There's no right way to write.
Or rather, provided one is writing, that is the correct way, inasmuch as there can be a correct way. Hmm. If one must write, that is how one writes. Okay, look, pithy aphorisms aren't as easy to craft as Shakespeare makes it seem, so we'll settle with the more prosaic observation that, as long as words get written down, that's how the writing works. Yeah? Yeah. With 2021 fully upon us, trailing the stench clouds of 2020 behind it, I figured I should do my annual "plan for writing during the upcoming year" essay as a chance to lay out some of my hopes as far as my writing goes. I don't remember (nor do I want to look up) my previous year's goals. They most likely didn't happen, since I only managed to finish a novella or two and that was all, to say nothing of the tens of thousand fewer words I failed to write over the course of a twelvemonth. I still keep borderline-obsessive track of the words I jot down in all but my school capacity (like, I don't word count assignments or emails or whatnot), with a spreadsheet that gets more and more complicated with each successive year, so I have a fairly accurate view of how well I'm doing on the word-count front. Good ol' 2020 saw me crank out 482,881 words (as opposed to 2019's 528,743) a difference of over 45,000 words. That's almost an entire NaNoWriMo project's worth of writing. Since I completely failed at NaNoWriMo 2020, that makes sense. So I'm not saying that I did a bad job of writing in a general sense. I know that a lot of writers would love to produce that much content in a year. And while that's not all fiction writing, a fair chunk of it is. And while I lament that I didn't spend more time honing my craft, I can be somewhat proud of having managed to generate close to half a million words in the midst of a global pandemic, massive civil unrest, and frequent personal trials. What I want to do with 2021--as far as writing goes, of course--is to continue on the strengths of the last year. To that end, I decided to modify my goals. While I usually want to put in a certain amount of time into fiction--increasing the short stories that I sometimes create, or getting another bit of worldbuilding into my notes--I also derive pleasure from the act of writing itself. I love to type. I love to write by hand in my far-too-expensive-but-what-are-you-gonna-do notebooks. I love to brainstorm in my beaten-up-because-they-cost-a-quarter-jeez-Moleskine-could-you-maybe-drop-the-price-a-bit-you're-killing-me notebooks. It's great to have a diversity of ways that I go through the physical actions of writing. And, because 2020 taught me better than Steinbeck's title or Robert Burns' poem ever could, "the best laid schemes o' Mice and Men / Gang aft agley", I selected a daily requirement to write. No minimum requirement. No genre expectation. No expectation save that I grace the page with a squiggle or two. On one level, this feels like a capitulation, a throwing up of my hands in the face of the crushing reality of what I have to deal with and submitting to the unbending tide of responsibilities. On another level, though, it has--thus far, at least--been a gentle enough goal to maintain the pleasure of completing it and a steady enough pressure to ensure its continuation. Thus far, I have written every day. Some of it has been therapeutic and emotionally driven, such as the stuff that I write when discussing my wife's battle with breast cancer. Sometimes it's creating a new TTRPG (I'll essay on that another day). Often it's jotting down a page in my reading journal. (This one is particularly useful, as it means that I need to keep reading so that I have something to write about--double trouble!) Because of all the stress that's been my life recently, I've arranged for a couple days off to do a private writing retreat at an AirBnB. It's a difficult decision--COVID is still real and I live in a high risk area. I did go through a bout with the sickness, as well as getting the first round of the Moderna vaccine, so I feel a bit more comfortable making the trip. I also really need some writing time, not because I have a lot of writing that I feel pressing to get out of me (that sort of thing, the fire of a story that will only be quenched by writing it, hasn't happened to me in many a-year), but because I am pretty close to a breaking point, mentally speaking. Almost all of my wells for well-being have been dipping dry and the strain of knowing that it will continue until long past the seasons' change isn't helping in the least. Since Gayle is on her "good week" with her treatment, she and I both feel confident that she'll be all right without me around for a couple of days. (I'm not far away, in case of emergency, plus her mom is willing to be on-call, as it were.) I'm hoping that this will do a little bit of recharging my spirits and that I'll have a bit more fortitude in confronting the rest of what's troubling me. And if it doesn't? Well, you'll know. I'll probably write an essay about it. I hate phones.
