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The Soul
Institute |
Synopsis | Background | MS. Info | Sample Chapters | Contents | Fragment
Soul Institute Images | Writing InventoryThe novel, The Soul Institute, and all writing on this page copyright 2003 by Michael D. Smith
At Writer-in-Residence Moolka Waxtor's going away party in the English Department office, Derrick recalls in shock their out of control lovemaking in a closet half an hour earlier. How can he handle an affair with his flirty cousin? How can he escape from The Soul Institute as Moolka is doing? How can he deal with his wife Jipo, TSI's ruthless administratrix? As Director Alfred Moid Burlcron announces that a replacement has already been hired to take Moolka's place, Moolka tearfully declares she's decided to stay.
In a hallucinatory twenty-hour drive, Himal Steina pilots his battered Porsche from Chicago to South Texas to become the new Writer-in-Residence. He meets Moolka in the foggy morning and is instantly in love with her.
Alfred Burlcron, who founded TSI on royalties from his bestselling novel, tours Himal through The Soul Institute. Neither he nor anyone else can bring himself to pronounce the obscene title of Himal's book, which TSI has contracted to publish. Burlcron's fourteen year-old son Mitar is the JFK Assassination Librarian. Naming Himal one of the secret, powerful Overcrons, Burlcron promises Moolka to him.
Derrick takes over Fall Play class and foolishly offers his own rough draft play Linstar for the students to revise to their liking.
Director Burlcron's eighteen year-old daughter Lisa enters The Soul Institute as a freshman. Her previous sexual relationship in New Jersey is contrasted with the innocence of her new interest, sophomore guitarist Dorrington Caldwell.
To ninth grader Mitar Burlcron’s shame, the pregnant girl in Mrs. Plollio's art class rescues him from bully Tom Kaiser, then leads him to the Paint Sniffing Gang. Mitar sniffs paint outrageously at the storm sewer under the eye of brutal, charismatic gang leader Angent Tunn, and is taken in as a “Paint Snigger.”
The feared Inner Circle of dope-smoking Overcrons discovers Lisa and Dorrington naked in the South Fields.
Inebriated Art Department Chairman Fannin Richardson realizes that his secret desire for Burlcron's wife Debbie has been a painful five-year fantasy.
Blasted by days of inhalant highs, Mitar leads the Paint Sniggers on a raid to vandalize the Glouair Library. Back at the storm sewer, Mitar gets intimate with fellow Snigger Rhea Secovenge as new members Rod Admallan and Tom Kaiser die.
Dorrington and Mal Rumson's band plays in the nude at their Cyclo Street rent house. Fannin participates, forging an odd friendship with his art student Lisa.
Fannin makes love to Felicia, wife of Milton expert Greg McKinnon. Tunn commits suicide. Mitar consolidates command of the Paint Sniggers.
Himal and Moolka open to each other with sex in his Porsche at lunch.
Derrick realizes that the only thing that will save him is eighteen year-old cousin Lisa Burlcron.
Uncle Solis returns from exile to take nephew Derrick and daughter Moolka to dinner. To their horror, he blesses their heretofore secret union. Solis describes his years in Africa as a soldier of fortune as Derrick moodily assesses the scars from his past as a quasi-orphan. Despite having rebelled against Solis and his east coast Waxtor Summer Refuge twenty-five years ago, Derrick is still in thrall to his whiny, manipulative uncle. Moolka graphically reveals to the entire restaurant that she and Himal are now lovers.
Mitar brings five year-old Urside Charmouth along in an attack on his own house, where he discovers father Alfred and Derrick's wife Jipo having passionate, tasteless, dope-fueled sex. Mitar flees to Mexico with his girlfriend Rhea.
McKinnon doses Fannin with LSD in payment for his adultery. At the PolyMall, Fannin prepares himself to be wheeled upstairs to the puma surgeons. He and Lisa are kidnapped by the Kaiser Death Gang.
