Great Song Though

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Alfred's Story

Photo by Caleb Thal

image courtesy of unsplash.com

"When I was younger," the young lady began, "one time, I was fourteen years old, and I stole from my church."

"I thought this was going to be a dirty story," said Dan, still sipping his coffee.

"Don't interrupt," said Ben.

"There were a bunch of us that used to sneak into the church on weeknights," she said.  "Like ten or eleven at night on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.  One of the windows on the downstairs building would open from outside, and one of us would climb in and open the door.  We'd basically just run around in the church, you know the main part, what do you call it--"

"The transept," said Dan.

"It's not the transept," said Ben, "it's the sanctuary."

"Right, that," said Alfred.  "Anyway we'd run around, play hide and seek, feel like we were bad news.  Anyway it used to be fun, then we'd go get a soda from the grocery store or something."

"A soda," said Ben, with a certain look.

"Or something," said Alfred.  "Most of the older kids left after they graduated.  Anyway, the group shrank, and we didn't feel like letting any of the younger kids in on the secret, so we sort of stopped.

"Except for the one last night," she said.

"Ooohh," said Dan.

"Aaaaah," said Ben.

"I was the second-youngest person in the group," said Alfred.

"Quick question," said Ben.

"What?" asked Alfred.

"Did you like going to the church at night?" said Ben.

Alfred hesitated.

"I think so," she said.  "I know I liked spending time with my friends.  I don't think it had to be at the church, but I didn't mind going.  I didn't think we were doing anything that bad."

"Wasn't it creepy?" said Dan.  "I remember when I was a kid--"

"Can she tell this story?" asked Ben.

"You interrupted first," said Dan.  Then he glanced at their companion.  "Sorry, Alfred."

"What were you saying?" Alfred asked courteously.

"When I was a kid," said Dan, "I remember going back into the church after the service, when it was dark and quiet... it freaked me out."

"I think that's why they wanted to go there," said Alfred.  "It creeped me out a little, sure.  I remember the way the streetlights looked coming in through the pictures in the windows, they were orange and sort of soft, indirect."

"Diffuse," suggested Ben.

"Sure," said Alfred, "whatever.  It felt like we were closed in there, like there was a storm outside, but that we didn't need to be.  I'm not sure it makes sense.  I wasn't worried that we'd be caught, or that anything bad would happen.  The worst was just, sort of, that we didn't need to use it.  Like we were parking in the handicapped space, you know?"

"I think so," said Dan.

"So what happened on the last night," said Ben.

"It was just me and two other guys," said Alfred.  "I'm pretty sure what one of them had in mind inviting me, but that wasn't going to happen.  I should probably have told him, but he was actually a really nice guy and I didn't want to hurt his feelings."

"Like poor Dan here," said Ben.

"What?" said Dan with a violent start.

"Not really," said Alfred.  "The other guy--"

"As if," Dan said, making scoffing noises and changing colors.

"The other guy," said Alfred, as if Dan hadn't spoken, "I don't want to use names, so I'll call him Lem, he was older, and the one who usually got us in.  We all pretty much knew how to do it, but this Lem guy was the one who always actually did it.  They were both older than me, but Lem was already graduated, he'd sort of hung onto the group until it was gone.

"So we snuck in," said Alfred.  "I think it was a Thursday night, I'm not sure.  It was towards the end of summer, when nothing was really happening in town.  That was the last year before I got a job.  Usually we'd just sit and talk if there weren't a lot of us, we wouldn't run around for long.  

"But that night the first guy I mentioned, I'll call him Sam, Sam wanted to play hide and seek, like we used to.  I don't think he meant anything by it, anyway we agreed, I think we all knew it was sort of the last hurrah, if you know what I mean.

"So we scattered, which was sort of awkward because it was just Lem and me, and Sam started counting like usual, you know, standing in the middle of the row between the benches.  I remember looking back at him, this guy was like sixteen or seventeen, plaid shirt and jeans, hands over his eyes and counting out loud like a little kid.  Lem was already out of sight, somewhere over by the organ.  I went up to the altar."

"Oh no," said Ben.

"Hang on," said Alfred, "you don't even know what I did yet."

"I have a bad habit," said Ben, "of assuming the worst."

"Oh," said Alfred.

"What?" said Dan, who had forgotten his embarrassment.

"You didn't," said Ben.

"I don't know what you think I did," said Alfred, but she sounded uncertain.

"Continue," said Ben.

"There was a little closet in the wall by the altar," said Alfred.

