While watching The Ice Storm again for the fourth or fifth time recently, I was struck by how strangely prophetic the movie is when it opens with Tobey Maguire reading a Fantastic Four comic book on a train. Five years later, he starred in Spider-Man. I can’t help wondering if whoever cast him had been watching The Ice Storm and made that comic book superhero connection. It made me think how life is like that. One thing leads to another, and looking back it often seems to fit like pieces of an intricate puzzle into a perfect whole.
These are the kinds of connections that strike me after viewing movies a few times — or reading books more than once. Once I get to know a story, my focus changes and, if the depiction is sound, connections and inner workings start to reveal themselves. I see not only the primary theme, but layers of meaning, sometimes meaning no one ever intended. I like, so far, the fact that I know little about how movies are made. My lack of knowledge lets me keep the illusion alive even while I look deeper.
One of my favorite forms of interaction in movies is between humans and other animals. Horses in particular. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering the connection between horses and people throughout our shared history. But horses in movies seem significant to me because, in spite of the historical relationship, so few of us spend any time with horses today. Including me. I don’t know much about horses except that even though I’ve ridden them only three times in my life (and not very well), I love them, in real life as well as in movies and books. I ate up the Misty of Chincoteague series as a girl, and Airs Above the Ground started my idol worship of Mary Stewart’s books. When I first read The Lord of the Rings, as a teenager, I was almost as upset as Sam when Bill the pony had to be released before entering Moria. I’ve thought that if there is one tiny flaw in Peter Jackson’s movie verions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy it was that Shadowfax didn’t get more attention. He was bigger than life in the books. (But the movie version is so intense and rich that I can’t complain. I can only suggest that anyone who loves the story should also read the books.)
Maybe my fascination with horses is genetic. My mom grew up around horses. Her father traded them, and spent a lot of time at the racetrack. Her maternal grandfather, a Danish immigrant, was a rancher, and a few of her relations were cowboys, either the working kind or, more recently, the rodeo kind. My dad’s grandfather was a blacksmith. So yeah, horses must connect to my DNA somehow. Possibly to everyone’s, considering human history.
There is a special horse in the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, nonetheless. Each time I watch The Two Towers, I have to go back and play a particular scene over again. Perhaps you know it. Aragorn’s horse finds him washed up on a riverbank. The horse nudges him awake, and then kneels to help his injured rider mount. The relationship between horse and man hits me, there, every time. It’s just a movie, right? Well, a little research led me to the fact that Viggo Mortensen spent extra time with that horse during filming and even purchased the horse after finishing the movie. He went on to make his next movie, Hidalgo, with another horse named TJ, again spent lots of time getting close to the horse during filming, and again purchased the horse afterward. Old news for many fans, perhaps, but new and touching for me. I haven’t seen Hidalgo yet, but now I’ll have to.
My favorite movies are the ones with so much intricacy and detail that I can watch them over and over and see something new each time. I’m the same way with books, with poetry, with artwork of all kinds, including architecture. I like the appearance of simplicity, with complexity running deep within. I like infrastructure, lots of background and foundations we never see but sense are there. I like fine craftsmanship in all forms, and the drive to put one’s heart into one’s work. I’ve started to notice this chemistry in movies sometimes, a hint of how a cast and crew must have worked as a team, that remains as a very personal energy running through the finished product. I like to think that even what winds up on the cutting room floor has a part in that energy. That’s how the world is, after all, it’s full of interconnections and even interspecies cooperation, as well as competition, yet deceivingly simple on the surface — for all its obvious glory. The best fiction and the best artwork is, after all, a metaphor for life — at times even something beyond this life.
Which leads me to a final observation from those movies, one that led to an epiphany for me. It came to me the last time I watched The Return of the King. At the very end Frodo turns for a last glance at his friends, and his face transforms from a look of sorrow and grief to a combination of mischief, delight, anticipation, and near beatification — the same expression Galadriel wore when we last saw her a moment earlier. They remind me uncannily of accounts I’ve read of near-death experiences or of messages received from the other side by mediums. Earlier in the story Gandalf even spoke to Pippin about death, referring to it as a passage to a distant country, full of wonder and beauty.
This got me to thinking about why we love fiction, and Joseph Campbell’s perpetual examination of the power of myth.