Not, like, any specific one. Or even the concept, really. I think it's great how much phones connect people. But I hate them. More accurately, I hate having to talk on them. I don't want to call in a pizza order if I can help it; I don't want to call customer service to work out an issue. I just don't want to be on the phone. (I don't mind talking to friends and family on the phone, however. Go figure.) But why? Tracing my developing personality--and, maybe, finding an answer to the question in the process--can be difficult. How much of what I see in myself is directly grown from what I've done in the past, and how much of it is a result of innate tendencies? I feel like I've grown more introverted over the past couple of decades--was it my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that made me feel like I had used up all my extroversion? (This one definitely makes sense to me, but perhaps that's just sublimation.) Still, there is one thing that I deeply misunderstood and has continued to affect me ever since it happened in 2001 that may be a clue to my animosity toward Alexander Graham Bell's invention. I worked at the Convergys, a telemarketing/telesupport firm close to where I grew up. I had just graduated from high school and needed a job to get money for the aforementioned mission. The Convergys hired me as an inbound operator. Our client was American Express and it was my job to "activate" the callers' credit cards. Really my purpose was to lie to them ("while your credit card activates…" when the card was already activated) and then try to upsell additional (and unnecessary) features on the credit card. The more features I sold to them, the larger my paycheck would be. I'm not much of a salesman, despite my understanding of words. I figure this is mostly because if I truly believe in what I'm selling (or, in the case of the mission, preaching), then I get myself tied into the sale and feel personally rejected, and if I don't care at all about what I'm selling, then I don't care if someone else wants to buy the product or not. This was certainly true of the Convergys job. I worked there throughout the summer of 2001. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, with the strain of starting college, preparing for my mission, and deeply hating the menial, pointlessness of my job, I started looking for a way out. What ended up being the worst thing for me (mentally speaking) was when a customer called in, sick of the endless phone-trees and being placed on hold, and threatened to cut up his card. I told him that the card was now activated and that he could use it immediately, then ended the call. Nevertheless, my 18-year-old brain misheard what he said. I thought he'd threatened me with violence if his card wasn't activated immediately. He hadn't. He definitely only said that he'd cut up the card, not the teenage phone operator on the other line. But my fight/flight response was triggered and a surge of adrenaline tsunamied through my system. I'm not a fighter--like, at all--so the mental connection between that spurt of fear-induced adrenaline forged between me and two things: American Express (a company I don't much care about or give thoughts to) and telephones. I won't say that this is the original "trauma" that led to my telephonic antipathy, but it's certainly a component to it. Nevertheless, becoming an adult has meant that I've had to use the telephone more frequently than I would like. Sometimes I do have to set up appointments or sort out a problem via phone. It's not pleasant and I often try to come up with alternative ways of handling the issue sans that technology. (The fact that I don't want to talk to employees at stores if I can help it definitely limits these alternatives.) So the fact that I've called Gayle's oncologist office two or three times during the first two weeks of chemotherapy is an indication of something to me: When it comes to helping my family, I can overcome my distaste. I was on the phone as soon as my help wasn't enough to help her through the migraines that knocked her down the first day and when the antinausea medication was only making things worse. I hate using the phone, but more than that, I hate seeing my wife curled up in pain and feeling powerless at the sight. Here's what I've learned: Sometimes the only way you can fight for the ones you love is by doing what you don't want to do. I can't go through chemotherapy for Gayle, but I can be her liaison to the oncologist's office. Her fight is against an uninvited return of cancer; mine is a mangled memory that has affected me for many years. There's no parity between these things--one of the hard parts about watching a loved one go through health problems--and I'm not trying to assert that there is. Still, if fighting over the phone is the only way I can help Gayle, I'll do it. My "baby William", which is seven years old next week, is the Complete Works of William Shakespeare International Student Edition. I bought it from William Shakespeare's childhood giftshop, adjacent to his birthplace, for thirty-five quid. It was my big souvenir from that trip and it has been my go-to version of Shakespeare. This is a deliberate choice, as I have a host of copies of the Complete Works. One is the Barnes and Noble discount