The victim of this abuse is Joe Belmont, a 23-year-old med student, whose repressed memory of this traumatic event from his childhood appears to be the cause of recurrent nightmares.  Joe is a victim of Legg Perthes Disease as a child—the disease is a physical, not a mental malady, and affects the hip joint, not the brain—a victim of the loss of his father, who dies when Joe is seven; a victim of poverty while growing up in Philadelphia’s Little Italy; and, as the novel opens, a victim of an unlikely murder plot which claims his mother and uncle and means to claim him also.

According to Northrop Frye’s Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance, some of the building blocks of the romance form of literature include a polarization or very clear delineation of ideal and abhorrent worlds and black-and-white characters like pieces in a chess game.[1] 

In Chasing Backwards, we have the idealistic world of medical school, education, and compassion for others, especially children, and the abhorrent world of poverty, both emotional and monetary, murder, and fraud, including corrupt police officers and ruthless hit men.  This abhorrent level seems to exist on another level, a morally lower level, or hell, in relation to the ordinary world.  In this world of violence and fraud, Joe is like a prisoner in a cage.  “My whole life is a damn cage,” he says at one point.  At another point, he says, “I’m a criminal.  I mean I’m not a criminal, but the whole world thinks I’m one.”

In one of his recurrent nightmares, Joe “is in a cage, my arms and legs wrapped in leather.”  It is only by trying to analyze his nightmares that Joe is able to unravel at least part of the mystery that compels the story:  who is trying to kill him and why?  The leather turns out to be a dream symbol for the leather restraints that bound him as a six-year-old boy.  The bed in which he was bound was like a “jail bed” and also a “cage.” 

Joe learns from the nurse who befriended him when he was at the hospital as a boy—her name is Sally Monero—of the strange and tragic story of the seemingly mentally ill nurse who abused him and of his parents’ last-resort attempt at an intervention with the help of an organized crime figure.

The author, Arthur Smukler, wants us to live in is a world of friendship, pick-up basketball games, coffees and scones at Starbucks, sweet-smelling fruity perfumes, love between one man and one woman, making love rather than having sex, and being trustworthy to neighbors and children.  The world Smukler doesn’t want is a world of violence, guns, deception, dishonesty, abuse, including child abuse, and disease.  In fact, it would seem that the untreated mental illness of the nurse who has Joe bound as a child—her name is Sarah—sets in motion the entire chain of murders that leads up to Joe’s own fight to stay alive.

And so we have the polarized world of starkly defined characters that Frye noticed to be characteristic of romance.  On the good side, we have Joe, Karen Levine (Joe’s true love), Lieutenant Barneggi (a good cop), Sally Monero (the good nurse), Jeff (Joe’s “best and oldest friend”), and by the end of the story, as if redeemed, Joe’s mother and uncle.  On the evil side, we have the policemen who attempt to assassinate Joe, the “Redhead” and “Wild Tie” hit men, the evil nurse, Sarah, and Tim Stevens, the organized crime figure, who appears to be behind all the gangland-engineered accidents and murders.

As Frye explained in The Secular Scripture, literature presents an illusion of logic and causality in the progression of one scene to another.  This illusion is of minimal concern in the romance form, which tends to be sensational, moving from one discontinuous episode to another.  In a romance, the action proceeds mainly by a simple “and then” logic while a more realistic story would attempt to supply more logic and causality, turning the transition from one episode to another into a “hence” progression.

The point is that the more true to the archetypal romance form a story is, the more episodic it is likely to be.  And if the story contains all the building blocks (archetypes) that have proved to make the form popular with readers over centuries, then the story should be successful in winning over a ready audience. 

As Frye says, “a sequence of archetypes, traditional fictional formulas or building blocks, has an interest in itself, however poor the logic or ‘hence’ narrative connecting them might be.”  So, we can accept much that would at first glance appear implausible on the strength of the way Smukler relies on the inherent power of the romance form itself to develop plausibility.

Which is what Frye appears to have meant when he said that “in the criticism of romance, we are led very quickly from what the individual work says to what the entire convention it belongs to is saying through the work.”  For this reason, as readers of romance, including mysteries, we are eager to root for the hero and see him or her emerge victorious.  Romance is not about losing but winning, solving the mystery, and returning to our true home and true identity, innocent as a child’s, in an idyllic world of safety, health, and wish fulfillment.

Arthur Smukler’s Chasing Backwards is available as an eBook for $2.99 and as a paperback for $9.99 from Amazon.com; Northrop Frye’s Secular Scripture is available as a paperback from Amazon.com for $26.00. 

Nike had beaten Tama apparently for having sex with Nike’s girlfriend at that time, for after Nike found out about the sex, Leila, the girlfriend, had cried rape, provoking the fight.  In the fight, Tama had stabbed Nike in the arm with his switchblade.

Later, Tama commences to harass Nike’s younger sister, Maia, for sex, even though Maia is no older than 14 and wants nothing to do with him.  As the novel opens, Tama and Mikey, a 14-year-old gang member with a crush on Maia, pursue her in an attempt at rape.  Just as she is about to get away, Tama stabs her in the back.  The police show up before Tama is able to consummate the rape and Maia is taken to the hospital.

Behind the Hood is not exactly a cogener to the wild American West novels of a writer like Louis L’Amour, but it would seem that Hansen would like us to understand Nike and his episode with the bat much in the way we would understand a L’Amour hero like Sackett in the novel of that name when Sackett says, speaking to Ange, a woman he wants to make his own:

“No, Ange, if the folks who believe in law, justice, and a decent life for folks are to be shot down by those who believe in violence, nothing makes much sense.  I believe in justice, I believe in being tolerating of other folks, but I pack a big pistol, ma’am, and will use it when needed.”