Too often today fiction is criticized as a form of manipulation, and in many cases rightly so. We see the manipulation in advertising every day, even the most artistic of it. More and more product placement in TV, sensationalized — almost fictionalized — news rather than objective coverage, celebrity worship, so-called reality TV, politicians pumping themselves up or dragging others through the mud, and religious figures taking on exaggerated roles, promising to save us from hellfire of one flavor or another. Even in purer forms of fiction, in the quest to make money, publishers and writers pump out novels faster and faster, according to contracts and marketing ploys, seeking the next book that will be like the one that sold so well before. Stories seem to lose something in the process. They become pure entertainment and cleverly rather than artistically crafted, in a hurry, with little art remaining, little beneath the surface. A tree is cut down for something that remains on bookstore shelves for a couple of months and then is sold used for a penny at Amazon, or forgotten. The reader can begin to feel manipulated or addicted to the illusion and rapid consumption rather than edified by it.
In the midst of all this, why do we still love fiction? Why do we feel driven both to create and consume story? Is it a waste of time? Is it mere child’s play, the pastime of dreamers who need to get a grip on reality? Or is there something much deeper, an innate hunger or instinctive need at work?
If, as some philosophers surmise, and many near-death experiencers and mediums claim, this world is but an illusion, then is all fiction a metaphor for this great stage performance we call life? Plays within the play? Dreams within the dream? Is its purpose to teach us to see the difference between the smaller play and the bigger play, in order to prepare us to see beyond the greater play we act out in this life? (Which might mean Shakespeare’s Hamlet is holy scripture.) Is fiction a tool, an abstract ritual object we use to prepare us to see through that illusion and finally leave this world behind?
I wonder does that make directors, actors, publishers, and fiction writers the priests, handing out the keys to salvation in the form of story? Are theaters and libraries our true temples? Some of us would love to think so, I’m sure. What an ego pump that would be, for a few. What a power trip.
Or is the truth that each human saves himself, perhaps with the cooperation and companionship of his chosen cohorts? Does each of us take in each story and each experience and sift out those of his own choosing and discretion? Does each, in his own way, create his own story, and interpret it as he journeys through life, thus honing his ability to see past the illusion? Does each person make his own way to a deeper truth, progressing step by step toward the blazing dawn of enlightenment?
How does that come about? The best fiction, the best movies, draw us in so completely that if we let ourselves we can believe they’re real at the time we’re in the story. Is that the key to realizing how completely we can be drawn into an illusion, the key that helps us begin to see that it is possible this life, this world that seems so real and has such a hold on us, might possibly also be just a story, only an illusion? Does creating our own illusions show us how it’s done?
That’s my little epiphany, perhaps not meaningful to anyone but me. These things are personal. But I didn’t invent the possibility of the world as an illusion. Plato wrote about it in his Allegory of the Cave some 2,300 years ago, and it’s my understanding there are similar teachings in Hindu scriptures possibly more than 5,000 years old. It’s a thought probably older than that, painted on the walls of caves and leached into the earth from the ashes of ancient campfires, blown on the wind by their smoke, still inhaled each day by us. An ancient thought, as ancient perhaps as myth itself, and human self, which we explore today in the form of movies, plays, short stories and novels, through art, poetry, music — as well as through religion, history, and science. But it’s new for me to think from this perspective, and I don’t think I can ever see the fiction, fantasy, dreams, or creative endeavors I choose to partake in as a waste of time, from here on out. Not that I ever did. Some instinct in me drew me to them, and I answered. Perhaps all I’ve gained from my epiphany is an answer for those who would denigrate such as being a waste of time, of being a symptom of escaping reality or not being practical. It could be that carefully selecting my chosen forms of illusion is a way of taking greater control over my own life rather than escaping it. I can tell the “realists” who call me nothing but a dreamer to . . . watch a movie . . . read a story . . . write a poem. Get real by way of study of the dream within the dream.
Edited 12-21-2006. —BK
This is a brilliant, beautiful post. I’m not going to find anything worthy to say about it at this time of night. It seems to demand something more than an offhand response. So just for now I thought I’d let you know how much I enjoyed it.
Eric, I’m such an oddball, I sometimes think that no one will understand thoughts like these. So I find your comment reassuring that I’m not babbling incoherently. Thank you!
