The Screenplay: For Non-Screenwriters

Even talesmen who don’t want to write for the movies can use and learn from screenplays

The movies have lured talented writers for many decades. There is a lot of money that can be made, and fame from having your name attached to a movie that is sold with tens of millions of dollars, and celebrity, and glamour, and sex (never underestimate the lure of sex to lonely writers). Many writers show open contempt for Hollywood, producers, directors, and the movie-goer; all the same they work in the industry and cash the checks.

And many a talesman has all the same managed to resist these sirens, and for one cause or another has held fast to his own corner of the talespinning world, and left Hollywood alone.

And yet even such as we who dwell apart could use screenplays, and write them, and learn from them.

For the good in the screenplay form has some meaning for all forms of talespinning, as indeed other forms have meaning for the screenplay. But what I here would point out to you, is that you can tell your tale in screenplay form as a sort of advanced outline or prototype of a first draft.

Where a screenplay bests the draft is in letting us flesh out our heroes, by telling of some scenes in sharp detail, with actions and dialogue, and yet without the need to form and shape our descriptions. The setting is given in briefest form, the actions merely summed up, but the dialogue is fleshed out, and this makes us attend to our cast and their characters, and gives us a better view into their hearts, both why they do what they do, and the style in which they do it.

Now you may answer, that a screenplay is short, and a novel is long, and if you were to make a screenplay draft of your novel, it would run almost as long as the novel itself. This may be true, and the solution is to do what screenwriters have always done when they adapted novels: skip over scenes. In our case, we indicate, with a paragraph or two, the scenes we don’t flesh out in screenplay form; these would then be more ‘outlinish’ if you will, and would be those scenes of long processes where little change of character is demanded, where ‘things go on of their own momentum’ until the next crossroads in the plot.

Childe Rowland

Joseph Jacobs retold the tale of Childe Rowland, a variant of the Tam Lin tale, in his famous collection of English Fairy Tales. I excerpt the start to indicate how the thing can be done. Here Jacobs filled in exposition and backstory with the prose. (I use the version as posted online by Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org version 7eftl10.txt.)

The Start of Childe Rowland as told by Joseph Jacobs

  Childe Rowland and his brothers twain
    Were playing at the ball,
  And there was their sister Burd Ellen
    In the midst, among them all.

  Childe Rowland kicked it with his foot
    And caught it with his knee;
  At last as he plunged among them all
    O’er the church he made it flee.

  Burd Ellen round about the aisle
    To seek the ball is gone,
  But long they waited, and longer still,
    And she came not back again.

  They sought her east, they sought her west,
    They sought her up and down,
  And woe were the hearts of those brethren,
    For she was not to be found.

So at last her eldest brother went to the Warlock Merlin and told him all the case, and asked him if he knew where Burd Ellen was. “The fair Burd Ellen,” said the Warlock Merlin, “must have been carried off by the fairies, because she went round the church ‘wider shins’--the opposite way to the sun. She is now in the Dark Tower of the King of Elfland; it would take the boldest knight in Christendom to bring her back.”

“If it is possible to bring her back,” said her brother, “I’ll do it, or perish in the attempt.”

“Possible it is,” said the Warlock Merlin, “but woe to the man or mother’s son that attempts it, if he is not well taught beforehand what he is to do.”

The eldest brother of Burd Ellen was not to be put off, by any fear of danger, from attempting to get her back, so he begged the Warlock Merlin to tell him what he should do, and what he should not do, in going to seek his sister. And after he had been taught, and had repeated his lesson, he set out for Elfland.

  But long they waited, and longer still,
    With doubt and muckle pain,
  But woe were the hearts of his brethren,
    For he came not back again.

Then the second brother got tired and sick of waiting, and he went to the Warlock Merlin and asked him the same as his brother. So he set out to find Burd Ellen.

  But long they waited, and longer still,
    With muckle doubt and pain,
  And woe were his mother’s and brother’s heart,
    For he came not back again.

And when they had waited and waited a good long time, Childe Rowland, the youngest of Burd Ellen’s brothers, wished to go, and went to his mother, the good queen, to ask her to let him go. But she would not at first, for he was the last of her children she now had, and if he was lost, all would be lost. But he begged, and he begged, till at last the good queen let him go, and gave him his father’s good brand that never struck in vain. And as she girt it round his waist, she said the spell that would give it victory.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 31, 2008)

The Screenplay: They All Do It

First thoughts on the movie script

Today I thought I would post the first of some essays on the art of telling a tale through a screenplay.

Plan Only

The first thing to observe about a screenplay, or teleplay, or theatrical play, is that it is not the final telling of the tale. It is instead only a set of indications as to how the final telling should proceed, and in between these indications or instructions, and the actual tale as it is told, come so many people, crafts, and work, that it is almost impossible to say that one should simply ‘shoot the script.’ In the first place, we should note that those other craftsmen would not be doing their jobs properly if all they did was ‘shoot the script.’ In the second place, a screenplay cannot indicate everything the finished film will hold, or else it would run to thousands of pages. Even if it did indicate everything in the finished film, the script could not give the same effect that watching the film gives us in the audience, because what we feel and apprehend as we watch a movie is immediate, and depends upon both senses of sight and hearing to work as one and at once.

Thus we can say to the beginning screenwriter, to look upon his script as no more than a blueprint for the final work, or in more writerly terms, the script is a sort of outline for the film.

If a writer compares his outline to the novel he creates based upon that outline, he sees two things:

1. There is much in the novel that was not in the outline
2. The novel’s events often change from the order and nature of the events in the outline.

This every writer can see and understand, but often screenwriters complain when the final film diverges from their script. Even when a movie derives from a novel, we often hear the novel’s author complain that the movie changed things. Sometimes these complaints are understandable, as it sometimes seems as though the producers of the movie bought a story only to film a completely different tale; why, we wonder, didn’t they just commission an original script to their own specifications, and save the option fees on the novel? But there is more to it than that, though the complaint of the novelist in these instances are justified. In many cases, though, we suspect that the source of the original author’s complaints stem from a misunderstanding of how movies are made.

They All Do It

A movie script is revised in order to use the money in the budget most effectively; this means that locations are sometimes changed or combined, and that for almost all movies, the scenes are shot out of narrative order. All the scenes in one location will be shot at once, then the crew will move to another location and shoot all the scenes that take place there. All the location night scenes will be shot, then the day scenes, because the cast and crew can’t work around the clock, 24 hours a day.

A movie will also ‘complete’ the script as the different departments go to work on it. Costume department must design and make the costumes all the main and featured characters will wear; this is a matter not only of understanding the characters, their milieu, and their intentions, but also how the costumes will affect us in the audience, both emotionally as to whether we like the character or not, and intellectually as to how we understand the character and how he will function in the tale. And the costume department must beyond this consider the actual actors who will wear the outfits, and how the color and shape and cut of the costumes will dress the actors’ bodies, and how well the actors will be able to move and perform their parts in the costumes.

The production designer commands set design and props, those parts of the set that can be picked up and moved about by the actors. A general color scheme may be chosen that reflects the tale’s themes, again with an eye to both the intellectual and emotional effects it will have on us the audience. The set is ‘dressed’ even as the actors are.

The cinematographers in camera and lighting then must light the sets with an eye toward the mood of the tale, its general tendency toward one of the poles of realism or expressionism (or fantasy), and the style of the movie. Then the camera department chooses lenses and filters for those lenses, and what film stock to shoot on, and what aspect ratio to shoot the movie in. And then sometimes the camera will be itself a kind of actor in the scene, in the way it moves or zooms in or out on the scene.

The actors go over the lines of dialogue in the script and the lines will sound different as different actors speak them. What sounds good coming from one actor might not sound so good from another; the cast is chosen based on a variety of considerations, among them financial, but let’s think only of the artistic side of things here: the best actor for a role is the one who can best portray the character over the whole of the story, and one or two lines might sound awkward or unintentionally funny coming from this one actor — in which case the lines are better changed. All the actors must not only speak their lines, they must speak them with certain inflections, using great subtlety, and they must speak the lines at a certain pace, timing their delivery and their pauses — the moments in their lines when they are not speaking them. They must also control the volume or loudness and softness with which they speak.

Each scene will be broken down into various camera angles or shots, and each shot will be rehearsed, then filmed one or more times. Each time a shot is performed, the performances of cast and camera will differ slightly, and decisions must be made as to which take is best, over all, for the telling of the tale and its effect on us the audience.

When filming is complete (both principal and secondary), the scenes are assembled in editing and the first rough draft of the tale is now complete. The editor works on choosing which takes to use, which camera angles to use at which moments, and the overall pacing of scenes and movie.

After picture is cut to a reasonably finished form, the sound department cleans up production sound, re-records some dialogue (which even at this point may be rewritten), adds sound effects, ambience, and fine-tunes the volume and the other aspects of sound through various sound filters.

The music composer then composes music to cover and enhance some scenes, arranges it for different instruments, and records it. The music editors then tailor the recorded music for the film scenes.

Any special effects are created and added by the f/x departments. There are effects created on set, to be performed while shooting, and there are optical effects to be added in camera and post-production, and there are digital effects which can be created in advance in a pre-visualization stage, then finished and fine-tuned after shooting. These are cut in by the editors at various stages of post-production, using the first drafts to get an idea of how the effects will work, then the final fully-rendered effects very late in post-production.

Then the sounds are all mixed together to the final version of the film, and titles are designed, filmed, and cut in with their music and sounds.