The villain of Behind the Hood, Tama, is a highly sexed, doped up, highly psychotic 18-year-old gang leader who carries a switchblade and uses it. The narrative closely follows his sexual exploits with one available woman after another, including a virgin, as he comes around to the obsession of seeking sex with Nike’s wife, all the while under the delusion that she actually desires him.

Pornographic actors probably know each other better than the characters who clash together in sex after a few moments’ meeting in Hansen’s book.  And just about all the characters get to know Middleton Hospital well, either as visitors or patients, not for STDs, but for the various betrayals (mostly sexual) and reprisals (mostly beatings) that occur.

According to the World Book Encyclopedia,New Zealand “is a beautiful country of snow-capped mountains, green lowlands, beaches, and many lakes and waterfalls.”  But this is far from the New Zealand Hansen portrays.  Her story is set in Claydon, a suburb of Auckland, which, the World Book says, is “New Zealand’s largest city and chief commercial center.”  Hansen says:  “Claydon, the shithole, was one of the most policed areas of Auckland.”

According to the World Book, “Nearly a third of the nation’s people live in the Auckland metropolitan area.” The Maori are descendants of Polynesians from the middle of the South Pacific who settled in New Zealand around 1200 AD, British immigrants arriving in the early 1800s. There are thus two main ethnic groups in New Zealand, the Maori, who make up about 15 percent of the population, and people of European ancestry, who make up roughly 70 percent of the population.

In Behind the Hood, we find ourselves in an environment where it is difficult to tell which people the characters belong to, white or Maori.  A character might have a “wide, flat nose” or wear an “afro” or have “lily white legs,” but that is as much as an indication of race as we get.  Nowhere does Hansen appear to come right out and say that a character is of Maori ancestry, or even European ancestry, for that matter. 

Hansen herself looks white, as we know, from her picture on Twitter.  But it would be difficult to tell that from the way Behind the Hood is written.  The style is journalistic.  Hansen appears to avoid metaphor, preferring to narrate from each character’s point of view in the way each might talk, it would seem, in ordinary conversation. 

Each chapter in the book is written from one of the characters’ point of view.  There are more chapters from Tama’s point of view than any other character, and the book’s cover appears to be a portrait of Tama, for the cover depicts what appears to be a Maori boy with a distinctive tattoo on his head.  As described by Maia, “He’d shaved off his hair recently, replacing it with a curved pattern called a moko.  Usually the tattoo adorned the face, a sign of a Maori warrior—something to be proud of.”

The story builds toward Nike’s revenge on Tama for the stabbing of Maia and Tama’s deluded quest to have sex with Nike’s wife, Jess, a quest Tama stubbornly pursues when he just as well might have sought safety somewhere, “up north,” for example, where his uncle happens to be in prison.

For Americans, such a character as Tama might well call to mind a shadowy figure from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  Melville’s description of this character does not fit Tama, of course, as well as a hoodie and jeans:

Ahab’s demonic harpooneer, Fedallah, “was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations . . .”

Behind the Hood is the first book in a series.  The next book, due out in 2012, is Behind the Tears.  Behind the Hood is presently available as an eBook for $2.99 or a paperback for $12.99 from Amazon.com.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

As Sparrow says, he has “dog-rolled / in a cow dung of love.”  Dirty, rough, animalistic perhaps, love is still the opposite of that ugly, puerile lust that fascinates him in the picture he draws of “breasts, erotic gaping lips / damp silky gussets, / and sundry porno clefts” in “Gallery.”

Sparrow has “no Faith,” he claims in “Bavarian Cemetery.”  For Sparrow, Faith, religion, is like a label or brand that advertises itself as if from a store shelf of crass materialism.  The trouble with materialism, and the reason that goes with it, is that too much of experience makes no sense, especially in the adult sexual world which can become like an “alley” where “a trembling bitch / fucks a pack of sperm rage dogs.” 

In “Bargain Bin,” the poet picks up or attempts to pick up a woman as if in a bargain store like Walmart where, as the poet says, “I too come cheap.”  The impulse to pick up a woman in such a scenario contrasts sharply with the desire to pick up and throw a stone, since the pickup of the woman is done in “desperation” and throwing a stone is not desperate, but the opposite, “careless.”

Love must be snatched like a stone from the shore of nature, not from the shelf of commercialism.  Love is there for the taking if it can only be recognized for what it is, a spontaneous expression of play, a kiss in a meadow “where the iris blaze their summer / whoever you are / wherever now the meadow.” 

Hence to gather bluebells is as if “to snatch a prisoner,” the prisoner of “any labeled plan” like religion, say, which cannot adequately account for “the rhythm of this Earth— / this soul of blueness.”  Yet the bluebell is a “mortal flower,” however “rooted in our winters past.”

The mystery of death confronts the poet throughout the book.  He stands perplexed before Oscar Wilde’s grave, unable to pay proper homage, unable to “make some remark / about an after-life.”  He even speaks in “L’Importanza di Essere Oscar,” the name he gives to this poem, of his “brand of love,” using “brand,” a pejorative term for him, as if even he is unable to escape the pollution of his own inmost and most reverent self by the commercialism he despises.

In “Conkers,” Sparrow finds a tragic peace that engenders a “sudden surge of joy, and tears” as he contemplates the tree in his garden that has grown from a conker he planted ten years before.  Unlike the crows in “Beak,” the blackbird that perches to sing in this tree does not threaten to make him a Promethean hero.  “Know it. / It has always known you,” Sparrow cries out like Prometheus in “Beak,” with the “Beak of Time / wheedling in / to inner thinner spaces, / the bone and tendon places.”

Sparrow values tears.  His view of nature and humanity’s place in nature is tragic.  The singer Edith Piaf’s “each sadness” creates “a longing for tears.”  Yet there are no tears in his steadfast view of the raindrop that can “kiss away its path of life/ on the lips of a dying rose,” here a Blakean rose on which Blake, as we remember, found a worm. 

