Released December 2023 

”.…….. there are bullets to dodge and fools to outwit and wealth in countless places though often hidden, and if I kept alert I could hear the avalanche from far off, and I learned that most conventional wisdom was only conventional ………”

In This Darkness Has Got to Give, Donn Harris takes us on a half-century wisdom-seeking journey through the tangled webs of society, politics, education, The Grateful Dead and the Bible. He navigates a blurred line between dreamscape and non-fiction, asking questions and inviting reflection on our unexamined beliefs, stumbling forward as we all do, looking for the light, listening for the sound. Darkness is one man’s impassioned story that rises to the level of the universal: a voice at once distinctive and familiar, describing experience that excites, frightens, confounds, and ultimately resonates with the truths of our times, offering insights into the mundane and the profound unlike anything we’ve encountered before.

This Darkness Has Got to Give takes us from the outer boroughs of New York City to the high Himalaya, from the mud-soaked rock concerts of the early 1970s to the halls of power in the post-millennium identity crisis, a story and a voice crackling with rage and hope and the pulse of life, and giving us a peek at the light emerging from the darkness.

“In the high desert plains of the mid-Asian plateau, slapped silly from all sides by brutal gale-force winds, we have come across the Graveyard of Empires, where they tell tales of bloated and arrogant militia that have wandered across the plains and through the high mountain passes for centuries, driven mad by the haboobs and the hyenas and the howling jinn and been stymied, defeated, their bones now dust beneath our feet. If this is true, then where are all these new Empires coming from? Haven’t they been exhausted? Or will we finally learn from history, take care of our problems back at the office, and stay the hell out of there?”

- Tom Durkin, columnist, The Union of Nevada City 

Donn Harris has played out many roles, from the American road to the high Himalaya, from New York to the Sahara Desert, in a diverse, edgy life that has skirted the edges of modern events and movements. He has been drop-out and scholar, rebel and teacher, actor and stage director, pacifist and soldier, School Principal and teacher of both the incarcerated and the gifted in the San Francisco Bay Area, Arts Executive, national thought leader, and Chair of the California Arts Council under two governors. Harris has incorporated these experiences into novels, essays, investigative pieces and articles that cover a range of topics with a unique voice capturing a worldview that is original, challenging and unpredictable.

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I was fortunate to have the varied experiences recounted in my written work, and to be alive at a time when there was much to discover, the freedom with which to discover it, and exceptional people with whom I could share the adventures and the ideas.

I wanted to write in a way that allows the rejection of the status quo to remain in a mainstream context. We can do many of the same things we are doing in this world – have ambition, make money, run for office, raise children, indulge our passions – only do them better, in ways that are kinder and more authentic, and so can have lasting impact. We need for our impulses to be generated in a different place, and our responses to what we experience to be fresh and original, not tied to layers of stale assumptions or the echoes of old voices in our heads. In my interactions with people, and in what I hear when in public places, the amount of time, energy and focus invested in canned ideas and shallow clichés continues to register with me. New ideas often have no place to land. The creative thinker is left floating in an ungrounded place. Part of my efforts is to connect the wild to the settled.

From the age of 15 until I joined the Air Force at age 20, I lived a somewhat nomadic existence. The trend continued during my military term: San Antonio, Biloxi, Pensacola, Phoenix, a year in Iceland, then returning to a vastly different America in the spring of 1980. The moment I touched American soil and received my Honorable Discharge remains among my most profound: I was an isolated entity at that moment, without obligation or connection, all potential, only limited by my own doubts. But soaring hope and great joy overpowered any internal turmoil. Whatever was to become of me, I owned it. America: this was our land! I could do anything, go anywhere, within or beyond America. And when I took my first steps in the new decade it was, to a great degree, the willful act of a free man.

Freedom makes powerful demands on its practitioners. There are many choices, many roads. I needed to observe what was before me, to give freedom a coherent and uncluttered structure. I had to wade through the detritus of generations, the layers of things no longer true that we couldn’t bring ourselves to discard. We had become hoarders, and our mindless psychological assemblage had turned into a slag heap of the meaningless and the obstructionist and the toxic.