Finally, the movie will be shown to an audience (to several, in fact, beginning with the producers and a small group of advisers, then to wider test audiences, in many cases) and the reaction is judged with an eye to making any final changes before general release.

Some films are recut after general release, for various reasons. Some films are recut for different national markets and versions.

Not Only One Talesman

At every step along this long road, each of these departments, and everyone in the departments, takes a hand in telling the tale, at least in his small or large part of it. Every one is a talesman, and the talesman or ‘author’ of a movie is the combined aggregate of all these members of the cast and crew.

The movie’s director is often given credit as its ‘author,’ which is acceptable if only because the director more than any other single person, controls the overall telling of the tale, since he is in command of production. But even where the director knows the crafts of all the departments, and takes a very active role in guiding their work, he serves often as the final arbiter, accepting or rejecting the proposals of the department heads, who in turn often work to accept or reject the proposals of their staff.

And all these talesmen work after the ‘final’ script is handed in and approved, and create the final telling of the tale.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, May 30, 2008)

Driftage

Wandering tales

Flotsam

What was once a ship, or part of a ship, that floats upon the waves, drawn hither and yon by currents and swells, at length cast upon a shore for a time, perhaps for good, but perhaps to be cast out once more and float once more, with storm and wave, and cast upon a shore once more: this is called flotsam in the old talk of the English mariner. Such things come from the sea, and touch land here and there, and go to sea once more, until in the end the land takes them and they are buried there, or the sea accepts them at last, and they sink into the deep.

But what floats on the sea or is found upon the shore, cast up by the sea, from whatever source, is called driftage in general.

Both have this in common, that they do not drive their fates but are driven by the complex, and seemingly random forces of wind and wave. So if we could trace the path of a bit of driftage, it would not be the character of the driftage that rules its path, but other forces. Thus the path marks out for us the profile of those forces. At the same time, however, the driftage is not left untouched and unscathed in the course of its wanderings. It weathers, it rots, it is pecked at and nibbled at, it is smashed against rock and ground into sand. The sun robs it of its hue and many other changes come over it, until at last it finds haven in some land that will not cast it forth again. There it sits and is buried. But if it never finds land, it will be in the end dissolved in the sea, and cease to be itself.

Some things will break down but never sink, and never find land. These things will be caught up in one of the great gyres of the sea, where the currents trap driftage and never let them go, in the heart of the largest ocean basins.

The Picaro

In old Spanish, the word picaro meant ‘a rogue,’ and it is the fate of rogues to find no place of rest for long. Soon or late they are found out, and punished for their crimes; else they sniff out the rising danger, and flee for the sake of their own hides. Such men are the driftage of the world’s sea, and from tales of these men came a kind of tale, the ‘picaresque.’

A picaresque tale tells of the career of such a man. At the start these men were all rogues and picaros, but the form later told of more honest men, men who for other reasons never settled, never came to rest in any home, but wandered throughout their lives, or at least through many years, until at last they found some home, and their tale ended. Or they found a home in a grave, and their tale ended there.

Even as the tale of driftage is not writ by the driftage itself, but by wind and wave, so the tale of the picaro is writ only in part by the man himself. He comes to some town or settlement, and there finds new men, new women, new customs, and new things. To these he reacts, according to his heart, until he is either cast out from this place, or he leaves of his own will — in this the picaro differs from driftage: he has some small rule over his fate.

Odysseus was the first picaro the West told of, and though Homer framed his tale in terms of a good man seeking home after years away at war, even Homer’s Odysseus partakes of some qualities of the rogue. A rogue is also a trickster, and the trickster is an ancient and well-beloved figure in tales told the world over since the first tales were spun. The cleverness of Odysseus is also sly, his wit is also playful; what has come down to us through Homer is heavy with longing and love, as befits a tale told by or for the women left at home, but even so we can see, with a slight shift of the prism or lens through which we eye the tale, the twinkle in the wanderer’s eye, that has good fun in his lies and frauds and trickery.

The Picaresque Tale

The picaresque tale differs from other tales, in that its structure is loose. It is more a series of episodes, of smaller tales, like a cycle of tales, than a fully-formed and framed tale. Not like a spire but like a group of huts, maybe. What we the audience will take from such a tale, then, lies more in the way we see the episodes as they lie alongside one another, some in harmony and others in dispute. And when we see all these in their jumble, we glean some overall impression of either the man, or his time (and the world through which he wandered).

The Tale of a Man

Let him be rascal or saint, the wanderer in the picaresque tale is shown to us in mosaic. Each of the episodes serves as its own tessera, and in itself says little. Only when we see all the tesserae en groupe do we espy the picture as a whole of the man. This is the tale of character, of the memorial of a man, and the wanderer is the focus in this kind of picaresque tale. The talesman will then choose out the places the wanderer finds, and the people he meets there, with an eye to how his wanderer’s dealings with them will shine light upon some new facet of his character. Repetition is only allowed here with variation: it’s what is new that we want to see. So the wanderer, after visiting an evil town, will come to a good one; or he will visit a second evil town and treat its people differently, and this will show us that he has changed.

What we recall from such a tale, is the character of the wanderer.

The Tale of a Time

Sometimes the wanderer is himself a blank, for the talesman casts his eye more upon the places his wanderer visits. (For example, Swift’s tales of Gulliver.) The wanderer becomes a slender thread from which to hang a series of short sketches of society in its aspects. Or the wanderer has a standard or ‘stock’ character, and we judge the places he visits according to the way they treat him. Here the wanderer does not change from place to place, he is constant in his way, and one village enthrones him, another scourges him.

It is usually the case that such tales are satirical, and point out the faults of all the places the wanderer visits; these places can either be different aspects of one land (usually the talesman’s own) or different lands within the talesman’s world or time.

Fantasy is often used in such tales in order to shield the talesman from his nation’s censors and jailers. But the fantasy does not truly tell of Eartherea, and comes closer to allegory or parable. The talesman does not tell us of strange lands and names for their own sake, but he means for us to unlock the clef to his roman and pierce the veil.

Exploration For Its Own Sake

The picaresque tale need not be bound to the Man or the Time, of course. Exploration of either the man or the time could be simply that — a looking-about to see what is there, and the talesman can simply challenge his own imagination about either, with no clear path forward.

If this is done to explore the Time, then a true Earthereal tale could be formed around this picaresque form. Usually such fantasy tales of late have used the Quest as an organizing principle, but it need not be so.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 29, 2008)

Of Cold Starts and Mid Starts

Two different ways to open a tale

“Turn round, my boy! How ridiculous you look! What sort of a priest’s cassock have you got on? Does everybody at the academy dress like that?”

With such words did old Bulba greet his two sons, who had been absent for their education at the Royal Seminary of Kief, and had now returned home to their father.

His sons had but just dismounted from their horses. They were a couple of stout lads who still looked bashful, as became youths recently released from the seminary. Their firm healthy faces were covered with the first down of manhood, down which had, as yet, never known a razor. They were greatly discomfited by such a reception from their father, and stood motionless with eyes fixed upon the ground.

“Stand still, stand still! let me have a good look at you,” he continued, turning them around. “How long your gaberdines are! What gaberdines! There never were such gaberdines in the world before. Just run, one of you! I want to see whether you will not get entangled in the skirts, and fall down.”

“Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, father!” said the eldest lad at length.

“How touchy we are! Why shouldn’t I laugh?”

“Because, although you are my father, if you laugh, by heavens, I will strike you!”

This is how Gogol opened his great tale of Taras Bulba (taken from the http://www.gutenberg.org edition of Taras Bulba and Other Tales, taras10.txt). It is what is called a mid start or opening in media res. It’s also what they call in movies a ‘cold start.’

Cold Starts

Movies usually open with the main titles. These start with the distributors’ logos, then whatever ‘names above the title,’ the title, and the main cast and crew credits. At last the main titles fade out, and the first scene fades in. Nowadays scripts are so packed with back-story that it often happens that a special filmmaker is contracted to create a title sequence, to go with/under the main titles, that sets the time and place and some of the background we need to know. Saul Bass was famous for creating abstract title sequences that gave hints for what the story would be about, and to set up the mood for us in the audience, and put us in the proper frame of mind: This is the kind of movie you’re about to see and enjoy.

But sometimes movies opened ‘cold’ with no titles at all. The house lights dim and scene one flashes on screen; bang! we’re off and running in the movie tale.

(This practice was hated by projectionists, the people who actually ran the film through the projectors, because they could use the main titles to set focus, after which all the story part of the movie was in focus, at least until the first reel change. Then theaters spliced the whole movie onto a single roll on a platter, and robots focused the image. And soon all theaters will project digital images and there won’t be any prints to deal with.)

A cold start in a tale that isn’t a movie, dumps us into not only the middle of the story, but into the middle of a scene as well. At least that’s how I look on it. Any tale that opens with an action without an introduction, or an experience without an introduction, or a line of dialogue, as M. Gogol opened Taras Bulba, is a cold start. Something is happening and we have to ‘catch up’ with it; explanations follow events; this gives us a sense straight off of an exciting tale.

Mid Starts

A mid start will begin with an introduction to the first scene. It might also have an introduction to the tale as a whole, as the Iliad of Homer does. But the first scene takes place well into the overall conflict, so again the result is a sense in us the audience of a running start.

