What I Seek and Can Not Find

The pattern of my longing

Of late thoughts of doom have taken me, as I watch the American Empire crumble, and slowly pull Western Civilization down with it.

This has left me feeling that art and tales are far away, not so vital after all.

And yet there comes on me, from time to time (and more in the past day or so) the haunting desire to return to Hans in the Schwarzwald, or join the Boy Who Never Grew Up in Fireland, or fall beneath the spell of the Temptress of Creepland (these being the last tales I worked on).

Why is this? Is it the urge to escape the difficult task of life, the hopeless toil to overcome the death that rises to take us all? Is it an addiction of mine, which having been starved, must return to plague me? Is it a healthy way to deal with the mess in some symbolic way?

I don’t know. But the thought has prompted me to put here, the pattern of my longing — the shape of the primordial Tale that shapes most of the tales I tell. If you are a fellow talesman, you might think on what the pattern of your longing is, as glimmers through your tales. If you are a fellow audience member, you might wonder about your own favorite kind of tale, and whether your best-loved authors have told merely that tale you like the best.

The Tale

It begins quietly, but with a roll of distant thunder. There are small, normal, ordinary people in a homey place. They are comfortable enough there, but one among them, and maybe more than one, harbors a secret, unacknowledged longing to explore what lies Out There in the Dark.

There comes a turmoil and trouble, the home nest is upset and made into madness, and the one who would leave, does leave; it may even be true that he must leave for one reason or another.

This is a critical, delicious moment: the first step down the Road, with Home at his back. There is a thrill of danger and excitement. No one else of his small home place has gone this way except in legendary tales out of the dim past.

He takes up the Road, and at first is happy there, and enjoys the strange vistas Out There. And yet Something Evil haunts and tracks him, and there is danger both before and behind.

Before long he finds himself out in waste and wild, cold, shivering, hungry, and lost. He does not know where to go or how to escape the darkness and threat that weave ever thicker around him.

He goes on — he ‘soldiers on’ as the old phrase has it, slogging on without hope, without much expectation of anything but pain. There are brief flashes of comfort and kindness along the way, but along with them he finds danger, pain, and loss. He loses goods and friends and loved ones and knows they will never return.

At last he reaches the end. He can do no more. He cannot go farther. He is at a loss.

And yet somehow he does go on — one last stage in the journey.

And then, upheaval — disaster — war — strife — massive death.

And survival. The one we have followed (the one who longed in secret to see what lay Out There) still lives. The evil has passed — at least it is in abeyance, under control, neutralized for the time being.

He goes back home. There he is glad to see it again, but the place is somewhat strange to him. It is smaller, weaker, quainter. And he finds himself a stranger there. He knows he cannot stay there, and that in truth he now has no home, no hearth, no place.

Now he faces, at tale’s end, one more Road, but he is weary, and now an inveterate traveller. It is with a much different frame of mind that he faces the blank, vast, dim Future.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 12, 2008)