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I was thinking a little about a comment recently made to me in conversation elsewhere:
And, you know, honestly, these three classes, loosely conceived, are usually present in relation to anything mind-altering. In religion there’s often people interested in power or escape, people who are invested but not that interested in understanding, and those who want to plumb all the depths they can.
That got me thinking about what else these categories could apply to; and of course, no sooner the word “escape” is uttered than people think of fiction, and it seems clear to my mind that these categories can be applied just as well to the experience of fiction as they can to anything else described thus far (naturally, fiction being a mind-altering experience in quite a literal sense. There are very few other easily-available methods of transporting your consciousness literally to another world and walking alongside people who, in a matter of hours, you can come to know as deeply as your own family and whose losses you mourn for as if they were your own).
I’ve never actually met anybody who termed their experiences with fiction as an “escape from reality”, but I believe they exist; those who perceive life as either dull or so unimaginably horrid that they would far prefer to spend as much time unaware of it as possible. It is the cliché portrayal of the fantasy fan, and while I do feel there is a much more positive case of this which can apply (“oh, other worlds are even more beautiful than this; I want to see them!”) which is perfectly lovely (and might even warrant being a separate category, more akin to the other two than this), I find the base, negative form an unfortunate thing. For these people, fiction will never be anything more than a distraction from an ultimately cruel or empty world; and thus they will find true meaning in neither. Furthermore, this way of looking at things tends to create dichotomy between the ideas of “fiction” and “the real world”. In this camp more than any you will find people who are unprepared to view fiction as too deeply applicable to their lives outside of it. You have surely heard the line a thousand times before: “it’s just a story. Elves and dragons aren’t real.” –and in saying that they toss away the baby with the bathwater and negate any positive influence the story as a whole could have hoped to have in their lives. (See later.)
The second category, here, would I suppose be analogous to most fandom; people who revel in fictional worlds, their exploration and creation, for their own sake. They might not look terribly deeply into the applicability of fiction to their lives (and indeed may sometimes shun it as the first category does, though on the other hand some may treat fiction seriously and consider it to have relevant lessons to teach; indeed I think this category is a spectrum, running the gamut all the way from where the first category ends to where the third begins, with the first and third “categories” really more as two endpoints), but they appreciate it well enough and draw delight from it without leaving their lives in this world behind. There’s not too much more I can think of to say about fandom; it’s not the intended topic of this essay.
Then there comes the category of people who, instead of using fiction as an escape– a place to run to separate from this world– engage in a dialogue, a relating, between this world, the fiction and themselves. They may delve deeply into fiction, treat its characters as meaningful and real, its experiences as valid; but they do not then turn around and say that their lives in this world mean nothing. Instead, they apply what they have learnt from their experiences in this world to their life here; from fiction they do not “learn” that this world is an awful and shabby place but rather learn morals, truths, sincerities, ways of relating that they use to make their lives and the lives of others here better. For them above all people, fiction is a kind of reality; fiction is applicable to reality; and their lives here are not compromised by it but strengthened. It is seen as perfectly just and sane to bring experiences from fiction over to this world, because they do not suffer from the neuroses about crossing the two over, brought on in the first category by insecurity about their “obsession” and a distaste for this world, and ironically in the second category by a fear of not being like they imagine the first category to be, that the other categories do.
I would be tempted to call this method of acting something akin to “inscape” or “conscape”; taking the ex- prefix which originally formed the word escape and replacing it with one that means “into” or “with”. Instead of escaping reality, these people enter more deeply into it by means of fiction, work with it; for them, fiction is a pathway deeper into existence, rather than a means out of it.
This is all IMHO, of course, but I thought I would share these thoughts.
A somewhat aimless piece of writing, but they were thoughts that were on my mind.
It seems to me that the major problem with a lot of people’s spirituality is that they get it from books.
Now if you are someone who finds deep meaning in fiction, and I know a lot of you here are, know that I’m not for a moment slandering that fact. I myself do the same. I certainly think fiction can be a valuable, for some people even indispendable tool for discovering the transcendent. The problem I perceive is not in finding meaning in books, but in finding no meaning in books and abiding by them anyway.
People use their holy books as if they were textbooks; “turn to page 367, chapter 5, subheading 1.2: Dealing With Prodigal Sons”. Literally, we quote chapter and verse and read up on specific passages as if we are trying to find how to take the derivative of a polynomial, not connect with the infinite (insert your own joke about infinity here, those more mathematically-minded than I). Even from the perspective of these books themselves (the Bible notes that it contains a lot of parables), much of them is fiction, an elaborate story woven around a few core truths to serve various purposes: to present messages in allegorical form to people not used to contemplating the spiritual or the moral, to personify the nebulous that calls to people and make it seem more “authentic”, and, later, to justify the whims of various kings, sects and leaderships by claiming divine accord.
If the divine ever wanted its words recorded in books– and I do not particularly believe there is any god who has ever said to a man, “Go, and describe these visions and perceptions I have given you in your human language, which is ill fit to contain them, and over the centuries allow them to be copied and re-transcribed and littered with errors, not even accounting for those your own limited perception will have introduced, and then translated into vastly different languages eliminating a good deal of the nuances and leaving people to argue about which one is right”– then it was so that people might look upon them, be inspired, and seek the message behind them for themselves; through the intuition of their own hearts and minds. This is the only way the transcendent will ever be reached, not through reading dry words and obeying without feeling but through seeking that which by its nature cannot be put in words; not through the mind but through the heart. For what is like the spiritual, that thing beyond the grasp of scientific measure, but the emotions?– what is impossible to quantify yet known to be real and true, but the emotions? Surely if we are to find this thing at all we must start with something alike to it in nature.