Each one of us must thus find the compassion to reach down “within the bucket of self” for the “melancholy rag” that can “wipe the mouth” of the “soul,” way down as Yeats once put it, “in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”  Would it not be appropriate in ascending to what Northrop Frye called the archetypal level of symbolism to ask if the others that “speed by / down the Damascus Road” in another poem, “Engine Management Light,”  are on the same Damascus road that Paul once traversed when experiencing his conversion, “facing the question –  / my question”?

The poet gives the name of ELTON to someone who has died without a name, and who thus represents an alter ego for any author or any person who fears to leave this world without having achieved some level of fame, that is, by making a name for himself or herself.

Elton, whose animalistic nature, like that perhaps of a fish, is alive in the “turn of tail” and “flick of eye” that characterize him, speaks with a “silent movie mouth,” as if making no sound because he is also importantly, like the strangers abed together in “I Threw a Stone,” underwater, and thus like any storyteller or poet in this life a “raconteur in bubbles,” seemingly unable to really communicate. 

By having received a name, however, Elton is also able to leave, as we know from Christian mythology that only Christ and Peter could do, a “footprint in the water.”  Maintaining our focus on the archetypal level of symbolism in these words, we recall that Christ not only called on Peter to walk on water, he gave Peter his name, which is a round about way of coming to the idea that it takes faith of a kind that borders on religion to be a poet, like God to give names to people and things, and like Jesus, who is also mythologically the living word, to accomplish miracles, if not in fact, at least in language.

I Threw a Stone is available for $4.99 as an eBook from Amazon.com along with a free audiobook of the poet reading his poems.

Her identity as cop just does not seem to fit the possibilities for a romantic relationship which begin to unfold in the cab, and so Anna commences to lie about her true identity as the beautiful man comes on to her:  “She smiled at his smoothness.  He was deceiving her, she was sure of that.  She was paying him back in kind.”

As the story unravels, Freddie turns out to have secrets of his own to conceal.  If one stands back from the story, one can see the shadowy containing form of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.  Both Cupid and Psyche were knockout beautiful.  Cupid did not want Psyche to ever see his true beauty, however, for fear she would no longer love him in the right way.  To use a term from Northrop Frye’s style of archetypal criticism, this theme of Cupid’s desire to conceal his true identity is displaced mainly into the character of Anna, though it is also still present in Freddie’s character.  Anna fears that if Freddie ever finds out she is really a cop, he won’t love her. 

There are other parallels with the myth of Cupid and Psyche in the novel.  Like Cupid’s palace, Freddie’s world is a world of wealth and abundance.  But Freddie is not only wealthy materially, he is sensually wealthy as well, not to speak of being well read, the son of a poet, and fluent in English and French.

Freddie is the ultimate turn-on and Anna has no trouble in coming to multiple orgasms with him.  But the sex is not just a matter of technique.  Freddie has it all, the complete package, from wealth to wisdom to six-pack abs.  With Freddie, Anna felt “separated and safe.”  Safety is a feeling Freddie, the champion boxer who is also an owner of a restaurant and a vineyard, provides Anna in full, a very physical as well as emotional safety.

Granting the wealth of evidence that exists on the elusiveness of orgasm for many, possibly even most, women during sex with a man, there is no question that with the many depictions of perfectly synchronized sex Anna achieves with Freddie in Knockout, we are finally at home among the gods. 

In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Psyche transgresses Cupid’s wish that she never see him.  For betraying his trust, Cupid leaves Psyche.  To get him back, Psyche undergoes a series of trials set for her by Cupid’s mother, Venus, goddess of love and beauty, the last of which involves a trip to the underworld.  Psyche accomplishes this task but ends up overcome in a spell-binding sleep.

In Knockout, everything comes down to the fight with Billy “The Boulder” Brennan, a “dangerous street fighting brawler.”   The Mob, also known as the underworld, is behind Brennan, and the mob gets hold of Anna as a kind of hostage.  She falls into the hands of hit man Mauro Tondelli, who puts her to sleep with a chemical like chloroform when he captures her, that is, after Freddie discovers he has been betrayed and ends up leaving Anna. 

In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid rescues Psyche and, feeding her ambrosia, turns her into an immortal.  “So all came to a most happy end,” as Edith Hamilton wrote:  “Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other; and that union could never be broken.”

Does Calin’s story have a happy ending like the myth?   You’ll have to read Knockout to find out.  Knockout is presently available as an eBook from Amazon.com for 99 cents.

The literal level presents us with the hypothetical meanings of the words themselves in relation to each other within the poem.  This level is the most basic level of meaning.  On the literal level, the words, “a morning after,” pose us a question:  a morning after what?

On the symbolic level, we add an extra level of meaning to the words.  This level is the level of metaphor as comparison.  On this level, morning, sunshine, and light are “waiting” for us like different people who can be found as the result of a search.  To find morning, we have to undergo a journey or quest across a “bridge,” followed by an ascent, or “climb” to some higher level where morning becomes like a place we reach, a distant “shore.”

The archetypal level of the lyrics unites our experience of the poem with our knowledge of mythology as a source of basic patterns that travel throughout a culture, permeating its imaginative forms.  Here we have a solar myth—a God of light like Christ whose “escape” from this world across the “storm” of his death to the distant “shore” of heaven after death is also like the return of the sun to the sky after night.

Anagogically, we have the story of resurrection, or the hope that there will be life after death, the morning after the storm of this life has passed.  This level presents the story of the soul, or if you prefer, human mortality in view of the possibilities for eternal life suggested by the cycle of nature, the mornings that continue to come after each night, without fail, “while we’re living,” in spite of “time,” especially “night” and “darkness”:  there’s got to be life after death.