Oral Tales and Cold and Mid Starts

I harbor some doubts as to whether an oral tale can bear a cold or mid start. (But compare to the Iliad or Odyssey of Homer, where the formal introduction, a dozen or so lines long, allows an entrance to the first scene, though that scene takes place in the middle of the tale. More, Homer spoke to an audience he knew was familiar with both tale-cycles, and would thus need no more than a small guidance as to where in the cycle the first scene took place.)

An oral tale (an oral tale that is original, and unfamiliar to its audience) is subject to all manner of interruptions by its audience, in ways that no recorded medium is, and that even a more formal live presentation such as a drama on stage, would suffer. ‘Wait, wait!’ the audience exclaims (or at least the loud-mouth in the back exclaims). ‘What are you talking about? Where is this, who are these people? Don’t you even know your own tale, man?’

There is also, in an informal tale-spinning, a period of settling-in to the tale proper. Take the example of some men in a bar. At first they are all equals, drinking and chatting about the day and their lives and the world in general. ‘That reminds me,’ says one, ‘of the time I saw the Duchess in her dress…’ ‘What! you never saw the Duchess in your life!’ rebukes another. ‘Ah, but I did…’

During such exchanges as this, the talesman (or would-be talesman) moves slowly out of his guise as fellow-drinker, into the talesman, the master of the tale; his cups-men slip back into audience. Their roles turn and shift. It is during this time that the formal introduction to the tale helps the talesman adopt his role, and draw his fellows into their role as audience.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 28, 2008)

We Gods of Tale and Life

Those who make their own reality tell their own lives’ tales

Holograms

There is a theory of the universe. It has been proposed by physicists but it is more philosophy than science. It is this:

The universe is a hologram that some being or beings has built in order to play in as avatars, like a cosmic videogame.

Let’s explore this notion as a bit of a mind game or thought experiment.

Who? and Why?

First let’s ask Who might be doing this, and why they would want to do it. The two questions are related, since answering Why gives us insight, and holds implications for the answer to Who.

Whoever could do such a thing, must have powers that far surpass our own. We might say that they must then inhabit a world, a culture, that also goes far beyond our own, except for one thing, the fear that our own culture may be less advanced than other cultures in our past that had less technological prowess. Either way, we can’t presume to understand them and say that their values are our values, their way of thought is our way of thought. But if we say they are utterly alien, we can’t play this mind game very far. So we’ll assume they share some characteristics with us. It is not all that far-fetched to think that even as we create videogame avatars that are more like ourselves than not, these beings would create us ‘in their own image.’ (Though again, that is to reason by analogy.)

Why then do we play such games?

• For amusement
• For education
• As punishment

Amusement, for that we are bored.

Education, so that we may learn from other lives.

Punishment, in the form of lessons we wish we didn’t have to take. (This last is theoretical, as I know of no instances of videogames being prescribed as part of a system of punishment.)

But if there is one thing we know about those other selves, that must be true, it is this: that they must be to us like gods.

Gods

They are gods, because they have built our world and all the universe that contains it. It may be they modeled this our universe upon their own; it may be they have conjured it up out of some theoretical basis, one of an uncounted number of possible universes and worlds within those universes.

They gave us life, and they work in mysterious ways.

They gave us life, and they mold the patterns of our lives.

They gave us life, and they narrate the tales we live out.

They are, in short, like the talesmen of Earth.

It may be they are One, or Many. It may be that one of them adopts my being, and another adopts yours, through the whole course of our lifetimes. May be your life is only one round or level in their game. Or it may be that we are programmed avatars responding to the constructs and algorithms of the Program of the Machine that has conjured all this up, and the Others visit this our Earth, among countless other worlds, as tourists, and live among us as spirits, unseen, or as though they were flesh and blood as we are, or as though they were the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the insects in the soil. From these vantage-points, whatever they may be, the Others watch us, and take some pleasure and instruction in seeing how we behave in all our little quirks and niceties and meanness.

Talesmen

Now in these guises, the Others are little different from the talesmen of tales we tell, or (if they be but tourists) from the audience of tales we hear. So what if we compare our relationship to the characters in tales, and think ‘up’ to the relationship the Others hold to us?

We would be characters in books, movies, plays, poetry, legends. And the Others would take pleasure in narrating these tales we live in, or they would enjoy observing them.

What Tale Are You?

This then leads us to a moral outlook from the mind game. If you are a character in a tale, what sort of character are you? Are you hero or villain? Do you help to do good or do you oppose the good works of others? And what sort of tale is it you inhabit, is it epic, tragic, humorous, sad, erotic, adventurous? It is High, or is it Low? Is it Noble or is it Mean?

Supposing we have some measure of control over our actions, it then means that we have that much control over ourselves as characters in our tales, and even over what sort of tales our lives exemplify.

What God Are You?

But if we look Downward rather than Upward, and consider instead the tales we read (and tell) in this light, and wonder, What if the characters in these tales had some measure of control over their actions? If those characters were like us, or like the avatars we adopt in videogames, what moral responsibility would we owe them? A videogame is confined to its genre, and the rules of the videogames we have built so far have been quite narrow. But there have arisen other games that have much more relaxed rules. Second Life is an example much more analogous to the sort of ‘life is a hologram and videogame’ notion that we are pondering here.

I have never played in Second Life but I understand that those who do will rarely adopt characters like their own. They will change races, sexes, age. And yet in the end, their true hearts tell: they act after all in ways consistent to their characters in real life. (I wonder if that is true? Certainly Second Life is a fantasy, an exploration of Eartherea, and as such offers us all a chance to ace quite otherwise than we normally do. How long, then, could any of us live out a lie that is so thorough — not only to adopt the other sex, but to behave according to an ethos entirely alien to our own? Could we do so throughout the remainder of our life?)

Go On

The end of this tale is not for me to tell. It lies rather in each of us to consider this and play it out. The best way would probably to enter into Second Life or some similar game with these thoughts in mind, looking Upward as well as Downward into the game, and thinking that we, as avatars on Earth, have adopted avatars in Second Life.

Go for a year through the game, play it every day for a little while, and act in it as you would wish you could if you were the noblest person on Earth. And then see if you can’t apply some of that nobility to your life here.

And then imagine lending that nobility to the Other that is your True Self, ‘up there.’

Who knows? The Other might himself have an Other whose avatar he is, and that one might be but an avatar himself.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 27, 2008)

Tales of the Night

Other times and other tales

Polyphasic and the Night’s Three Watches

In olden times, as I have heard tell (before man’s light slew the darkness), men drowsed and slept soon after nightfall, only to wake in the middle hours of the night, to wake a while by the fire (and perhaps to stoke the fire and throw more logs on), then slept again until the first light heralded the coming of the dawn. This meant, for those men of old, who lived through almost all of the 200,000 years or so since modern man has walked the Earth, that sleep was polyphasic, that is to say, men slept more than one session in the 24-hour turning of the day. (Also we might say based upon traditional cultures, that men slept some in the heavy, hot middle of the daylight, after the mid-day meal. But this could only be true of man in the last 12,000 years or so, for those folk who have mastered agriculture, lived mostly on grain, and had plenty to eat — ‘plenty’ meaning that starvation was held in check as the nightmare of famine years that came but rarely.)

Thus, in these times, the night held three watches:

1. the hour or two from twilight on,
2. the hour or two in the mid-part of the night,
3. and the last hour of night before the dawn.

This gave the men of those times past (and, maybe, times to come) three watches in which they could tell their tales.

Time and Tales

When a man finds himself in different moods, different kinds of tales appeal to his fancy, both to tell and to hear. The tales of Day are not the tales of Night, and neither are the tales of the Morning the tales of Day’s End. Here we have to do with the tales of the three watches of the Night, and how they might differ, and how talesmen might profit by the use of this knowledge.

This is of most interest to talesmen as they frame what tale to tell, and when to tell it, and most of all when they compose a tale for a later telling. For us in the audience, we know at the time what kind of tale our mood prefers, and we will let a talesman know when the tale he is telling bores us or doesn’t suit our mood.

The First Watch

In the first watch of the night, Day is slipping through our fingers. With it go the concerns of the Day. The Dark meanwhile is rising, and with that come on the thoughts of Dark’s realms. Thus, this watch straddles the two realms of Day and Dark. We feel yet some weariness of the day’s toil, and wish for a better life. This is the watch for light tales of humor, and pleasant wishing-fantasies.

The Second Watch

In the second watch of the night, when we waken from first sleep, we find ourselves in another world. We woke in darkness, and we will fall asleep once more in darkness. The Day seems far away. The firelight casts shadows, and all light is flickering. Stars fill the sky, and many nights the Moon will have already set, or will not yet have risen. This is the watch for high Fantasy, of the greatest of feats deep beyond the farthest marches of Eartherea.

The Third Watch

In the third watch of the night, when we waken from second sleep, and know we will sleep no more, we can see the first blush of the coming Dawn. We woke in darkness, but the Light is coming back to us, and our hopes and thoughts reach out for the Day we face. Once more we straddle the dark and the light, but now with greater energy than we felt at Day’s end, and with our mind believing that today will, somehow, be different and better than yesterday and all the days that went before.