version. Another is the first copy that I ever remember trying to read, one gifted to me from my maternal grandmother. Another is an illustrated version. I also have the one given to me for my 18th birthday. (That was the first edition that I read completely--poetry excluded.) Despite having so many editions that mean a lot to me, I've focused on "baby William" as the one that I mark and annotate, creating cross-references as they appear and appeal to me; it is the version of Shakespeare that I read for enjoyment. Since 2019, I decided to reread that entire book. I'm on no timeline--there's no rush to complete the canon. I'm simply going through as often as I can, reading when it strikes me, and writing up my thoughts about the play when I'm finished. With that recap of what this string of essays is all about, I'll now give a few thoughts about Love's Labour's Lost. I like it. I mean, it's not the best thing I've ever read, but it has a lot to commend it. There are some enjoyable scenes, and the premise is too ludicrous to hate. After all, who doesn't see the immediate dramatic result of four bachelors declaring that they will avoid all worldly contact--especially of women--for three years in order to become better scholars? The arrival of the princess and her entourage is the arrival of the best parts of the play, with the women not only being more engaging and interesting, but also better sports, more clever characters, and generally worth much more than the attention that they get. The princess of France gets a total of 10% of the lines--her match, the King of Navarre, gets 11%. Those lines are almost always the better ones, and though Biron is supposed to be the main wordsmith and primary protagonist (and he's also the gabbiest character, with 25% of the lines), he always strikes me as a bit of a bore. Take, for example, how the princess talks with her servant. Boyet is a sly observer of people, and he knows that his place is as a server to his princess. Nevertheless, the two will deliver lines of ease and familiarity, though always with the correct distinctions of class maintained. At the beginning of the second act's first scene, Boyet and the ladies are talking about where they are. Boyet explains that it's the princess' role to speak with Ferdinand, the king of Navarre. He urges her to Be now as prodigal of all dear grace Admittedly, I repunctuated the first line of the princess, so that it reads, "Good Lord, Boyet, my beauty, though but mean…", thus giving it a tinge of good-natured exasperation. The point, however, I think still stands. She is incredibly quick-witted and she lets that shine in almost every scene. She and her female companions are able to easily see through the gifts and love-notes the smitten males have sent them, and they recognize that these attempts to woo are just as laughable as they appear to the audience. They play along, just as eager for a good time as those in the theater's seats, all the while knowing the score. There's an insouciant indulgence that I get from the princess ("We are wise girls to mock our lovers so" (5.2.58)) and I really wish there were more lines from her and quite a bit less from the men. Indeed, the male lovers are essentially all interchangeable in a play where interchangeability is a part of the theme. (Interestingly, the next play is A Midsummer Night's Dream where this theme is drawn in even clearer lines.) After all, we have duplicates galore: Holofernes and Nathaniel are both erudites (though the latter is perhaps a more sycophantic version of what he sees in the former); Dull and Costard (and Mote, to an extent) all occupy a similar position in the society; who, save the actors who play them, can differentiate between Longueville and Dumaine? Stand out moments are often derived out of a bit of wordplay rather than pure character, with a possible exception of Costard's confusion about the word remuneration during 3.1. Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O, that's the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings--remuneration.--'What's the price of this inkle?'--'One penny.'--'No, I'll give you a remuneration:' why, it carries it. Remuneration! why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word. (125-130) This play has a tendency--in part because of Holofernes and Nathaniel--to tend toward sesquipedalian expressions. Shakespeare sends up this tendency, parodying it by parroting it with the misunderstanding of the lower class. Since this is seen better (and with more examples) in Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry, I won't comment more here. Maybe this is where Shakespeare first started down the path that ends with the confounded constable? At any rate, I love the way that Costard does with remuneration what any of us might do with an unfamiliar word: Try to use the context for some sort of meaning. Granted, this may lead us astray--I teach my students the word prodigal every year because there's an assumption that it has to do with a fall from grace or a grievous sin. That it has to do with being a spendthrift isn't really as clear the title of Parable of the Prodigal Son might