Because of the symbolic richness of the lyrics to “There’s Got to Be a Morning After,” it would seem to be no accident that this song won an academy award for Best Original Song in 1972. All four levels of meaning—literal, symbolic, archetypal, and anagogic—work to make the song into a little masterpiece on morning, life, resurrection, and the hope of an afterlife.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

Interviewer:  Do you think art should be personal or objective?  Like a newspaper—treating things that affect many many people, not just one, not just your personal experience, but experience for all people—which do you prefer in art?

Kasa:  I agree with you [Joshua].  Art can be personal.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  If you communicate well about your personal experience, it’s no longer personal.

Joshua:  Right.  It’s your job to communicate with other people, to make the personal universal.

Interviewer:  So you can paint family members—that’s fine.  You can paint your son—you can paint him if you do a good job.  Right.  If you’re professional.  It’s the same for poetry and literature, right?

Kasa:  Yes.

Joshua:  We agree.  Because that woman, Joanne Greenberg, who wrote the book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about her personal experience with mental illness, she brushed off our book, Portraits, because she said it was too personal.  It was personal, so she refused to write a blurb for our book’s cover.  But her own writing in Rose Garden seemed to me to be pure personal writing.

Kasa:  Because the paintings were mostly members of our family—that apparently upset her.

Joshua:  T.S. Eliot talked about the objective correlative.  As I understand that, he meant that you could find an objective way of presenting any emotion, even a personal one.

Interviewer:  You like T.S. Eliot?

Joshua:  He was a snobbish man who represented rich people.  I liked Dreiser better, and Melville.  I side with the working class. That’s why in music I like the Beatles.

Interviewer:  Let’s talk about the working class.  Your family was from the working class, although your father became a doctor.

Joshua:  That is true.

Interviewer:  You even went to Landon School, an exclusive private school in the affluent Washington suburb of Bethesda.

Joshua:  Yes I did.  I dropped out after 10^th grade because I simply couldn’t square the Landon experience with my own background.  My father’s father was a coal miner.  My mother’s father was an adding machine repairman.  At the time I left Landon, I identified with black people and saw myself as a kind of revolutionary.

Interviewer:  Are you still a revolutionary?

Joshua:  Very much so.

Interviewer:  Tell me about your revolution?

Joshua:  Well, I read Marx’s Capital and I think I understood a good part of it, but I haven’t been able to understand the way Marx’s teachings got twisted in the Soviet Union and China to justify political despotism and tyranny, mass murder, and persecution of millions of people.  My head never got twisted around to think that I could glorify communism.  It certainly wasn’t the answer.  But capitalism is not the answer, either.  I believe in social and economic equality among all people; social equality which would include the underprivileged like my wife, who is deaf, and the poor, who have every right to all the privileges that rich people presently enjoy.  The world is a big place.  There’s plenty for everyone here.  Let’s share with each other.

Interviewer:  As in utopia?

Joshua:  Yes, as in utopia.

Interviewer:  We finally got around to talking about your idea of economic equality. 

Joshua:  Yes.

Interviewer:  How would you implement your idea?

Joshua:  Well, I’m not a politician.  I was interested in communes when I was in college, but I read about them in a book and the book I read unwittingly revealed the alpha males of any commune ended up with all the desirable women.  The communes simply reenacted the selfishness of the greater society.  For that reason, I knew they wouldn’t work.  There had to be another answer.

Interviewer:  Like what?

Joshua:  I don’t know.  I don’t have the answer to that.  I only know what doesn’t work so far.  This society doesn’t work.  There should be no poor people.  There should be no excluded people, like deaf people and mentally ill people.  What I have chosen to do to bring about change is present my conflict with the present system, just as graphically and powerfully as I could.

Interviewer:  Mythology is very important to you.  As Northrop Frye would put it, you are or seem to be in the midst of fighting with society’s myths of concern in an ongoing fight for freedom.

Joshua:  That is true.  I stand for freedom and so I find myself continually fighting with the antiquated and prejudicial and often stupid mythology we have inherited.

Interviewer:  Yet you try to see the good in that mythology.  You don’t reject it all?

Joshua:  Yes, I continue to be Catholic, for example.

Interviewer:  Do you see the story of Christ as a myth?

Joshua:  I do in the sense that Frye does.  As a writer, I understand the story of Christ as a central story of Western culture.  As a person, I understand it as a mystery far too great for my rational understanding.  It has to be accepted on faith.

Interviewer:  So you believe Christ was a historical personage?

Joshua:  Yes, I do.  But as Frye said, the historical Christ is not the real Christ.  The Gospels were not interested, Frye said, in presenting the historical Christ.  They were interested in presenting the mythical one. That’s why the Gospels are such bad history.

Interviewer:  What is the mythical Christ?

Joshua:  It’s everything Christ stood for—the poor, the excluded, the oppressed, the persecuted.  Love for all, not just for the winners, but for the losers also.  Some who are first will be last, and some who are last will be first.

Interviewer:  Would you like to end our discussion on that note?

Joshua:  It seems as good a stopping point as any other.

Interviewer:  How do you feel, Kasa?

 Kasa:  Fine with me.

 Interviewer:  Well, thank you both for sharing with me.  Thank you very much.

 Joshua:  Thank you.

 Kasa:  Thank you.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

Joshua:  You told me the classes [in Seoul,Korea] were not heated.  You told me when you sat in class you could see your breath go white.