Vice president Jipo Jarg seduces the bitter, rejected Dorrington Caldwell at his new library job.
Himal chairs the Local Arrangements Committee for National Soul Day. Burlcron hires the Kaiser Death Gang to protect his disintegrating kingdom, and forces Derrick into the gang.
Derrick and Moolka escape to the Waxtor Summer Refuge. Although fantasy sex is blocked by bleak winter reality, they stumble across a greenhouse where a gardener marries them.
Lisa muses on the blue jazz anteroom transcendence she can feel cancelling her petty existence.
Souls in disarray--some armed with machine guns--prowl the college town in the early hours of National Soul Day.
The 4 AM National Soul Day press conference breaks up in revolution and panic as the potted Vice President for Coordination, Holcombe Charmouth, finally turns feral on his master.
The Kaiser Death Gang kidnaps the five year-old Urside. The petroleum-filled sewer snaking through town blows all at once. Mitar has to shoot child terrorist Leon Mesquite and library director Milton Raeynold Glouair.
Alfred Burlcron takes over the TSI Web page. Yet Himal Steina and Debbie Burlcron have come together, Mitar can write Chapter One of his novel, and the revised Lisa has a final comment.
The novel spans a fall semester at The Soul Institute, a small South Texas university founded on royalties from the Director’s bestselling novel. The novel came from my recurring dream of a return to Rice University--not the common anxiety dream about getting behind in classes, but the urge to explore some vast, stupendous, mystic Source, the Other World, the sanctuary of Himal Steina’s foggy university of Soul. See also the painting, Recurring Dream - The Soul Institute, from 1997.
There is also a page, Soul Institute Images, with various paintings and pastels of Soul Institute characters:
Several sets of characters build their own stories, all eventually interrelating:
- The TSI administrators and faculty perusing complex, farcical love affairs, power struggles and fantasy life in an attempt to ignore TSI’s eccentric, hateful, and increasingly bizarre bureaucracy.
- The TSI students who came to live the life of Soul as advertised in the TSI catalog and are dismayed to discover the underlying chaos.
- The ninth graders at Faller Junior High with their separate world of inhalant abuse and gang violence.
- Members of a past paradise, the east coast Waxtor Summer Refuge garden, with its deep genealogical ties to TSI. Considered by some to be merely a “rough draft” of The Soul Institute, for others WSR is the Other World they must return to.
The Soul Institute was probably the most problematic of my novels to write, but apparently needed to be. Not until the end of a second draft did a central emotional concept become clear. At times during five years of the novel I considered abandoning it, taking a years-long vacation from all writing, or abandoning writing entirely in favor of visual art. Throughout the first draft there was something frustratingly unmelted, unfused, unintegrated. Yet whenever I did sit down to write the fiction, wonderful events and strangely deep characters kept emerging. And finally in the last year a major plot reorganization brought out the central vision based on those characters.
Part of the early lifeless, conceptual tone was the original concept of a “happy, uplifting ending.” We come to expect happy endings in movies and novels. But think of some of the great Twilight Zones or the novel Seconds. What they thrust at us in uncarved block fashion is much more a gift of power and freedom than all those weak works that put people through crises and then miraculously save them at the end, leading us to believe that life is easy, that the happy ending is our due, that we don't have to struggle for it. You can also create a paper tiger struggle that appears to demonstrate that you must struggle for your freedom, but deep down we all know it’s set up from the beginning. Cheating at solitaire. Every novel is an experiment. You may have an idea how it will go from start to finish, but it's still an experiment.
Apparently I needed to write three long and more or less difficult novels: Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, and The Soul Institute. Each one took four to five years. But despite a long novel’s mandate to explain EVERYTHING that’s been going on, by the time you get to the fifth year you’re working on a structure that’s five years old, no matter how many new insights you’ve thrown in. While The Soul Institute was worth this effort in the end, and finally got emotionally up to date, my next urge is to write a lot of shorter novels, spending six months to a year on each and staying current with myself.
