Breathing Space

The next day Ben was working on another paper when Dan came in and shrugged off his bag.

“Ready to listen?” he asked.

“Only if you’re not busy,” said Ben, looking up from his work.

“A moment,” Dan said, setting the bag down and going to the bar.  He came back with three beers.  Setting one down in front of his friend and pulling the other two to his side, he sat.

“An old man is in the hospital,” he began.  “His heart’s giving out.  He’s never really traveled, never really opened up to anyone.  He didn’t keep close with his family when he had one, he has no close friends.  No one has come to see him, it’s doubtful whether anyone knows he’s there.”  

He paused and took a sip of beer.

“Uplifting,” remarked Ben dryly.

“He doesn’t know how much time he has left,” said Dan.  “But he likes looking out the window.  It’s spring, maybe summer, and he likes the way the sun looks on the green leaves on sunny days, and he likes the way the cool white light looks on the rainy days.  Mostly he looks at the ceiling, he can’t stand the T.V.  He sleeps a lot, except sometimes he can’t seem to settle his mind down at night.  He likes looking out the window.

“One day,” Dan went on, “he gets a roommate.”

“I thought it was a visitor,” said Ben.

Dan set his beer down.  “Did I say visitor?” he said.  “I meant roommate.  It’s another old man, also apparently dying, also has no visitors.  Our old man doesn’t know his name, he doesn’t pay him any more attention than he has to.  He’s just glad he got to keep the side of the room near the window.

“The new guy talks,” Dan said, “a lot.  He seems to be talking to himself, except he keeps saying Roger.  Our old man isn’t sure if the new guy is calling him Roger, or if he’s talking like he’s on the radio, you know, ‘roger, Roger,” Dan made a hand gesture near his ear in explanation.

“I follow,” said Ben.

“Actually I’ve read they don’t really talk like that in real life,” Dan said.  “You know, ‘roger wilco, over and out.’”

“I think they do say roger,” said Ben.  “If I remember right, the only one they don’t say is over and out, and that was because one means ‘you talk now,’ but the other means, ‘don’t talk anymore.’  So saying both would be contradictory.”

“I’m not sure that’s right,” said Dan, “but I refuse to look it up right now.  Anyway, this old guy.”

“His neighbor talks a lot,” said Ben.

“Right,” said Dan.  “And after a while, our old guy gets to be pretty sure that his neighbor really is talking to him, except he can’t make out what he’s saying very clearly.  He has to hold his breath and listen, and then he can just make out the words, sort of a steady rambling mumble.  And over and over again Roger.”

“Is our old man’s name Roger though?” asked Ben.

“No,” said Dan.  “It’s not important to the story, but it’s Adam.”

“Just making sure,” said Ben.  He seemed to think.  “Adam seems like a young man’s name.”

“I know,” said Dan.  “But there must be old Adams out there, I figured why should they go unrepresented in fiction.”

“You’re going to call him Adam?” asked Ben.  “Or just the Old Man?”

Dan shrugged.  “I haven’t been worried about that,” he said.

“Does he have a last name?” asked Ben.

Dan thought for a moment.  While he was thinking he drank beer.

“Carter,” he said, setting down his glass.  “As of now, he’s Adam Aaron Carter.”

“Aaron,” said Ben.  “Somehow that’s a young man’s name, too.”

“Anyway,” said Dan.  “Our old man, he’s troubled.  He doesn’t have to go to the bathroom often, but when he does it’s a pain and a nuisance, because it’s hard to get up.  And they’ve got one of those plastic bins in the toilet, they’re keeping track of him, so he has to sit no matter what he has to do, so that’s another get-down-get-up ordeal just to get it over with.”

“Shared bathroom?” said Ben.

“Just the one,” said Dan.

“Wouldn’t the other man screw up their keeping track?” asked Ben.

“Excellent question,” said Dan.  “But what really bothers our old man,” he said, pressing on, “is he’s sure, as sure that he’s still alive, that his neighbor is staring at him when he gets up, when he shambles over and closes the door, and when he comes out and shambles back to his bed.  He never catches him looking, but he can feel those two eyes of his neighbor’s, like round black beetles piercing into him.  They bother him even when the door is closed.”

