Those who crave fame don’t truly appreciate anonymity. And those who have it, desire to find a way to hide from it. We live in the world where everyone seems to want their 15 minutes of fame and attention. For artists and writers having a wide audience is must if they want to sign with large agencies to represent them, if they want their work to be bought and sold. Or even if they want representation by an agent or a contract with a publisher — everyone wants an established market for stories.
We mark the passage of time through personal milestones and seasonal holidays. Another major marker is bearing down on us — December! All the gift giving, family gatherings, end-of-year parties, and toasting mark another round trip around our star. We are on a continuous ride through time and space. We are never at the same place at the same time. Our lives are flux personified. Change is the thing that lives are made of. Humans hate change. We always yearn for the good old days even as we don’t remember them personally and even when we totally misunderstand history. Nostalgia is big. Change seems bad. I get it. I’d rather go the same old restaurant, order the same food, and wear the same comfortable clothing year after year. When my favorite store closes, I take it personally. When my neighborhood changes, I take it as an affront. I want things stable and familiar. I don’t want to spend my mental resources learning useless-to-me new ways of doing things. And I have a sense that most people are more like me than not, given that we all fall somewhere on the spectrum of hating novelty to needing it. So when the…
We define ourselves by the stories we tell each other. Myths, fairytales, fantasy, scifi, fiction, drama, superhero movies, et., they are all different ways to look at ourselves in a mirror. Consider metal illness and cognitive developmental disorders.
Stories can bring the salient details of life to light. Real life contains a lot of noise and extraneous detail that can obscure a through line. Fictional stories remove that noise to rise the core themes and emotions to the surface for observation and examination. Fictional stories both pare down and embellish real life. They zoom in on the important stuff and focus the reader’s attention squarely there. When the story captures something true about the lives of its characters, it binds us to them. Usually, we find a story engrossing when we care about the characters and want to see what happens to them. While some portrait painters insist on live sittings with their subjects, it’s easier — although perhaps more facile — to start with a photograph. Photographs manage to capture some essence of personality, to flatten it into something easier to paint, simplifying the process of portraiture. Caricatures identify particular features of their subjects and render them in a ruthless way. In the realm of words, identifying salient features in characters and their world makes them more memorable and makes their actions more comprehensible. Perhaps caricatures resemble jokes in this way. Last month, I wrote about fairytales.…
When I was about five, I was obsessed with Swan Lake. I adored the score and played the record over and over again. I remember attending the ballet, but it was the music and the story that truly captivated my soul. The music, written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between 1875 and 1876, is sublime. Even now, I can pinpoint where we are in the story just by hearing a few chords; the ending still brings me to tears. But what affects me the most — is it the music or the story? Here’s a quick summary of the story: a princess, cursed to live as a swan during the day, regains her human form at night. One evening, a prince, out hunting, encounters her and falls deeply in love. While court intrigues attempt to lead the prince to choose a bride and a malevolent witch tries to deceive him, these elements pale in comparison to the climax. Ultimately, the prince forsakes his humanity, transforming into a swan to join the woman he loves. Together, they fly away, a happy couple. Swan Lake embodies a mythic story archetype, echoed throughout fantasy and fiction. Consider Twilight, where a lover surrenders her humanity…
The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened yet. The present is a liminal space between two non-existent things. We’re encouraged to stay present and live in the moment. But who really does that? Primarily, it’s young children and adults under duress. Young children live in the moment; their time is now. A toddler of a certain disposition doesn’t understand that taking a nap now will make them happier later. That kind of thinking requires conceptualizing a future self and taking actions now for its benefit. Those concepts take time to develop. Children typically develop time perception roughly equal to that of an adult by about eight years of age. [(2021) Development of Young Children’s Time Perception: Effect of Age and Emotional Localization] Another set of humans who are trapped in the moment are people caught in disasters — be it wars, personal attacks, illness, weather events, or earthquakes. Like young children, these individuals are also anchored in the present. When faced with the immediate demands of a catastrophe, there is little room left to consider the past or the future. Typically, as adults, we find ourselves oscillating between the past and the future, seldom pausing to embrace the now.…
Humans are builders. We are all given different talents and resources in life that we use to try to construct happiness for ourselves and for those we love. This continuous process of creation is not only quintessentially human but also the most common thing all animals do. All animals build, humans just take it to another level. We write and read books, make and play games, create and watch movies, paint and sculpt stories, weave musical ballads and landscapes. We are able to envision other lives and share those visions with others. I think that’s an amazing facility. We believe that we’re unique, as humans, for building by using our prodigious imagination. We don’t only build in physical and social realms, we craft fully imaginary worlds populated with people and other creatures. Perhaps whales, apes, or even other animals — the octopus? a colony of termites? — also dream up stories. It’s hard to know. I have always lived in my imagination. As a child, I made elaborate sets and toys to act out stories for myself and my friends. Our apartment gradually filled with paper and fabric cities, castles, and little animals made from scraps; I used to make…
