It’s how I feel these days.
Stranger in a Strange Land is the title of a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1961 …
A child born during a failed mission from Earth to Mars remains the only survivor and is raised by Martians, only to return to earth two decades later, hitching back with another, successful mission. Brought up by Martians, he is now an alien encountering aliens …
The book makes worthwhile reading, even more relevant now then it was decades ago. The title came to mind recently, and it also brought up a precious connected memory.
During the late 70s, instigated by my then Sufi teacher, Fazal Inayat-Khan, I stayed with my then partner and later husband for several weeks in Washington DC, at the time when President Carter was inaugurated. Our contact person was Dr Abdul Aziz Said, Professor for International Relations at the American University.
The above image is us at Amsterdam flee market, raising money to the journey To Washington D.C.
I posted about Dr Abdul Aziz Said in 2015 … https://courseofmirrors.com/2015/11/28/the-inner-jihad/
In that post I did not enlarge on the remarkable people we were introduced to during our stay.
One such person was a young scholar who held an influential position at the American Library, the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill, and the largest library in the world. He welcomed us to a tour of this magnificent place – a great privilege. At one point he asked if there was a book we would like him to locate for us. My partner and I looked at each other and had no problem choosing … ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’ A short search on a console and the book came whizzing through the extensive tube network of the library and landed in our hands in no time.
This happened half a lifetime ago. I’m thankful for this memory.
If you haven’t yet read Heinlein’s novel yet, do. And share if you, too, like a Martian, feel at times like a stranger in a strange land.
Course of Mirrors 
I’ve never read the book, and with the way the country is going, how could I not feel like a stranger in a strange land? ~Nan
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From a young age I felt that I had been born on the wrong planet. For eighty years now I have been adapting to life within human society. I read Stranger in a Strange Land a long time ago. Almost fifteen years ago I did something completely out of character; I spontaneously wrote a draft novel having never had any interest in writing fiction or intention to do such a thing. I did it simply to purge the alien thoughts flooding into my mind every day for several months.
At the time I was regularly corresponding with John, an American university tutor in English literature who was also a researcher at the National Archives in Washington DC. He kindly agreed to read my draft and provide comments on it and I was pleasantly surprised at how much he enjoyed it given that his favourite pleasure was reading and watching Shakespeare’s works, a subject in which he was an expert.
I never had any serious intention of trying to publish my novel and had even enjoyed quite intentionally including in it pitfalls to trap gullible critical readers. For example, I apparently incorporated a glaring deus ex machina device as a novice writer might, but as the entire story revolved around an apparent machina ex deo a more astute reader might have realised that even a novice writer can produce a work that needs careful examination. My friend John read the story twice and enjoyed it on both occasions before sending me his comments. That was the most taxing but enjoyable aspect of the story though, that every time I read it myself to discover where the ideas in it had come from I saw it in a completely different light. As a consequence I was unable to write any representative synopsis for presentation to a publisher had I wanted to do that. In my correspondence with John I summarised this problem by writing that all I could state with any certainty was that “it’s white on this side,” the well-known statement by Anne, the fair witness, in Stranger in a Strange Land, implying that even a synopsis depended on a particular reader’s state of mind and point of view rather than being a characteristic of the work itself.
Many years later I discovered the evident truth about the novel, that it had apparently been inspired by events and people I encountered over several years after I wrote it. The evidence was so convincing that I joined the Society for Psychical Research and have compiled a personal website which contains a collection of articles about the weird unlikely coincidences that occur in my life. I also subscribed to an online forum for novice writers and occasionally spontaneously wrote poetry to post there, another serious deviation from my character, but that too appeared to have been inspired by my later experiences. I don’t write fiction or poetry any more because at my advanced age now a spate of writer’s block might signify that I no longer have any future left to inspire me.
Some years ago I read in a periodical circulated by the Society for Psychical Research an article about the search for a “white crow”. This term apparently arises from the idea that to contradict the assertive statement that “all crows are black” one only has to find a single white crow. Of course the SPR are constantly searching for conceptual “white crows” within apparent psychical events. I don’t know whether my novel was a genuine “white crow” but from my point of view I can still state with considerable certainty that “it’s white on this side.”
Rob
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Thanks for commenting. I can relate to your experiences, or, as a Martian might say, I grok them 🙂
I had many déjà vu moments. Am now reminded of MC Escher’s visuals. They bring the paradox of circular time so well across.
Did you say you had a website?
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MensTemporum.UK – Enjoy but . . .
