Why Another "Handful of Dust"?

As I was developing, discovering, living, and writing my novel, I went through several working titles. "Renew the Ghost Dance" (trite). "The Ghost Dance Sutra" (pretentious). "The Blah, Blah Chronicles" (brilliant, but no).

Eventually, an account I read in Mooney's The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 began to become a central symbol for the book I was writing, which led to the final title of A Handful of Dust. This was an act performed by a doomed man in the moments before the massacre of Wounded Knee. As I describe it in the novel:

"The light of early morning brought no relief from the bitter cold of late December as the pneumonia-stricken Lakota leader [Bigfoot] and his followers were assembled by the troops. An order for a surrender of weapons resulted in a handful of hunting rifles. The Bluecoats were unsatisfied and began ransacking the tents; taking axes, knives and even tent stakes. Following this, they began pulling blankets from the people themselves, searching without a shred of discretion. At this newest insult and haughty lawlessness, the medicine man Yellow Bird performed an act of profound poetry. In the face of absolute hopelessness, treachery and impending slaughter, he danced a few steps of the outlawed Ghost Dance and began singing one of the holy songs -- he then took up a hanful of dust and threw it into the air. A handful of dust in defiance against not only this insolence, these blood-thirsty cowards, those looming Hotchiss guns; but also against the generations of greed, hypocrisy and stupidity; the lies, thefts and murders; the genocide, enslavement and subjugation.
"A handful of dust to sting the eyes of hatred."

And then later:

"Against certain death, in the face of the complete destruction of his people and everything that he knew was sacred and good, Yellow Bird danced. And in complete defiance of the reality of those guns, to scoop up a handful of dust and throw it into the air. ... It is merely a handful of dust, and yet we must remember that this is how the world began."

Yellow Bird's final act became the central metaphor for the primary message of the novel, so I then knew which title was the only one to use. A couple years later (it took me ten years to go from the initial idea for the book to hammering out the last page), I was shocked to come across a small paperback in a used book store: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh.

I was floored, stunned, and distraught with the thought that I might need to change my title. Not for legal reasons (you can't copyright a title), but for personal ones: I needed my book to be singular. I haven't read Waugh's book, though a friend has told me that it's one of his favorites, but flipping through it, I got the sense that it's yet another look into the tragic lives of obsenely wealthy British people. Something Robin Leech might narrate. I'm sure that Waugh means to condemn this lifestyle, but I'm not sure that these types of books ever achieve their intent. I suspect that most readers get caught up in the fancy estates and extravagant clothes and exorbitant dinner parties, and entirely miss the underlying social message. (To me, Titanic was a poorly-acted story about the injustice of the rich placing more value on their lives than those of the poor; but to the vast majority, it was a tragic love story. ... I couldn't wait for the damn boat to sink ... but that's a whole other can of worms -- who says that? "a whole other can of worms"? I'm not even sure if that's the right expression, not being a fishing person).

(Here's a dirty, little secret for you: I don't give a damn about the troubles of the extremely rich and their constant strife with being torn between love and class propriety. The vast majority of the world's people have real troubles, caused mostly by the aristocrats and oligarchs who are enshrined in so much literature and film.)

Waugh takes his title from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

So what to do? Change what I knew was the true title of my novel, or share the name with another book? I finally decided (after much grief and soul-searching) to keep it, and here's why:

Nothing against Waugh; in fact, I'm sure he's a much better novelist than I am, but I believe that my use of this particular title has more meaning than his. I can't prove this, or even wish to argue it -- it's just something I feel. I'd choose Yellow Bird over Eliot as a guiding inspiration any day. Nothing against Eliot (although I am a better poet than he; except for "Four Quartets" and "Prufrock.")

[You can read sample chapters of my A Handful of Dust here.
And you can read in interesting review of Waugh's book here.]

Back in the Scrabble Again

Three chapters into the new novel, and it finally feels like it's coming back to me. The flow. The focus. The feeling of the right word at the right time. ("The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug" --Mark Twain).