The human nature yearns for the infinite, and has since the dawn of human history. And it is no mere delusion; many have indeed found it, or at the very least some glimpse of it. From our earliest days we have felt and known, found ourselves guided right when we went by our intuitions, experienced unseen hands in our lives that guided us in the most statistically improbable ways; yet because this is a thing we cannot pin down with scientific doctrine alone, the more rational-thinking disregard this part of our experience as sentient beings entirely, while the more spiritual weave analogies around it to illustrate it that, over generations, become entangled with the core message in people’s minds such that those blinded by it swallow brutality and foolishness whole in the name of higher seeking, and those astute enough to see that the stories themselves are just that write the whole thing off.
To say that the human being is not a wholly rational being should not be seen as a slur, an admission of weakness. That part of us which is not rational is not “irrational” but transcendent– grasping at something beyond the explanations of words, as yet beyond the structure of our understanding, yet no less a part of a structured existence because of it. There is that which we can measure with rulers and weighing-scales and set-squares and compasses, and there is that which speaks to us in our hearts and souls and guts; and if we are to dismiss this latter part of ourselves as biological impulse, to dismiss love as a chemical imbalance and the spiritual as our own solution to a wishful ache, then we must also dismiss the seat of our morality, our conscience, and say it has no meaning; for it is no less embedded in the intuitive as opposed to the measurable. And if we are to do that, then we may as well not be human, nor animal, for if animals do not have conscience then at the least they are guided by ingrained instinct to act sanely, and our instinct as a species is a thing weakened and made meaningless by civilisation.
Isn’t it interesting that whenever people report experiences of meditation, trance, altered consciousness and the like– whether through deliberate self-inducement, drug use, or something else– there is almost always some reference to feelings of “everything being alive” and “becoming one with the universe”? Encounters with fond and friendly creatures who wish to help people reach a “higher state of being” or just show affection are also common. It interests me that the creatures in this encounter were indentified perfectly by the wise woman whom the author visited thereafter, that through drugs and meditation respectively both were put in touch with a very similar phenomenon.
I am, for future reference, not one to approve of chemicals as a way of seeking the spiritual, though I respect people’s right to use them. The times I have tried alcohol it has always made me feel more out of touch with existence than in touch with it, and as such I don’t drink. To be disconnected from feeling my place in existence is frightening, and since I am perfectly capable of having experiences of greater connectedness without drugs I do not see fit to put myself through experiences I feel might mangle this communication as much as, or even more than, they enhance it. That is just personal preference, but it feels like the way I am meant to approach things, and so I do. However, that does not keep me from finding what happens to people during these experiences interesting, from a spiritual perspective.
(To note, I did not set out to write this essay as an argument for or against drug use; you may certainly feel free to discuss it, but it was not my intention in writing it, so I hope it doesn’t overshadow the main point– that is, that people approaching the transcendent from wildly different pathways often seem to find the same core experiences. My disclaimer was purely that, a disclaimer that I do not endorse these things, though neither do I censure them.)
As a result of feeling rather out of sorts, the other night I had a dream which brought to mind an interesting topic to discuss. About a year ago, I was sick in a rather distressing way; a group of us were out camping far from immediate access to medical help, and it wasn’t something that a doctor would have been brought out for in any case but just something that had to pass, but I was experiencing unsettling hallucinations and distortions of perception, and I really could not bear to be alone– I felt extremely distanced from everything and very small, there were periods where visually nothing was making sense, and night was closing in. My closest friend at the time spent that night wrapped in blankets with me, keeping me feeling warm and, perhaps more importantly to me at the time, secure. When I was incoherent and distressed, he held me and brushed the hair out of my eyes and tried to keep me from getting too hot or too cold, and kept me pressed close like a child when I expressed how much it was bothering me that I felt detached from everything around me, to keep that sensation from becoming unbearable. The thing I remember most clearly from that time is how much of a help that was, how much worse of a state I surely would have been in without it, no matter how much I tried to reassure myself that it was only the sickness making me feel so.
We made ourselves very emotionally vulnerable to each other during that incident: two people clinging to each other in the middle of a freezing field, one of them babbling like a five-year-old and the other reassuring them as if they were. Our friendship had always been a close one, but it was only after that, when things we’d revealed could not be un-revealed, that we realised how deep of a bond we had; in particular, how much he cared for me and how happy I was to have that.
Stop me if this sounds like bad slash fiction. Because it isn’t. And, furthermore, I have said absolutely nothing that might have logically implied that a relationship of that nature developed between us. Indeed, the ending to this story is that I discovered he had considered me as close as family for quite a while, and since my blood family have all been (not through any especial fault of their own) estranged from me for most of my life, I appreciated that bond, and since I have always shared a lot with him it didn’t feel awkward to acknowledge this closeness. Neither of us misunderstood the other as wanting something other than we did, which was genuinely nice.
I haven’t been sick in quite a while, and something about being so must have reminded me of the incident, because I did indeed dream about it the other night, and it brought up something I wanted to discuss in general; namely how a deep expressed affection for someone, particularly one that includes a comfort with or even desire for physical closeness such as hugs, is almost always correlated with the existence of sexual feelings– and I think we would be much happier as a species if these two concepts were treated separately.
Emotional closeness and caring does not necessarily equate to sensuality, and I think a lot of people reject the strength of closeness they feel for others because they think that expressing it implies a physical kind of closeness that they don’t feel interested in having. And that’s a shame, because if they didn’t feel it had to imply that, if those who did not necessarily feel sexually for each other but nonetheless loved were able to express the depth of their feelings without fear of being misunderstood, I feel that people would be… well, a lot closer. Even outside of distressing situations, children like hugs and closeness, and adults are no different; they perhaps are a little less forward about desiring such, but I assume most adults still generally appreciate it much as children do, as a soothing and bonding experience. Spending time lying curled up close to a friend isn’t something most cultures normally invite, but if it feels appropriate for both parties, what could be the harm in it? Just because it crosses arbitrarily-drawn boundary lines about what friendships might allow, what sibling or sibling-like closeness might allow, and what sexual relationships might allow, does not invalidate the fact that it is not a sexual experience in and of itself and that people might find it bonding in a way that does not touch on that aspect of life. Similarly, one might desire to write effusive letters detailing the good qualities of a friend and telling them that they are loved, without either considering them a parent- or child-figure or a sexual partner.