“Hmm,” said Ben, and took a drink.  His beer had maybe a swallow left; Dan was more than half through his first.  Ben, still listening to Dan, started gathering his papers together and putting them in his bag.

“One day, he’s not sure when,” Dan went on, “he speaks up for the first time.  He says to his neighbor -- what do you think he says?”

“‘Who’s Roger?’” suggested Ben after a moment.

“He says,” said Dan, altering his voice to be deeper and drier, and  “‘could you keep it down, Jack? We’re resting.’  Just like that.”

“Starting to snap,” Ben said, as if to himself.

“That’s what I thought,” said Dan.  “But the neighbor quiets down at once, he doesn’t hear from him again that day.  He looks out the window, it’s a rainy day, he looks at the leaves and it’s quiet.”

Dan finished his first beer.  “The next day,” he said, “his neighbor starts to talk to him more clearly.”

Ben shrugged on his bag and made preparations to rise.

“What does he say?” he said.

“Hey hey hey,” Dan said agitatedly.  “What is this?”

“Gotta run,” said Ben, “meeting someone at the library in half an hour.”

“What about old Carter?” asked Dan.

“I suspect he’ll keep,” Ben said.  “What does his neighbor say?”

“I’m not telling,” said Dan.  “You’ll have to come back.”

“Good answer,” Ben said.  He picked up his glass and swallowed the last of his beer.  “See you tomorrow.”

He left.  Dan sulked for a moment, took a drink from his second glass of beer, then took out a notebook and continued to write.

On Daydreaming

Fairies on the Seashore, painting by Francis Danby and engraving byWilliam Miller, 1833
image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Day jobs are boring.  This may not be true of everyone, but in the past it’s certainly been the case for me.

There are at least a hundred little ways one goes about making an uninteresting task more interesting.  Some listen to music or to podcasts, others get up once every hour or so and walk around the office.   You can keep up to date on office gossip.  You can see how many widgets you can process in an hour, and then try and break that record.  Whether it’s absolutely essential to my nature or not, the method I seem to fall back on time after time is to daydream.

It’s not that I’m not giving my work my full attention.  I feel like that would be dishonest; they’re giving me money for my time, I should do my best to ensure that the quality of time I’m giving back is the best I can.  It’s just that below a certain level of task complexity, using 100% of your attention gets the same level of results as using 75%, or sometimes 50%.  For me it’s a simple function of efficiency: a job less boring would take up more of my brain.  When I get bored I pay less attention, and the quality of my work goes down.  When it’s impossible to usefully give my work 100% of my focus all the time, I try and find ways for that percentage creep to make me feel less bored the whole time that I’m on the clock.

There are of course times when it’s not boring to be at my desk, for instance when something needs urgent attention, to be fixed or processed quickly.  Then it’s not an issue to occupy my mind with side-projects, so I don’t do it.  I set the daydreaming aside, and focus on the task at hand.

This might not work for everybody, but over time I find it works best for me.  (Alright, enough apologetics, get to the point.)

Daydreaming

I try and solve problems in my head, usually in the form of asking questions and telling stories.

I take stuff apart, try and look at what it’s made out of, what makes the thing identical to itself and what could be left aside without changing it.  I make up people and places, I put them into situations and try and see 

All of this is extremely short-lived.  Sort of a flash-and-its-gone collection of images passing by.  It’s also more difficult to explain than I had originally imagined before starting to write this.

Usually this requires some kind of data-in.  Nonfiction works best for me, because it gives the best high-nutritional content for open-ended speculating.  Movies and TV shows work in a pinch.

Actually that phrasing is unintentionally misleading.  Movies and TV shows are what my brain chews on for most of the time I’m daydreaming.  Or novels.  It’s just that the nonfiction-fueled stuff is more useful and better worth remembering.

For example, let’s say I’m re-playing a movie I recently re-watched in my head.  Generally I’m moving through the story beat by beat, shaking things that happen and trying to see if they had to happen the way they did.  Did that character have to do what they did to get out of that mess?  Did that villain really act in their own best interest by deciding on that course of action?  Sometimes the things seem to have happened for a good reason, and that’s satisfying.  Sometimes the best answer I can come up with is: because if they hadn’t done so, the story would have stopped there.  And that’s sometimes okay.  (Thoughts like these are probably part of why, re-watching a story, I’ll wish things could turn out other than they always do.)