Kasa:  If it went down to zero, they added a little heat.  You had three pairs of socks on.  Shoes.  Your feet would be freezing.  You weren’t permitted to wear your coat in class.  You had on a long sleeve shirt and under it, you’d wear a couple sweaters.  You’d bring a pillow to sit on on your chair and warm it up.  Everyone wore a uniform.  The bathroom was way off outside.  The teachers had a bathroom down the end of the hall, but you weren’t allowed to use it.  Students had to go outside to the toilet outside which was just like a hole in the ground.  You could see everything in it.  The bathroom had a cement foundation with a hole.   It smelled horrible.  It would make your eyes burn to look into it.  I could never shit in that hole; I only peed in it.  There were windows way up high.  The men used the same bathroom as the women and at the same time.  There might be a man in there peeing.  There was no rape.  No one was afraid.  There were two stalls for women, one stall for men, and two pee places for men.  They had another bathroom outside the library, just as primitive.  (You had to bring your own toilet paper for the bathroom—there was no toilet paper.)

When you entered class, you had to take off your shoes and put on white slippers because they didn’t have a vacuum to clean up dirt dragged in on shoes.  Your feet would freeze in those slippers.  When we had a break, we would go outside and try to warm ourselves in the sun.

Interviewer:  OK, did you ever have homework from school?

Kasa:  I had math homework.

Joshua:  Did you do it?  Or did you get your sister to help you or what?

Kasa:  I did it myself.  Lousy.  I didn’t understand math.  I understood Korean history.  Mostly, I did a lot of sewing.  Knitting.

Interviewer:  Would you make clothes for yourself?

Kasa:  I made things for the school and they would sell what I made and give me nothing.  I had to do it for credit to get a grade.

Interviewer:  You made clothes for adults or for kids, which?  What size?

Kasa:  Rugs.  I made rugs.

Interviewer:  You didn’t make clothes?

Kasa:  Other kids made clothes.  I made rugs.  I knitted them.  I found the teacher would keep things I made for her house, to make her house look nice.  My brother, who was deaf, asked me what I was doing and he would get angry.  He would get angry and face the teacher and ask why I was making rugs, not for the school?  He would get angry and face the teacher.  He even went to the president’s secretary and said, “This is illegal what you’re doing.  I don’t permit her to do that.  That’s for your home.  Better she should study.  Why are you doing that?  It’s no good for her!”  One woman was fired because of that.  She hated my brother.  He wanted deaf people to have a good education.  Deaf people were supposed to be very skilled in making things like rugs and clothes.

Interviewer:  All right.

Kasa:  I was very patient.  I had a hard time at that school.  I suffered so much.  Americans are spoiled but Americans are smart.  They get a good education.

Joshua:  Right, right.  They get a different education.  You got what’s called . . .

Kasa:  National Government School.  It was not free.  Deaf people had to pay for registration.  It was supposed to be free but the school did accept money.

Interviewer:  So you feel like your education was a waste of time?  A waste of your life, like jail?

Kasa:  There were fun things.  Deaf people were all together like a big family.  Deaf people enjoyed being together and talking.  It was great.  There was no education.  The teachers were very strict authority figures.  There was one teacher who used to molest me by kissing me all over and hugging me.  I would scream—I didn’t want it—and fight with him and he would hold me and hug me.  The man was deaf himself.

Interviewer:  How old was he?

Kasa:  He was around 40 and I was 14 or 15, 16—from age 14 to 18.  Wait a minute:  8^th, 9^th, 10^th, 11^th . . .

Joshua:  Twelfth grade is the last grade in high school.

Kasa:  In 8^th and 9^th grade I was mature and beautiful.  10^th, 11^th, 12^th.  In 12^th grade he let up on me.  He liked me because I was thin.  Thin and tall.  I don’t know.  Other teachers liked me too.  But they didn’t abuse me the way he did.  Only one deaf man did that.  There were two girls he used to hug and kiss, me and one other, but mostly me.  This was the deaf man who told the funny stories in class. Deaf people liked and respected him because he supported deaf people.  Of course, he abused me.

Joshua:  When you saw him you used to try and escape. He would grab you.  If you were alone in a hall, you’d try to escape and he would catch you.  How did you escape him once he got you?

Kasa:  I would punch him and everything, pull his hair, punch him.  He was a big man.  He would almost break my ribs squeezing me. He would kiss me all over—on the lips, on the cheeks . . .

Joshua:  What did other student do when they saw that?  They were just quiet?

Kasa:  They were just quiet—they permitted it.

Joshua:  Did they think you would become a prostitute or anything?

Kasa:  No, it was the teacher himself, not me.  I was just defending myself.  He would mess up my clothes and everything.

Interviewer:  Kasa was abused.  Were you abused, Joshua?  Do you have that in common with her?

Joshua:  Yes, I was.  However, I was not abused sexually.  And I had a great youth.  My father was an alcoholic, but I steered clear of him as much as possible, like Huck with Pap in Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.  My problems came as an adult.

Interviewer:  What do you mean? 

Joshua:  I had experiences like the ones I describe for my character, Moody Santo, in Other World.

Interviewer:  How so?

Joshua:  Well, the plot may be fiction, but the characterization is true to my own experience.

Interviewer:  Do you have mental illness?

Joshua:  I can’t answer that.

Interviewer:  Why not?

Joshua:  Let’s just say I based my novel on personal experience, which includes direct experience and what I would call analogies of experience.  I will not say anything more than that.

Interviewer:  Is this an example of your muteness?

Joshua:  Yes.  Someone who is mute is not necessarily someone who can’t talk, but someone who doesn’t talk.

Interviewer:  Well, Kasa does not seem to be mute the way you are.  When given the chance, she talks freely about herself.

Joshua:  And I think that’s great because her muteness consists mainly in her not being able to speak vocally.  But she also is reluctant, as you may have already seen, to speak up in most social situations, even with deaf people.

Interviewer:  [To Kasa]  Is that true?

Kasa:  Yes.