To say, as some people do, that a person could not possibly want to share physical closeness and warmth with another human being– we are social animals, after all– without having some “ulterior motive” for doing so, is, I feel, a very limited and distorted view of how people work. It puts caring into such a limited box. Indeed, it puts caring into a box focused on short-term gratification, and I don’t think that is a helpful way to look at it at all. Not that I have anything against sexual intimacy outright; not that I would demean its value. It just seems very wrong to think of it as the ultimate reason for wanting any kind of closeness.
I make distinctions between “sexual relationship” and “romantic relationship” throughout this post specifically because I believe one can have the latter without having the former; and certainly it is not an unfamiliar concept to most people that one can have the former without having the latter. I also do not think that all friendships in which one desires or allows physical closeness, or effusion, or any other such thing necessarily need to be termed, or ought to be termed, “romantic”. For the record, the friend in question is not someone I would generally seek out to cuddle with, though I would certainly not feel uncomfortable if, for example, during a trip we ended up sharing sleeping space. However, that does not mean that I might not find that appropriate in another friendship. There are, I believe, as many diverse and individual ways to relate to people as there are people, and putting them into boxes marked “friend”, “lover”, and “family” hardly does justice to the full expression of these relationships.
Do we ever, indeed, love two people in the same way? For those who have had a number of romantic-and-sexual relationships (I could have used the word “relationships” alone here and most of you would have understood what I meant, yet if I had meant another type of relationship I would have had to specify, a testimony to the monopoly this type of relationship has over the word. I would like to think I have “relationships” with all my friends and even acquaintances, that I “relate” to them in a meaningful and identifiable way. Can we not reclaim the base form of this term?), did you love all of those people identically, or was each a unique feeling and expression of affection for that person’s individual qualities?
There are other people I feel this way for too. I have a friend in particular whom I love dearly, but I’ve found that culture is a barrier to conveying that easily. In this culture, you cannot easily say you love someone without being misinterpreted and, if the person does not return your feelings, inviting a possible future of awkward interactions– all based on the assumption that you are implying this expectation of sexual closeness. What hope do those have who might not ever wish to be sexually intimate but wish to bond deeply with others none the less? If they have no close family, must they spend their entire lives without any real human contact other than the occasional hug in greeting or accidental touch? Children deprived of physical contact frequently develop psychological problems in adult life, and while once we have made the transition to adulthood this comfort becomes less essential if we have had our sufficiency in infancy, it is still a vital part of our makeup. It is a sad thought that those so inclined might especially suffer for, ironically, being presumed to be the exact opposite of what they are. I rather wish more of society understood this perspective.
Further to this entry, a powerful and poignant website on the history of deep friendship.
The more I read the articles on this site, the more I find it distressing and absurd that society has fallen to a state where genuine, tender affection between human beings is variously ridiculed, censured, seen as little more than window-dressing for a particular specialised kind of intimacy, and confined to those only in specific roles. Until recently the kind of closeness that these days requires lengthy essays and websites just to explain was a cheerful norm. What have we deprived ourselves, and our society, of by this isolation?
I would also consider this website required viewing for slash writers. I have no objection whatsoever to people who wish to write about gay relationships– goodness knows they are stigmatised enough as it is– but if it is merely closeness between two individuals that these people seek to explore, there are other, less overused, options in need of exploration and exposure.
Through thoughtful discussion with others and through attempting to put into words those things that I myself see and experience, I have been noticing lately how so many things that people so easily write off are actually, if one does stop to examine them and truly reflect upon them, not so easily dismissable at all; or rather, to put these phrases in the order which ought to be most surprising, how so many truly valuable insights are so easily dismissed.
For example, the eating of meat. Now I do not wish to be offensive to any person reading this who eats meat; nor am I trying to get people to change their ways; rather only to encourage thought. (And the very fact that I do have to include such a disclaimer, that I cannot bring this topic up in this way without fear that my words might seem hostile, says something of my following point, I believe.) I had, until very recently, gone the entirety of my life thus far without ever once questioning meat-eating; certainly I had never felt horrified by the taste and texture of cooked flesh in my mouth. (And that phrase sounds so terrible, now, to my ears. I am not trying to invoke sympathy or disgust with loaded words; it is flesh. One can say no more or less about it.) Even those who appreciate the reasons for vegetarianism in others never seem to truly take them to heart; and I say this speaking as someone who felt this way myself; that is, we hear phrases such as “what poor creature died, so that you could experience this brief sensory pleasure?”, and nod, absently, seemingly understandingly. It seems, on the surface, a fairly reasonable thing to say. But we do not internalise that thought, do not truly dwell on it. We think no more of it than “well, it sounds reasonable”, and move on. We cannot do and continue to act as we do. I did not. And in less tolerant circles, “what once-living thing had to die so you could eat that?” is brushed off as a slogan of the fanatical, the wild-eyed, activists who bomb the homes of the families of cousins of best friends of people who might once have worked for a company whose profits are tied in with animal experimentation.
Even, I believe, a good number of vegetarians themselves do not abstain from eating meat because they are truly emotionally horrified by taking animal life. Rather, they do it because they have been raised to do it, or because certain animals are “cute” (thinking not to the objective value of life but to its subjective appeal to humans; a less cute animal is worth less, to some minds), or because on some level they consider it a good thing to do; but not because it truly bothers them on a deep level.
There are so many of these little phrases in our lives that have become pat, rejected by reflex rather than by thought, because they have become associated with the fringe fanatic, those whose perspective on the situation is unbalanced in entirely the opposite direction. We consider that because the majority live their lives like this, then it must be okay. But if we actually stop to consider these phrases for a moment, might they actually have value? Might they once have been born from a reasonable train of thought, only to have been tainted over time by association until we assume that they can no longer have any real meaning whatsoever?