seem. (It's also refreshing to see some of the characters on the stage being as equally confused about the language as the people in the audience can be: I'm not going to lie, the footnotes and marginalia were crucial in my understanding and appreciation of this play.) Shakespeare also experimented with poetry a bit here, using a lot of rhymes and even different metrical standards throughout. I'm less of a fan of Shakespeare's lyrical period. Some of it has to do with Milton's observation in the second edition of Paradise Lost: "Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially…" (though I might disagree with him that it was "the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter"). There's already a great deal of artificiality to Shakespeare's language, where so much of the syntax is warped to better express his thoughts and to fit within the blank verse's syllabic requirements. When those poetical tricks are amplified by rhyming, my own attention wanes. The bigger issue, for me at least, is it seems to cheapen whatever the character is trying to say, making the rhyme become more important than the substance. While this isn't always the case, it is often enough--especially in this play--that it distracts me. There is one thing that I'm rather curious about, though, and that's how Rosaline is described. Save for two references to her "white hand", Rosaline is commented on with enough racially coded language that I can't help but think that she's Black. An editor of my Norton Edition, Walter Cohen, argues that "only Rosaline's hair and eyes are black" (page 773). The ending of 3.1 describes her as "A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes" (181-182), which certainly fits for the latter half of Cohen's argument. (I don't know how he got to the conclusion about her hair color.) However, this is turns into a matter of deciding which details have more weight and which have more metaphor. As I mentioned, there are two instances of her hand being called "white" or "snow-white" (3.1.153 and 4.2.121 respectively), and a reference to her brow (as mentioned above). These seem to point toward the idea that she's white--for obvious reasons. But when the men start teasing each other about the women they've fallen for, Biron (who is in love with Rosaline), rejoins the king: FERDINAND These to me seem much more direct a description than the potentially-metaphorical descriptions of her "white hand" and brow. It could easily be a mistake on Shakespeare's part--he's never been one to care a great deal for continuity--to have left in small descriptions of Rosaline's hand; it could also be his inclusion of the romantic ideal that Biron is voicing, rather than describing her actual aspect. If this really is an example of a (presumably) white male wooing and seeking the affections of a Black woman, it's something that I haven't seen explored in all of the literature I've read on the play. (Full disclosure: I've not explored a lot of scholarship on this particular play, and I don't really remember much of what others have said.)
As far as representation goes, I've seen a great many "color-blind" castings of plays. Often, it's a fitting choice, as the character's race doesn't affect the story in deeply noticeable ways. However, having Rosaline be "canonically" Black really makes a large difference in how race in Shakespeare can be discussed, to say nothing of the fact that she would be the only Black female character in the oeuvre (Cleopatra, being from Egypt, may necessitate splitting the claim in two). Aaron the Moor, from Titus Andronicus, the prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and Othello in his play make up the primary characters of color. There's a valid and worthwhile argument to put Caliban (from The Tempest) in that category, too, as well as Shylock and Tubal (the two named Jews from Merchant, though whether or not Jessica would count is a matter for a different essay). I may be wrong here, but I think that's the entire list of people of color in the plays. I find this sort of thing really important. Shakespeare as a product of white nationalism and British imperialism is one of the more uncomfortable aspects of his legacy that I struggle with. It's hard to love something so unabashedly when I know that the thing I love has been the means of hurting other people, even those far removed in time and place from me. And while I operate under no delusions that Shakespeare was some sort of proto-progressive or in any way looking to provide token characters of a different race or religion, I find a lot to unpack in the conversation between Ferdinand and Biron about a Black woman. There are so many cultural assumptions that Biron is refuting as he confesses his love for her, and the idea that Rosaline is a clever, complete human never fails to come across to the reader. Despite white supremacists' claims to the contrary, there most definitely were Black people--and other people of color, too--that lived in the highly metropolitan and economically-vibrant London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean time period. Though it's fair to say the majority of people