"It's called an aumbry," said Ben.

"How do you know that?" said Dan.

"I read a lot," said Ben.

"What's an aumbry for?" said Dan.

"It's for the host," said Ben.

"Right," said Alfred.  "Anyway, Sam was still counting, so I opened the door, there was a metal container inside."

She paused.

"And?" said Ben.

"I thought you were going to say what the container's called," said Alfred.

"Oh," said Ben, changing color.  "Sorry."

"Do you know what it's called?" Alfred asked.

"The tabernacle, I think?" said Ben.  "No, it's called a pyx."

"A pyx?" said Alfred.  "You're making that up."

"No," said Ben, "it's the pyx, it's this little box they put the eucharist in when it has to go to someone sick.  Or if there's extra, and they need to leave some around for later."

"Well, I guess they'd had some extra," said Alfred.

"You took communion wafers?" said Dan.

"I took the whole box," said Alfred.

"No," said Dan.

"Slipped the whole thing in the pocket of my hoodie and went and hid," said Alfred.

Ben and Dan looked at her in silence for a moment.

"It was a long time ago," said Alfred, with a little shrug.

"Desecration of the host," said Ben, "was a mortal sin.  It could net you excommunication latae sententiae

"What's that mean?" asked Alfred, looking a little timid.

"That you're kicked out of the church," said Ben.

"I know what excommunication means," said Alfred, "I'm an art student.  What's the rest mean?"

"That there's no trial necessary," said Ben.  "If you do it, no matter who finds out, you're guilty.  In the eyes of God, as it were."

"Just for taking the box?" said Alfred, sounding outraged.

Ben shrugged with a speculative expression.

"I'm not sure," he said.  "Maybe, maybe not.  Depends on what you did with it."

"Jesus Christ," said Alfred.  She didn't sound alarmed; she spoke as if she were reacting to a building burning down a hundred years ago.

"I didn't know you were so spiritual," said Dan.

"So what happened next?" asked Ben.

Rodger Wilton Young

World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C.
image courtesy of wikipedia

"Rank and organization: Private, U.S. Army, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division. Place and date: On New Georgia, Solomon Islands, 31 July 1943. Entered service at: Clyde, Ohio. Birth: Tiffin, Ohio. G.O. No.: 3, 6 January 1944. Citation: On 31 July 1943, the infantry company of which Pvt. Young was a member, was ordered to make a limited withdrawal from the battle line in order to adjust the battalion's position for the night. At this time, Pvt. Young's platoon was engaged with the enemy in a dense jungle where observation was very limited. The platoon suddenly was pinned down by intense fire from a Japanese machinegun concealed on higher ground only 75 yards away. The initial burst wounded Pvt. Young. As the platoon started to obey the order to withdraw, Pvt. Young called out that he could see the enemy emplacement, whereupon he started creeping toward it. Another burst from the machinegun wounded him the second time. Despite the wounds, he continued his heroic advance, attracting enemy fire and answering with rifle fire. When he was close enough to his objective, he began throwing handgrenades, and while doing so was hit again and killed. Pvt. Young's bold action in closing with this Japanese pillbox and thus diverting its fire, permitted his platoon to disengage itself, without loss, and was responsible for several enemy casualties."

-Citation, Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumous

It's All Relative

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Interregnum

Photo by Caleb Thal
image courtesy of unsplash.com

"Well, at least it's spring outside," Dan observed.

They were standing in the street outside their favorite bar, which either was or was not on fire at the moment.  The smoke detector had chased them out a moment before, though there didn't appear to be any other apparent cause for alarm.

"So what does our old man's neighbor say to him next?" said Ben.

"You're tenacious," said Dan.

"One of my few good qualities," said Ben.

"I can't tell my story without beer," said Dan.

"We could go buy some," said Ben.

"I'm broke," said Dan.

"Maybe they'll let us back in," said Ben.

Neither one of them commented on the fact that beers were available to them in this bar whether they were broke or not; it was an arrangement with the management, but not one they acknowledged aloud, because of how it had originally arisen.

They squinted through the tinted glass.

"Think there's really a fire?" asked Dan.

"I don't see or smell smoke," said Ben.

They squinted through the glass some more.

"While we're waiting," said Ben, "we should think of something to pass the time."

"Like what?" said Dan.

"You could tell me what the old man's neighbor says next," said Ben.

Dan half-laughed and shook his head.

"In this my hour of thirst," he said, "all you want is to satisfy your curiosity at my expense."