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

Next time I came to visit, Christmas decorations were up.  Kasa and Joshua’s tiny house was just as cozy as ever.  We sat together, quite comfortably, in their living room.  Using Joshua as my interpreter, I started by saying to Kasa:

Interviewer:  You are deaf and you can’t talk.  That means you’re mute.  Some people in the past talked about being dumb, deaf and dumb, but deaf people don’t like to hear that kind of expression any more.  How do you see yourself:  as mute or deaf or what?  Tell me.

Kasa:  I don’t know.  I like to read in English.  So I can remember things.  Deaf people today go to college and use interpreters to help them learn and they’re not mute.  They can write what they feel. 

Interviewer:  You and Joshua have called your art “Mute Art.”  What do you think about the idea of mute art?  That’s a different thing than being mute as a deaf person, right?  Mute art means you don’t know how to talk about your art with other people.  Is that right?

Kasa:  Deaf people can think, talk:  if they’re educated, they’re not mute.  I’m mute, yes (I can talk a little).  In Korea, my sisters and brothers didn’t tell me about what was happening.  They didn’t keep me informed.  I didn’t read.  I came to the United States.  I was behind in my English.  Art?  I don’t know.  Painting?  What?  You have to read a lot to know how to express yourself.  If you don’t read, you’re called mute like me.

Interviewer:  What does mute art mean to you?

Kasa:  It means I’m quiet.

Joshua:  It means we don’t know how to talk about our art with other people.  [To Kasa]  You agree with that?

Kasa:  My teacher, Professor Van Nistrooy, is very skilled as a painter, but still, he can’t explain his art well.  He seemed mute himself.  He could show something was wrong in the way perspective was set up or the composition.  But to tell me a story about the art, he wasn’t professional.  My husband tells a good story about a painting, but my two teachers, Mr. Van Nistrooy and Un Young, a Korean teacher who happens to have made it here in America, were not able to do that.  Value, shadow, composition—that’s all.

Interviewer:  Do you agree with your husband that your art is mute art?

Kasa:  [To Joshua]  “Is your art mute art?”

Joshua:  Yes, I feel like I’m mute.  I can’t express myself about my writing with anyone.  I don’t know how to express myself.  So when I see my own art, I feel mute.  I don’t know how to talk about it.

Kasa:  I think you’re much better at expressing yourself about your art than Mr. Van Nistrooy or Un Young.  Do you agree with that?

Joshua:  I haven’t met them, so I don’t know.

Kasa:  You’re very imaginative; they aren’t.

Interviewer:  [To Kasa] OK, well, tell me about your education.  Did you get a good education in Korea?

Kasa:  Nothing.  Nothing.  Because the teachers themselves used grammar with sign language.  I was deaf, so I didn’t understand them.  They knew nothing about deaf culture.  They were the same as all hearing people.  Deaf people have to use KSL [Korean Sign Language], but those teachers didn’t know it.  So I had to guess what they were saying.  I could understand one deaf teacher who used to tell great stories about himself because he used KSL.

There were two deaf teachers.  One was married to a hearing woman who had gone to a highly prestigious university and was a pharmacist.  Deaf people did not like this teacher because he was a snob.  But he did know KSL and could entertain us with interesting stories.  On Sundays, he was a missionary in our church, but in class he liked to tell off-color jokes.  He was a hypocrite who refused to support my brother’s dream to become a teacher, even though my brother took private English lessons (tutoring) from him. He taught English and acted as an advisor to deaf students.  The bastard used to pick on me in class.  I was very shy and would go beet red when he compared me to my deaf brother and sister and told me I was stupid compared to them—in front of the whole class. 

The other deaf teacher taught practical math.  Deaf people liked him because he supported deaf people.    

Joshua:  Your school was very strict.  In the morning you would parade around the grounds and exercise together like communists.  Sometimes teachers would abuse students physically.  Like you told me one time, you were talking in math class and you weren’t paying attention and the teacher beat you with a stick, a pole, what?  Metal?  A metal rod?  A wooden rod, like about three feet long, that he held with both hands?

Kasa:  He held it in both hands.  I was very bored.  The teacher was talking.  Another girl was interpreting what he said into KSL.  She loved math.  I wasn’t interested.  All the other girls were bored.  Only one or two were paying attention.

Interviewer:  You were talking a little with another kid and he caught you?

Kasa:  He caught me and came over and stood in front of me and said, “Who are you talking to?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  The other girl said, “Don’t tell him—be quiet.”  He said, “You’re not going to tell me?”  He took the pole and he hit me over and over, in the head, and in the stomach.

Joshua:  [Seeing Kasa is reluctant to go on]  You’re not going to tell us?  That has nothing to do with you!  He did it, not you!  Why are you ashamed to tell that to other people?  Are you scared?  What are you scared of?  He abused you; you did not abuse him!  You did nothing wrong.  Why are you embarrassed?

Kasa:  He hit me hard.  I fell down.  He continued to hit me.  I was covering my head with my arms.  He was hitting my arms and continually beating me.  Crying and screaming, I hurt so much I didn’t know what was happening.  I was 13 years old.

Joshua:  So you immediately went home without telling the school, without telling the principal or anything.  You went home—what happened?  You just left school.  Your mother said nothing.  Your mother saw the bruises?  Did you have any bruises?  No one said anything about it?  Next day did your mother go to school with you?

Kasa:  Nothing.  The principal was inaccessible.  You couldn’t talk to the principal as you can here in the United States.  Other times, one teacher ordered a girl to the front of the class and punched her three times in the stomach.  Another teacher had a girl come to the front of the class and hold her hands out.  He hit her twenty times on the top and bottom of her hands, 20 times with a wooden baton.

Interviewer:  Wow, they were abusive there, weren’t they?  That sounds absolutely terrible! 

Kasa:  We were innocent kids.  The teacher who beat me was a young, handsome man.  He was new at the school and didn’t know me.  I felt like the teacher made a big mistake. 