were white, it's ahistorical to think that everyone in England was white at that time. The slave trade in England began just two years before Shakespeare was born (which was 23 April 1564, if you were curious), meaning that his entire life was spent with his country trading in the lives of human beings as if they were cattle. Not only were Liverpool and Bristol slave ports, but as Reni Eddo-Lodge points out, so were "Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire's Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London" (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, page 5). Black people have always been a part of European history. Reflecting the world around him, Shakespeare seems to have incorporated a minority-race character, a Black woman. Who knows? Perhaps she was inspired by any of the sundry "sources" of the Dark Lady in the Sonnets--"Lucy Negro, [a] bawdy-house keeper of Clerkenwell's stews, or Hundson'd mistress Aemilia Lanyer, or else Pembroke's silly paramour Mary Fitton" (Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life. Page 230). Personally, I doubt that. It makes more sense that he bumped into people of color throughout his life in the red-light district of London and that filtered into his art. While I would like to put more time and thought into this argument, I think I'll end with a final bit about the second play in this reread: Love's Labour's Won. We have two references to this "sequel" (who knows if it actually continued the story from the first play): One from a man named Francis Meres in 1598 (meaning he saw it when it was a brand new production), and another from a bookseller in 1603 (when the play would've been comparatively older). Neither lists the author of the plays, nor what they were about. Considering the unorthodox ending--the princess and her entourage leave unmarried, as the death of the princess' father necessitates her departure, meaning that the recent lovers never get married--it isn't a surprise to think that there's a sequel somewhere out there. Like Cardenio, another lost play by Shakespeare, we only have vestigial wisps that float around the historical landscape, evanescent and intangible. Maybe if we had that play, I would be able to assert my interpretation about Rosaline more fully. As it stands, this play is on its own. It's light and strange, a valuable if faulty addition to the Complete Works. Definitely worth checking out… …unless you're thinking of picking up Kenneth Branagh's musical version. That one is not good. At all. Read it instead, if you have to choose. New year, old habits. I've been in the habit of tracking things I do for a number of years. Whether it's words written or books readen, I try to keep a running list. This is to give me a sense of movement in an otherwise very similar existence: The cyclical nature of my job is reassuring in its familiarity, but it can be disorienting if I'm not careful.
To that end, I jot down the titles of everything I complete during a year. For esoteric reasons I don't fully understand, I categorize my entertainment input in two: Books, and Everything Else (except music). In 2020, I read/watched/played 119 comics/movies/video games. The number is not necessarily accurate. I will put things like "Christmas cartoons", which was probably a good two hours or so of The Amazing World of Gumball, Captain Underpants, or Teen Titans GO! Yet I lumped them all together, rather than counting each one separately. I didn't count Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was watched by my boys in the van during our commute time. I will put something like Deluxe Invader ZIM #2, which is actually a dozen comics in one. Also, it's only completed things. That's easy for something like movies (I watched all of the Jurassic Park films with my kids this summer), but I ended up stopping my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 with, like, two episodes to go. So it didn't make the list. Even The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I have three or four episodes left, didn't get added on, even though each episode is nearly an hour long--meaning that two episodes combined is more than some movies' runtime. And while 119 titles is quite a bit (especially considering how many hours I obsessed over Bloodborne these past few weeks--and, let me just say, that completing that game was a personal accomplishment), what really strikes me is that I only had 37 books or plays read in 2020. I'll admit that there were some…interruptions to how I normally live my life. I did find it harder to concentrate on the written word during the pandemic, and I even fudged my numbers a little by including books that I wrote and finished during 2020 (two novellas actually, my lowest output in years). Some of the books are the annual retreads: Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and All Quiet on the Western Front always crop up in the first half of the year. Hamlet…well, I don't actually reread Hamlet each year. I do watch the film with my students though, so… My point is that despite my best intentions, I don't do a lot of reading. Author Joe Hill said that you can get