Now, the tales for the third watch come, as I imagine, in two forms. Some will deal with practical matters — they will partake almost wholly of the Day itself — and so Realism might drown out Fantasy. But the more our minds turn to practical matters, the less we feel like spinning tales. At the same time, the second sleep of the night has been heavy with dreams. The first sleep was mostly deep and dreamless, refreshing brain and body. We woke from it somewhat groggy, and do not, in the whole of the second watch of the night, come fully into our waking state. But the second sleep is mostly dreams, dreams and nightmares, and when we wake for the third watch of the night, that will blend into the waking day, we will wish to linger in that realm of dreams. So here we have, when we sink and lapse once more into thoughts those dreams evoke, the best time for tales of desire of darkest and weirdest kind. Tales of violence and vengeance; tales of strange unfathomable twists and turns; tales of sex and desire.

Spinning and Spanning the Watches

It may also come, when the fire of illusion burns so bright and hot in us that sleep yields, and drifts far off, that the second watch of the night eats up the second sleep, and then it is best to ride it out for so long as we can. But there is danger here, lest we end the night spent to see the dawn, unwilling to face the day, and longing to sleep out the best hours of the morning.

Few of us can manage such a feat. The young, perhaps, and lovers, for love burns and yet draws forth hidden secret reserves of strength, and banishes weariness in its fever. For the rest of us, it seems that only those men who can lie abed days (and only those cultures and classes wealthy enough to afford to keep such men in bread and shelter) can spin tales through the second and third watches of the night, and do without their second sleep. For them, their tales must take the place of dreaming, and will partake of both the high Fantasy of the second watch, and the weird, dark, and desirous aspects of the third watch and its tales.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, May 26, 2008)

A Time to Tell and Hear

The twilight hour and after is the finest time for tales

Early to Bed, Early to Rise

Before electric lights became common, and before cities were lit by gas lamps, there were only candles, lanterns bearing candles within, torches, fires, and oil lamps. The light from these flames is flickering and ‘warm’ in its color — that is, its wavelengths come well below 3000 Kelvin, in peach and amber and orange and red, and now and then a yellow.

As it happens, melatonin production is disturbed by the blue wavelengths we find at noon and in full day, but yellow and reddish wavelengths do not disturb it. Thus we can have light from fire, but still feel sleepy and drowse.

The light from these fires is sufficient to see broad things but makes close and fine details harder to make out. Yellow, amber, red light consist of longer, less energetic light; it is softer in appearance, which is why it is favored for glamour. The fine wrinkles and slight imperfections of the beloved object of desire are ‘smoothed out’ by warm lighting.

The people who live without the aid of artificial light stayed awake and doing chores after darkness fell, but not for very long. Instead they would often, we are told, go to sleep within an hour or two of sunset, sleep a few hours, wake in the middle watch of the night, stay up for an hour or so, then go back to bed for the second sleeping of the night. (This I have read in one news article recently, though I haven’t seen it repeated in other texts. Whether it is true or not, I am not sure.)

Candle-Spell

Drowsiness and the onset of sleep are hypnogogic states. Our brainwaves slip out of the more energetic, active, short-wave beta, into alpha waves, on the way to delta, and the deep, healing theta waves of deepest sleep. In the half-slumber of drowsiness, aided by the flickering of the flames, we find our imagination opening to other worlds, and we have glimpses of imagined past and future days, and even of Eartherea herself.

This is the best time to hear tales. This is the best time to tell them, too.

The world we live in fades with the gloaming. What lives and lurks ‘out there’ we can apprehend only through the sounds it makes, and what small flashing glimpses we may win of it. These are both more suggestive than informative, and when we take them in under a hypnogogic state, we make of them more, and other, than they are. Thus they can enter into our dreams, and the tales we tell and hear.

The end of the day’s toil also brings with it a sense of ease and relaxation, and this not only of the body. Our minds also settle and rest, at least when we feel secure within our shelter, warmed by the fire, the flamelight dancing on the walls. The walls we build within, against unwanted thoughts, and desires and fears that would trouble us, are weakened. Patches and threads of light shine through them, and small hints and glimmers of those fears and desires enter closer to our minds.

This is the time for tales to tell and hear.

This is the talespinner’s hour.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, May 25, 2008)

Eye, Haunted

Third person intense viewpoint

Oh, O!

Pauline Réage was the pen name of a Frenchwoman, an intellectual who was mistress to a famous French intellectual man in the 1940s and 1950s. Alas, the man was married, and would not leave his wife, who was quite ill. Thus the lovers could only meet at the odd moments, and rare was the night ‘Pauline’ could share with her love.

Feverish with longing, and fearful lest she lose his affections to a younger woman, Réage wrote her lover love-letters of a most unusual kind. She wrote him a pornographic tale, which he had published, and which became world-celebrated: L’Histoire d’O or The Story of O.

This tale is justly famous. Throughout most of its telling, up to the throw-away ending (which Réage later admitted was more a stop than a conclusion), the tale holds a luminous, hypnotic quality. It haunts one.

It also haunted its authoress. Its quality stems from these factors:

• The state of mind of its authoress
• The subject matter of the tale
• The circumstances under which it was written

Réage wrote O in a sort of delirium. She longed to be with her lover and could not; when writers and talesmen find themselves in these straits, they usually turn to love-letters or love-poetry, addressed to the object of desire. In the course of writing these notes and verses, the lover feels she is with her love, that he is present with her, looking over her shoulder, hearing her voice, nodding and smiling and encouraging. Addressing such lines to the lover, she brings his presence into sharper focus. This is one of the flowers of the madness of love. But O was no love-letter, but a tale, and the fever of Réage burns through the prose and comes, in a way, to infect the reader.

The tale was, of course, pornographic, and engaged in sadomasochistic fantasies. The best pornography is Romance, or Fantasy that takes place in a lustful quarter of Eartherea. Since these fantasies (not those of Réage, she tells us, but of her lover) are un peu bizarre, they involve the creation of a demimonde, an underground association of men and women involved with these unusual tastes and activities. Every demimonde has its flavour of Eartherea and ‘unreality,’ which strengthens the natural bent of the pornographer towards the realization of the unreal. So these streets of Paris, the château at Roissy, and the fêtes in the midi, only look like France of the 1950s. In truth they belong to Eartherea.

Réage could see her lover in the day, at work, at lunch, after work. It was only in the night, in the late night, alone in her room, that she could not have him, and longed for him the most. She wrote O late in the night, until the dawn, when she would wash and dress and go to work, just like a million other Parisiennes. What is written in the small hours, when the streets outside are quiet and dark, when the rest of the world lapses into dream, into unreality, comes to glow with that unearthly fervor, it acquires a particular earnestness and focus. Also what is written in a rush, easily, in utter self-absorption, as though the writing were the automatic product of dreams and sleep, has both that focus and that unearthly, dreamlike, haunting quality.

The work was penned without plan or structure; an opening that has no preparation, no setup, no introduction of its world or characters, launches O herself along with us into a strange phantastical adventure. She finds herself in her car with her lover, even as one would come to remember the onset of a dream; the lover has his driver take her to the château where she commences her training as a slave. She accepts this without a murmur, as I recall; her motives are obscure as are his; this too partakes of the quality of a dream or even a game they both enter into, and they follow its strictures because those are the rules of this particular game. With a game, you may stop playing, but so long as you play, you must obey its rules (or at least you must appear to obey the rules, if your aim is to cheat).

Eye Shadow

There is one other aspect to L’Histoire d’O that contributes to its haunting quality, and that is the point of view Réage chose. It would be called ‘third person subjective’ by most, but I call it ‘third person intense.’

It is a most extreme form of third person viewpoint. The narrator or talesman is completely suppressed; we the audience must swim inside O’s mind, her thoughts, and her feelings. We never see a scene where O is not present, nor do we see a scene except through O’s eyes. More, O is herself a character well-suited for third person intense: she is interior, thoughtful, introverted and introspective. She dwells mostly within herself, and the outer world exists for her only insofar as it holds meaning for her and her story and her relations with her lovers.

The third person intense is third person written as if it were first person. It would be simple to take O and rewrite it in the first person; all we would need do is replace ‘elle’ with ‘moi’ and ‘je.’ I think nothing else would be required.

If we were to take Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca or The Scapegoat and replace ‘I’ with ‘she’ or ‘he’ it would give us the third person intense point of view. The same cannot be said of all first person tales.

There are two points that make a tale third person intense:

1. The narrator hangs with the hero like his shadow, never leaving, never seeing more than he sees.
2. The hero has a rich interior life that dominates the tale, every bit as important as external events.

We the audience seem to haunt the hero, and in turn, tales told in the third person intense seem to haunt us long after we finish with them. They linger, and we can, if we hark back upon such a tale, see our own world through the eyes of the intensive hero. So we can enter his world, and find his world become our own.

Trends Today

The third person intense form has come to dominate many tales today. This I think comes from two factors: first the tendency to suppress the actual narrator of tales, and second the inclination among writers and readers alike toward introversion and introspection. This sort of subjective experience of reality is how the world seems to many writers, and to those people who still read today. And since the form is so strong, those readers who go on to become writers themselves learn from the third person intense tales they grew up on, that this is the ‘natural’ way to tell a tale — it is what a tale is.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 24, 2008)

The Roots of Romance

What we wish for, long for, hope for

Troubling Times

We are entering, we of the ‘developed’ world, times of great change and travail. The bases of our civilization are about to ebb away, and though we have known this would happen for many decades, we have allowed our leaders to deceive us in false hopes that things could just go on and on and on.

Change, as Eric Hoffer remarked in The Ordeal of Change, is frightening. It provokes anxiety in our hearts. We fret and worry. Change always involves X the Unknown, and by definition we cannot know how well we will fare under Unknown circumstances.