I very recently saw, in association with an article on a particular restaurant, an image of a whole cooked pig. It was perfectly recognisable as the animal that it had once been; but its skin was turned to a seared, brittle shell. It did not look any different from a human whose skin had been burned, in terms of that, and if we were to accidentally look upon an image of a human all-over burnt, their flesh darkened and charred, we would instantly wince and turn away. We could not stare upon it for long. It would be the same if we saw a dog in such a condition. We would feel sick. Yet this image of a pig is not considered shocking. Why does this not upset us the same way? It horrifies me, now. But for my whole life I have been looking at roasted pig’s heads and similar things and feeling no sorrow, no remorse. It is curious, how the power of collective acceptance can be a total emotional blinder to these things. I was not supposed to think of it as horrible, therefore I did not. It might even have made me hungry. We need to recognise that cultural memes have such power to affect us and condition us, to change our very basic emotions, to alter them completely and totally; not just this one but many, many others.
Once again, this post is not an attack on those who eat meat; not a disdaining of them as callous. I am not raising myself above anyone; we are all susceptible to it. In fact I have arguably done more unpleasant things in my life than most because of cultural acceptance of the things I did; I am not one to preach or judge, and I will not. Indeed that is partly my point; that we as a culture have internalised these ideas such (and my culture is no different) that they have lost their capacity to shock unless analysed very closely. When something has been stripped of any potential to upset by having been a presence in human lives since the dawn of the species (and back then, a necessary one), we are not to be considered unreasonably cruel if we are not moved by it. However, we should at least consider it our duty to contemplate these things, to look beyond layers of cultural conditioning, not just at this one thing but at everything that we take for granted in our lives, to ensure our actions are based on conscious awareness, not acceptance of the status quo. If you do consider this entry offensive to you, please, before being upset by it, ask yourself why. That was the point of my making it, after all; just to provoke thought on a topic that few people are comfortable with provoking thought on, precisely because it is such a sensitive one.
One thing I have been made aware of about this culture– and by “this culture” I mean the primarily-English-speaking culture of what is thought of commonly as “the Western world”, of this present day and age– is how male children are not, generally speaking, taught and encouraged to appreciate beauty. This is fairly obvious. When with female children, parents will emphasize how pretty this or that thing is; oh, you look so pretty, you would look beautiful in those clothes, isn’t that a pretty flower, isn’t that elegant, isn’t that nice? Rarely do we see young boys being spoken to in such a manner; indeed in many social circles men are disdained and treated with horrific cruelty for showing sensitivity or appreciation of beauty, none moreso than, if my reading and the experience of some of you is anything to go by, and I am sure that it is, the school system, which, entered into at the most fundamental period of our lives for learning (obviously), has a huge influence over what we come to internalise as “normal”.
And what is this love of beauty replaced with?; what is it that boys are taught to focus on? There have been several studies conducted to confirm that, when people are given babies to hold dressed in clothing that, in this era and culture, indicates they are probably male, they are engaged in more active, rough-and-tumble play by their caretakers, whereas those indicated to be female are treated more tenderly, told stories rather than encouraged to be physically expressive. Neither of these things would be bad, I feel, if it were not for the extremes; active, athletic play is shaped into war games, and encouraged; reading and appreciation of beauty are turned into a disdain for physical self-expression. Beauty is replaced with war; self-awareness and physical interaction with the world, with nature as something more than flowers in a picturebook, replaced with squeamishness towards “rough” and “ugly” things.
Why do we socialise children differently? We are all human, all equally capable of appreciating the various aspects of the world if only we are shown how to, have the love of them instilled in us from childhood so that we do not have to grope for it blindly in adulthood, blindly and in utter defiance of all we have been taught. Here in this culture we have the capacity, in terms of intelligence, in terms of self-awareness and species-awareness, collective understanding of what makes us tick, to consciously move beyond our unthinking subservience to our biological origins, as warriors and nurturers, hunters and homemakers. Our society doesn’t need it, our brains do not need it– many societies and cultures operate outside this arbitrary set of roles successfully– and our personalities are injured by it. If there is any perceived need for it left in us, let us strive to cast it aside, however hard it may be, in the quest to become truly civilised, truly balanced, as a society.
I was, incidentally, not raised with such a cultural bias against my appreciating beauty; indeed my native culture reveres art almost as much as it does deity, and both men and women are encouraged to take an active interest in the arts, in theatre, in architecture, in literature. I was not given much overt instruction as to my play, to be fair; most of it was conducted alone, out of doors, away from the influence of guardians. But I was taught to be courteous and mannered, to be respectful in my dealings with others and neat in my dress, and I am sure that I was given more incentive to care for beauty than not to; I cannot imagine having been encouraged not to. In this culture, some people– I do not think people like those who read this journal, but a good portion of people outside that group– would see the behaviour that my upbringing has tended me towards as “effeminate”, the very choice of word suggesting that it is only appropriate for females. Why is finding beauty in the world not an appropriate thing for men to engage in? I suppose if the argument is that it makes me “less of a man”, then I look at the traits typically ascribed to being “a man” as opposed to “a woman”, and think that perhaps they are right, for generally I want no part in them; I want to be nurturing and protective and kind and compassionate; I do not want to be domineering or emotionless or even “acceptably” aggressive, for I do not find any part of being aggressive acceptable. (What is my identity as a man comprised of, then?; for I would never have said I thought of myself as anything but. Is it a subtler thing than this? Is it merely a result of my associations with the body I was born into? I feel as if it runs deeper than that; but I could well be questioning it too little. It is an interesting question, and I do not think that I know how to answer it just yet; I have never really thought about it before. But it is something I will dwell upon.)
I do wonder; before people knew explicitly of my gender, how did I read to you?