"What are friends for?" argued Ben.

"Our old man is pretending," Dan said, crossing his arms and still looking through his blurry reflection at the tinted glass, "that his neighbor isn't sitting at his bedside, because he is tired and wants to rest, and because it is repugnant to him to entertain a stranger with conversation while dying alone in a hospital."

"Well put," said Ben.  "What's next?"

"I'm getting to that," said Dan.  "I thought we agreed no more questions."

"I didn't agree to that," said Ben.

"Well I did," said Dan, "and it's my story, so pipe down."

Just then, a young lady in paint-stained jeans walked up.

"Hey slugs," she said, punching Dan in the upper arm.  "What's news?"

"Hi Alfred," both young men said.

"I didn't see you inside," Ben said.

"I wasn't," said Alfred, "I just got here."  

She glanced around; most of the crowd from inside, when the doors hadn't reopened in the first five minutes, had dispersed.  A few tired-looking local businessmen were chatting up the bartender in front of the other window, otherwise Ben and Dan were the only ones still outside.  

"Why are you two outside?" she asked.  "Is there a fire or something?"

"Funny you should say so," said Ben, standing on tiptoe to look over their heads and up the street.  From somewhere they could now hear sirens.

"I think maybe," he said, "if we want to wait the alarm out, we should at least cross the street."

They crossed, and crowded around a bench in the village square park facing the bar, and soon a huge red firetruck came screaming up.  Men in baggy darkened coats and helmets hopped off and jogged around to the back of the building and in the front.

"I still don't see smoke," said Dan.  "Or smell it."

"I wonder what's wrong," said Alfred.

"They've probably just got to reset the alarm," said Ben.

Before even Dan could rejoin this comment, a thin white cloudy shape, very pale against the brick front of the building in the flat afternoon sunlight, eased out of the front door.

"Smoke," Dan and Alfred said at once.

"Oh no," said Ben.

Soon there was a lot of smoke, and the firemen were very busy.

"Do you think it's bad?" asked Alfred.

"Bad enough," said Dan.  "There was a small fire in my aunt's house once.  Only the stove and the wall above it were burned, but almost everything in the place was smoke damaged. She had to buy all new furniture.  I remember because the replacement couch she got was the kind that buzzed."

"Colorful," said Ben.

"Anyway," said Dan, "if there's that much smoke, it's probably bad."

"But they have insurance for this kind of thing, right?" asked Alfred.

"Probably," said Ben.

They continued watching, saying little, as the firemen jogged back and forth.  A hose was connected to a hydrant on the curb and run inside.  Two police cars pulled up, and uniformed officers got out.  Two crossed the street and stood near the building on the sidewalk, one of whom was speaking to one of the firemen and the other speaking into his radio.  The other two stood in the park and told the three young people not to get any closer to the building.

The smoke got grey, then black, and Ben noticed that as the firemen came out the front door what looked like great clouds of brown dust were booming out with them.  Dan asked where the bartender had gone; both she and the businessmen had crossed the street when the three young persons had, but now apart from the two officers and the strange onlookers, mostly students of the local university, there was no one at the park that any of them recognized.

Soon the smoke was gone, and the activity dropped to an apparent zero.  The firemen finally came back out of the building, which appeared unchanged from outside, and spoke with the police officers.

"Well I think they're closed," said Ben.  "I'm glad I grabbed my things."

"I wish I'd left this essay inside," said Dan, shaking a thick wad of clipped pages he'd been turning over in silence for some minutes.  "The fire would have been the best thing for it."

"Well I need some kind of poison," said Alfred.  "You guys feel like a coffee?"

Ben and Dan preferred the bar to the cafe primarily because you got more townies than students in the former, and the reverse in the latter, and they both preferred to maintain a certain professional distance from the bulk of their clientele.  Fortunately it was not to a campus coffee shop that Alfred led the guys, but a very small place, with room inside only for the counter itself and small tables and chairs along the opposite wall, two streets back from their bar and stuck between a dance school and a closed pizzeria.  It was packed, but the light was dim, and none of the students were familiar.

"I didn't know this place was here," said Dan as they entered.

"You don't know where here is," said Ben.

"Fair enough," said Dan.  "Don't leave without me."

They ordered, Alfred bullied some kids away from a table with four chairs at it, and they sat down, Alfred negligently laying one of her outstretched feet on the extra chair as they did so.

"Territoriality," she said in answer to the generous Ben's glare at her feet.  "Those kids are in my department.  I've got to maintain my dominance or these whippersnappers will overrun me."