What can help us to endure the Change?

Fantasy and Romance.

Escape to the Future

Against Romance & Fantasy the charge of ‘escapism’ is often brought. ‘Escapism’ is a flight into wishing in place of dealing with any unpleasant reality. But in that wishing-place we can deal with the unpleasant reality in less-anxious, symbolic terms. When we gain some relief from the anxieties that plague us, we find we can deal with practical solutions, we can better bear our troubles.

Throughout history, the poor and downtrodden have always preferred happy ‘escapist’ tales. But in the wealthy, easeful classes, we find a preference for tragedy and misery and gloom.

I think this is no accident.

When great Times of Change arrive, we all join the ranks of the poor and downtrodden. We all need the hope that Romance can bring.

Different Paths

There are different ways that Fantasy deals with troubles and the anxieties of the unknown.

One way is through fear. Horror and terror tales inspire in us such deep and primal fright, that when we return to our reality, we find nothing there to cause such tremors. It all looks easier then. There is also a biochemical basis to this, I imagine: whatever chemical pathways are invoked in feeling fear, their sources are temporarily spent in the aftermath of experiencing a great terror such as we find in a Romance of Fear.

Another way is through rage. Tales of vengeance, of a dark, unkillable hero who slaughters and slays all those who threaten him, satisfies our anger at those we would blame for having put us into whatever dire straits that Change has brought.

A third way is through magical solutions. These tales offer us the problem solved, and some gift or discovery effortlessly sets us free of all that worry us. This is a sort of short-cut to hope. (I must add that science-fantasy tales belong to this class; the difference lies simply in whether the talesman hopes to persuade his audience, or himself, that the talismans that solve the problems are to be realistically attended.)

And then there is the way through hope. In such tales a hero arises who shall lead us through the troubled times to the paradise beyond. A small part of these tales detail religious faiths new and old.

It is typical of these tales that the beginning acknowledges the current trials, only to find some way through them. The tales of Fear show us what is the worst that can happen — far, far worse than anything we might realistically expect. Tales of Rage show us how a hero lays waste to the troubles and their presumed human agents directly — no real solution is offered, but there is satisfaction in lashing out, which is what these Tales of Rage amount to. Tales of Magical Solutions are what the child within us longs for, and tend to stress the happy results of the magic in creating new societies, families, and personal results. Tales of Hope deal more in social responses to the troubles, and might assume the most ‘realistic’ dress over the underlying wish-fulfillments.

Hope for Romance, seek it out. For the talesmen who would create the Fantasies we will need, the technique is simply to immerse yourself in the worst news, the worst fears, until the pressure you feel in your heart seeks its natural outlet; this outlet will be the fulfillment of your own wish to free yourself of your anxieties, and it must correspond to the wishes of others beside yourself.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, May 23, 2008)

Middletwist

A sidestep can break the monotony

Mid-point as Mirror

Yesterday in Middlemarch I spoke about the mid-point of a long tale. The middle of a long tale is like a wilderness, because it strays so far from the sure anchor points of start and end, and talesmen and audiences alike can get lost in it. The details of the scenes at hand overwhelm, the heroes hack in the undergrowth, there is action and movement but no sure sense of getting toward the goal.

One way to break up this long march is to highlight the mid-point; this breaks the middle into two parts, each of which is smaller than the whole thing. If this mid-point relates somehow to the final goal in some demonstrable, sensible way, it provides either false hope or false despair as to whether the hero will be able to achieve his end or not. And in general, since the second curtain’s effect is to deny the final result, so that if the end will be happy, the second curtain will reach the height of despair, and if the end will be tragic, the second curtain will make the goal seem at hand. Under this model, the mid-point should mirror the second curtain even as the second curtain mirrors the end. Thus, a happy end provokes a dour second curtain, which provokes a happy mid-point. This gives the tale a general zigzag, up-and-down pattern: up to the mid-point then down to the second curtain then up to the end, or down at the mid-point, up at the second curtain, and down at the end.

Mid-point as Twist

Another way to make the mid-point stand out is to introduce a twist. A ‘twist’ is not a reversal, but rather a step to the side — something unexpected that set the hero off on a new path.

This twist, broadly speaking, is not a reminder of start or end, and thus does not serve as a milepost on the tale’s journey. Rather it offers some relief along the seemingly-endless march through the middle.

One way to combine twist and mirror-point is to follow a pattern I can illustrate by looking at the tale of a quest. In a quest, the hero seeks something, and must journey to find it. So let’s say the hero hears that the Grail lies in a mythical town of Potzrebie. At the mid-point, the hero at last finds his way into Potzrebie … only to learn that the Grail is not there! This then gives him a new clue to go somewhere else (or even to return to the source of the lie that the Grail was in Potzrebie) and a new path is laid out.

This approach gives us a double-mirror point for mid-point, in that

1. the hero gains his goal (Potzrebie) which has equaled the end of getting the Grail
2. the hero is at despair since the Grail is not after all in Potzrebie; this then seems to be the end of the road, setting him back at his starting-point.

But there are twists that do not serve this double function, and simply come as unexpected turns of events. These twists freshen the tale, and cause us in the audience to look at things in a new light, and reconsider our basic assumptions.

As such, these twists are not logical bases for marking out the mid-point, such as the mirrored mid-point offers. Rather they are tactical in nature.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 22, 2008)

Middlemarch

Thoughts on blazing a trail through the wilderness that is the middle of long tales

Start Middle End

The start of every tale, long or short, gives its talesman a secure perch to hang onto. He must introduce the setting and characters to his audience. Just where the start should come is a muddle, at times, but once the talesman has made up his mind about that, he has a fairly easy time in telling it. And the end of every tale, long or short, gives its talesman a definite goal to grab. Maybe the start and the end are easier because they are buttressed by nothing in the tale: the start takes the audience into the tale from their lives, and the end gives them back to their lives out of the tale. The middle of a short tale is also simple enough; the start and the end both lie in sight of what comes between, they share a mood or tone, and every sentence brings the talesman and his audience closer to the end. But the middle of a long tale is a trackless wild.

Middle Middle Middle

The middle of a long tale has only tale before it, tale beyond it. The start sets forth the predicament, and the end resolves it; the middle just wanders through trouble upon trouble, and sometimes the talesman can lose his sense that he’s getting anywhere at all.

The middle of the middle, or mid-point of the tale, is pointed out as something of note in screenplay courses, where structure is vital. But there is no logical, inherent basis to see the mid-point as special, is there? There is on the other hand logic behind the opening, the ending, the first curtain, and the second curtain as special points along the tale’s path.

Once the predicament is set, the hero must deal with it, and the action throughout the second act, or middle, ought to be ‘rising’ as they say, which means that the audience should feel a growing suspense as they hear the middle of the tale recounted. This suspense is just another way of saying that the audience should feel more fear lest the ending turn out the way they don’t want it to, and they should feel more hope that it would turn out the way they do want it to, at the same time.

There’s a feeling of a bump or a jolt at the first and second curtains. Once the predicament is locked in place, the hero must take on the problem, and there is no escape or going back for him. And when the second curtain (or ‘climax’) is passed, everything is decided, and there is but to play the last hand, do or die. The second curtain comes when the roulette manager says, ‘Rien ne va plus,’ and the ball is in the wheel; you can’t add to your bet or change it or take it back. All the tension of the bet comes when you decide which number to bet on, and how many chips to put there; once the wheel spins, you can feel a bit of ease, for the matter is out of your hand. But the action of the wheel is at its height just after the words are said, ‘Rien ne va plus.’

In poker, you feel the most tension when you make up your mind which cards to hold and how many to take, and whether to match or raise the stakes. But once the stakes are matched at last, and ‘Call’ is uttered, there is only the laying-down, and the result. And yet it is there we see the most action.

If then we look on the middle of a tale as rising action, why can we point to the middle as an inflection point?

The Jagged Edge

First let’s consider the curve of the rising action in an abstract way. There are four shapes the curve can take:

1. Accelerating
2. Decelerating
3. Straight
4. Jagged

The Accelerating curve rises more steeply as it climbs. It is parabolic and has no inflection points. The Decelerating curve rises less steeply as it climbs. It is parabolic in the opposite direction and has no inflection points. The Straight line rises at the same steepness all the way through. It is flat and has no inflection points. The Jagged curve rises, then slows and falls back, then rises anew; each new peak reaches higher than the peaks that came before it, and each new valley sits higher than the valleys that came before it. The jagged curve has thus two inflection points for each set of rise-and-fall.

The jagged curve is more amenable to breaking the long tale’s middle into shorter chunks; each rise-and-fall set becomes its own small sequence of scenes. The jagged curve also feels more natural, i.e., it feels more like our own real life struggles in pursuit of a long-term goal.

This lets us pick out one of these inflection points, a peak or a valley, for our hypothetical mid-point. But if we have more than one peak and valley, which shall we choose? Even if we have only one peak and one valley on the way to the second curtain, should we pick the peak or the valley to call our mid-point?

Mirrors

The only theory that makes sense to me, of those I have seen, is that the mid-point mirrors the second curtain in the same way that the second curtain mirrors the final resolution. That is to say that if the end will be happy, the second curtain will paint itself in the gloomiest of hues, and thus the mid-point comes as a peak, a point of false hope and optimism. But if the end will be unhappy, the second curtain will serve as a high point of false hope, and the mid-point ought then to be a valley, a setback of the audience’s hopes.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 21, 2008)

Lists and Ticklers Et Al

A tale is but a list

The Dread of the Blank Page and Silence

There is a common experience of writers, when they face a blank page (in the old days of typewriters, pens, and quills) or a blank screen (in today’s world). For oral talesman, we could say it happens in that silence when the audience first settles down and gazes at the talesman, awaiting the first breath of his tale.