Doing the same thing with well-written nonfiction leads to more interesting results.  What if someone like Napoleon I, faced with the situation at Austerlitz, had happened to zig instead of zagging at a particular time?  What if there were a world’s fair in the U.S. next year, the kind they used to have in the 1880s and 1890s?  Would anyone  go, or would they just watch the events on TV?

Not alternate history necessarily, it’s not an absolutely literal just how the different parts worked, how they might have worked in other circumstances.

The nonfiction books that are for me the most fun to use for daydreaming are popular physics and psychology.

Is there a way to make daydreaming effective?

For me, the most useful thing I can do is jot down notes.  Making record of any ideas that come up that might be worth remembering.

EIther a few words of explanation of an idea I’ve had, or a doodle that explains it better than words would.

Particularly energetic and complicated ideas will warrant full-out diagrams with exploded components, labels, short descriptions of all the parts and their uses.

And often ideas feed on themselves, so that you build up a mental box where you keep the things you like to think over, take them out, dust them off sometimes, roll them around, see if there’s anything new growing on them, or if anything that’s happened to you in real life since last time you thought about them gives them different emphasis or importance.

What’s the problem with daydreaming?

In the long run it’s the same problem with too much fiction in general: you wind up divorcing yourself from your actual life.

I think I’ve probably digressed into this terrain before; basically I think you have to find a balance between dream time and real time if you’re going to have a healthy relationship with your own identity and the way things are going in your life.  Daydream too much, and the opportunities you have to start and finish projects that are important to you will slip by.  Believe me!

There are parts of waking life that should be more interesting to you than the most vivid daydreams, because they’re real and meaningful.  If you need advice on how to make real life more meaningful, I will try to find a way to apply stories and storytelling to the problem in a future post or posts, but I suspect you might need another blog.

What do you do to avoid it?

Set rigid limits and stick to them.  The first of these is easy, the second is hard.

I’ve already said I try to avoid daydreaming when there’s something more urgent or interesting than step-and-repeat work going on.  My only solid advice is to make something that requires actual thought happen to you in the real world.  I’m not saying go around setting fires, I mean get up and shake your legs, make small talk on a break, take a walk outside maybe.  Go to a library.  Go volunteer somewhere.  Look up a new recipe and cook it.  See what turns up.  For the same reason you shouldn’t sit and read all the time (or sit and watch TV), it’s good to have an actual life and actual interests to fall back on, since even daydreaming, in the end gets kind of boring without at least having a reality to escape from.

The more interests you have, also, the better chance you have of encountering what the gurus call “flow,” and which is probably the healthy and necessary twin and counterpart to daydreaming in the life of a creative person.  But that’ also another post.

Either that, or set a timer with an alarm before you wander off in your head.  But maybe pick a song you're not fond of to call you back.

I generally only write down my notes between tasks, unless an idea is so good (or so headache-with-pictures) that I can’t ignore it long enough to finish what I’m working on.  I put my notes in a pile, and then I don’t think about them when I’m done with them, until I can find a way to put them to good use.

But then there’s another question.  Is there an effective way to make use of these notes?

Force Equals Mass Times Acceleration

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Suspension

“I’m working on a new story,” said Dan.

“Oh?” said Ben, without looking up from the paper he was marking.

“It’s about an old man in the hospital,” said Dan.

“Seems probable so far,” said Ben.

“Thanks,” said Dan.  “Anyway, he’s been ill for some time, he knows he doesn’t have much longer.  He’s not really troubled by this.”

“Good for him,” said Ben.  “What is troubling him, then?”

Dan had a drink of beer.  “No one’s come to see him.  He’s got no one to talk to, he’s totally alone.”

At this, Ben looked up from his papers.  “I’m hoping that there’s an ‘until’ on the way.”

“Until,” Dan said, “he wakes up one morning and finds an old man, about his age, sitting in the chair beside his bed.  An old man with some odd but curious questions.”

