I wrote a story a few years ago called Another Country that is still my favorite thing I've written. And then I mentally let it go. About six months ago, though, I went back to proofread it and clean up some grammar (stuff that should've happened before I ever considered it finished) before finally showing it to a friend. That re-reading allowed me to see aspects of the story that weren't apparent to me when I wrote it. I've read about this phenomenon, but I had not experienced it for myself until then.
What did I notice in that second reading? Mainly, that the story contains a metaphor of women - and specifically possible romantic partners - as countries. Both are 'places' that we may visit for a length of time - short or long - and in which we may experience a great deal or a little, shallowly or deeply, leaving us anywhere between unchanged, and profoundly changed. (Funny: the metaphor isn't just apparent in the story - it's almost heavy-handed, making it that much more remarkable that I didn't notice it while writing it.) Furthermore, any Freudians would likely notice that "country" is even prefixed phonetically by an especially foul (though pertinent) term.
It wasn't just that the metaphor eluded my conscious consideration - the whole notion that this was a story about women, or relationships, was not what I considered myself to be writing. It began as a story about travel, and the way places imprint themselves on us. The women worked their way into the story, I think, as part of the natural 'backdrop' the narrator experiences (or so it seemed at the time). I can only suspect that from that point, the metaphor took hold subconsciously, which pulled them further into the story, reinforcing the metaphor, in a virtuous cycle. This would at least explain the relative elegance of the narrative alignment to the metaphor - the narrator's encounter with each woman feels harmonious with the place - not in the sense that the women "belong" in their locations, but rather that you believe his memory of each country could never be separated from his memories of the particular women. And, vice versa.
It's interesting to me that Gabby, herself traveling between countries, seems to transcend the framework in which the other women exist. So what is she? She could be seen as the counterpart to the narrator - someone else whose romantic attachments change with each country. Interestingly, both characters' home countries are referred to - early in the story, their having departed them, and near the end, their returns (the narrator's occurring in the story's last line, albeit only in his mind). This parallels the way our relationships exist within the bookends of our lives, as we arrive and depart from this life alone.
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Sunday, February 16, 2020
No Way Back
It it tempting to view life as climbing a mountain of greater and greater recognition of the workings of the world around us. This may or may not be true, but by certain outlying moments of my life, I've come to the conclusion that the steps a person climbs on this journey slowly evaporate behind them. The journey we each take cannot be retraced, nor do we necessarily retain the steps we've taken - no matter what we believe we have gained, our memories of learning are one and the same with the wisdom of knowing, and as the memories turn to echoes in our psyche, all we are left with is habits of thought and action.
"That is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They don't grow wise. They grow careful." - Ernest Hemingway
A More Refined Take On Alternate Realities
I went through a period after high school where I was obsessed by the idea of alternate realities, and later, their relationship to so-called "multiverse" theories in physics. Of course, I didn't yet understand topics like probability and expected value well, so my conception was basically, "everything is happening somewhere", which isn't what the theory actually suggests.
In a nutshell, even a very large number of permutations on the same building blocks should NOT be expected to produce stochastic output (though it may, of course, at one or more resolutions). It's more likely they would produce distributions and clustering of the same nature that we see in our single universe when we analyze most discrete phenomena across a large number of observations.
So what? Well, at some point it occurred to me that the first rule of ecology ("you can never change just one thing") is probably intertwined with this. Those early thought experiments of mine always took the form of, "what if the past looked just like my past, except for X?" (e.g., "what if I had done better in college classes my freshman year?") These might be fun to think about, but there's no reason to think that they are viable "alternate realities." After all, how likely is it that some alternate universe is different in one way that is so local? (Everyone is the same except me, and my differences don't manifest at all until the age of 19.) You can have fun, I suppose, assuming not very much would have to change for a different sperm to have fertilized the egg I grew from, but even that is a flawed assumption, is it not? After all, they were all obeying the same physics that all of history had to obey. Are you telling me that a change that would make a different sperm win wouldn't have had an effect even 5000 years ago (much less a billion - outlier variations tend to amplify through time) that would've led to a meaningfully different present?
Something that might be more useful to consider: what would make my example alternate reality plausible? In other words, let's answer that question first, then work backwards. The reason this might make sense is because nobody who is examining the implications of alternative realities as a way of understanding themselves and their own past decision-making actually cares about whether envisioned alternate timelines are likely reconcilable into the multiverse.
It's not crazy to think that if my brain chemistry had been a little bit different, lending more to discipline and less to impulsiveness, I might have succeeded my freshman year of college. But I likely would have grown up with different experiences, giving me a different personality (not *just* "more discipline"), and making it unlikely that I would have been at the same college, with the same friends, the same perspective on life, or the same values.
I think it's a MORE rigorous thought process this way - at least, in the way rigor matters for what we're trying to assess. When the difference first occurred to me, I perceived this as "sucking the fun out of the exercise," which is how it often feels as we solidify a process that felt creative, but I think it also helps train me in planning for the future. Because the future also requires a careful dose of imagination, tempered by an understanding of how the world works. It only stands to reason that the more fully-formed is the latter, the less space exists for the former.
In a nutshell, even a very large number of permutations on the same building blocks should NOT be expected to produce stochastic output (though it may, of course, at one or more resolutions). It's more likely they would produce distributions and clustering of the same nature that we see in our single universe when we analyze most discrete phenomena across a large number of observations.
So what? Well, at some point it occurred to me that the first rule of ecology ("you can never change just one thing") is probably intertwined with this. Those early thought experiments of mine always took the form of, "what if the past looked just like my past, except for X?" (e.g., "what if I had done better in college classes my freshman year?") These might be fun to think about, but there's no reason to think that they are viable "alternate realities." After all, how likely is it that some alternate universe is different in one way that is so local? (Everyone is the same except me, and my differences don't manifest at all until the age of 19.) You can have fun, I suppose, assuming not very much would have to change for a different sperm to have fertilized the egg I grew from, but even that is a flawed assumption, is it not? After all, they were all obeying the same physics that all of history had to obey. Are you telling me that a change that would make a different sperm win wouldn't have had an effect even 5000 years ago (much less a billion - outlier variations tend to amplify through time) that would've led to a meaningfully different present?
Something that might be more useful to consider: what would make my example alternate reality plausible? In other words, let's answer that question first, then work backwards. The reason this might make sense is because nobody who is examining the implications of alternative realities as a way of understanding themselves and their own past decision-making actually cares about whether envisioned alternate timelines are likely reconcilable into the multiverse.
It's not crazy to think that if my brain chemistry had been a little bit different, lending more to discipline and less to impulsiveness, I might have succeeded my freshman year of college. But I likely would have grown up with different experiences, giving me a different personality (not *just* "more discipline"), and making it unlikely that I would have been at the same college, with the same friends, the same perspective on life, or the same values.
I think it's a MORE rigorous thought process this way - at least, in the way rigor matters for what we're trying to assess. When the difference first occurred to me, I perceived this as "sucking the fun out of the exercise," which is how it often feels as we solidify a process that felt creative, but I think it also helps train me in planning for the future. Because the future also requires a careful dose of imagination, tempered by an understanding of how the world works. It only stands to reason that the more fully-formed is the latter, the less space exists for the former.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)