"How long have you been going to school here?" said Dan.

"I'm a senior," said Alfred.

"You've been a senior," said Ben, "since I've known you."

"So now we're down on accomplishment?" said Alfred.

"Why don't you finish and go be a painter?" said Ben.

"Because no one will pay me to be a painter," said Alfred.  "As long as I'm here, I get to paint."

"In the meantime," said Ben musingly, "maybe you can settle something between Dan and I."

"What's that?" asked Dan, perplexed.

"If a description of a work is adequate for judging a work itself," said Ben.

"This is a question?" said Alfred.

"Oh, right," said Dan, "I forgot how all this started."  He frowned.  "That wasn't the issue though."

"Close enough," said Ben with a mild shrug.

"We were trying to decide," said Dan, "if getting the description before you view the actual work informs your judgment of it."

"It comes to the same thing," said Ben.

"I don't follow," said Alfred.

"I'm telling Ben a story," said Dan, "before I write it down." 

"If you ever finish it," said Ben.  "You've been stuck in the middle for about ten years now."

"I was about to continue it," said Dan to Alfred, "when the fire alarm went off."

"I can't remember where we even were," said Ben.

"And then," continued Dan, "after I give him the description, he gives me feedback on the description, and then description after I write it down."

"Objection," said Ben.  "I said I'd read a different story, not the same one you described."

"You guys are a real laugh riot," said Alfred dully, staring ahead of her.

"Oh like I'm going to write two stories," said Dan.

"You were going to cheat?" asked Ben.

Dan shrugged.

Their coffee arrived.

"Don't have to get up for drinks here," murmured Dan as he took a sip.

"These drinks keep me awake," said Ben, picking up and shaking a sugar packet.

Alfred was ignoring them, "I need this," she said, gulping what appeared to be scalding light-brown foam with gusto.  "I'm so exhausted."

"What's going on?" said Ben.  "Year-end project?"

"I wish," said Alfred.  "I need to work on that this weekend, I don't know if I'll have time to sleep.  I just got out of the hospital."

"Did you need a refill on pretty pills?" asked Dan awkwardly.  Ben stared.

"No, stupid," said Alfred without a smile, "I wasn't there for me.  My dad's sick."

"Oh," said Dan, turning the color of an eggplant.

"Sorry to hear that," said Ben.

"Yeah sorry," said Dan.  "Is he going to be okay?"

Alfred looked at her brown foam.  "They don't know yet," she said after a moment.

They were all quiet.

"I don't want to think about that for now," said Alfred, turning to Dan.  "What was this story you're in the middle of?"

"Ahh," said Dan.

"It's," said Ben.

"Boring," they both said at the same time.

"No surprises there," said Alfred.  "What's boring about it?"

"Oh," said Dan, "you don't want to hear about it.  It's just so..."

"Boring," said Ben.

"So what," said Alfred, alert with curiosity, "is it about a girl or something?"

"No," said Dan, with too much enthusiasm.

"I can't believe you two," said Alfred with a smirk, "you sit around telling each other dirty stories all day?  For 'feedback?'"  She made an obscene gesture as she said the last word.

"It really is boring," said Ben.

Alfred made a mm-hmm noise that sounded skeptical.  Dan drank his coffee.

"I thought you guys wrote for a living," she said, sitting back against her chair.

"We do," they both said in reply.

"Why are you bothering with telling each other stories," she said, "when you should just be writing them down?"

"My point exactly," said Ben.

"It was a thought," said Dan.  "Stories are older than writing, after all."

"There is that," said Ben.

"And visual art is older than both," said Alfred.

Both her companions looked at her without comment.

"So you're trying to figure out if talking through stories is better than writing them down?" she asked.

"Nothing that structured," said Ben with a shrug.  "Sure," said Dan, at the same time.

"I'll tell you guys a story," she said.

"Hoist by the petard?" asked Dan.

"Try to beat us at our own game?" asked Ben.

"You want to hear this or not?" she asked.

Both her companions sat forward to listen.

Inventory - The Island of Unfinished Posts

Photo by Joshua Earle
image courtesy of unsplash.com

I was sitting down to write a post and I said to myself, Hey, I should really finish one of those series of posts that I started, and then never got back to.  And then I realized: I do not currently know how many of those there are.  There may be too many to count.