“Uh huh,” said Ben.

Dan raised his eyebrows, half-shrugged, and drank more beer.

Ben bobbed his head back and forth a little before saying, “I’d keep reading it.”

“I’ve got to write it first,” said Dan.

“How much do you have done?” asked Ben.

“I think I’ve got it all,” said Dan, “but I haven’t written any of it down.”

“I don’t see how you can work like that,” said Ben.  “If I think all the way through something I’m writing I get too bored to go on.”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation,” said Dan.  “You just have to write really quickly, while it’s still clearly a good idea, even to one’s self.”

“I like the surprises,” said Ben.

“So write while you’re still feeling surprised,” said Dan.

“I’m not sure I can,” said Ben.  “I work slowly.”

“So the old man’s visitor,” said Dan.  “He’s well-dressed, very soft spoken, clearly a man of the world.  But the old guy in the hospital bed’s never seen him before.  When he asks--”

“Wait wait,” said Ben holding up a hand.  “You’re not going to just tell me the rest, are you?”

Dan blinked.  “I wanted to see what you thought about it,” he said.

“I’ll let you know when I read it,” said Ben.

“You can read it too,” said Dan.  “But I wanted to see what you thought of the idea before I write it down.”

“Why?” said Ben.

Dan shrugged again.  “It’s hard to say.  I feel like I waste time doing the first draft, I know I’m just going to change it anyway, especially after you’re through reading it.  So I thought maybe if I told you the idea beforehand, I could jump straight to the second draft out of the gate and save time.”

“Do you always change everything I tell you to change?” asked Ben.

“No,” said Dan, “of course not.  A lot of the time you’re way off from where I wanted it, I just didn’t make what I wanted clear.”

“I rest my case,” said Ben.  “Don’t make me change your story before it’s even born yet.”

“It’s already born,” said Dan, “I know what I’m going to write, and how I’m going to write it.  I just haven’t put it down yet.”

“Listen,” said Ben.  “If you want to tell me your story now, go ahead.  But if you want me to read it later, keep it to yourself, and give me a copy once it’s written.”

“It is written,” said Dan, pointing at his temple, “up here.  It’s just not on paper yet.  Does it really make a difference whether it’s actually written down on paper yet?  Does it?”

“Either way,” Ben said, returning to his notes, “I’m saying no thank-you on this one.  If you tell me the story for feedback from me now, I won’t read the story later.  One or the other.”

Dan sighed heavily, shrugged.  He half-smiled.

“Now I’m kind of curious,” he said.  “I’ve got one other idea I haven’t worked on yet, maybe I’ll do both.”

“What do you mean, both?” said Ben.

“You want a beer?” said Dan.

Ben looked at a large clock on the wall behind his shoulder.  “Not yet,” he said.  “Too much still to get through.”

“How many do you have coming due?” Dan asked, half-risen from the booth.

 “This week?” said Ben.  “Only two, and they’re both back with their owners now.  They’re as ready as they’re going to be.  Next week I’ve got six, and so far I only feel good about two.”

“I’ve got four this week and four next week,” said Dan.  “I don’t feel great about any of them.”

“How many are done?” asked Ben.

“For this week?” said Dan, and smiled sheepishly.  “Four, unless I make more time for them before I hand them back.”  He rose and went to the bar, came back with two glasses and set both in front of himself.

“By doing both,” said Dan, “I mean I think I’ll tell you the story of the old man and his visitor out loud, since you’ve already heard the set up and part of the hook.”

“Then I’ll have to pass on reading it when you’re done,” said Ben.

“And then--” Dan said, but he was cut short by a Ding Ding! from his pocket.  He withdrew a cell phone, read something on its screen with a frown.

“Do you want a couple of beers?” Dan asked.

“Why?” asked Ben, looking up again.

“Duty calls,” said Dan.  “I’ve got five this week looks like, just got an email.  One of next week’s is needed early.”

“You’re taking off?” asked Ben.

“Afraid so,” said Dan.  “So the old man and the visitor will have to wait.  You’re coming back tomorrow, right?”

“I’m here until the end of time,” said Ben.  “This place is pretty much the only place I can think, with everything going on at my place.”