The experience is fear.

The fear paralyzes.

The blankness is unfilled, unfillable. The silence is utter and unspeakable.

The enormity of the task, this creating and expounding of the whole tale, rises up before the talesman in his heart, and it daunts him. It all seems too much to bear, to much to face, far too much to overcome. He can’t think, imagine. His creative powers falter and die.

Nothing.

Silence.

Void.

Blankness.

Defenses

What can we tell a talesman to help him to begin? What can we tell him to help him carry on a tale he has begun in the past but put down for a time?

The usual answer is to relax, breathe, focus on what happens next. Take the tale in small bites, only chew on the morsel at hand, look away from the whole feast. Get on with it and do what you can.

This that I counsel now is like that advice.

Think of the tale as but a list.

What is a tale, after all, but a list?

• A tale of an action is the list of all its subordinate actions.
• A tale that remembers a person is the list of his qualities and deeds.
• A tale of experience is the list of all those smaller effects and experiences that add up to the effect of the whole.

Outlines

If we look upon a tale in this way, we can see the connection it has to an outline, which is a way to tell a tale in its smallest, barest bits. And we can see why some talesmen find that making an outline is a good way to prepare to compose a tale’s draft.

An outline is a telling of the tale that is to the full draft what the skeleton is to the living man. It defines the extent and the underlying shape of tale and man.

An outline becomes a draft as each item in the list grows more detailed, with smaller items. Each item becomes the heading of its own list; each item on that list becomes the heading of a further list, and so on. And each item, from a word or two, grows into a phrase, complete, and then adorned and molded into a pleasing, or at least effective, shape.

Ticklers

A tickler is a special sort of list. A tickler, or tickler file, is a list where the talesman files away ideas, concepts, notions, characters, effects, that he finds intriguing enough to form the base of future tales. The items in a tickler have no connection, they come to the talesman at odd times, out of the æther if you will. But a skillful talesman can take any number of these items, or all of them at once, and sort them and link them and come up with a tale.

And a tale can be built from a single idea, when a talesman creates a tickler file formed from all the connections this idea inspires in him.

The difference between an outline and this tickler-list for a single tale, is that the talesman builds his outline in order, in sequence. ‘This, and then that,’ or ‘Because of this, then that,’ or ‘This, therefore that must have already taken place.’ But the tickler-list for the tale simple comes from a random jumble of ideas, scenes, characters, and the like, rather like a mind map. ‘This suggests that … that suggests this other … what about this? and this? and this as well?’

Out of this tickler-list the talesman makes a pile of the items; the pile has no order as yet. He then sifts and sorts and dreams, and shuffles, until the pile begets an order, and becomes an outline. Some of the items he must set aside; on second thought, they don’t fit. Later on he might see where they could and would fit, and bring them back into the outline.

Storms of the Mind

A list is much easier to tackle. The tickler-list is the easiest of all. It takes a quiet moment, a bit of easy reflection, aimless, purposeless, vague, dreamy. Ponder the basic idea of the tale, or of some part of the tale, treat it as an inkblot, and ask yourself, ‘What does this suggest?’ When some image or thought comes to you, note it in a way you will not forget — jot it down, perhaps — and relax back into the reverie.

This may be done at any odd moment, in a gap in doing some other task, especially a mechanical, repetitive task.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 20, 2008)

The Bounds of Romance

Magic and Faërie have their limits

JABBERWOCKY

(From Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass the Project Gutenberg edition, online at http://www.gutenberg.net lglass19.txt version.)

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!’

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
  He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s RATHER hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that’s clear, at any rate—’

‘It’s RATHER Hard to Understand!’

Carroll wrote ‘Jabberwocky’ as a nonsense poem, a ‘looking-glass poem’ that Alice found printed backwards, so she must hold the page up to a mirror in order to read the letters and make what little sense of it she did. Since Alice is a child, we could look at the poem and her effort to make head or tails of it simply as how a child feels upon facing a particularly difficult adult text, which holds so many unfamiliar words that it borders upon nonsense. Many scholarly texts delight in abstruse words, and faux-antiquarian works of Carroll’s time would often employ obsolete, middle-english words that would send even fairly well-educated adults of the day to their dictionaries. We will look upon the poem only as a tale of Eartherea, however, and see if it can stand as such.

To begin with, we must distinguish between words in their tasks as parts of speech. Nouns the talesman coins, such as ‘toves,’ ‘borogoves,’ and ‘Jabberwock,’ are common fare in the glades of Faërie. They are indeed necessary to name those beasts, tools, objects, plants, and other things that have no Earthly counterpart. And we in the audience delight in the strangeness of them, in the magical Other world they conjure in our heads.

Verbs like ‘whiffling’ are more of a problem. Here Carroll makes them work when the words sound like something; we assume that ‘whiffling’ is some action that creates a sound such as the speaking of ‘whiffling’ will produce. He does not coin many of them, and when he gives us one that has no clear sound-sense such as ‘brillig,’ it is as much as reading a stone.

Adjectives are also troubling. ‘Frabjous’ and ‘mimsy’ and ‘frumious’ give a wonderful sense of the strange, which is part of the ‘sense of wonder’ so vital to works treating of Eartherea. But still we get no notion of what he means. The nouns are needful and we accept ‘Jabberwock’ though we have no guide as to what a jabberwock is or looks like, and we usually want such things. But an adjective such as ‘frabjous’ acts rather like a weed in the garden of the tale. It may smell nice and herby, but it rather slows us down.

Then there is the question of proportions. A phrase that holds only one of these coined words, the rest being familiar, we will accept with ease. The words we know serve to support and give us clues to the meaning of the words that are strange. But when all or almost all the words are new-coined, and we hear them for the first time, we wonder what it is we are hearing or reading. At least when we read the line we can be clear that the words are indeed strange; when we hear them, we will wonder if we heard aright, and our minds will seek feverishly to hear the words as words we know. A line such as,

All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

gives us so little to go on, that we are shoved back to the overall context of the scene to try to make sense of what the borogoves and mome raths were doing — even then it can be no more than a guess.

Plunge or Dip?

When a talesman begins a tale of Eartherea, he may plunge us headfirst into the strangeness and wonder of that unknowable land, or he may lead us slowly in, an inch at a time, deeper and deeper, so that we may accustom ourselves with the first bits of the strange before we take on the next. The plunge can be a wonderful tonic to the toils of our dusty everyday life, bracing and intoxicating. It can also leave us so dizzy we give up the tale. The gentle dip on the other hand leads us deeper and deeper into the strange, but it might seem at first so commonplace that it fails to satisfy the need that drove us to an Earthereal tale in the first place.

The talesman must feel his way through this difficult passage, and rely upon his own sense, and his knowledge of his audience.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, May 19, 2008)

Glamourie

What sex and magic have in common

An Olden Worde

Glamour is an old word, and glamourie is its Scottish version. I use glamourie here to set apart what I mean from the common, modern usages of glamour. Instead I mean the ancient meaning of glamour that has more to do with witchcraft than fashion and cosmetics. And yet there is an overlap between, which is telling.

Spell-Wrought

Glamourie involves hexing, spell-casting, and indeed the effect of such upon their victims. When you’ve been hexed, you do things you wouldn’t normally do, and you don’t really understand why. A sort of compulsion seizes upon you and you find yourself acting as though under an outside force. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re doing it.

By ‘glamourie’ I mean the triple parts of the magic: the caster, the casting, and the effect upon the victim. You could call it another way of saying ‘magic’ except that it is specific in that it is a compulsion set upon a person.

As of today, the hexing sense of ‘glamour’ is obsolete, because we don’t believe (officially and publicly) in magic. The word has remained, and now means sex appeal, particularly the sex appeal of women. ‘Glamour photography’ includes that class of photography where the model herself (the model is almost always a woman) is the object of desire rather than the shoes, dress, hairstyle, or other piece of fashion. There is a fashion magazine, calls itself Glamour.

This kind of glamour is always skin-deep, and yet there is more to it than that.

Allure of Mystery

The glamour of today is a mysterious quality. The word holds onto its sense of compulsion: glamour girls cause men’s heads to turn, and muster up an invisible, unquantifiable and undefinable attraction upon all those who fall within their orbit. Though fashion exists to sell makeup, hats, dresses, and other accessories and styles that appear wholly on the surface, the promise in the word *glamour’ involves some inner quality, something that goes beyond the mere smearing-on of paint and oils, beyond the scents, beyond the cuts and flips of tresses.

And so it is with the original glamourie. It is, in the end, unknown and unknowable. We can trace where it has been, through its effects. Those who can cast the spells of glamourie are as much artists as workers in crafts.

I stress the mystery, because it is common in today’s Romance works of Fantasy, to bind magic with rules, to define its limits, to corral it within systems. Each magical world must be founded upon a theory of magic, a system; these theories and systems are known and can be stated in a few words. They are logical and, dare I say it, even rational.

But reason is the antithesis of magic.

Glamourie lurks in the half-shadow, in dusk and twilight gloaming, in the half-smile, the wink, the sideways glance. Like glamour today, glamourie is beyond defining, beyond capture, and has no limits, no rules, no system.