a rough sense of how many pages you read per day by seeing how many books you finish in a year. At 37 titles, I read only 37 pages a day, on average. Part of me feels insulted by this. The rest of me realizes that's probably more true than I'd like to think. It's also tricky, because I only count what I've completed during the year, regardless of how long it took me to get there. I started The Iliad a couple of different times throughout my career, but I only finished it this summer. (That was a complete read, though; I restarted and finished it in 2020.) I finished London: The Biography after it sitting on my nightstand for three years. So it's really an incomplete list. I put all of that down because it's on my mind and I think it provides a bit of context for what I'm about to describe. I finished Stephen King's The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I today after trying to read it for…I dunno, twelve years? Something like that. An old work buddy gave me his copy of The Gunslinger (and the frustratingly titled The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book in the series…why does it have the number 3 in the title, then?) and I've picked it up a handful of times since then, only to put it back down. After becoming more accustomed to King's writing style, I decided to give The Gunslinger another go. This is in part because I bumped into a former student who was picking up one of the later Dark Tower books and said that, once you get to the third entry, it is really good. That's a bit of a slog, if you ask me. Still, I decided to try it. After all, I reread The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan in the hopes that, by the time I eventually get to the third book I'll actually really like it. A man can dream. And I think that's what my problem is with The Gunslinger: It feels like a weird dream. There's a place for that, of course. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are excellent examples of dream fiction (both of which I read this year, as a small aside). A lot of Neil Gaiman's work fits into that mold, too--a place where imagination is the fuel of the story. The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. Or, perhaps more evenly, a little goes a long way for me. And when it comes to King, I've come to expect a different kind of story. Part of the reason It is one of my favorite novels of all time is because the world is grounded, making the fantastical seem more plausible. King does this in other works, too: 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary stand out to me in that way. (The Stand, which I picked up again when the pandemic struck--wonder why--kind of blurs the line a bit more than I prefer.) But when it comes to The Gunslinger, well… The problem I have with dream fiction is that the stakes feel artificial. Since nothing can be taken as real, sacrifice and death, pain and worry all become meaningless. The impermanence of the situation leads me to apathy. In the case of The Gunslinger, I had a hard time believing that Roland was in a real world with real people. He may shoot his way through much of the book, knock boots with a tavern wench, and traverse a seemingly-endless underground tunnel, but is any of it "real" to him? Chapter Five is essentially a twenty-five page conversation, which turns out to have somehow taken ten years and maybe the skeleton is the corpse of the man in black he's been chasing… King himself admits that the book is a cowboy Western take on The Lord of the Rings, which in and of itself both sounds amazing and totally bizarre. The execution of the book--for me, at least--was tedious and meandering. The rich characterization that King does so well in his other books felt lacking here. Forgive a digression here: For almost all authors (Austen and Shakespeare feel like exceptions to this, though I'm sure there are others), the way that we get to care about characters is through exposure to them. Why does it mean so much to see Hagrid carry Harry Potter out of the Dark Forest? Because we've spent so much time with both characters. Why does It clock in at over 1,400 pages yet leave you wanting more? Because we've spent a lot of time with those characters and we have come to care about them. Why do shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural have such loyal fanbases? Because they've spent time in those worlds. The best short story can't connect with the reader as securely as the tenth book in a series for the simple reason that we readers haven't gone through the adventure with them. Now, there are seven books in the Dark Tower series, so there's definitely a chance to get to know Roland. In fact, I can't really fault this first book for not being more since there's a long journey ahead and this, the slenderest volume of the series, isn't going to give me a lot of time with the gunslinger. However, the time I spent with him felt inconsequential. I think this comes from a couple of things. One, Jake comes into the story with his own confusion and inability to remain connected to the world that he came from. At this juncture, Jake feels like a narrative add-in, a character