“What’s going on at your place?” asked Dan.

“Long story,” said Ben, in a tone that suggested he was tired of talking about it.  “Not at all urgent.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Dan distractedly.  “Anyway tomorrow I’ll tell you the story, and I’ll keep in reserve another idea I have to tell you.  I won’t tell you that one out loud, I’ll write it down instead.  That way I can see what the difference is between the two.”

“You won’t like it,” said Ben.

“How do you know?” asked Dan.

“I just can’t see any real improvements coming from it,” said Ben.  “None that you’ll be happy with.”

“Well, either way,” said Dan, getting up again, “I’m curious to see how it works.  Now, can I trust you with these beers or not?”

“Leave the little darlings,” Ben said, “I’ll make sure they get home.”

“I knew I could count on you,” Dan said.  “I’ll be back tomorrow.”  He got up and walked out the front door.

Some Questions about Superheroes

Flight is possible, just currently not highly likely.
Photo by Jeff Sheldon, courtesy of unsplash.com

I started, but couldn't yet finish, a post about superheroes and storytelling, in anticipation of the summer movie season that is rapidly descending upon us.  

It turns out it's a more complicated issue than I expected; I started trying to write about what makes a good superhero story good and a bad superhero story bad, and wound up writing more words than necessary about why they're popular these days, which I'm pretty sure is a different issue.  (The first issue is hopefully about storytelling in general, the other is about the fashions and tastes of the market and what controls them, if anything.)

In lieu of getting that post (or posts, most likely) up here on time, I have a few of the questions I'd like to try and tackle pinned down, for further reflection in the meantime.

-What makes a superhero story a superhero story?  
What's the difference between a superhero movie and a spy movie, or an ordinary action/adventure movie, or science fiction/fantasy, etc.?  What's the difference, for instance, between Guardians of the Galaxy and Galaxy Quest?

-What kind of problem is a superhero problem?  Are there any that aren't?
Is it more a question of defining what makes a superhero solution?  (besides superheroes and water, that is.)

-Are superheroes just for kids, and for grown-ups who haven't grown up yet?
What do we make of superhero stories clearly intended for grown-up audiences?

-When did superhero stories really enter into the history of storytelling?  Will they ever leave?  Does that question have meaning beyond simply expanding or contracting what our definition of a superhero is?

-What good to superhero stories do?  Can they really do any harm?
How come we ask these questions about some genres of stories and not others??

-What use are characters that are larger-than-life?  What does larger-than-life even mean?  Does that term have a sliding scale? 

-Is there a meaningful difference between what makes a superhero heroic and ordinary civic duty?  Do we still know what civic duty really means?  Do we care?

And finally,

-Is there anything useful left to say about superhero stories that hasn't already been said?  Or is this a topic that has been analyzed to death these days, and yet keeps on walking?  And if it has been, does that mean anything?

I don't know if these add up to a successful post, but I'm curious about whether useful information can come out of trying to answer them, and they've eaten up a lot of the time I'd set aside for writing while I've tried to sort them out.  

I'm pretty sure if I just sat down and tried to answer them one at a time en bloc that it would make for pretty textbook-like reading, which is something (believe it or not) I'd like to get away from on here.

So I'll keep chipping at this, at least we've got a whole summer full of superhero movies to keep us company, and we'll see where these questions gets us.  Any thoughts about any of the above you think are worth sharing?  I'd love to read them.

Up Up and Away!

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Roam part 4

Photo by Todd Quackenbush
image courtesy of unsplash.com

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I’d thought, when I was perpetually lost on the south-west Pacific, that I’d been suffering from a lack of contact with humanity.  Before an hour had gone by after I’d made landfall in Asia I found myself thoroughly disabused of this notion.

In some ways, southern Asia was the worst part of my wanderings, and in other ways it was the best.  It was the worst because, at least for the first few days, I was never, never alone, and I learned rapidly that being alone is something I have to be able to do to keep up that priceless sense of inner peace I’d been wandering around to find.  It was the best because whenever I’m close enough to people, I get filled up with whatever they’re feeling and thinking, until I almost forget that I’m there.  When you have to walk miles and miles in order to find a room, or a building, or even a stretch of road you can have for yourself, it gets easy to blot yourself out for a while.  The trouble with that is the people are also always in motion, so one gets quickly confused.