I hate blogging about blogging, it’s not what I’m trying to write on here, and it’s not what you want to read, at least so I imagine.  But I’m in the tall grass here, and 

So I’m going to take a short break this week and try to at least get a handle on all the juggling pins I have in the air that deserve should be brought back to earth at some point.  Consider it a checklist for the next few essay series, unless if something more interesting or more urgent comes up.  Maybe that should be ‘until when.’

Unfinished Essays

First is the “Favorites” series.  This one got a little ugly.

Hey, I hadn't even got to that one yet.

This one started with the best intentions, and I actually had something like a long-term plan for bringing it off.  I wanted to illustrate, in reverse, that I think there are four main kinds of stories, the way I understand them, and this would lead into a discussion of what makes those stories the way they are.  Sort of a new categorization of genre, but based on the structure of the story instead of its content.  In hindsight this was more like a structure I wanted it to grow along as it progressed (nota benne: even with essays this is a crapshoot).

The analysis became self-sustaining, and sort of breached its banks.  The series ran into a second month, the breach breached with an endless series of analyses of, ye gods, Hamlet.  At this point, for some unknown reason (cough) I lost steam eventually, and we didn’t finish our analysis of puzzle stories, the second of the four categories I was working on.  

So if I want to pick that one back up, I’ve got to keep the description and analysis of each favorite story short.  If you’ve got a point you’re trying to make by talking about something from the ground-up, remember that you’re going to have to get to that point sooner or later.

Also if it’s picked back up, I have to be sure to nudge things along more towards a definite statement, even if I have to occasionally say “this will make sense later, for now remember that X is X, and it’s important because of Y.”

I think the series may have, in general, been too much for this media, unless short posts (≈400 words) are going up every day, and that’s the only thing that’s going up.  This is a blog, not a textbook.  The comics and the essays have to be unrelated, to keep it from being boring.

But I’ve started it, and it deserves to be finished, because we might learn something.  You never know.

Next up is the How to Start a Story series.

This can't be Georgian England, that guy wasn't a big deal until at least 1882!
image courtesy of imdb.com

This one I think didn’t go that bad (badly! Who taught you adverbs?!), though it did suffer somewhat from over-compartmentalization of its entries.  By which I mean each segment got written so far apart from its predecessor that it was impossible to keep up the flavor and the general drift, and the ideas, which should have been conjoined across entries and back each other up, were as useful to one another as a suspension bridge’s towers without cables between.

By which I mean I kept putting off writing the next one until a few days before it was due to go up, and, surprise surprise, they lacked both forethought and any spontaneous energy.  All the alive-feeling of something canned for weeks before being unshelved and served, combined with all the careful attention of something thrown together at the last minute.  As Aunt Betsy used to say, “Ba-a-ah!”

This dereliction is especially egregious on two counts: first, if I’m not mistaken (I’ve turned off the WiFi to get this post done and cannot check), I left it actually on an essay cliff-hanger, with the next post to resolve some issues of character changing with or without changing setting.

Second, it was proposed as the Three Body Problem of starting a story; if you’re going to write a series of how things are essentially and inseparably intermingled, and that you can only understand one thing by understanding the others, it’s probably not so great an idea to write about one one month and then the other two months apart.

I think this should probably be written, as I originally planned, en block all at once, or as near to all at once as possible, and then parceled out in discreet, short segments over time.  This would avoid a lot of the troubles that come from too much time passing between entries (repetition, unrelated thoughts stealing the action, loss of focus) and get the thing done.

If I can’t do it all at once, I should at least set aside enough time to re-read the last of the previous entry before starting on the next, in order to ensure some continuity of effect.

Still, not a bad thing.  Some surprises came out of the details.

Superheroes

Writing: a balancing act of excuses, deadlines, and excuses.
image courtesy of imdb.com

A recent notion, just introduced last month or the month before at the earliest (I would check this but I don’t currently have wifi).

The trouble with this one is I’m kind of sick of the subject.

I was trying to write a series of essays trying to figure out why we, the people who pay money to watch movies and TV shows mainly, are not sick of superheroes yet.

And then an unexpected thing happened: I got to be so sick of superheroes all of a sudden that every time I sit down to write something I 

The other trouble is EVERYONE, I mean every single person blogging about writing and entertainment, is writing about super heroes right now.  And they have been since about 1954 or sooner.  Unless something wonderful and new occurs to me, it’s just white noise.

Still, I’m interested, me, in this subject, because I really do want to know why these stories are so enduring.  If they are.  And the only full post I’ve done about it so far, On Saving the World, was actually meaningful to write to me, so maybe one day I’ll pick it back up.  Originally I thought I’d write the series over the summer, which is the season of superheroes, but maybe now I’ll be subversive and think about them again when it’s time for costumes, who knows.

