This is a 7 part series that will all be tagged under The Third Eye. However, the articles will appear on the page appropriate to the specific subject matter. To read them all in sequence use the tag view window in the table of contents on the right hand margin of each page.

I am used to being the smart guy on a crew of grunts, or the analytic mind among boxers. But the conversation I had with Metzger yesterday was far an above that.

This is something different. This is a guy who is much more intelligent than I am. I have been getting a lot of attention—questions and sounding board venting sessions—from young men ranging from late 20s to early 40s and from women in middle age, which is roughly the life stage at which the more intelligent and introspective of each gender tend to wake up to the suspicion that large tracts of postmodern social life are in fact cloaked in lies, or non-too-subtly veiled restrictions on their very humanity.

Note: I sense that much of the misogynistic tone in current cultural dissent discourse between men is that men wake up to social betrayal more quickly than women because they are by nature less loyal, and often interpret the women in their lives still bowing to the social order that they feel has betrayed them as an additional or even conspiratorial betrayal.

In this series of essays, discussions with people who have recently approached me in my reclusive place of observant alienation will be the meat I chew on in an attempt to make solid sense of these folks utilizing conversation with me to make solid sense of what seems an elusive and shifting subtext to their lives.

Subtext is the fiction writer’s reference for exposing, in a usually muted fashion, the underlying aspects of the human condition that do not generally get play on the temporal stage. In medieval times we would have been discussing theology. In recently defunct modern times we would have been discussing ideology. We—those who have approached me about their changing and darkening view of the world—find ourselves now discussing a process of self-assigned meaning, for I am not sought out by ideologues or the faithfully religious, but by those who have a sense of having got the measure of both of these constructs as having been instruments used to deceive them.

If you have not yet read ‘A Forest Dark’, I defer here to me impressions of Dante’s seminal work instead of repeating myself.

The pieces in this series which I shall write through the first half of November, in an inadequate attempt to assist some good friends and a few fleeting though kindred acquaintances, will, I hope, result in better placing my literary projects in a human context. What is the place in the writer’s mind, or of the mind, that is the hub from which the various expressive spokes radiate?

Readers of my age and older are not generally familiar with the concept of a writer ranging widely across genres, although some greats did. Now us mortal writers can write and publish widely. A mere 20 years ago, my writing would be regarded as exclusively in the field of combat arts and urban survival, the other 7 categories I write in unpublished. But now, the writer can range in full view instead of burying his divergent output in unsalable stacks while he forges on producing work that sells.

For that handful of readers who support this site and have expressed more and more disgust about the commercial nature of everything—seemingly a cancer that reduces everything to the lowest common denominator—this is a good thing, the freeing of written expression from the commercial shackles that have so often bound it. This is enabled by technology, and I believe more importantly, by the greater illiterate audio-video world looking the other way.

Before breaking for a person-by-person impression of my conclaves with fellow cultural dissidents that increasingly access this writer as a sounding board, we should look into the concept of the third eye, which is the role that these seekers have intuitively assigned me.

At its root this role as sounding board, confidant and sometimes advisor, is an aspect of the writer’s lot, and has nothing to do with perceived knowledge or wisdom, but of perspective. There is an underlying confidence that the writer is keenly observant and has through the process of researching his work been exposed to divergent views of life. This fairly common sense assessment of the writer’s place as an investigative observer with a gift or craft for articulation makes him a natural choice for a sounding board by the painfully opinionated. I find myself having numerous conversations with more intelligent folks who are literally using me as a thesaurus, hoping I will bounce back a more concise and easily interpretive version of their insightful ramblings.

That is the writer’s specific role as the ‘third eye’ which places him in the shamanic tradition, with the poet being the clear link between the primal shaman and the prose writer, the poet originally not being literate at all but mnemonic. Before discussing the rather bland concept of the third eye we should glance at the ancient art of facial interpretations which eventually morphed into the racist science of physiognomy, at least so far as the eyes are concerned. In Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on H.P. Lovecraft he goes just deep enough for our purpose, so he should be consulted here ‘The Shadow Cast By The Tree’ after reading this piece.

The belief in internal duality, which is expressed by some of the major religious faiths as a duality between God and Satan or light and darkness, likely comes from the shamanic tradition and can be examined by all of us ourselves in the mirror.