Interviewer:  He sure did.

Kasa:  That teacher was the most boring teacher in the school.  He just concentrated on math and math only.  He told no interesting stories about himself or anyone else.  You just couldn’t pay attention to him.

Joshua:  You were telling me once that if you even came late to class, the teachers would make you crumple up paper and wash windows.

Kasa:  It was discipline to wash the windows with newspaper balled up, and wash the windows without water or rag.  You had to clean the windows with your own breath.  Water and rag would make it easy.  We would clean the windows in the teachers’ offices.  Sometimes the boys would slip us a rag that we would quickly use and then hide in our pocket and go back to the balled paper before any teacher could see us.

Another disciplinary measure the teachers used was to have us shine the wooden floors to the school’s halls.  How did we do this?  First we’d rub a candle on the floor to make it waxy, then we’d take a glass mug like for drinking beer and rub the wax into the wood with the bottom of it.  After that, we would buff the floor shiny with a rag.

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

Joshua:  Hey, can we get off the subject of where I’m from?  I’m from God who is our home.  I’m really not from any other place.

Interviewer:  You believe in God?

Joshua:  Yes, I do.

Interviewer:  Are you a member of any particular religion?

Joshua:  I’m Catholic.

Interviewer:  How do you square that with being a disciple of Northrop Frye?

Joshua:  I have no trouble with that.  You can examine a crucifix as a collection of atoms or as a religious symbol.  Either way, neither view should conflict with your beliefs.  The crucifix is still a crucifix, whether you look at it atomically or symbolically.

Interviewer:  Some people would say it is only a collection of atoms.

Joshua:  They would have an incomplete view of the crucifix then.

Interviewer:  What would the complete view be?

Joshua:  I’m not sure.  But it would include the importance the crucifix has had for Western culture from prehistoric times to the present, including the metaphysical importance.

Interviewer:  What would the metaphysical importance be?

Joshua:  Well, on one part would surely be that Hitler was defeated in World War II. Israel once again became a nation.  And countless people have depended on their belief in God to overcome the selfishness, greed, and cruelty that seem to rule this world.

Interviewer:  Couldn’t all that be blamed on our animal ancestry—on instinct?

Joshua:  Maybe.  But I prefer the Bible.  You said that I was a disciple of Frye’s.  That’s kind of a strange word to use—disciple.  Frye was not Christ, just a literary scholar and critic.  I suppose you could call me a follower of Frye’s, but even that might be misleading.  I believed him when he said that biblical and classical symbolism permeate and inform the entirety of Western literature, acting like a kind of key to its symbolism and meaning.

Interviewer:  So why do you need religion?

Joshua:  Well, my religion is something apart from literary criticism.  It no longer sees the crucifix as a collection of atoms, even by means of Frye’s brand of science.  It sees religion as something beyond science, that is, metaphysical.  As of yet, I have neither seen nor heard of any explanation for it better than the one I have heard since my earliest consciousness, that there is a God, that there is only one God, that he is all-knowing and all-powerful, and that he has worked through history and through the church to influence the course of human history.  I don’t think I would believe this with scientific evidence to the contrary, but I have never seen any such evidence.  Even the Catholic Church accepts evolution as a possible explanation for the creation of human beings.  Let me just say that because I don’t understand or can’t fully explain why I am Catholic doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be Catholic.  The world is full of irrationality.  If religion seems at times irrational, so be it.  I only know it has done much good in my life and when I really needed help from other people, religious people stepped in to help me.

Interviewer:  What kind of help did you need?

Joshua:  I needed help and let’s just leave it at that.  Psychologists always talk about help and how much they want to give it to you.  When I really needed help, priests stood behind me with an encouraging word, the right word, the word I needed to hear.  That was all the help I needed.  Such encouragement did not come from psychologists.  They did not know the word.  They did not know that God loved me, no matter who I was, and that I deserved to be treated with the respect that every human being deserves and nothing less.

Interviewer:  You sound like you’re distrustful of psychologists.

Joshua:  This is just another subject I’d like to avoid.  Can we skip to something less personal, like my creative writing?

Interviewer:  Well, if you would prefer, we can talk about something else.  I have no problem with that.

Joshua:  Religion is something personal.  I feel no need to justify my faith to any other person than to myself and to God.  I am not a theologian, but if I ever get into theology, I’ll let you know.  I doubt I will.  I simply don’t have time.  Besides, I trust the church to take care of that for me.  With all the mistakes the church has made, historically and even recently, I still trust it, so if you want answers to why Catholics believe as they do, go to the people who can answer you.  As I’ve already said, to me the world is not a rational place.  In that context, my religion makes perfect sense to me.

Interviewer:  Let’s talk about Other World.

Joshua:  All right.

Interviewer:  It’s a fascinating book.  How long did it take you to write it?

Joshua:  About eighteen years, but there are some parts of it that were written over thirty years ago.

Interviewer:  Were you trying to create something like a mini-replica of the Bible, something like an episodic epic connected as little books?

Joshua:  I think you’ve perceived exactly what I tried to do.  For much of the time I worked on the book, however, I did not know exactly what I was doing.  Finally, what had been an unconscious process became conscious and the form of the book suddenly became clear to me. 

Interviewer:  You certainly have incorporated the theme of death and resurrection in a way few, if any writers, ever have.

Joshua:  Thank you.  I am proud of what I’ve done.  But, you see, just as many authors have said—a book actually writes itself and the author merely gets it down on paper, though it’s actually a much more complex process than that.  I named the author of my book Garden Urthark.  I felt that what I was getting down on paper had special significance, something like, but not the same as, sacred scripture.  Other World is what Northrop Frye called the secular scripture of romance.  It’s important but will never have the importance or authority of myth or religion.  I am still Catholic.  I have not given myself up in any way to the worship of a literary work of art, which would be idolatry.