For these and other reasons I don’t have many clear and helpful memories that I can relate from my time in Asia, it’s mostly an enormous pile of unchecked, uninspected impressions; some graffiti on the blank wall of a building that looks like two people turning into plants, the havoc of dense and insanely colorful city streets, the wreak of a thousand different kitchens pressing into each other.  One thing I do clearly remember is when I first came onto land.

It was a stretch of beach somewhere that looked like a poster in a travel office, except for the people.  It must have been in either Vietnam, Thailand or Malaysia, to be honest I’m still not sure, and although there were people on it, it wasn’t extraordinarily crowded.  I remember thinking to myself, as shapes became clear on the horizon, that I had begun my journey in California without any ceremony, that I had just kept walking once I was out on the water without a pause.  I was telling myself that, for some reason, it would be good to finish the journey in the same way.  But when I got up close to where the unlimited ocean met the limit of the land, I had to pause, and it wasn’t clear until I’d already done so why.  The people, standing in the gently rolling water and nearby on the sand, were looking out at me.  At first I must have thought this was natural, in fact I think I remember thinking that I’d have to come up with some sort of explanation as to who I was and why I was walking in from the desert with, as the man says, a perfect disguise.  But it recurred to me that I was usually not visible to those still obliged to breathe, I halted in mid-step, about twenty feet from the water’s edge.  I stared at them, they stared back at me.  There were five or six of them, all young, half of them little kids.  All were dressed for bathing, sort of.  Further off down the beach I’d seen some men in bright wide hats stringing long red nets, like giant versions of the kinds oranges sometimes come in, through the surf.  There was a little kid, closest to me, I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, and they weren’t afraid.  Just looking, maybe waiting.  Then a large wave rolled under me, broke on shore, and everyone looked away and resumed their business, as if they’d seen nothing.  I remember looking behind me, out at the horizon, to see if maybe they’d been looking at something else, but if there were something there I missed it.  I didn’t try and attract their attention again.  I walked onto the land, and into the low hills and buildings that abutted the beach, into the huge sprawling heated press of people, people, people.

Time changed rapidly.  That close to people, it smoothed out and sped up drastically; I seemed to be unable to keep up with it.  I think I might have still been a little wild in the brain from all the time by myself on the water.  I remember I sat down a lot, and thought of the storm and the big wave, and tried to calm down a bit, and I was always surprised when I got up and found that time had passed, the sun was not where I’d left it.  I got turned around a lot in the press of buildings and road corners and foot traffic, but I did my best to get inland, on the assumption that sooner or later I’d get away from the ocean and into drier country, and civilization would eventually have to thin out.

What were the thoughts and feelings I picked up?  It’s sort of a haze.  I remember that on the beaches I went to you could count on three or four strong chords, played endlessly with small variations: the bright spots of little kids rushing around, either jubilant with activity or listless with waiting; older folks trying to relax in the sunshine or the shade and feeling little nudges of discomforts and distractions become exaggerated as their minds quieted down; younger men looking at young women, younger women looking at everything, sometimes young men.  Into the cities themselves it became an incomprehensible stew most of the time, with a few short exceptions.  Mostly it felt like traffic everywhere; the tension of people trying to get through from one thing to another thing, and finding their way eternally blocked.  I might have been imagining this.