dropped into the story because the idea struck the writer and so he put him in. Then, unsurprisingly, killed him off. I didn't get a strong sense of the gunslinger and the boy becoming close or gaining a lot by being together. Sure, Roland explains how he earned the right to become a gunslinger because Jake was there, but the narrator could have given us that section of the backstory by having Roland reflect on his own past. Jake felt extraneous and randomly included. I don't know if that is a criticism that stands up with the rest of the series, of course. But it is how I felt for this individual book. One thing, however, that I really did like, was what I mentioned earlier: The last chapter of the book--what should be the climax and resolution, a full-fledged battle, according to most fantasy tropes--is a twenty-five page conversation. The book begins "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sets up the goal, which is attained by the end of the book: Roland the gunslinger catches up with the man in black. But, rather than duking it out, the two sit down around a magically created fire and talk. Thanks mostly to the video game Bloodborne, I've been thinking about eldritch horror a lot more recently. (I had a spat with it about thirteen years back; I even have a couple of Lovecraft anthologies on my shelf.*) And though that game does an excellent job of dealing with the cosmic horror themes, I don't think I've seen anyone describe the terror of that genre as well as the man in black does to Roland. Chapter Five does a lot of things, and while I rather doubt that this Western/fantasy/grimdark tale was meant to also include eldritch fear, the existential dread conjured by the man in black pushes the story into that genre, too. Here's a passage: 'Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?' (287-288) Can you imagine what it would be like to be that fish? To be dragged out of the world you know and then, suffocating in an unfamiliar ocean of air, die as you watched beings oblivious to--or worse, the causation of--your plight pass you over? That is an almost unimaginable terror…an eldritch one. Eldritch horror is facing the insignificance of humanity in the face of powers larger and darker than ever before dreamed. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft writes, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corelate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity, 1) For the man in black, we humans are the fish in a small pond of existence. The idea of so much being out beyond us, past human ken and comprehension, is humbling to the point of disheartening. We do so much in our small scale and view ourselves rulers of the world, yet what can we do in the face of our own mistakes and the turns that consequences inevitably bring back home to us? Like a virus can take a human life (a reality that we've seen iterated thousands of times these past few months--a reality that many millions more outright deny), so too can the comparatively tiny actions of humans accumulate into trophic cascades that may end up ruining the only home we have. We don't even have to go into cosmic horrors to see the effect that size has on us. A single individual's actions can no more change the climate than a twig in the Mississippi will dam it. But you get enough twigs… The idea that there are things bigger than us is maddening. For Roland, it's about interacting and becoming part of light--a metaphysical escape from the eventual nihilism this kind of thinking often leads to. For us, we rest more comfortably in our "placid island of ignorance" than trying to confront the larger (or much, much smaller) worlds that surround us. In Bloodborne, the world the player inhabits is surrounded by enormous eldritch beings called Amygdala. They hang from gothic spires and observe the player from afar. However, until the player gains "insight" (a currency in the game, but also a metaphor), these creatures are invisible. After gaining enough insight, the player is able to perceive what had been there all along. What the man in black is pointing out is that there is so much more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, just like Hamlet told us four hundred years ago. From what I can tell, we have two ways of approaching this: To embrace the reality that there is so much more than we can every possibly learn or understand, or to cave inwards, cocooning ourselves against all uncomfortable aspects of reality. And it's a choice that we have to make again and again. So, should you read The Gunslinger? I don't know. For me, I didn't really like the vast majority of it. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see where it goes. I would say that if a seven-volume epic is too intimidating, don't start. Now that I've begun the journey, I may just have to see it all the way to its cyclical end… ___ * I know about Lovecraft's disgusting racism. I'm not a fan of the guy, and his writing is…well, it certainly exists and can be read. His impact on the horror genre is inescapable, even if I think, as a human, he was a sleaze. |
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