Bright & Dark

An interesting article with much food for thought — The Pleasures of Imagination, from the June 8, 2010, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time in my imagination. It’s one of the reasons I also consider movement to be so important, and am not physically satisfied unless I’ve had some exercise on any given day. It’s easy, if I spend so much time in my head, to neglect the rest of me. But I digress.

I spend plenty of time making up stories, translating them to the page (or computer screen). And then I spend some more time reading and watching other people’s stories, and sometimes re-reading and re-watching them — the book and TV versions of comfort food. And then I make up all sorts of things I never write, or if I write them it happens much later and I’d be hard-pressed to recognize the reappearance of a former daydream. My life would be much poorer without all of this imagining.

There is a certain point at which fantasizing for the sake of fantasizing becomes only a means of escape rather than an exercise of creativity (and, yes, those two can be and often are the same thing, but the difference I’m talking about here is in degrees). If all of the energy is hurtling towards escape and none of it towards creation, then things are out of balance, and I’d best drive myself to Nia and cook something succulent for dinner. And write.

The main point of the article that people experience lives and situations different from their own through imagination, and that although we know rationally that what we’ve imagined (or what the TV producers have dreamed up) is not real, some part of us believes that it is. The term the article uses to differentiate that state is “alief.”

For instance, some fictional characters have become so real to me through re-reading or re-watching that their stories have become part of my personal mythology on some level. To name a handful, Stuart Redman and Nick Andros of Stephen King’s The Stand and the characters of the Joss Whedonverse from Buffy to Mal. While this is interesting to me, this alief as regards these stories and characters, what I find even more interesting is the way the alief translates to or informs my own philosophy of living. I’ve said several times that certain stories have completely changed the way I see the world, and certainly the way I act within it.

The part of this translation the article makes me think of most is something I’ve also written and talked about — I wrote an entire novel based on the premise that a society that loses its stories ceases to exist. A society that continues to create its stories, and to evolve them, thrives.

Based on the quality (in any way you choose to interpret that word), what kind of society are we?

I’m working on a short story this week. The idea came to me in a dream — exceedingly rare for me, that sort of thing — and I surrendered to the idea of waking up long enough to write it down on my bedside pad o’ paper.

The story is a mad wrangle. My critical voice, having been kicked out of my office for months upon months, storms the castle at least once every writing session, sometimes twice. Can we say annoying?

I can only come the conclusion that there’s something important trying to be expressed here (and by important, I don’t mean that I have or have not committed literature or an excuse for an award nomination, just that there’s something deep and imperative for me to express). In this case, important = dangerous.

As it happens, I’ve come across a link a few times in the past day or two on Facebook that leads to a letter David Mamet wrote to the writers of The Unit. The letter is specifically about writing for the screen, but IMO the text is a great refocusser no matter what medium you’re writing for. It’s certainly helping me with my current wrangle all of a sudden.

Thanks to my friend Thorn for sending the link directly to me so’s I could finally read it.

Here it is for your enjoyment and edification.

As in, The Emotions (woah, woah, you’ve got the best of my love) or “Emotion” (It’s just emotion/taking me over). Or any descriptive passage that could be properly begun with the words “I feel.” It’s been on my mind lately.

A few days ago, my BFF and I drove to Austin to attend Starr’s memorial. Such a different animal than the sorts of memorials and funerals I’ve attended before. There was genuine mourning, sure. And there was also much celebration of Starr’s life. Who she was, the lessons she lived and taught so well by example to all of us, distilled in the messages of her music and in the hearts of everyone present.

It had been a long, long time — in some cases, years — since I’d seen some of the people I reconnected with there. Every hug, every moment spent standing in front of the fire with our arms around each other brought home that this was the way to honor Starr. With love. With community. Always connected, no matter how far we may drift from each other in these individual lives we’re living.

I exchanged many a sad glance. I laughed. I sang out loud when her band, The Lovers, played their set after many, many stories told by family and friends. And I cried, though not as much as I had cried already. It felt important to remember everything and everyone. What is remembered lives on in us. Or, for short, what is remembered lives.

In the religion of my birth, remembering is important. Remembering to keep the holy days, lighting a Yarzheit candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing, holding close the essence of thoughts and deeds and love given and received. In this way is memory made to be a blessing to all who live.

All of this remembering — or, better yet — re-membering, as if the whole world and everyone in it were shattered and longed to be whole once more — is not mere rote. It would be nothing without feeling, without emotion.

Over the lunch hour today, I finished reading Melissa Marr’s Fragile Eternity. Warning: Vague spoiler alert. I felt more captivated by the last third of the book than any of its other parts, which is not to say those weren’t good but that the last third touched me in special way because of an unexpected weaving of emotion into the steady, unchanging threads of order. End warning.

What does it mean to bring emotion into the warp and weft of order? How does a person who prides him- or herself on equanimity deal with the ebb and flow of the heart? What is the right balance between logic and feeling? How does it shift and change? Slowly, steadily? So quickly that we give ourselves whiplash? Somewhere in between?

There is a time for more and for less, a time for sharp and bright and dark and explosive. There’s a place for gentleness, for gratitude. There’s magic in all of it — the kind of awe and wonder that goes along with being present, right now, in all of our humanity — however it feels.

The point is to feel.