Written 1994-1999 Chapters 27 MS. 919 pages (Courier 10, double-spaced) Words 269,000 Currently input in Word 97 Previously published No parts yet published
1. Moolka's Party, or, The Dim Warning
Moolka's going away party in the English offices. 6. Cubic Miles of Buried Light = Darkness Mitar meets the Paint Sniggers. 8. Hanging Numerous Paintings in a Space Drunk, Fannin realizes his desire for Debbie is a fantasy. 10. Cheating at Solitaire Mitar leads the Paint Sniggers on a raid of the Glouair Library.
16. A Visit from Uncle Solis Solis takes Derrick and Moolka to dinner and, to their horror, blesses their union. 19. Progress of the Non-Self Administrator Jipo seduces young Dorrington in the Friends Lounge. 23. Unbidden Memories of the Blue Jazz Anteroom Lisa muses on the blue jazz anteroom transcendence. 24. My Final Statements Concerning Librarianship... Souls in disarray--some armed with machine guns--prowl the college town in the early hours of National Soul Day.
Part 1. Paradise and Depression
1. Moolka's Party, or, The Dim Warning
2. In Fact, He May Originally Have Contacted TSI for Publishing Purposes
3. The Head Monk Is Thoroughly Likeable and Charming
4. Getting Mystically Drunk Over a Map of Chicago
5. Her Moody First Semester
6. Cubic Miles of Buried Light = Darkness
7. Yet "Overcron" Soon Does Inspire Fear
8. Hanging Numerous Paintings in a SpacePart 2. Art, Music, Doomboat and Crackadon
9. The Doomboat Tolls in the Harbor
10. Cheating at Solitaire
11. Where Nude Men and Nude Women Play Rock Music--Openly--in the Texas Heat
12. Priest Monsters of Ortang
13. The Relationship Between Sex and Light, or, Problems of Photographic Exposure
14. How May I Be of Surface to You?
15. There's Never Enough Pain to Force Any Sort of Awareness
16. A Visit from Uncle Solis
17. The CrackadonPart 3. Tying the Directions of Our Lives into One Big Direction
18. Asteroid Hospital
19. Progress of the Non-Self
20. Local Arrangements Committee
21. Deathometer Rising!
22. Church Bells on Greensward
23. Unbidden Memories of the Blue Jazz AnteroomPart 4. I Have Never Given Up, But I Have Halted, Dazed and Confused, at Hazardous Places Where I Could Have Been Taken Out By Snipers
24. My Final Statements Concerning Librarianship: The Full Text of the Farewell Address, Complete and Uncensored
25. Gorgeous Mental Illness
26. The Sewer at Soul Hour
27. Welcome to The Soul Institute!
I found this fragment in old notes. It sums up a certain mood behind TSI:
But Derrick was immersed in the dream. A dream of wandering with Felicia and several others on the rugged hillside by a huge lake--an endless park that seemed related to the Waxtor Summer Refuge but wasn't WSR. They'd been searching for something in the dusk, but it had gotten too dark and they'd decided to leave. But Derrick had lost his boots and needed to go back alone, in the dark and barefoot, to retrieve them. There he'd found two long-haired young men eagerly digging up a box containing five thousand dollars in cash. Evidently some acquaintance of theirs had committed suicide and had left a note telling where the treasure was. Derrick had come up to them and said: "Excuse me, but I think that's my handwriting on that note--" Bored, they'd let him look at the note. Yes, some of it was his handwriting, and some of it was his mother's, but that was only on the back, and their handwriting was just part of a photocopy that the suicide writer had used as scratch paper for his real note on the other side. "Don't worry, I'm not here to try to claim the money," Derrick had said, backing away--to spend the entire night until dawn walking barefoot, looking for his boots--and meanwhile Felicia was waiting for him, with the others, all night long, they'd returned to the city and were worried about him...
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03/28/08