Stand before an evenly lit mirror and look at your face, trying to focus on the eyes, often termed the windows of the soul.

Take away your impression.

You may use my photo found on the bio page to check my own reading.

When I do this I see a face that strikes me as unbalanced but bland, mostly inoffensive and mild in temperament, but with a veiled restlessness.

Now stand before the mirror with a hand covering the right eye.

Take away your impression.

When I do this and look into the left eye I see an eye that appears wider, more open, more dreamy than the bilateral impression I took away from the whole face.

The left eye is the farseeing dreaming eye. The role of the shaman was to be the left eye for the entire community, to see the world in the light of dreams. The most ancient modern humans are the Australoid ‘aboriginal people’, who have a term for the underlying reality being a timeless ‘dreamtime’, with he who goes there being able to see the world from a neutral perspective.

Now stand in front of the mirror and cover the left eye.

Take away your impression.

When I do this I see a mean little slit of an eye. The brow over my right eye is atrophied and scrunched, giving more the appearance of age and, worry and tiredness. This eye seems ruthless compared to the other and when focusing on this side of my face I get the impression that this man is grown harder than most, with signs about the eye that he began his journey softer than most.

Only now does the restless nature of the face on my bio page, too tired looking to harbor the restlessness indicated by some of it, make sense. These eyes portray a mind in conflict with itself: a left eye too wide and dreamy for a man and a bit crowding of the small socket; and a right eye once normal grown excessively cruel and mean.

All of us can come to an interpretation of our face in the mirror. What I get out of my examination is contrast, a wide divergence of nature, wherein a dreamy characteristic has been enabled and preserved by an excruciating narrowing of focus for the survival characteristic. In short, my rough explanation for why I seem to attract troubled people to discuss the things that are deeply felt and out of place, is that they have, subconsciously perhaps, read my face and sensed a gap between the conflicting content of my character that might be large enough to accommodate the conceptualization of their self-seen plight.

If we look at Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in his description of Van Helsing the vampire hunter we are treated to a physiognomic interpretation of the character’s face that seems to some reviewers to describe Stoker himself. Van Helsing is presented in that shamanic role so similar to that of the author of horror, that his presence might therefore be indicative that Stoker’s seminal horror novel represented his disapproval or partial repudiation of Victorian England; a nation whose educated class had as high a degree of national confidence and sense of cultural superiority as does the politically correct elite of our current America.

I equate this writer’s perspective with coaching. One can be a piss poor fighter and still be an excellent coach so long as one understands—even if incompletely—the circumstances, mechanics, nuances and nature of the game and its players. This, in me, I suppose is enhanced by the nack for listening empathetically to the many troubled subjects of my violence study back in the late 1990s. Lately, I have seemed to develop a better ability to understand what is bothering the person speaking to me. When Edward Dietz came to me recently seeking a clarification of his own words, I realized that working as a novelist and playing at seeing the world through the eyes of people of a nature at odds with my own, has made me a better conversation partner.

In Edward’s case, and in the case of my old friend who recently sought my interpretation of a suspected mugging attempt he avoided, I had experience in the areas that troubled them and was able to offer some advice that they seemed to think was useful.

However, in my conversation with others I often find myself at a loss to do more than take what they confusedly spewed at me, restructure it in a concise phrase or sentence, and bounce it back in hopes that it helps them achieve the clarity they seem to be seeking. My suspicion is that by stepping outside the economy into this observant reclusion I have been noticed by more than a few people who are troubled by the nature of the lowest-common-denominator world they find themselves waking up in.

I don’t have any more questions or answers than they do. A number of these folks have been supporting this oddly alienated writing endeavor with a shekel or more here and there. A few have even donated reading material for me to review, to the extent that I spill more ink on reviewing than writing. That has helped me grow as a writer, as everything read is research for the novelist or essayist.

In closing, I find myself having been nominated as a personal ‘third eye’, a kind of cultural triangulating device, by a number of diverse people who have in common only their dissent from the direction in which our habitat seems to be evolving. The review of literature on this site seems to have grown into more than a published author’s notebook. In this light I am devoting the next two weeks of my writing life to try and more adequately answer in writing the questions recently put to me in person, and to offer belated commentary on subjects recently brought to my attention through e-mail and phone.