Life is what happens to a writer between drafts. A lot of life has happened, and I’m grateful for that. * * * Do I seem obsessed with The Perfect Song? I am! I’m obsessed with whatever creative project I have at the moment. But TPS has been on my mind for a quarter of a century. I remember driving an hour each way to work and back and being so involved in the characters that the drive seemed like a minute. I lived out Einstein’s theory of relativity without even knowing it. When we travel around the country, I look at every new mountain, desert, plains through Mendel’s eyes. Seeing them for the first time, ingesting the feeling of the place, its colors, sounds, smells. I grew up in the mountains and thought I knew peace and quiet. But when we first visited the desert—I think it was Arizona – I knew what silence was. No planes overhead, no sound of traffic. No wind. No animals speaking. It was a stillness so expansive and complete it was inspiring. . . and unsettling. Then there was the mile high volcano in New Mexico. At the top you can look out over miles and miles of flat, still land where dinosaurs lumbered millions of years ago. As I stood there I could see their ghosts moving huge and graceful in the once hot, swampy land. My wife walked down into the volcano while I stood there and watched the hawks soar below me. It was this volcano that Poul trudged up looking for Mendel.
* * * The beauty of Mendel is that he sees everything with a fresh, untainted outlook. His quest is so strong that he pulls in every experience as if it were brand new, like a baby, seeing it with awe and wonder unfettered by the clogging, slogging machinery of consciousness and its dreary judgments. Mendel’s life is a continual process of discovery, joy, frustration and interpretation. It’s that way for all of us if we pay attention.
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