The following text is based on a grant application I submitted this past summer.
Tracing the development of Point M, I come across a 2016 sketch of Isaac Silva, one of the story’s two main characters. For eight years, Isaac has remained constant—a filmmaker with a Puerto Rican father and a Canadian mother, a twenty-four-year-old who graduated with a BFA in filmmaking from the University of Hawaii’s Academy of Creative Media and then enrolled in its graduate school. Likewise, the beginning of the story remained constant: an emotional upheaval due to Isaac’s wife, a Japanese national, separating from him and taking their son to live with her parents in their island home. Several months later, despairing and adrift because she refuses to reconcile, he meets a cab driver at a large shopping center, drawn to her for inexplicable reasons. It is here that the story, influenced by real-world events of 2023 and 2024, changes. Isaac learns that the cab driver, Asami Kaneko, met her husband, William Harris, while he was stationed at a U.S. air force base in Okinawa and that after living and working there for twenty years, he retired and they moved to Hawaii.
When Isaac and Asami meet at the shopping mall, she is chatting with a fellow cab driver, and he thinks to mention the film Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter because of the title character’s decision to take a taxi to reach her destination. Released in 2014, Kumiko follows a young Japanese woman as she watches the film Fargo, believing the story is real, and tries to recover the ransom money buried along the highway. Kumiko lives in Tokyo, though, and neither speaks English nor understands the myriad obstacles to getting to Fargo. Isaac tries to summarize the film for Asami, and when she asks him to tell her the ending, he hesitates because he fears the tragedy of it will sadden her and spoil their meeting. Something interesting happens at this point, however: because writer and filmmaker David Zellner uses symbolism and metaphor to represent Kumiko’s end—and it is poetic, not realistic, i.e., an end the character deserves in a fair world—Asami perceives the film as “good.” Kumiko has acquired her treasure, has reached her goal, as she set out to do.
Unable up to then to see the good in the film, Isaac has a revelation and his life takes a turn. This journey and the role Asami plays in it—and the role he plays in her journey toward fully expressing a shamanic power she has inherited from her mother and grandmother—are what Point M is about. The story takes up the two great themes of our time: the truthful (what is real?) and the social (what is moral?).
Over the year that I have been working intensively on the story, I’ve been influenced by important events in the U.S. and internationally. Of most interest to me have been the shifts in our understanding of metaphysics caused by the discovery of different intelligences—plant, animal, nonhuman, artificial—and the possibility that these can expand and deepen our concept of reality and even alter our experience of it. I’m also very engaged in moral questions and see the Mideast conflict as being the defining moral issue of our time. I’ve tried to render these in Point M to flesh out my understanding of them and to explore their potential for greater discovery of the human heart and the physical world.
I’ve also tried to render these events from the point of view of the artist, i.e., Isaac, and the healer or spiritual person, i.e., Asami. Each is sensitive and compassionate but not fully awakened to his or her potential for creative and moral action, and I want to document these journeys. To this end, the point of view shifts between first person and third, sometimes being expressed in the personal or autobiographical and sometimes in the objective. In this way, I’ve tried to involve readers, allowing them to form their own judgements about the things Isaac and Asami observe and the conclusions they draw. In addition, by letting Asami describe her fares, where she takes them and why, I’m able to render some of the cultural and historical multiplicity of Honolulu and capture some of its paradoxes.
I’ve finished about half of the manuscript. Isaac has been selected as the documentarian for an experimental military mission that has reached the second of five targeted sites. The remaining sites will be in Peru, Brazil, and Oregon, and then the ship, an experimental hypersonic vehicle, will return to Hawaii. I want to explore the idea, now popular in the UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) field that NHIs (nonhuman intelligences) or aliens are alternate or advanced human forms. I am thinking that the mission will encounter NHIs that will share or bestow technologies on the crew of the ship and this information will cause a rift in loyalties that will cause the crew to betray their mission. Various technological concepts will be employed, including one that challenges our understanding of artificial intelligence as capable of human understanding. Another will be the merging of philosophical concepts and mechanical or technological concepts to produce a new epistemology, especially one that will tackle imminent ecological catastrophes. I also want to incorporate Asami’s shamanistic knowledge and traditions into the solutions that the crew comes up with to address the conflicts in their loyalties.
These ideas are speculative and dependent on my doing more research.
Recently I shared the manuscript with my friend Alok Bhalla, an eminent translator, editor, and writer who lives in New Delhi, and he responded with the following wonderful comments.
Your novel promises a complex structure necessary for a deep philosophical exploration of ideas that may yet sustain us in our disturbing times. There is a desire for and an abiding hope of reaching a still point of peace and goodness.
I spent the entire morning yesterday, deeply absorbed. It is radically different not only from the structures of your previous work, but also much bolder in form and voices, minimalisation of characters and their social biographies, and more profound in the questions raised and the quest embarked upon. Quest is perhaps the right word (even though the novel is not linear like quest romances) since what you want to do is nothing less than to ask, in a world like ours where we are living under the shadows of malicious and heartless fates (your phrase), if it is still possible to arrive at a meaning, a purpose or at least a little mercy extended to each of us by the universe. Maybe, what your taxi-driving shamanic woman (an alien immigrant and a refugee from earlier wars) will finally tell the documentary maker (our alter ego) who wants to record testimonies (bear witness), that all we can do, and must do, is to endure with hard-won selflessness the world as we find it.
I loved the austere clarity of your writing, especially in the beginning as you record dreams much like the early di Chirico paintings you invoke. The dream-records create complex meanings: mysterious threats to one's survival by nature's capricious force [Goya calls these events Capriccios], fear of violent seizure or erasure by another [as in vampiric and predatory state violence], utter loneliness that renders the idea of a social person meaningless, or one's life as a spectacle in a horror movie. These dreams are yoked with images of joyous children ‘carrying noise on their shoulders’ and the poetry of the earth’s beauty. Further, the scenes of arbitrary violence are followed, quite unexpectedly, by gentle conversations and calm graciousness between the taxi-driver (another wanderer) and other wayfarers she picks up who recognise her exceptionalism (a secular version of the road to Emmaus?).
I was reminded by your listing of strange phenomena of the work of Charles Fort. Northrop Frye said that Fort’s gathering of the oddest of earthly events was an “intellectual satire” against any “scientific claim to reason.” Of course, Frye, despite being a great Blake scholar, didn't add that if instrumental reason produces Frankenstein, the sleep of reason produces monsters.
I don't really know much about your own life, but I do suspect that some bit of the novel draws upon your own survival.