Further to my previous entry on fiction and grief, which was inspired by discussion of themes in a book my friend Catherine is currently writing, I have a few more things to say today that were inspired by further discussion of a scene therein.
I spoke before of how our grief when we lose contact with a character through a work of fiction’s end can and, I feel, should be able to be legitimately paralleled with our grief at a physical person’s death. We even use the reverse metaphor to describe death; we speak of the closing of the book of that person’s life, and it is a potent analogue for a reason. Both a dead person and a character whose story is over may no longer speak, no longer experience, no longer interact with the ones who loved them, even if the character is written as ostensibly “living on”. They have said their final words. They have been silenced.
But who, from this point on, has the authority to speak for them? One might argue it is the author who retains that authority; the canon is their creation, and at any point they might step up to write a sequel or give an interview expanding upon that character further. But would that be meaningful, many years later, to a person who has already accepted this character into their heart and whose own version of them, with time and the fleshing out of details in that person’s mind, has likely developed into a subtly (or drastically) different person than the one who now resides in the author’s mind? Would the author’s words ring hollow? Would the one person who could arguably still provide those words have any power any more? From the point of view of the reader who loves them, who has most authority to speak for that character?
From the point of view of the character who has become alive again in someone’s mind, who has the right to speak for them? What might they feel to step before their creator? Would they be humbled? Would their creator be as a god unto them? Would they accept the author’s further placing of words into their mouth without question, or do they live on in a wholly separate way as soon as their words leave the page and enter into someone’s mind? What is it to be such a person, able to be aware of one’s creator in a way most humans are not aware of their gods, aware of the hierarchy to which they belong, yet also possessed of an independent mind? In such a relationship, the living character’s words would almost certainly not be valued by most people above the author’s analysis of a person they no longer entirely know. Is that rightful? What is it to “own” a character? Can one ever own what goes on inside another person’s mind?
Who has the right to speak for the dead? And when the living speak, are their voices always accepted?
Thoughts to ponder….
Often, upon reaching the end of a fiction that has profoundly affected them, people will feel a deep sense of loss. When the seminal 70s shoujo series Rose of Versailles ended in Japan, schools reputedly let out because children were too distressed to study (a deeply empathetic reaction, in my opinion). Even when death itself does not form part of the plot, a fiction’s coming to an end can often have that same impact, whether it is a long-running series or a book that took several hours to read. Culture often encourages them to push aside this loss as trivial– it is only the end of a story, after all, not the end of someone’s life. But it strikes me that there is something far more akin to death in the ending of a story than is typically appreciated, that triggers a literal grief response that cannot and should not so easily be pushed away.
When a story containing characters that we have bonded with ends, whether or not the characters die in plot terms, in a sense they are dead to us. Think on this: we will never more receive another sentence from them, never know one more action of their daily lives. Is this not what we say of dead loved ones, that we would give so much to have but one more sentence from their lips, to spend one more day with them? The character may be painted as living on, but at best it is as if we have lost all communication with them and know it will never return. They will never again speak to us. We may know nothing more of their lives. The book, literally, has been closed. We are wrenched suddenly and painfully from them, and we are told in no uncertain terms that we are never to see them again. With as close as some people become to fictional characters, is it surprising that this induces a sense of grief?
Perhaps this is where the drive to write fanfiction comes from; it is allowing the dead to speak again, giving new words and new actions to a person whose life would otherwise be closed to us, keeping the people who would have been torn to us near to us, clinging to them for dear life. It is saying, “don’t go from me; stay with me, let me know you more”. It is giving control over how much time the character spends with the reader back to the reader (where I believe it belongs; a good book should be for the reader first, not the author). Similarly, perhaps this is how certain people come to find that characters take up residence in their minds, though they could perhaps speak of that better than I; for is this not similar, in a way, to how those living will often talk to dead relatives, and hear their responses in their mind; not a mediumship, but an empathetic bond?
I am of the belief that the significance of fiction’s effect on people should be taken into account a lot more than it is by society, who by and large brush off people’s sincere reactions to it with statements to the effect of, “it’s just a story”. Stories induce real emotions in people; that is their design. Characters can become as close to us, as living to us, as any person in this world. Whether or not people find this “appropriate”, it has never struck me as unhealthy– indeed, those I have known who bond with fiction seem to derive many vital things from it that I would say enrich their lives– and the fact is that it happens; it cannot be denied that it happens, that it affects people, and as such I feel it should be treated sympathetically.
There is a common assumption that with knowledge about the world, with clarity, comes cynicism. Indeed, this is a truth in part, borne out by the practical experiences of many people. However, it is also an assumption based on the idea that those who are cynical know everything there is to know, or that further knowledge would only be of the variety that would drive them more deeply into cynicism.
We begin as children exploring and learning about the world, wide-eyed at its possibilities. When all is new to us, most is joy; there is pain and suffering, yes, but the thrill of the newness of life unfolding absorbs the attention; the childhood years are frequently remembered as times of discovery and pleasure, even if the childhood was not otherwise an ideal one.
As we grow older these pleasures fade, and responsibilities and burdens loom large. Furthermore, we have a greater capacity to philosophise about life, and in particular, knowing little of the truth of existence and having mostly, as a species, neglected and renounced our intuitions as meaningless– and those who do still possess them in rudiment follow them only to find themselves confronted with a lack of what they seek, the feeling of having hit a ceiling that bounds off anything meaningful– we suffer from that malaise of the human condition, existential angst (which does not mean what you might think it means, but rather to suffer from terror and uncertainty derived from not knowing whether your life has a purpose, what happens when physical life ends, and so forth). We have forgotten how to see all the goodness in life, and now confronted with the darkness of it, we look back on the child we were as hopelessly naïve. That child, who could not philosophise, who could know nothing of adult burdens or sufferings, who had not yet the capacity to contemplate existence, was completely unknowledged, and as knowledged people we look upon them as obviously deluded. The name for this feeling is, commonly, disillusionment.