All art works as much by breaking its ‘rules’ as by obeying them. The masters were ever iconoclasts.

So it is with magic and glamourie.

Cast a shadow in hazy sun; trace an outline in the fog; glimpse an eye through the net of a stray lock of hair. The limits of glamourie can be sensed and felt but they are never clear-cut, there is always a faint stretch where their power falls away and yet persists, and the heart of them is pierced by light and undone.

The Beauty in her glamour will often wear a veil.

So it is with glamourie — and all magic.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, May 18, 2008)

Steps Into Romance

From here to there is not done in a single bound

Shakespearean Fantasy

Recently I watched Peter Hall’s 1968 and Jonathan Miller’s 1981 versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is one of Shakespeare’s fantasies, set in a timeless ‘Athens’ ruled by one ‘Duke Theseus’ who has just won the heart of ‘Hippolyta.’ When two sets of lovers are frustrated in their desires, they flee to the woods, where the Lord and Lady of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, are at odds over a ‘boy’ Titania has taken as her own. Meanwhile a group of commoners has undertaken to stage a play at the festivities of the Duke’s wedding, and they go to rehearse in these same woods. Oberon has his most mischievous fairy, Robin Goodfellow or Puck, cast various enchantments that result in comic misalliances, including Queen Titania’s infatuation of one Bottom, an ass of a fellow of the acting troupe, now transformed into a literal ass.

Both these productions make some of the same mistakes in treating of the fantasy elements of the play.

For one, both shoot in a real wood. Now the camera has a great dead-weight upon whatever it photographs, and fantasy is fragile. When you shoot in a real wood, we the audience see a real wood. At best you can employ filters and color timing and other technical tricks to lighten the load of the camera. You can also choose a wood that looks to the naked eye somehow more magical than most woods, but you must then compose your shots to enhance this impression. You can shoot only near mid-day, to get the most sun to filter through the leaf canopy, and bring out the richness of colors. But alas, the play is set at night in the woodland scenes, and so you must shoot day for night, and desaturate color, and emphasize bluish tones over gold and green and the bright hues of woodland wildflowers.

A better choice would have been to follow the 1935 MGM example, and construct your own fantasy-wood on a soundstage. Ridley Scott built his own wood in Legend (1985) which gives a good idea what a talented production designer with a lot of money could do in the time very near to Miller’s version of Dream. The soundstage gives a couple of other advantages as well. For one thing, weather is no problem. For another, the dialogue can be recorded live and not looped, which allows for the actors to give full range to their vocal inflections and act in the moment.

Both these productions also shoot in real manors of British history of the 1700s. Once again, the dead weight of the camera depicts these villas in all their ponderous reality. Since this reality is moreover peculiar to us, we can’t accept it as ‘palace’ and ‘courtyard’ but we can only see it as ‘18th-century British mansion’ which is far from fairyland, let alone the ‘Athens’ of any period whatsoever. Costumes are chosen to fit, more or less, with this background. Miller, who was given the assignment of adapting all of Shakespeare on video, deliberately chose to costume his actors in garb of Shakespeare’s time rather than whatever setting any play employed. This gave his series a similarity of look, but resulted in some truly grotesque botches, for example his Taming of the Shrew where John Cleese is asked to play Petruchio … as a Puritan!

Fairyland and Foreign Land

Shakespeare had no known source for the story of his Dream. But he showed a keen knowledge of how to approach fantasy. The producers Miller and Hall didn’t quite grasp this; they treated the play as simple comedy, and their efforts at capturing fantasy were ill-used at best.

The heart of the play is what happens on that magical night. Various sets of lovers wander through an enchanted wood by moonlight, spell-wrought to comic misalliances. But Shakespeare does not plunge us into that wood straight away. Rather he gives us first a mythical Athens, where Theseus, a character of fable 2000 years before Shakespeare was born, wars upon and captures the Amazon Queen Hippolyta. Shakespeare writes all his dialogue in the stage-poetry of his day, but the very names of Theseus and Hippolyta are enchanted and magical. After all, in the first legends, Theseus captured Hippolyta on a campaign with Hercules at his side.

Thus Shakespeare gives us straight off two folds of distance from our daily lives (and both are just as distant from the daily lives of his Elizabethan audience as they are from our own). First there is ‘Athens’ which is far away in space. Second there is ‘Theseus’ who is far away in time. ‘Hippolyta’ as an Amazon is also far away in another sense, as is Theseus himself, for both are players on the stage of foreign myths and legends.

Already we are plunged into a world where anything can happen. And yet the court of the Duke is not so very different from a Renaissance court: Theseus has no magical powers, and hears the suit of one of his noblemen as any Prince of the middle ages might. We are thus taken only halfway to the wood where wonders will unfold.

In between the scenes of the crossed lovers and the Duke and his bride to be, we get the low-comedy scene of Bottom and his gang of would-be actors planning their production. Here we are about as ‘realistic’ as any scene in the play will get. But the story they intend to enact is one of classical legend as well, Pyramus and Thisbe, and the discussion of the legend aims our minds at the mythical realm.

From the commoners planning the performance, Shakespeare hurls us dead into the heart of fairyland. Puck is introduced, then Oberon, then Titania. This is the one misstep I can find in Shakespeare’s strategies in the play. It is too great a leap, and would have been better prepared with a scene of one set of lovers, Hermia and Lysander, getting lost in the wood on their way to his aunt’s house, where they hope to wed despite Hermia’s father’s objections. This would have led us deeper from a real-but-wondrous wood into the magical fairyland wood where the transformations of appearance and affections will take place. Puck could then have come upon the lovers, cast down and resting, with not a clue which way to go, and Puck could have led us to Oberon and Titania as happens in the play.

Frames Within Frames

The point is that there are in fantasy talesmanship two general strategies on how to bring the audience into the proper frame of mind where we can live and breathe and accept the unreal magicks of events to unfold.

The first is the direct plunge. This approach is best used when the audience already knows something of the setting or characters — for example, a tale of Robin Hood or Hercules, or a tale set in ancient Egypt. It is an approach that may also be forced upon the talesman, for example when there is no connection whatsoever between the events and setting of his tale and any known reality, past or present. Many current fantasy tales box in their talesmen in this way. But even here, if the talesman acknowledges that he is telling a tale, he can offer his audience an introduction in his own voice, which takes them from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and this need not take more than a paragraph.

The second strategy is the progression by stages, as we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is the most elegant approach.

A middle-way is to use what is called the ‘frame story’ or else some object that serves in place of the frame story. The frame story was popular in the more outlandish Romance tales of the end of the 1800s and early 1900s. In this we have a tale that introduces us to the subject matter, allowing us the audience a sort of antechamber through which we may enter fairyland. An example would be H. Rider Haggard’s opening onto his Cleopatra in which he offers us a letter he got from a prominent doctor in Egypt, describing the doctor’s entry into a newly-discovered tomb. In one sarcophagus there is a set of three rolls of parchment attached to one mummy, which will be translated and tell the first-person tale of Harmarchis, last native-born Pharaoh of Egypt, and his struggles against the last of the Ptolemy Pharaohs, Cleopatra herself.

In more modern versions of this frame, a simple object suffices, which itself is a product of fairyland, and so is less of an antechamber but rather a disguised introduction. Often this object is a Codex or other writing, either of history told in a subsequent age of fairyland, or from a previous age, representing a prophecy of the events the tale will tell us.

Now and There

Many modern fantasy talesmen seek to establish some link between our daily life and fairyland. This is seen as making fairyland ‘relevant’ to the audience, as someone from ‘our world’ who is much like the intended audience makes the journey into fairyland. It has some minor advantages of exposition, since the wanderer knows no more of this fairyland than we the audience do; as he wins explanations, we learn of matters at his side, and this further strengthens our identification with him.

An alternate approach to this seeks to bring fairyland into daily life, as magical objects or beings emerge from fairyland into the contemporary world, to wreak havoc before being destroyed or sent back whence they came.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 17, 2008)

The Good of Romance

Escapist fare can lead to good

The Promise and Peril of Romance

What good can come of Romance, those tales that are larger than life, that speak of heroes in far-off lands and times?

There is surely the potential for ill to come of Romance. For the hours we spend to ponder the unreal must be robbed from the time we spend in dealing with the real. Therefore the utilitarian good of listening to tales of Romance can only lie in the benefits we gain in coming ‘back’ out of the lands of Romance to our real lives. I would list the benefits so:

1. Refreshment
2. Enthusiasm for life
3. Encouragement to take up life’s struggle
4. Hope that the end will bear its reward
5. Greater-than-moral patterns to live by
6. Perspective on life

Refreshment

The Refreshment we can win from Romance is like that which we win from any well-told tale. To the extent that a Romance lightens our hearts and offers a holiday from the toil of our daily work, it lets us return to living with renewed energy, just like any entertainment.

Enthusiasm

The Enthusiasm we can gain from Romance comes from what is peculiar to Romance, that heightened sense of adventure, struggle, conflict, and the sense of glory we feel from such high concerns. The struggles in tales of Romance always matter because the stakes are so high and the sacrifices are always worthwhile. The heroes of Romance embody in some form our best values, and when we hearken to a Romance, and see ourselves either as acting in the skin of the heroes or as tagging along with them, taking their part, rooting for them and fighting alongside them, we see ourselves as heroic and larger than life. To be sure, when we take such a view back to our daily life we face pitfalls, and may think too much of ourselves. We may judge ourselves too harshly when we fail in our tasks to live up to the deeds of our heroes of Romance. But for a time at least when we first emerge from a Romance, we feel a heightened sense of enthusiasm for tackling our own problems.

