31 Days, 31 Memories - Day 18

[bironic]

Alan and Denny mambo-ing in Denny's office for several minutes. Is all I have to say about "Boston Legal" tonight.

18. Elementary School

For a few years as a kid I watched and re-watched the Superman movies, especially the second one, which starts with Clark and Lois at Niagara Falls, and Superman has to rush to rescue a boy who plummets toward the water after playing on the wrong side of a railing. I decided, for whatever reason, to try the boy's game once at school. It hadn't looked very difficult and I thought his mistake was only a plot device. Like he'd done, I stood on the bottom of the cubby shelf and took turns gripping the bar on top, left hand, right hand, left again, with a brief space in between where neither hand touched the bar and I fell slightly backwards before catching hold of it again. Easy. Until I missed, once, and stumbled backwards into a desk. Into the falls. The teacher wanted to know what I was doing.

Comments

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

Not everything in the imaginary world is imagined. Must be the lesson of that one...
And now that we are on the subject of imagining, my memory about Star Wars from yesterday got me thinking about this one - which is really two connected memoried.


One of the many times that I read Lord of the Rings as a child (first time was when I was eleven) I made a remark to my mother about Tolkien having created "a perfect world". She freaked out and demanded to know how it could ever be better than the one we lived in. I wasn't that old and it took me a while to find the words to explain to her that I'd meant that it was complete and thought through and as full as the real one. And that I did know the difference between real and imaginary. It hurt that she didn't seem to think I knew the didfference. That distrust manifested again later when I started roleplaying, but it wasn't as strong then.
The related memory, which explains how the first one happened, is my mother telling me (when I was around 22 or something) that she could not imagine ever wanting to imagine being someone else.
It was a very sad moment to me.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I've also found that it's hard when parents react like this. My father is resistant to the idea of fiction in general, preferring science -- though I've persuaded him in the past year or so to read HP and now The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- and often doesn't understand how it can be healthy to spend so much time dipping into novels and TV shows and movies when they aren't "real." And when I started reading vampire lit back in high school my mother similarly freaked out, demanding to know what was so attractive about blood-sucking, violent freaks (she thought). It took years to get her to understand their appeal.

Not everything in the imaginary world is imagined. Must be the lesson of that one...

Funny, I was just writing down what happened. I wonder if that's one of the marks of a storyteller's brain, that you have a sense of what the story should contain (whether it's fictional or not) and how it should be told, without necessarily consciously recognizing the meaning(s) of that story. Last week pynelyf had a similar comment about how my memory of finding a missing book in the back of my desk had a wry humor about it, which I didn't notice while writing.

I think this ties in to how much a reader can interpret from a book vs. what the author "intended."

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

My father at least seems to have a liking for fiction, and a little for the fantastic. He's at least read Lord of the Rings and while he doesn't really like sci-fi or fantasy, he likes "magic realism" and stuff like Umberto Eco or Karen Blixen. So there's a little more understanding there.


Good point, the intention vs. interpretation. It's always been a favourite paradox of mine, the way we interpret the works of writers and artists. There can indeed be intent behind it, but sometimes it's just a story and all we read in to it comes from us rather than the author. lysa1 had an entire class on this at the U and told me it's called structuralistic critiscism.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Whereas my father hadn't heard of C.S. Lewis or the Chronicles of Narnia until he read the movie review. *shakes head*

Note to self: look up structuralistic criticism.

[maddy-harrigan.livejournal.com]

This mistrust of anything that isn't "realistic" or "relevant" both saddens and terrifies me. People NEED fantasy, we NEED fairy tales, because we need to be able to imagine a better world. Whenever I finish reading Narnia, I end up peering around this suddenly dull-looking, ordinary world of mine, filled with this tremendous LONGING.

For backup, I turn to Lewis himself.

This is from The Silver Chair, when the heroes are trapped in the Underground World of the Witch, being enchanted to believe that the things they remember from the World Above are only dreams or make-believe.

"Suppose we HAVE only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours IS the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

Or, to take another source:

"These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For ... [they] desire a better country." (the letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11)

Sort of a story and sort of a comment...