However, few words could be less apt descriptors of this condition, for in my opinion it is in fact a profound illusionment, perhaps the greatest illusion there ever was. There is a knowledge beyond the glass ceiling; it is a knowledge that can be acquired at least in part through simple contemplation of the world, through appreciation of the fact that for every sorrow there are a thousand beautiful things that must necessarily exist for it to even be possible– for life to end, to fear, to doubt, there must be life, and all its wonders, the miracle of the complex anatomy of the living being, and beautiful things to fear the loss of, and magnificent hopes and truths to doubt, and things that we strive for that we fear we cannot have but nevertheless exist, and countless things before our eyes that would consume our attentions for our whole lifespan if we were only to sit and marvel on how truly wondrous and detailed they are; while sorrows are but shallow and transient things, the pattern of life, the continued creation of new beings to laugh and live and love and learn, to stretch up to the sky and feel the sun against them, to create and hope and dream and know, is eternal. As we touch the true nature of existence, we are awed by it anew; for there is so much more for us to know that we ever might have dreamt, so much complexity and wonder to see even in the structure of the things we can observe, and rarely-told wonders hinted at in that which we cannot.
So, no, perfect knowledge does not necessarily induce cynicism. Rather, an intermediate state of knowledge that is assumed to be perfect knowledge induces cynicism, which is really a longing for something more that cannot be found because the person, after some attempts, has resigned themselves to its nonexistence and embraces this in an attempt at comforting the self. Turning in on themselves, binding themselves up in themselves, they renounce the world. But the world calls. It is not a simple thing to reach, for collective illusion in the form of each other’s expectation bounds, but it is there. None need give up hope: begin to find marvels in the small things around you, reflecting on the joy and complexity inherent in a single leaf, and change your thinking thus; and the big things will begin to take care of themselves.
(Or, to sum up all the above into a single comic strip: knowledge that transcends cynicism can be found in many walks of life.)
The Sanskrit term Dharma signifies the underlying order in nature and life (human or other) considered to be in accord with that order. The word Dharma literally means ‘that which upholds or supports’ (from the root ‘Dhr’ – to hold), here referring to the order which makes the cosmos and the harmonious complexity of the natural world possible. Dharma is a central concept in Indian civilisation where it governs ideas about the proper conduct of human life. So central is it, indeed, that the symbol of the dharma – the wheel – takes central place in the national flag of India.
I think there is a common conception of the force of “order” as a negative, constraining, authoritarian, stultifying force; and by contrast chaos as change, creativity, freedom and individuality. I think if more people took this view of order, they would not think of it as such a hateful thing.
Just my sleepy thought of now. 
By choosing to experience a work of fiction, it could be argued that we enter into a contract of trust with its creator. We give ourselves over to fiction in many ways that we would not give ourselves over to a person. We open our thoughts to its implications; we enter a state of mind in which its words, for a time, are unquestionable truth, the only truth in our minds as the story takes over and the outside world recedes, at least if the fiction is good enough at suspending our disbelief. We take its characters into ourselves and consider them as dear, for the duration of the story– and sometimes beyond– as our oldest friends, our closest family. We allow– indeed, we encourage– fiction to manipulate our emotions. We enter into stories asking to be made to feel joy and sorrow and fear and confusion; we consider that stories which do this are engaging, compelling, realistic, and those that do not are flat, bland, uninspiring. Often, it could be said, we come to fiction looking, at least temporarily, to be wounded, to be hurt, to feel that awful sinking, cringing pain that comes with empathy for someone deeply loved as they go through trials. Why we seek this– to feel a sense of deep connection to another person, perhaps?– is beyond the scope of this short essay, but the fact is nevertheless that we open ourselves a great deal to fiction, to allow it to give us experiences, and as such give it an immense amount of power over us. And the responsibility for wielding that power well lies in the author’s hands.
When we give ourselves over to fiction, we give ourselves over, ultimately, to the author. They have made themselves responsible for crafting the experiences we will have– experiences that we may learn from, that may change us profoundly, that may impact us emotionally just as much, or even moreso, than experiences we receive through other means; for pulling us into dark chasms and bringing us out through the other side safely. We trust that the author will have care both for us, and for the characters; that they will have the skill, and empathy, to carry us and not drop us.
My conversation partner began this train of thought by suggesting that this calling, the calling to be an author, was almost something of a holy office. The author must be as a priest or confessor; someone to whom you give the deepest parts of yourself, who you allow ultimate say over what is right and wrong in a particular context, and as such they must not abuse that power, but treat it with careful thought and compassion. They must exercise a great deal of social responsibility; the reason we place such high standards on people of the clergy is that the public does feel inclined to place so much trust in them and allow them such power over their lives, and as such they are required to be exemplary people– and if they fail such standards, we are horrified because such a deep and total trust, one that we rarely experience with people outside our own friends and family (and sometimes not even then), was breached.
It strikes me thus that this is a further reason that authors, also, ought to be held to such standards. Not merely because their work has social influence, because it has the potential to condone or denounce an act, situation or type of person in people’s eyes, but because it has individual influence. We place our total trust in the creator of a story from the moment we enter into it until the moment we put it down; and a lot can happen during that relatively short timeframe. It is the author’s duty to recognise and respect that, to consider the importance of what they are holding in their hands, and ensure that their story, no matter how intentionally harrowing, terrifying or dark, is ultimately for the betterment, not the injury, of the reader.
To summarise: You are influencing people when you write. That is a great responsibility. Take care with it.
I am not, incidentally, talking about being anti-abortion. (I honestly don’t know what my stance on that issue is; I think it’s regrettable that people end up in, or are forced into, situations where they might consider it, and I think people should be careful above all, but it would depend heavily on individual circumstances. I do not think I can make a blanket judgment of everyone that might be involved in such a situation and expect to be fair.) I am talking about being pro-life, which is a phrase that has been sadly co-opted by a certain radical movement that, if its aims were more rational, would not need to use such emotive language to win people to its cause. (I am also pro-using words as their original meanings suggest and not forgetting their roots in the face of popular idiom.) Pro-, from the Ancient Greek “in front of”, supporting or favouring, agreeing with; life, the state of being alive, existence, that experience we have as living beings.
