incoherent, creating frequent errors and misconceptions, which have led many a novice soul astray.

In Purgatory you dress in beige and must never express a definite opinion.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t mind, it’s all the same to me.”

Everything is decided by committee. Extensive minutes of the meetings are circulated widely.

In Purgatory, you eat lettuce twice a day and three times on Sunday. You stay inside when the sun shines. The main pastime is snobbery and it is always Tuesday.

You arrive in Hell with all of your worldly possessions intact, even the ones you sold or gave away, or lost, or broke or forgot about. Or hated.

You carry these possessions piled upon your back or dragged along behind you, and you can’t rest or stop walking or leave hell until you’ve sold them all. But no one wants to buy.