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

I've also found that it's hard when parents react like this. My father is resistant to the idea of fiction in general, preferring science -- though I've persuaded him in the past year or so to read HP and now The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- and often doesn't understand how it can be healthy to spend so much time dipping into novels and TV shows and movies when they aren't "real."

I remember a truly surreal conversation I had with a friend of my mother's last year. At the age of fifty, never having worked, she had decided she should do "something creative" to enrich her life. At the moment she was dabbling in photography, but as soon as I mentioned that I like to write ("like" is actually the wrong word, but that's another discussion), she became fixated on that and wanted me to explain HOW you make things up. The more I talked to her, the more I realised that this wasn't the standard question, "Oh, where do you get all your ideas from?" She genuinely had no idea how people create fantasies or imaginary worlds, and couldn't remember EVER making up any kind of pretend games or imaginary friends as a child. Despite the fact that she casually told me that she'd never read a novel, didn't like them, and basically equated all fiction with lying, she was oddly obsessed with the idea of learning to write fiction, and kept trying to get me to explain how it was done. I felt like I was explaining, in a very abstract, intellectual manner, how to swallow. Sure, there's a perfectly sound academic explanation to how the human digestive system works, but ultimately knowing that explanation has no effect whatsoever on the reflex that takes over if you take a sip of water. What little I was able to describe - like the feeling at times that you've discovered a character or a story rather than invented them - only seemed to unnerve her. I ended up setting her little daydreaming tasks, tiny alterations to imagine in the world around her, but I never heard her mention the subject again.

Funny, I was just writing down what happened. I wonder if that's one of the marks of a storyteller's brain, that you have a sense of what the story should contain (whether it's fictional or not) and how it should be told, without necessarily consciously recognizing the meaning(s) of that story. Last week pynelyf had a similar comment about how my memory of finding a missing book in the back of my desk had a wry humor about it, which I didn't notice while writing.

It's not unlike telling someone about a puzzling dream you had, only to find out that the meaning of the imagery in it is incredibly obvious (and, with my luck, probably secretly obscene) to your friend. Often, when you trust yourself, you get far more complex and subtle layers of meaning than you would if you were trying to inject them deliberately.

I've probably told you this, but I once read that Tom Stoppard hates discussing "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" with undergraduates, because it's embarrassing. He says it's like going through customs: The guard asks, "Anything to declare?" and Stoppard says, "Oh, no, just two blokes playing games in a castle." And then they open his luggage, and it turns out to be full of diamonds, cocaine, Kalashnikovs. And he ends up having to say, "Well, I'm sorry, officer - I must have packed all those things, but do you know, I honestly don't remember."

[bironic.livejournal.com]

That is a fantastic quote from The Silver Chair. Must read it. *mutters* Must read a lot of things...should quit job to make more time for literary pursuits...

Re: Sort of a story and sort of a comment...

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Right, I have no idea how this is going to sound in the morning, but here goes:

She genuinely had no idea how people create fantasies or imaginary worlds, and couldn't remember EVER making up any kind of pretend games or imaginary friends as a child.

How? HOW?

And aside from "How can someone reach 50 without using her imagination?", "How indeed do you teach that person how to try it for the first time?" Whew.

That's a great analogy, though, and a good assignment to have given her. You did your best to save a soul. :)

I agree with lots of what you said, so instead of saying, "yep, yep, yep," here are some more specific reactions:

It's not unlike telling someone about a puzzling dream you had, only to find out that the meaning of the imagery in it is incredibly obvious (and, with my luck, probably secretly obscene) to your friend.

It is like that, only with writing, you don’t necessarily see the "meaning" as soon as you start telling the story, while I’ve found (for me at least) the meaning of a dream often becomes apparent when you vocalize it or write it down. They are similar in that someone else might see more to the story than you did, like you said, and also that if you come back to look at what you’ve written at a later time - say, reading your dream log/story a year or five years afterwards - you’d see more in it than you did while you were in the midst of it.

Often, when you trust yourself, you get far more complex and subtle layers of meaning than you would if you were trying to inject them deliberately.

So would an ideal story have what you deliberately put in it plus what you unconsciously slipped in?

Love the Stoppard quote. Never gets old.

*falls asleep*