Preparation By Contrast

What goes Up must come Down

Relativity

Nothing in man’s life is absolute. Absolute zero is a never-reached theoretical state of cold. Absolute black, the total absence of photons, is also only reached in the imagination, as is absolute white.

This is also true in art and tales. Cold is less warm, hot is less cold. Black is more dark and white is more light. All things exist in relation to those things that are nearby. We judge if a thing is cold, hot, black, or white by comparing it to the other things next to it. This is the artist’s principle of relativity.

A light thing seems more white when it lies next to something dark, which then seems more black.

In tales, ‘next to’ means: ‘before or after.’

Ups ’n’ Downs

Therefore a wise talesman gives his hero a rare victory just before he meets a crushing defeat. And he shows us how the hero loses his last hope just before he turns to his final victory. And he tells us how all hope of love is lost, just before love comes back.

Before each great and powerful scene where he would have us feel the most intensely, the talesman will make us lie in the bed of the opposite feelings. This is what my teacher, Frank Daniel, called ‘preparation by contrast.’

For us in the audience, we find this trick to be the rare one that works best when we can see through it. When we see the soldiers take time out in the midst of a campaign to chase a butterfly, doze in the sun, and feel at peace, we know all too well, with a gnawing sense of dread, that at the next moment a bullet or shell may come whistling in with death. And on the far end from this, when we see the hero has lost his last hope and fears that he stares into the maw of total defeat, we can enjoy the secret hope that he is wrong, and that this is not to be the end.

In Life Too

This rule seems to hold in life as well. For when we look back at our past (as we have shaped it in our memories) it does seem as though it ‘was darkest ere the dawn.’ Day does follow night, as winter follows summer. But the truth is that our memories are great talesmen in themselves, and these turnabouts are true only in how we see them.

It may be, in truth, that all the laws of talesmanship come, in the end, out of the way our minds reshape the events in our lives. But that’s another tale for another day.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday 31 January 2008)