Kinds of Story Meanings

This I mentioned above was the planned follow-up to the Favorites series, and I hope one day it still comes about.  I should get the favorites out of the way, so I can write this one, I think it’s worth thinking about.

In other words, not one I’ve started, but one I’m still looking forward to, if I can get out of my own way.

The Unfinished Stories

Oh lord, he’s not going to write about writing fiction that was never wrapped up, is he?

You had your chance, Jubal.

Well, it’s also a part of this blog that’s in its own middle without apparent threat of ever being brought to justice.  I mean, being finished enough to actually make sense.  Whichever.  Also the above isn't my work, so I take no responsibility for it.

I’m not going to analyze the unfinished stories, I think that would be like a kind of suicide.  So I’ll just list them:

Tireless (two detectives are investigating an odd murder)

Roam (man with surfaces but without substance is currently lost in Asia)

Untitled Ben and Dan series (they're trying to get through a very slow-going verbal description of Dan's new story, and were last seen fleeing their bar as smoke alarms went off).

What’s next?

I’d like to tackle these in the reverse order that they’re mentioned here, in order to wrap up the most recent first.  However, as mentioned above, unless I’m suddenly overcome by something new to say about the whole Superhero thing, I think that one can be safely left to dissolve until it’s a bit more more off-topic.

So maybe I’ll alternate the two.

In the meantime, I’ve got a seriously messy set of folders labeled ‘blog’ to try and clean up... better me than you, reader.

OH WAIT WHAT ABOUT the series I started on sad things and why sadness? Dang it!!!

Or I’m going to go watch Beverly Hills Copy.  Either way.

(like that's even a choice)

Happy May!

On Saving the World

Miniature re-creation of the Temple of Artemis
image courtesy of wikipedia

“Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”  

-The Talmud

Who was Herostratus?  

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, he's the man who, on July 21, 356 BC, burned down one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, namely the ancient Greek Temple of Artemis, at Ephesus, in what is now Turkey.  He did it because the temple was famous, and by burning it down he wanted to become famous, too.

After he burned the temple, and openly took credit for it in order to acquire his desired notoriety, not only was he put to death, but the Ephesians in charge ordered anyone who even spoke his name to be put to death as well.  Apparently, again according to the wikipedia, the only reason we know even his name, is because an ancient historian called Theopompus, who was alive at the time the temple was burned and who was described by a contemporary scholar as "A man who wrote slander, not history," noted it in his account of the temple's destruction in his Hellenics.

Of course, because of this I can find little else known solidly about the man without further research.  To a certain extent I understand and sympathize with the punishment; unless some form of deterrent is found, what's to keep others from following his example?  But I’m still curious about the guy, and why he really did what he did.  What was his profession?  Was he another architect and was jealous?  I doubt this somehow.  Did he have a family?  This I don’t know, it could cut either way.  Was he successful in any other aspect of his life?  On the one hand, I’m irked that the guy destroyed something to be famous, and to a certain extent it worked.  I don’t really want to give the guy what he wants, but I can’t help feeling curious.

I was going to say I’m neutral about this sort of thing, but when I started to write about a more recent example of something famous getting destroyed because the person who destroyed it wanted to be famous, I realized, sort of to my surprise, that I didn’t want to write about that guy, or what he did, because I feel he shouldn’t get what he wanted by doing what he did.  It’s a little infuriating to be partial about this, I’m not usually this way.

The real question I wonder about is, does banning the mention of his name really work?  I notice that the article about Herostratus isn't flagged for deletion by the wikipedia editors; he’s part of the history of the Temple of Artemis.  It had been destroyed once before Herostratus came along actually, by flood, a few centuries earlier.  And it was rebuilt after Herostratus destroyed it, and later this third version was destroyed again, by the Goths, or someone, it's a little hazy.  All we have now are a few foundation stones and written records to suggest that it ever really existed at all.

On one hand, I don’t think that fame is fame, no matter what kind.  What you’re famous for matters I think; Herostratus may have gone out in a blaze of glory, but what if he hadn’t been put to death?  What if instead they had arranged for him to be followed around by a small group of armed men and one man with a loud speaking voice, so that every time he entered a place or passed by in public, the loudspoken man could pronounce loudly, “This man is Herostratus, he burned the Temple of Artemis, because he could not be famous for anything else,” or something like that.  He might have enjoyed it at first, but give it a few decades to sink in.  Let the words form bitterly on his tongue for the thousandth time, just before they're shouted out by his permanent paid-for chaperones.