On it I also offer to send copies of my original and revised partial drafts of the novel to anyone curious about it at no cost but also warn that my website contains extensive spoilers out of necessity as it explores the remarkable time-defying apparent inspiration behind many of the events within the story. Also the novel was only the first in a potential trilogy that I never wrote and most likely never will, so the full complexity of the entire saga is still my very personal intellectual property, now being contained only within my mind. The surprising integrity of the whole conceived work is illustrated by the fact that the last words of the last novel in the trilogy are also the title of the first novel, that entire last chapter having already been written. Also in my original draft of the first novel the first words were “The End” but that was just another joke to annoy critical readers and persuade them that they didn’t need to read any further.
If you do want to read my draft and revisions then I recommend doing so before reading any more than the introduction page to my website and the subsequent page entitled “Not Foreseeing the Future”. I now believe that the novel was only the first essential stage to compiling the real intended work, the website describing how the novel came into being, this being to my mind the more remarkable story whether it is regarded as fact or fiction. The possibility that it may well be and indeed is entirely factual despite reading like fiction adds an extra dimension that actual fiction of a similar nature cannot portray. Of course for the reason of privacy of those directly involved I do not offer sufficient information for any sceptic to try to verify the truth behind my words despite my possessing it. We each have to find our own paths to the truth about our lives and the nature of reality through our first hand experiences.
I make additions to the website occasionally and currently have another remarkable sequence of coincidences still to record on it but I am too busy doing other things to write that up just yet. Bearing in mind your own comment to scientists on your About page, this item describes my latest attempt to convince a very old friend from my school days, a highly sceptical scientifically minded former Oxford university chemistry tutor, that future knowledge can indeed influence our past thoughts by emailing him reports of the resultant “coincidences” even as they were developing. However, he is retired and nowadays prefers to take long walks in natural surroundings and indulge his artistic side, being at peace with his life and no longer seeking answers. For my part I already have mine.
Yes, I enjoy Escher’s works but strangely I apparently have aphantasia, the almost complete inability to visualise images in my mind’s eye, so my mind contains predominantly conceptual imagery rather than actual visual imagery as I understand other people experience. This makes recognising people somewhat difficult and yet with my writing I can apparently create convincing visual images that I will never see within other people’s minds. It is possible that my conceptual images translate directly into text well without any intermediate visual interpretation on my part, so giving the reader more freedom to place their own visual interpretation on my words. It proves that we only guide our readers towards painting their own scenes in their mind’s eyes. Before I started writing my novel I found the most useful books to be not those describing the established techniques of writing but ones explaining the psychology of reading, that being the real canvas on which we create our work as choreographers of other people’s thoughts.
Rob
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Thanks for the link. Too many words to process at the moment, but I’ll explore … A. ♥
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Yes, I write a lot of words because I also read fast.
One final remark then as I just saw this item in your entry on LinkedIn.com.
“Course of Mirrors is a gripping adventure story, a psycho mythical opus. In its sequel the storyteller is revealed as the myth-maker overtaken by her myth – yet seeking to re-arrange past and future.”
That is exactly my reality, a myth-maker overtaken by his own myth seeking to re-arrange his own past and future to make some sense of it. I had quite literally made the story up out of my own head, that head being clearly represented by the building central to the story. I have found the whole experience fascinating if almost incomprehensible in its implications.
Rob
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I echo, both conceptually and experientially so much of what you describe. Particularly the realisation of the causality from the future, as well as a sense that what you wrote had its origins in the ‘white on this side’ Also the arbitrariness of ANY attempt to summarise or encapsulate a book of that kind.
Ashen will forgive me if I refer you to my ‘magnum opus’ Involution: An odyssey reconciling science to God. I can hardly believe I wrote- something ‘through me’ wrote it. That conundrum spurred me to re-examine the life that gave rise to it, which was a continuum of white crows! That one is ‘Safari of a Patchwork Pilgrim’ which Ashen kindly reviewed on Goodreads.
I also so identify with your current views on creating the link for the reader to visualise. It is why I eshewed including photographs of the characters. A photograph blocks an emotionally created image.
We have much in common.
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For some reason, my response did not identify me. My name is Philippa Rees. I don’t use a pseudonym!
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Me again.
I only just noticed that your photograph was taken in Amsterdam. By inevitable coincidence Amsterdam and people living there featured in the retroactive inspiration for my novel. I live in England and had no connection at all with Amsterdam when I wrote the novel but have visited it a couple of times since and now have Dutch friends. I suspect that many people barely scratch the surface of the human psyche, which is a great shame. They too are strangers in a strange land without even realising it.
Rob
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🙂
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🙂
kamran
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