So Why A Writer? I wanted to create, and words were the tools I was best suited to employ. The urge to create is very powerful, the process fulfilling. When I was directing my first play, I was in college, had a full load of classes, a part-time job, was broke most of the time, and when we entered the grueling tech week prior to opening it was intense chaos. It was also finals week; I remember taking a Logic final with a 102 degree fever and a 4-hour rehearsal awaiting me. Tuesday of that week I was zipping down a hallway looking for the costume designer to quell a controversy about a costume I wanted for one of the characters. Three people were racing behind me calling my name. Someone stepped into my path and shoved a clipboard at me so that I could sign off on the budget for additional stage set lumber. The group following me were able to catch up and were literally tugging on my sleeves. I happened to look down and saw there were holes in my shoes and my socks protruded, had holes of their own. I had lost so much weight that I couldn’t get my pants to stay up even with a belt, and the cuffs had dragged on the ground and were fraying. I was stressed, exhausted, hungry – and as joyful as I’d ever been. I was creating, using 125% of myself. 

Now, as I write, everything I ever learned, everything I ever experienced, is utilized in some capacity – on its own, or as the catalyst for something fictional, or as a piece of some larger mosaic or, most often, in an inexplicable subliminal way. 125% cannot go on indefinitely; often creativity is better served by 80%. But that is not the impulse of the young. It took me a while to understand the value of proportion.

A friend once told me that our lives were a work of art, and I thought he was ducking the hard work of actually thinking something up and executing it. Life was right in front of you. What was there to create?

But I was way off-base. A reserve of rich experience infuses what is created with depth and resonance.  The stuff of our lives matters.

A writer, unlike an actor or visual artist, is primarily a thinker, and the quality of writing is in direct proportion to the quality of thinking. What has been considered sharp thinking was usually sequential logic nestled in established process – it still can be, but there is more than that. We need to recognize lives and experiences that have been crafted uniquely and independently, to appreciate those whose sensibilities tend more toward the abstract than the linear, or who simply walk a different path. These divergent souls are often ridiculed and ostracized. I combat this type of judgmentalism daily. Let people be who they are going to be. Weirdness deserves its space, and if we’re open enough it enriches us. How you live directly impacts what you create. The choices we make as we craft our lives – what to eliminate, what to emphasize, what we pursue and how hard, when to improvise and when to go back to the basic theme – are the choices artists make.

I came to appreciate that the authentic life is the ultimate work of art.

Powerful social and artistic forces combined to give us an American Renaissance, a rebirth that broke free from an oppressive past, only to backslide these past few years. From the post-WWII years through the early 1970s – a generation – a path of creativity and authenticity emerged open to anyone, in any profession or role, but only a few had the vision and courage to follow that path. Even the most progressive spirit feels great pressure to follow the herd. Maybe they will be a dissenting voice from within, and those are valuable roles that keep the mainstream honest. But we will always need the renegade, the maverick, the dissenter, the refusenik. The herd tends to collapse toward the center, to look askance at outsiders and outliers. This has been going on since settled tribes tried to fight off the barbarians at the gate. We have evolved from those times, but troubling remnants haunt us.

By definition, the divergent thinker is in the minority, but it’s a problem when advocates of the divergent thinker are in the minority. I wage a daily battle against the forces of control and fear. We still fight wars, and fire people for having online sexual posts; and there are hostile corporate take-overs, manipulated economic disasters, campaigns against leaders in other countries who think and act independently. We experience petty tyrants who wield power unconscionably, weaponry deployed — wholesale death is not a deterrent. 

Elsewhere, the office manager presides over a milieu of duplicity and judgment. The school secretary believes spare the rod, spoil the child. The line supervisor is proud that 40% of his evaluations are “needs improvement” or lower. These are not isolated attitudes. They are connected, and prevalent, and they lead to extreme outcomes.

But progress toward greater tolerance and freedom is unmistakable, and even with recent setbacks we’ve come far. There is hope, but at times rage is not an unreasonable response to what we see. I use my words as I was taught, I love my enemy (easier with some than with others), and put only partial trust in those who are keeping the score. This is the game we inherited, and it’s up to us to give it a modern spin.  There is a fight underway, the issues are worth it, and there is honor in fighting fair. You take in the big fish, throw the little ones back – that’s a lesson in proportion, and fairness. I work from that premise these days.

In more than one place, you will read about the campaign to decertify truth, and I proposed authenticity as its successor. That’s in case the decertification becomes complete. I still favor at least something like the truth, but it’s teetering.

Thanks for reading and send me comments on the CONTACT page.

 - Donn Harris, Nevada City, CA, July 2024  

Truth, I began to see, was not something that could be assumed. It was merely one choice among many in deciding on strategic options. I was being told that Truth was a rigid construct, not nimble enough for the modern game. I proposed authenticity as its replacement, and haven’t heard back yet.

- Martha Grube, Redding, CA