Or maybe he didn’t have a few decades left when he did the deed.  Was he old, or terminally ill, when this happened?  We’ll never know.

So Herostratus is part of the story of the temple, just like he wanted.  You can deny him his noteriety for this if you want, but in the end, when time has made the tragedy impersonal, his anonymity will only make him a more curious figure.  I think of this as a sort of Paradox of sorts, you could call it the Paradox of Herostratus, if you don’t mind giving him more fame for it, but that's another post.

The reason I was thinking about Herostratus has to do with superheroes.  I was thinking about the question What Makes A Superhero Story a Superhero Story, in connection with an earlier post about the different kinds of trouble that happen in stories.  It’s my assertion that without some kind of trouble, you can’t have a story, or at least not a very good one.  The problem to be solved is basically in my mind another way to look at the plot, what gives the reader a reason to keep listening/reading.  If I remember right, in that earlier post I said that more or less the simplest kind of trouble you can have in a story is to have to Save the World.

I think Saving the World is the simplest kind of storytelling trouble because it’s the easiest to understand, and the easiest for the audience to sympathize with.  To paraphrase the eloquent saying of Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, we can all get behind wanting to save the planet Earth, because each and everyone of us is “one of the idiots who lives in it!”

He's just so wise.
image courtesy of imdb.com

Most often Superhero movies, and movies in general I think in the last twenty years or so, have been mostly about saving the Entire World, usually either the planet Earth or at least human civilization, from either utter destruction (typically), total enslavement (sometimes), or some other thing that would change the world until we no longer recognized it (almost always).

Whether we outlaw their names or not, I think there will probably always be another Herostratus.  I don’t really understand the appeal in wrecking something great, because I think there are different kinds of fame, but I think that the appeal will always be there for somebody, as long as there are things famous enough that destroying them will get you to be famous, too.  And I think there’s a lot in common between what makes a Herostratus want to burn down a temple and what makes a storyteller want to put The Whole World at risk in their story.  

I’m not trying to be derogatory, and I have myself written, at great length, a ridiculous number of stories and story ideas involving the World being in jeopardy and being saved.  I just think that “The Whole World” is a shortcut, the way that burning a famous temple is a shortcut.  To get to the point, I’m most interested in how these stories come to a head, how the trouble is actually avoided, how the World is actually Saved.  When a story like this is in print, what are the descriptions and actions we’re given?  When it’s in a movie, what are the images?  

I find that it’s very rarely a matter of depicting more than a handful of real people, the heroes and villains included, being put in actual danger.  Almost always, the only characters are the heroes and villains, everyone else is a bystander.  Which is sort of the way it has to be, it’s the way we’re trained to interpret the information, if the people actually being put in jeopardy by the World’s imminent destruction were to take on dimensions and characters of their own during the Final Showdown, we’d be distracted by their sudden and otherwise inexplicable introduction into the action.  Storytelling needs some sort of understood continuity in the stream of information being presented if it’s going to function, unless you’re James Joyce, I guess.

Even in my favorite movies that depict the heroes Saving the World, the saving the world part isn’t the real reason why the movie is so good.  In Ghostbusters and The Avengers, the threat to the world and the characters feels real, and important, but it isn’t the first thing we care about.  The first thing we care about is how much fun the heroes are having while at work.  

Sure, he's dangerous, but firstly he's a great excuse for manly friendship and jokes.
image courtesy of imdb.com

These are stories that would arguably be almost as good if The Whole World weren’t at stake, but I suppose the conceit doesn’t at all hurt the mood.

My point is, when The Whole World is in danger in a story, it’s usually not really The Whole World, it’s usually New York City, or Los Angeles, or Tokyo, or Neo-Tokyo, or a small research camp deep in the  Antarctic night, and the only reason we think the Whole World is in danger is because of an inferred indirect effect caused by the villain winning; in other words, because the characters say so.  There are obvious exceptions to this rule, like Armageddon, but even here it’s the characters who’ve been talking all along that get the most attention, and the only real nod to The World is that the things getting blown up by the asteroids (spoiler alert) are not in the United States.

So the question becomes, how do storytellers define “The World?”

Last week, as a stopgap/prelude to this post, I posted a pair of pictures.  I think that both embody a way of looking at the world in ways that are more interesting than as a shortcut to making an uninteresting story more interesting, and making an unthreatening threat seem more dangerous.