Ever since I was a kid I’ve sometimes felt a need to justify to others why I’m the perpetual dreamer I am — or hide the dreamer in me. Including 25 years in jobs where I didn’t really fit. I’m still amazed and grateful that anyone ever paid me to do technical writing and editing, even more amazed that some understanding people promoted me to positions supervising and managing distribution of those manuals. All those years I felt that I had to hide a large part of who I was every day just to get the work done and do my best at it. I can’t complain those were misspent years, since I met so many terrific people, learned a lot, gained some self-confidence, and the promotions allowed me the rate of pay I needed to retire early — and of course it was my choice to take those jobs. But I feel as if I sold out the dreaming, creative part of me. I developed physical problems during the last few years of that work, some of which were, I think, signs that I was in the wrong line of work. Added to that, working for the military felt like a wrong livelihood, a wrong fit for me at least, from the start. (I do think we need a strong defense, but I don’t think it should be anything but an absolute last resort — true defense, not offense as it’s been used in Iraq.)
I felt a greater urgency to leave that work after 9/11, then my mom’s death, and finally the ramp up for war. I’d hoped to take early retirement for years, if the opportunity arose, and it did in 2003 because of downsizing. I don’t like to think of it as retirement so much as leaving one work phase for the next. I’m not old enough to retire, though I was sure beginning to feel that way.
Soon after leaving that phase of my life, I had a dream in which I was dressed all in beige. I squeezed into a building through a transom, as I’d had to do every day for some time in the dream. As I got through I felt great relief that it was the last time I’d have to do that, and my beige pants split open to reveal paisley tights underneath. I felt such relief that I no longer had to worry about letting them show.
But in real life, hiding the dreamy, peaceloving, contemplative, creative — and especially the spiritually-oriented — parts of me had become a habit and a form of self-defense. My armor. You don’t take off your armor until you’re sure the battle is over. My subconscious had to be convinced it was, and that’s taking some time.
The epiphany I wrote about in this post has stayed with me for days. Yesterday it bubbled up and demanded to be shared. Must be my paisley tights peeking through. I just turned 50 in October, and life’s short, so I plan to spend a lot more time in my preferred clothing from now on.
I’m in the always difficult process of changing over from the fiction writing which has dominated my work for weeks to legal writing. The latter pays well, the former doesn’t, but I am easier to live with when doing the former. I feel more at home with fiction. The worlds I write about make more sense to me, sad to say, than the world I live in.
But you can make an argument that fiction is more truthful than the artificial society we inhabit. Much of our world seems designed to deny basic human truths about human nature and human needs in order to further the accumulation of wealth and power by a few. Why do people cheer at the movies when the good guys win? Or read mystery novels where justice triumphs? Is it because, really, the truth is that the good guys should win and justice should triumph but in the “real” world they seldom do and as adults we’re supposed to deny the truth, go along with al the lies, pretend the bad guys who are winning are good or pretend that in reality good and justice don’t matter, when in fact, they do, because of human nature they can’t help but matter and all this talk about “well that’s the way things are” or “that’s the way business works” etc etc is just so much deceit. Yeah, I think a good case can be made that people read fiction to experience the truth.
Eric, I was going to say much the same thing. A lot of food for thought in Barbara’s post, and so beautifully phrased. I enjoyed it, too, and it’s too late at night for me to give a coherent response. Let me just say I’m looking forward to re-reading it!
I can sympathize with the difficulty of that transition, Eric. I used to go from working with technical information by day, to fiction in the evenings and weekends, and it often seemed easier to go toward fiction than to move away from it. Technical writing and fiction writing are such completely different pursuits, it’s almost as if one has to be two different people.
Wow, that’s quite a post. I wish you the happiest of holidays, Barbara.
It’s wonderful to stay in touch.
Beautiful post, Barbara — and a wonderfully articulate apologia for what drives us to create. You probably could have subtitled this “Why Are We Writers?”.
Sarah, Beverly, and Blogdog, thanks so much for your kind words.
I want to comment of the horse-y aspect of your post. I had a horse, growing up…well my sisters and I did, anyway. I liked riding well enough, but a couple of my sisters were absolutely horse-crazy. And still are. I think that you are either born a horse-person or you are not. Clearly, you are one of them…the horse people. I always wonder what it is that causes this and have been unable to ascertain what it is. Do you wonder this, too?
[...] You know, I think if I’d grown up with horses I might very well be as much a horse person as anyone. I confess I’m intimidated by them, unfamiliar as I am, but [...]
[...] My sister emailed me about my post, Interconnections, parallels, and epiphany. She got me to thinking about how individually we process things that happen in our personal lives through our writing and artwork. (Aside from teaching yoga, Helen paints and does collages. You can see some of her artwork at her website, Your Yoga Voyage.) [...]