Encouragement

The Encouragement that Romance can offer us is related to the Enthusiasm we feel. Romance not only tells us that life is worth living, and the struggle worthwhile, it also fires us up to take on the struggle of our own lives. A hero of Romance is a man of action first and foremost. He does things. A tale of Romance lists the actions the hero undertakes toward the winning of his goal; the scenes are pared to what advances or hinders the hero, and nothing extraneous is left in. The Romance is a tale of things that happened rather than a remembrance of a fallen hero, for even when a Romance takes the shape of the remembrance, what is being remembered is not the character of the hero per se but rather his character in terms of what he did to win his high status. We remember him for what he did and this is almost always framed in terms of how he came to achieve his great goals. Thus, when we leave a Romance, we look on our life as a tale of deeds we must do to gain our own goals.

Hope

The Hope we win from Romance comes from its ending, which falls into one of two sorts:

1. Winning it all
2. Winning what is most important though at a great price

The Hero of Romance gets what he wanted. The Romance ends with the winning of the goal the hero sought. Sometimes the hero is left mostly unscathed in the struggle, he lives and is strong to fight another battle. Sometimes the hero falls in the struggle — but in his fall the hero ensures that the goal is won for others. He remains true to his values and the end of his travail is always to the good.

Patterns to Live By

A Hero of Romance also offers us a Pattern by which we may live our own lives. This Pattern is moral but it goes beyond morality. The morality the Hero embodies may not be our complete moral code, and the Hero may indeed break many of our ethics only to underscore how the values he clings to are the main ones, the most important. (It is in this sense that Jack Bauer, the hero of the television series 24, is a Hero of Romance, though he is a murderer and torturer and lawbreaker, and in real life should be judged guilty of his crimes and imprisoned for life … if any bars could hold him.) This Pattern is detailed in the hero’s specific actions in concrete situations and scenes. The Romance is not an Allegory, though some Allegories can take the shape of Romance. The two forms are not mutually exclusive. But what we seek in Romance is action, not parable, and we want to believe that it is or could be or should be in a greater sense, ‘real life.’ Aristotle said it was ‘life as it could be and ought to be.’ The great value of the Romance here is our very confounding of reality and fantasy, and the way we are wont to view ourselves as heroes of Romance when we go about our daily chores. ‘What would the hero do here?’ is the question that gives us a concrete, immediate answer that does not need to be reasoned out the way we must often reason out the proper behavior from abstract principles and ethical codes.

Perspective

Last, the Romance offers us when we leave it, a Perspective on our own lives. Because Romance is set on such a high and lofty plane of being, we return from it to look upon our own lives as though from a height. This helps us to thresh through the chaff of daily details, and see what lies beneath — what is truly important in what we do, and what great goals our daily actions may lead to, if only we dare to dream.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, May 16, 2008)

Romance and You

Is Romance worthwhile? Or does it destroy those who love it?

This essay is not an easy one for me to write.

All my life I have loved Romance. When I wrote, I wrote Romances. My favorite tales have been Romance. Eartherea itself I could call ‘the land of Romance.’

Many years ago, I grappled with the question of ‘escapism.’ The genres of Romance have long been accused of providing their audiences with mere escapism, a sort of narcotic to soothe the pain of their real troubles, an antidote to solving those troubles, and a waste of time and thought. “If wishes were horses, we would all ride as kings.”

My answer then was grudging, but I accepted that Romance was toxic, and I stopped creating it or even enjoying it.

Years later I came back around.

What had changed? There was no conscious argument on my part, I never re-thought that topic and reached a different conclusion.

Now I consider that Romance may be of some help, but only if treated the right way. Only if we look at Romance in the right way, and only if we take from Romance its proper lessons, can Romance be a boon to our real lives.

The problem is that so few of us do treat Romance in this way.

An example will provide some chilling lessons.

There is a popular television show that has been running for half a dozen years, called 24. This depicts the efforts of heroic Jack Bauer, a spy and counter-terrorist agent for a US federal agency, against some grave threat. Each season involves a different conspiracy, which Jack must uncover, track down, and thwart. Along the way Jack captures many of the conspirators, criminals, terrorists and other enemies of the State (in and out of official government). He must get the truth out of these captives, and being under an imminent deadline, Jack uses the most expedient methods at hand, including torture.

It has been widely reported (though I don’t know the truth of this) that Vice President Cheney loves 24 and has mixed up in his own mind the fictional agent Jack Bauer with himself and his minions in the government. It is also reported that the Vice President has strongly lobbied for the use of torture by government agents and soldiers, because torture works for Jack Bauer, so it will work for others as well.

Consider this report, if you will. The Vice President is no impressionable youngster, with an immature mind, unable to tell the truth between fantasy and reality. He is not insane. He is rather a grown man, father, husband, grandfather, who has spent many years in government and a few in a armaments company, who is highly educated, highly competent. And yet he takes the two highly dubious assumptions of a fantasy television show, first that the suspicions and intuitions of a trained US agent are infallible, and second that torture always elicits truth from an enemy captive, and he applies them to his advocacy of official policy involving the torment, mutilation, and destruction of real human beings, many of them, as it has later been shown, entirely innocent of any wrongdoing or knowledge of wrongdoing.

As I say, I don’t know if these reports are true. They represent only the potential harm that Romance can bring us, if we learn from it the wrong lessons.

What are the proper lessons that Romance holds for us? I’ll talk about them tomorrow.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 15, 2008)

Romance

The super-genre defined

Romance in Art is not about Love

In French, the word roman is like ‘novel’ as a lengthy tale. But also in England and in France, at the end of the 1700s, the middle-class began to rebel against the dominant artistic style of the times, which was Classical. Classical art emphasized the form of the art, and delighted in restraint and simple elegance. As a result Classical art tended to be quite ‘cool’ in its emotional tenor. The middle class found that emotions were more appealing, and they rediscovered and fell in love with medieval tales. This gave rise to the genre we call Gothic after the Goths and the period of their ascendancy in art.

The languages of Southern Europe that descended from Latin were called the Romance languages, and this movement towards a more primitive but expressive art was also called the Romantic movement, since it wrote in the Romance languages of the commons rather than the Latin of scientists and educated men of the Classicists. The Romantic movement created tales that were called Romances as late as the 1930s.

In the latter 1900s, as Realism came to dominate not only in the critical tales but also in the popular ones, Romance came to be associated with a sub-genre of the broader, older Romance. This new Romance was a genre all about Love and was aimed at women readers. The consequence was that Romance featured a female heroine who endured various trials and tribulations in her life, and whose main story-line concerned her stormy relations with one man in particular, a man the heroine often couldn’t make up her mind if she loved or hated. In the tale’s end, love triumphed over all adversity, misconceptions are all cleared up, and the Girl gets her Man.

At first this new Romance retained many of the older trappings of the broader Romance. Models of the new Romance tales could be found in the Romantic Gothic novels, such as the great Jane Eyre.

Romance as it came first upon the stage in England, then France, then Germany and other lands, is an amorphous beast. Many have defined it in various ways.

This is my way.

The Other

I see Romance as primarily appealing to the emotions but to some emotions more than others. The idea of Adventure came to the front for the 1800s were an age of Adventure for Europeans building empires and looting the rest of the globe for raw materials and wealth and military strength.

This Adventure involves the Other, which is the key to Romance as I see it. In brief, a Romance tells of

• the Other Self leading
• the Other Life with
• the Other Sex in
• the Other World.

The Other Self is like the reader, but unlike him. We may call all these things ‘larger than life’ or we may call the whole thing the ‘fulfillment of a wish.’ The Other Self is the man the reader wishes he might be. As such the Other Self embodies the reader’s own values, and has more of those personal qualities the reader values most, and wishes he has more of.

The Other Life is the kind of existence the reader daydreams he might lead, ‘if only.’ This Other Life is not necessarily all good, but rather exists in extremes beyond the life the reader finds himself living. Failure exacts a greater price, often one’s life, and success grants rewards beyond one’s wildest dreams. This Other Life demands for success exactly those values the reader would rank as foremost, and thus his Other Self is eminently qualified to be the Winner here who takes all.

The Other Sex is the most-desired sexual partner the reader can currently imagine. She shares his values and embodies them and has all those personal qualities the reader finds most desirable in a sexual partner. Though ‘love’ is usually the term used, and the Romance ends in marriage that will last the rest of the couple’s lives, this is but a veil cast over Sex, which is what really counts. Remember this is a Dream, and Emotions come first, and the primary emotions are strongest.

The Other World is that land that forms the basis of the Other Life. It is also set in a higher key, with greater extremes of everything than the world the reader inhabits. This Other World lay, in the first blush of the Romantic movement, either in the Past or in a Foreign Land. By virtue of these exotic settings, the Other World often included elements of the supernatural made flesh in ways scoffed at in the ‘real world’ the reader dwelt in. When science led men to speculate on what life might be like on other planets (and when most of the Earth had been mapped, explored, and reported on), the Other World became Mars, the Moon, outer space, and Science Fiction developed under the broader rubric of Romance. It is only in the Other World that the Other Life becomes possible, or at least is properly valued and flourishes. It is only in the Other World that the Other Self rises to the level that he merits.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 14, 2008)