A lot of people seem to be ultimately neutral towards life. They enjoy it a lot of the time, but they also feel negative about it a lot. They experience beauty, but only in the overly impressive, the obviously, stunningly attractive; everything else is dull or plain or mundane. They see existing as a thing that people do by default, a neutral state that can be made to seem “not worth it” by sufficient emotional pain.
(I hope this does not seem overly critical of people who do feel life is not worth it, and as one who has admittedly not experienced great emotional pain myself but knows a number of people who have, believe me when I say that I am not dismissing their experiences or saying that it is foolish to feel like that. I know well that people too easily become trapped in spirals of negative thought that they cannot help and which are difficult to escape from. I am merely providing the counterpoint of my view, which will hopefully help reather than offend; I think that if people were to dwell on these thoughts, they might be helpful in escaping from such thought patterns.)
My feeling is that life is not a neutral, passive state; it is an overwhelmingly wonderful state, an active goodness, a positive. The very fact that people live and breathe and think is a magnificence in itself; that we can communicate in complex language, that we can create art and build elaborate machinery, that we can run and dance and leap and tumble, that we can experience wonderful, deep, sincere connections with other human beings and other living creatures, that we can be brought to tears by our appreciation for beauty, are bonuses atop that, and things like having plenty of money, living somewhere with breathtaking views, having a love that will last a lifetime, are only further decoration on the icing. I sincerely believe it is a better state of being to have no sensory experience but one’s own thoughts than it is to not be conscious at all; that there is beauty and awe to be found in every aspect of life, and the only reason we do not value what is before us nearly as much as we should is that we compare it to what others have. If we were all blind, would it be a suffering not to see?
Think about it; the very facts that we are conscious, can think, can appreciate, can know, can understand are beauties and gifts beyond price. If you are able to run and let the wind catch in your hair, if you are able to run your fingers over the rough bark of a tree and appreciate the contrast in texture between it and your skin, if you can experience beautiful music, if you can read books, you are even more greatly privileged. Even in the simplest facts of us there are wonders to be breathtaken at, if only we think about them for long enough; how fascinating our complex sight, that it might discern so many vibrant and pastel hues of colour, that we might be able to tell all the shades in a strand of rabbit hair, that we can see the sun and see the stars and marvel at gorgeous handwriting and pick out the tiniest grain of sand against a background. What care, what wonders, gave birth to such a thing? We could spend each day of our lives sitting staring into space, held rapt by the very fact that our bodies are so complex and wondrous, if we truly thought about all that was involved and got to know it. What then of the wider world?; is it not fascinating how water moves and ripples and flows and pours, how the smallest leaf contains such gradients of colour and such well-crafted mechanisms for keeping itself alive? Is it not inspiring that we live in a world that changes and grows, grass from the ground growing stronger and taller with each revolution of the earth, yet remains the same in all the fundamental aspects we need to survive?
Take any object in your room, or wherever you are reading this now. Stare at it; think of all the complexities that went into creating it from the very birth of the materials that made it, how marvellous it is that the laws of existence are such that it does what it does, does it reliably and consistently. Isn’t it amazing that that can even happen? Isn’t it amazing that so many things in the world are aligned such that we find them beautiful, experience such positive emotions just to look at their patterns– indeed, that practically all of nature is so?
You have a vast, incredible gift, all of you. Don’t waste it. That doesn’t mean use it for something grand and impressive by human social standards, like getting a high-powered job– although certainly, by all means, do that if you wish it. It means don’t fail to appreciate how wonderful it is, and don’t waste your time finding philosophical what-ifs to terrify yourself with when you could be being awed by the beauty of even the simplest thing. It means don’t go through life being neutral about it. Love it. Be passionate. Be obsessed. Be absorbed by things. Throw yourself into things you adore; take time to relax and reflect and contemplate and enjoy what is right before you rather than searching for staggering beauty far afield. If you do, you’ll appreciate the staggering beauty even more when you come across it. There is so much to love about existence, and it begins with the fact that you exist. Think about how incredibly valuable that is.
I took a short nap just now, having had to wake up comparatively early to take care of some things, and as I was drifting into that strange state of pre-sleep– I’ve oft heard it quoted that nobody knows what it’s like to fall asleep, but that seems to me to be untrue, or at the very least we do know what it’s like to enter the state just before falling asleep and find oneself succumbing. Admittedly I’ve usually heard this quoted in children’s fiction; perhaps the ability to sustain the state and actually note it develops with age?– I found myself noting the curious qualities of dream logic, or more precisely, since I was too awake to be dreaming and thus I don’t believe it’s limited to that state, reduced-consciousness logic. I’ve heard it said that “dream logic makes no sense” or that “anything can happen”, but I found myself noting, specifically, what seems to be the mechanism that makes this so: the part of consciousness we lose first is the part responsible for caring about whether something makes sense. It’s the part that hangs on details and will nitpick inconsistencies in literature, wants things to follow according to what they understand, in the physical world, as typically following. It allows for things to happen in a particular set, expected fashion, and if they don’t happen in such a fashion in fiction, at least within a reasonable range of leniences, experiences a failure to suspend disbelief; if they don’t happen in fact, it probably undergoes one of a wide range of experiences ranging from confusion to possibly even outright, subconscious-level denial and simple eradication of the circumstance in question from memory. (If it is possible to repress memories in mundanely traumatic situations, what else might we be repressing memories of? Admittedly this is a wild theory, yes; and it is one that comes from having just woken up, so do not take it too seriously, on top of that.) Before falling asleep, this seems to be the first thing to go, and all things are accepted as inherently possible; a perfectly ordinary and distinct plot emerges in one’s mind, and then, suddenly, Harry Potter appears! With a toad on his head.* If you’re at the point where you’re willing to accept this as a seamless transition of plot, without questioning why a character from a completely different story has appeared doing something incongruous (admittedly not so incongruous in his timeline), then you know you’ve successfully reached such a state.