Interviewer:  As the name Garden Urthark suggests and as you say in the explanation you give for the name in the back of Portraits, a garden is simply the human shape you wish to give to nature and the books you write are like an ark in which you wish to preserve what has traditionally been called an imitation of nature, a replica of model of nature or an action, as is sometimes also said, in literary art.  We haven’t spoken much of your wife’s art or of the graphic forms—rectangles, circles, spheres—that you sometimes use in place of words in your writing.

Joshua:  How about if we get to that next time we meet?

Interviewer:  Sounds good to me.

We had much more to talk about and agreed to meet in another week, next time with Kasa present.  Like William Blake and William Morris, Kasa and Joshua publish their own work through their own publishing company, Edizione del Cuore.  Just by talking with Josh, I felt I had glimpsed something of the vision of love and freedom Garden Urthark was supposed to be about, yet not through a discussion of any governmental or legislative changes.  The revolution was all in a change of perspective and the energy behind the change to make the revolution real. 

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

Imagine that I am also a World War II veteran and that I was a tank commander:  a miserable piece of business that was—there was nothing heroic about it.  I’ve known pain and I’ve known suffering.  I know the consequences of standing up for what you believe in.

On a cold winter morning in January of 2010, I interviewed Josh and Kasa at their tiny home in Kensington, Maryland.

Interviewer:  Joshua, are you the author of Other World? 

Joshua:  I am the writer, not the author.

Interviewer:  Who is Garden Urthark? 

Joshua:  Garden Urthark is the author.

Interviewer:  How could the writer not be the author?

Joshua:  Authorship is a group effort; even when people go down on a title page as the author of a book, they are inevitably members of one group or another and whether consciously or unconsciously expressing the thoughts and feelings of that group.

Interviewer:  Can’t say I really follow you.  Please explain.

Joshua:  I say on a special explanatory page in the back of my book, Portraits Deep in the Castle, that Garden Urthark is an “enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.”  That revolutionary process is what wrote Portraits—and Other World—not me.  I was just one part in the process.  Other parts include, say, the Beatles, whose music affected not only me but millions of people.  If you want me to simplify what I’m saying even more, I could say, as you already have for me, that Garden Urthark is a name for a group—a name like, “The Beatles”—and Kasa and I are members of that group.

Interviewer:  If you will remember, the Beatles were not so keen on revolution.  John Lennon said, “You can count me out.”

Joshua:  John Lennon said, “When you talk about destruction,” you could count him out.  I would agree with that.  I am not in favor of any kind of violent revolution.

Interviewer:  You seem to like the Beatles quite a lot.  In fact, you say as much in the final essay of Portraits.

Joshua:  When I was a boy, I bought every single Beatle 45 record when it came out.  Then I bought each album when it came out.  But I didn’t buy Revolver.  I thought that album couldn’t have been authentic.  I didn’t  believe the Beatles would make an album with a title like that.  So I didn’t buy it for years. 

Interviewer:  Did you recognize any of the songs that were on the album?

Joshua:  No, but I bought a tape of the album many years later, when I was in my thirties, and I loved it.

Interviewer:  What did you like about it?

Joshua:  I liked “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “For No One” best on Revolver.  But let’s not talk too much about the Beatles.  A good number of readers would have no idea what we we’re talking about.

Interviewer:  Maybe if you explained a little they would be able to understand better.

Joshua:  I’m not capable of it.  I haven’t memorized the lyrics to all the Beatles’ songs.  A lot of times I have no idea what they’re saying and even if I do, I’m unable to remember the lyrics even if I do understand them, not that they’re not good.  Don’t get me wrong:  the Beatles are an experience.  They are not a set of lyrics.  The music, the people, the lyrics—all of that—including the popularity and fame of the group, goes into the experience that the  Beatles are, not just any one thing.  With so much going on, anyone who wants to sit down and discuss the merits of a rhyme between “hand” and “understand” is missing something.  Oh, I know people do it.  I’m just not that kind of person.  (Laughs.)

Interviewer:  (Laughs.)  Let’s talk about you a minute.  Where are you from?

Joshua:  I’m from Washington, DC, although I was born in Suburban Hospital, which is in Bethesda.  I lived in Washington at the time.  I lived in Washington for the first four years of my life, over by the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Military Road in Northwest.  Right near Fort Stevens and Nativity Church.

Interviewer:  I see.  Did you know Lincoln almost got shot at Fort Stevens?

Joshua:  Yeah, I read that Oliver Wendell Holmes yelled at him to duck down or something.

Interviewer:  (Laughs.)  How did you like Washington?

Joshua:  I loved it.  My great aunt lived down near North Capitol Street and Florida Avenue somewhere.  She rented the upstairs of a row house and I used to love to visit her because every time I saw her she gave me a Hershey bar.

Interviewer:  That was nice.  Where did you go after DC?

Joshua:  We moved to Norfolk,Virginia.  My dad got his first job as a radiologist there.

Interviewer:  So you moved to Norfolk.  How did you like it there?  Want to tell me about it?

Joshua:  We rented a little house.  Up to that time, we had lived in apartments.  A crazy boy was supposed to have lived in the house next to ours.  His name was Sonny.  I don’t remember ever seeing him.  But one time he swung me around by the legs and threw me in a bush.  I remember that.  He was a lot older than I was.

Interviewer:  That’s too bad.  That must have hurt.

Joshua:  I remember thinking:  well, I finally met Sonny and he was crazy.

Interviewer:  How long did you live in Norfolk? 

Joshua:  One year.  We moved back to Washington when my dad got a job in a radiology firm here.  We lived one year in Silver Spring and then moved to Bethesda, where I lived from age seven onward, till I finished graduate school at age 24.

Interviewer:  Interesting.

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available free for a limited time from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.