The first is a famous photo of the Earth itself, the planet I mean, taken at the request of Carl Sagan by Voyager I in 1990, thirteen years into the probe’s flight, when it was about forty times as distant from Earth as the Earth is from the sun.  When I look at it, I think of a passage from C.S. Lewis’ first interplanetary novel, Out of the Silent Planet:

"Pale Blue Dot"Photo by Voyager 1
image courtesy of wikipedia

'"She is still well above the southern horizon." It directed his attention to something like a small window. Whatever it was, it did not appear to work like an earthly telescopes Ransom thought; though an attempt, made next day, to explain the principles of the telescope to the sorn threw grave doubts on his own ability to discern the difference. He leaned forward with his elbows on the sill of the aperture and looked. He saw perfect blackness and, floating in the centre of it, seemingly an arm's length away, a bright disk about the size of a half-crown. Most of its surface was featureless, shining silver; towards the bottom markings appeared, and below them a white cap, just as he had seen the polar caps in astronomical photographs of Mars. He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were - Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing - even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it.  It was all there in that little disk - London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

"Yes," he said dully to the sorn. "That is my world." It was the bleakest moment in all his travels.'

I think the image mostly speaks for itself: the world, our whole place, from a very large number of very real viewpoints, is a very small, limited, and vulnerable place.  I move my thumb, like Tom Hanks, it disappears and reappears again.  Thinking about this old stone globe this way makes it seem a little silly to write stories where it’s In Danger, because it feels like it’s in danger all the time, we’re just too close to it to know it.

The other image is a woodcut by M.C. Escher, made in 1959, called Circle Limit III.  It reminds me of one of my favorite interpretations of the Save the World story, which I’ll get to in the a minute.

Circle Limit III M.C. Escher

image courtesy of wikiart.org

The reason I like thinking of this image if I’m thinking about Saving the World is: it’s never as simple as you think it is.  We think about the world as a Whole, when really there is nothing we have within the clear reach of language that is more clearly better understood as being composed of different parts.  If you consider anything closely and carefully enough, you can see that it’s not a single thing at all, but has an almost unlimited number of integral parts making it what it is.

Everything is this way, the Whole World and everything in it included.  The longer you look, the more you see.  The only exception I’ve read about is that superstrings could be a kind of absolute, because if anything’s smaller than them, it simply can not, by the current definitions of physics, be measured.  But I’m not holding my breath.

To bring this all to earth and tie things off, I argue that if you're telling a story, you don't need to put the whole world at risk to get your audience's attention.  I think it's time we try to move past the Saving the World storyline, if we're ever able to.  Just one character, if we care about them and want to see them survive, can mean more to the audience than the whole fictional, say-so threatened offscreen planet.  

It's nice to have the largest stage possible for a story, and it's easy to understand something famous because its premise, the planet Earth, was famous to begin with, but it's not necessary to get a good story going, and stories without easy shortcuts, that have characters and struggles that matter to us for good reasons, are often the more rewarding.

But there will always be another Herostratus, because unoriginality springs up without source.  So there will always be Saving the World stories, and we can at least take comfort that talented storytellers can still find ways to make them interesting.  Those ways probably will involve sympathetic characters, and not the Whole World, but who's counting.

My favorite interpretation of the Save the World story is actually a mistake.  The first time I watched The Matrix, or at least one of the first times, I watched it with my Mom.  If you’ve seen the movie, read on, if you haven’t, why are you reading this, you have more important things to do with your day.  The very last sequence of the movie features the hero talking to an unknown person on the phone.  He delivers a short speech to them before (spoiler alert) demonstrating his newly acquired abilities by flying into the air, up past the camera and out of sight.  Like I said, his speech, though effective, is a short one, and being young at the time I managed to misinterpret it.  My first thought was that Neo wasn’t talking to the Agents and the other machines at the end of the movie, he was talking to some native resident of the Matrix who wasn’t freed yet.

And because I thought it was odd that the hero was wasting time on the phone, instead of using his superpowers to save all the people all at once, I asked my Mom why Neo was bothering to cold-call people one at a time.  Whether she’d misunderstood or not, I don’t know, but she understood my question, and said, “Because that’s how you have to save the world in real life.  You have to do it one person at a time.”

I remember being disappointed by this answer at the time, as simply talking to people is not very flashy business, but the more I think about what makes good stories good, even the ones that involve Saving the World, I think I’m beginning to see the wisdom in it.