After the beach I was never sure anyone looked straight at me again, but I became increasingly aware that I was having an impact on the people around me wherever I went.  Once when I was younger I was at a fancy buffet restaurant, or maybe a country club, with my family for a breakfast or brunch or something, probably to celebrate a graduation or some minor accomplishment, I can’t remember what.  I was little, and I remember having my shirt tucked in, and a cloth napkin in my lap.  And in the middle of everything, we were all sitting and people were eating and talking, and this guy came in, looking back now I realize he was a homeless guy, but at the time I remember he was just this older, wrinkled, dirt-darkened guy, and I remember that he was big not because he was fat, but because his clothes and all his bags took up a lot of room.  He walked into the restaurant entryway, and a little way past the hostess podium, coming only just far enough into the room to stand by the buffet line, by the plates, and he just looked at the food.  He didn’t touch anything, he didn’t say anything, he just looked at the food, and after a minute he turned to go, and of course by then someone had called someone and a man in a suit led him out the door again.  I don’t think he took anything, and I never saw him up close, but what I remember most is the reaction everyone had to his being inside the room with them.  They all glanced, and afterward they all looked away, or at their plates, or at each other, as if they were trying to decide whether to say anything, and it got quieter and quieter, until the man in the suit finished leading him out, and then everyone started talking at once.  I remember the shifting in seats, the straightening of spines, the way people held their silverware.  That’s how I effected the people I moved among while I was in Asia.  I felt it everywhere I went.

There were other things, other people, that I should mention if I’m going to talk about everything that happened in Asia, but I’m not ready to talk about them.  Not yet.

Why God Why

image courtesy of imdb.com

Children’s films.  What a horrible thing to happen to anyone.

Why do such horrible things happen in stories we love?  I was ‘doing research’ for this series (aka lazily surfing the web looking up examples I already knew of, instead of writing it) and semi-accidentally impelled both my wife and I to reminisce over the death of Mufasa in The Lion King, the death of Bambi’s mother in Bambi, the death of Artax (the horse) in The NeverEnding Story, the death of Ellie (Carl’s wife) in the first ten minutes of Up, the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time, and, worst of all, the sudden and utter heartbreak of a poor little lady squirrel in The Sword in the Stone.  The cumulative impact all these proxy disasters had on the mood of the evening was well... less than favorable.

What do all these have in common?  They rip your heart out, of course.  They’re some of the worst things that can and do happen to characters.  But, as sobbed by many of us while clutching pillows, for the love of wonder, why??

As in many cases, I think the cornerstone insight into my understanding of this matter comes from narrative commentary in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  In The Two Towers.  Frodo and Sam are in a situation that is the worst they can imagine (though not the worst they will encounter), and have been discussing heroes and unhappiness in their stories in order to pass the time (and at the same time of course their own story itself).  The following well-known appears:

“I used to think that [adventures] were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say.  But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

It’s not long after this that Frodo remarks,

“You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.’”

(This second quote, incidentally, is right before one of my all-time top... fifty favorite quotes from the book, “I wonder if [Gollum] thinks he’s the hero or the villain?” But that’s another post.)

There’s an electric hum that runs through this whole passage as the two hobbits almost address the reader, as if the print is shaking itself awake and is about to address us about what we think.  But apart from that, I think the point that Sam makes is worth looking over, albeit briefly.

Sam mentions that stories with hardship in them, rather than being all pleasant and a kind of sport, are memorable.  They stay in the mind.  Is being memorable the best thing a story can do?  Of course not.  I can remember many, many stories that were told in a way that made them awful, or which were awful without needing help to be so.  They’re memorable because they were awful, and often hardship for the characters played no small part in what made them a lousy time.

But being memorable isn't the only thing Sam was getting at.  When he says that the good stories "stayed in the mind," he clearly is using simple words to try and indicate something almost inexpressibly profound (good old Sam).  To me it means that good stories are one with meaningful struggles for the characters to overcome, ones where the dangers seemed real, even to the reader, where we were running the risk of getting hurt right alongside the characters we cared about.  In order for this to happen, we not only have to know the author's not always going to pull their punches, but we have to believe that something good can come out of the bad, just like the characters do.

All the examples I listed above are good stories (with the possible exception of The NeverEnding Story), and (with the possible exception of The Sword in the Stone) I argue that all of the horribly sad things that happen in them are an essential part of how they’re good.

My forays into this territory, i.e. the drafts of this post I’ve churned up in the course of trying to get this nailed down, are at this point sprawling.  

Boil it down to the one question of the post: why.

First a very brief summary of why I think the tragic happenings in the above examples are what make the stories good.

Mufasa’s death was the real start of the story, everything before it was prologue.  The story is of Simba discovering his own identity, partly as the son of a great king, but partly as the new king who is responsible for the kingdom.  In the end he can’t rely on his father’s considerable strength to solve his problems anymore, but he can rely on his father’s example to guide him in discovering strengths of his own.  This is definitely glib, but hopefully you’ll bear with me in calling it only ‘very brief’ and move on.

