The Anathemas Q-and-A: Why a Novel about Reincarnation?

Taking history personally

It was the late ‘60’s and the sacred icons we’d grown up with were tettering. My own young life too had taken a radical turn (pun intended) when I left a Catholic seminary in rural New Jersey for New York City at the height of the Hippie and anti-Vietnam-War movements. Eastern concepts, reincarnation among them, were patently groovy. Bridey Murphy had come and gone, and Audrey Rose was still below the horizon, but the idea that we might have lived before and would live once again was all the buzz among young adults.

I found the idea curious but irrelevant until I came across the story of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. Given my theological background and classical bent, these characters provided a personal bridge from the more familiar ancient history to the choatic present.

A wannabe writer in my early 20’s, I never imagined that typing out a couple of one-page character sketches about this imperial pair would start a process, and not merely a writing project, that would span decades before completion. Their story was history and thus worthy of a self-defined scholar, but with a twist that defied the status quo enough to support my recently adopted unorthodoxy.

I didn’t know what of this reincarnation thing was true or false or what Justinian and Theodora actually had to do with it, but I was fascinated and sensed a story.

Hooked by my own story

In the introduction to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav notes: “I realized that the book I was writing was more intelligent than I was. It was also funnier than I was, and it had a grander comprehension than I did.”

I too quickly discovered that my story had a mind of its own, and it made demands on the character and ability of its author. I had to be qualified to do the work. I wasn’t at first, so my life unfolded to make me so—a fascinating process, but quite another story.

Before long, it wasn’t me writing the book but the book shaping me. And that, on several occasions, resulted in gaps of seemingly unproductive years where I had to endure adventures I would not have chosen on my own. But even these, I came to understand, were the story marching at its own pace.

For the writer there was the process of going within to find the story and match its step. What in The Anathemas the protagonist calls the “quiet place”:

The river bank was his magic vantage point where even life’s discordant notes would blend into the symphony. That constant, flowing river was his personal Holy of Holies, the quiet place, where chaos flew off with only the lightest touch of his will to have it do so. It had to be approached, he remembered, on tiptoes with bare feet. The snap of a twig, the flap of a bird’s wing, any alien thought snaring a bit of his attention, and the sacred place would dissolve into a scene quite ordinary. (The Anathemas, p. 64)

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Copyright 2013 by Victor E. Smith. All rights reserved.