When I was writing A Handful of Dust, I got to the point where I was in that space all the time. I would do things like forget to eat and sneak away from parties to go back to my typewriter. Granted, it took me eight years to get to that point. Eight years of living with that story in my head and gut. While I was in Dublin, I finally figured out how the story could be told. I came back to Michigan as quickly as possible, found a free place to live, stocked up on coffee, pasta, and red wine, and wrote.

I stuck an index card on the wall above my typewriter that said, "Writer's write; everyone else makes excuses." Another wall was covered with hundreds of small scraps of paper with the details of the book scrawled on them. I had my journals, a few stacks of books, and a small radio tuned to the public radio station -- I organized notes during classical music and wrote during jazz.

This time around I have a studio/cabin full of books and CD's, a good supply of Rainier beer, a talkative cat, and the mountains. All of them help.

Tomorrow morning, we start chapter four. Wish me luck.

Naming Nagashana

I thought I'd start off with a question that I get asked all the time. "Why does the main character in A Handful of Dust have such a strange name?"

Finding names for characters is one of the aspects of fiction that I find most difficult, and in the case of this character (since it's really just me), especially so. I didn't want a name that reminded me of anyone, or implied character traits that would be misleading. During my search, I came upon a Sanskrit word, Nagashana, which literally translates as "peacock, whose food is snakes." On a trivial level, this name satisfied my two conditions: it certainly didn't remind me of someone else, and it didn't imply misleading traits the way "Buck" or "San Peligroso" or "Mary" would.

But on a deeper level, it was immediately the right name to use. You see, at the time, I could only trace my family matrilineally back to my mom's mom's mom, DeEtta Peacock. Since a matriarchy makes more sense to me than a patriarchy (one of the themes of the novel), I liked aligning myself with the Peacock clan. As far as the "whose food is snakes," i.e. who is nourished by the Snake -- a major theme of the novel is the Snake being a symbol for the Earth, and as the novel reveals, the character of Nagashana (and the me he's based on) is literally the Peacock who is nourished by the Earth.

When I was giving a reading for a university writing class once, an Indian student asked, "Nagashana is a Hindu god; aren't you worried that you may offend Hindus by using a name for a god as your character?" (I think the implication may have been, "you arrogant bastard, how dare you compare yourself to a god!")

I explained my reasons for using the name and said I meant no offense, but the answer I would have given if I weren't still trying to convince this jerk to buy a copy of the book, is this:

If anyone is offended by someone's use of a word that they consider "holy" (all words are, incidentally), that person is clearly wrapped up in the dogma of their religion rather than the essence of it. The name is not the Being. The map is not the land. Words can never hold the Nameless. Which is why Lao Tzu said, "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao" and why some nomadic Hebraic tradition attested that the true name of Jehovah could not be spoken. Those wrapped up in the essence of this religion knew that this meant that the big spirit of the cosmos can't be contained by a human word (you can't limit the Limitless). Those caught up in the dogma of it, stoned people to death for saying, "That halibut was good enough for Jehovah."

Saying "god damn" is not taking the lord's name in vain; using god to justify invading Iraq is.

And as far as the implication that it's egotistical to call oneself god, it's the exact opposite of ego. Our ego makes us think we're separate from the Eternal, the Nameless, the Tao, the grand pooh-bah in the sky. I am god just as you are god and everything known and unknown is. This is why the Mandukya Upanishad says, "All this that we see without is Brahman. The Self that is within is Brahman." (Hint for winning an argument with a dogmatist: Always quote their own scripture to them; it will always prove them wrong, and usually force them to acknowledge that they have no idea what they're talking about, they're merely regurgitating what some mean, old guy told them to think.)

As far as being a Peacock, I've since traced my genealogy back to my mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom whose name was Sarah Miller, but I don't know her maiden name. Which I guess means that Nagashana's name should be "the Unnamed-Unknown who is nourished by the Earth." Works for me.