Bambi’s mother’s death is worse, as it’s not the meaningful and interesting result of a villain’s machinations, it’s just a wild and horrible loss.  There’s no good reason for her to die, it benefits no one.  For a long time, I thought the movie, through that scene, as essentially an anti-hunting message, and this always bothered me.  Some mild close reading on the matter reveals that the movie is not, I repeat not, anti-hunting: as any deer hunter will tell you, does, that is deer, that is female deer, are decidedly out of season in early spring, because they still have babies that cannot fend for themselves yet.  And as we all know who have seen the movie, Bambi and his mother are rejoicing over the first new grass of spring right before she lifts her head because she hears...  Oh, oh God...

Anyway, this makes Bambi’s mother’s killer a poacher, not a hunter.  If the movie is anti anything, it is poaching, not hunting.  Hunting, as anyone who understands the natural world will tell you, is a necessary part of life.  The movie teaches us that, although it is sincerely unfortunate, poaching is a part of life as well.

But anyway, although it’s worse than Mufasa’s death, because there’s no prologue to help us see it coming, it nonetheless feels very real to us when it happens.  The poacher (I will not call him a hunter) represents the random sudden illness, or car collision, or .  We are ultimately in the hands of fate or chance, and when such terrible things happen we have got to pick ourselves up and do the best we can for each other.

Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time is sacrificed along roughly the same lines as Mufasa.  The story begins where her life ends, and the kid has to find his way on his own.  The differences here are that first, she gives her life deliberately to save her kids from Sharptooth (a large tyrannosaur); second, that like Bambi, the circle of life itself is to blame, not a villain (although Sharptooth definitely keeps recurring only semi-probably as a antagonist, quasi-Jaws IV: The Revenge style); and third, that Littlefoot doesn’t get to spend nearly as much time avoiding his grief as Simba does.  His journey to the great valley and integrating his loss into his life happen at more or less the same time.  There’s none of the spiritual and moral procrastination of The Lion King’s second act (we all know it was based on Hamlet, right?).

And finally there’s Up.  Up’s first ten minutes and the emotions they evoke are, I think, of a far more sophisticated language and impact than simple sadness, and I will put off close reading, brief or otherwise, for another day.  Unlike the others it's clearly not a coming-of-age story.  Suffice to say that Carl experiences a loss that is so intensely sympathetic that the viewer is compelled into almost real grief right along with him.  The passage is almost like one of those rare, long, complex dreams, wherein we meet people so real that their loss, on waking, is a little heartbreak in and of itself.

I won’t dive into The NeverEnding Story here because frankly it’s been a long time since I last saw it, and yet for me the grief of Artax’s end is still too near.  As for The Sword in the Stone, well, maybe there are some wounds that never fully heal.  If I’m ever going to get this article done, I don’t have time for any more trips to the store for tissues, so that one will have to wait as well.

I started in on children’s movies because, as mentioned in the last post, I think we can find something in their tragedies to explain why most stories have happy endings.

The point of all these brief analyses is to show that in every case the stories with horrible sadness in them are stories where the characters are able to process their grief, and that grief becomes a necessary and meaningful part of their identity, and through them, a necessary and meaningful part of the story.  Everything still works out in the end, even though such terrible things happened to people we care about.  Suffering is universal, and it’s probably best if kids knew that, but it’s also good for them to see that it’s not necessarily the end of the story.

But what about our original question, why all stories these days have to have happy endings?  In the end, all this talk about kid’s movies has, apparently, done nothing but reinforce it.

What about the alternative to a happy ending?  One where the protagonist doesn’t succeed.  The bad guys win, or the trouble, whatever it was, isn’t solved in time.  Usually people get hurt, almost always the characters we sympathize with are unhappy, and with regularity somebody dies.

What’s the point of a story that has a sad ending?

We’re in overtime already, so this post ends here, but the last installment will have to deal with this question by combining a point from the first post with a point from the second.  There’s more than one way, after all, for an ending to be emotionally satisfying.