My thought: what would it do to our perceptions of the world if that part of our brain were able to be turned off while otherwise conscious? Since this is ostensibly the point of meditation, entheogenic drug use, and other techniques designed to help the human (or other intelligent being) reach a “transcendent” state, I suspect I am not far from the mark in my speculations that it would allow a “purer”, more literal view of the world to free it from the expectations of “what should be”, that it would allow us to perceive things that we normally block or ignore; though of course such expectations are in place to help us handle everyday tasks successfully, and we would not want them always turned off. (As such, I also don’t feel my thoughts are exceptionally groundbreaking; they’re merely musings I’m recording.) Since the focus of perception would not be the idle fancies of one’s mind, as is the case in dreams and, arguably, drug use to a point– one might be perceiving the outside world too, but drugs also cause the thoughts to turn inwards– one would be less likely to see truly nonsensical things, such as Harry Potter, unless they were actually there, even if noticing the additional things that were present and the “raw” way in which the world was perceived would distract one from much else.
*An actual example from the “dream” scenario I was having at the time. Sometimes, I have the suspicion my dreams manage to approach insightful. Other times, they’re just bad fanfic. Of course, it may well have been doing this to prove my point; I can’t remember which thought came first.
I recently finished the book Ender’s Game, and I was talking a little to my friend Catherine about the concept of the Speaker for the Dead, and simultaneously, though at the time unrelatedly, of the importance of preserving stories, and particularly fictional characters– for they can live on forever, if their stories are properly propagated and recorded and instilled in the hearts of each generation, and there is no reason why anything that can be made immortal should not be made so, and perhaps a crime in allowing that which has the potential to live forever to be lost.
What occurred to me slightly later on was that, for all the common arguments against fanfiction– it is unoriginal; it is intellectual property theft; it is often poor quality (the latter of which in particular is no argument against anything as a whole)– there is an argument for it that, in my opinion, trumps them all. As authors of fanfiction, we are, if not quite speakers for the dead, at least the only speakers for those who no longer have a voice. We may not be responsible, true, for helping other people to see them in various lights, for helping others to understand subtle nuances of their character, and above all, for helping them to live on in other people’s minds, such that their lives will be extended. But we are the only ones who can; and perhaps that in itself is a sort of responsibility. Perhaps, to jump to an analogy from a different universe, we did not take anything akin to a Wizard’s Oath when we began reading and appreciating fiction, an oath to slow down or even stop the entropy of fictional worlds. But it is certainly nothing less than a noble task; and thus we should do it if we can, and certainly not feel guilty about it, for all the reasons that people might claim we should disdain fanfiction, but only feel that we have done a most positive thing for lives and stories that do not deserve to die.
Would not every individual want a Speaker for the Dead, at the end of their days, to record their lives?; and would not every fictional character, too, want a speaker for their lives, someone who has dwelt with them at length and seen their subtleties, their flaws and merits that few less close to them would know, all the hidden things about them that would otherwise go unrecorded by time? Certainly it will not be the only true story of them, that recorded second-hand; but it will be a true story of them; and multiple true stories that do not always agree are a far better thing, to my mind, than no true stories at all.
On the border of sea and shore rages a timeless conflict; a conflict, like all in nature, that is no true battle but merely a circuitous dance, a necessity of existence, the clashing of the elements stirring life from its dormancy into full bloom, shaping unremarkable shoreline into polished pebble and smooth crystalline glass. I have been that conflict; with my twin Runes I have known the swirl and crash of waves from the inside, have been each of a million grains of sand scattered upon the shores of my world; been dragged under currents and, to a lesser degree, been the currents that consumed them. But from a mortal perspective, I have never experienced it. My home is not close to the ocean, and campaigns rarely afford the opportunity for sightseeing. But recently, I have found myself with a little unexpected time, and so I travelled, last weekend, to see and experience the conflict not as one of its forces, but as a human caught in the clash.
It was an exhilarating experience; for long moments afterwards I could barely form coherent thoughts. I was scared and elated, breathtaken, overcome by joy and by the uniquely mortal experience, irrational as it is from my perspective, of fear for one’s bodily safety. We humans are made such, ingrained with such instincts, and I at my young age have not yet had time to burn them entirely from my system, especially since I can still feel pain, be wounded, even be killed though I will not truly die; even knowing that I can never be truly taken from this physical existence, there is nothing the less awesome– to use that word in its classical sense– about confronting a wall of water taller than you yourself and allowing it to take you, standing firm as it towers over you and pulls you into its embrace, within which it is the master and you are but a grain of sand tossed upon its foam. Thousands upon thousands of such waves formed all the pebbles of that beach, smooth as the ocean surface itself, stone soft like liquid against fingertips. I only needed to feel one upon my human body to connect the two halves of the experience instantly, to have all my nerves attuned to the flux and flow of the tide, to feel, long after I had retreated from the shoreline, the tide working within myself; I felt a gravity pull on me as strong as that which held me to the ground, my every cell caught in the eternal rhythm of the waves. Long after the waves had stopped hitting me, I closed my eyes, and I could still feel myself pulled and tossed by the tide. I knew when the ocean rose upon the shore, and when it had retreated; all the earth seemed to move beneath me, pulled into its grasp, released again.
Where two elements meet and conflict, there is a great energy born. I take that energy for granted, sometimes, perhaps, for my ability to wield it. But there I was not master over ocean and earth, but mastered by it; experiencing that energy from the perspective of the influenced, rather than the influencer. It is a vastly different thing, and in its own way, a rewarding experience.
