Lethe Bashar

novel, fiction, writing, poetry, blog, philosophy

I believe that there are only a few major themes in philosophy. These themes are repeated over and over using different vocabularies and different languages. The difference in words,expressions, and systems demonstrates the uniqueness of the observer, not the philosophy itself. We use different words to explain things. But there are themes that persist in philosophy and literature. As a writer, I am curious about one theme in particular. It is a theme that haunts my writing and my life. It is a theme that can be found in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Borges, and the Chinese Classics . . . It is the theme of "life as a dream".

I'm a writer who lives in Central Illinois. The monotony of my cornfield surroundings contrasts with the vividness of my dreams. For the last five years, I have been culling memories into fiction. Most of these experiences were imprinted on my mind when I was a wandering teenage hoodlum. I continue to shape and reshape these memories; the characters follow me through life, and they're always changing. I look at this project based on my alter ego, Lethe Bashar, to be a work of archeology. I keep returning to who I was during those years of my youth, and exploring the people and settings I came into contact with. I believe that ongoing and unfinished narratives are more interesting because they mimmick the open-ended, unstructured Novel of Life.

The Novel of Life is a fiction project that uses interlinked blogs to follow the life of one person in story form. The characters who come into contact with the main character are also examined. The Novel embraces non-linear possibilities. Because the fiction is essentially an exploration of character, meaning can be gleaned from any point in the text. The various sites represent different nodes from which the main character's life branches out. There is no site that begins the "grand narrative"; there is only embeded text, histories, and linkages.