The Grim Topic · 5:33pm Dec 19th, 2022
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
really? as if it was some kind of pink pill? no.
After last week, I'm gonna say "yes".
ho. ho. ho.
Blog Number 215: Escapism Edition
For those who have no idea what that was all about:
Firstly, a quick update on the Delaney Krings situation (I hope I'm spelling her name right) that Estee brought up last time. After being diagnosed with brain cancer, her parents made a public plea for support in preparation of her fifth birthday, which is likely to be her last. It looks like the drive to give generously was successful, as these latest reports indicate:
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Neighbors and friends in Pewaukee came together Friday to show their love for Delaney Krings.
"It's amazing, and there's so many great people out there doing so much for us. You're really happy to see it, but you wish it wasn't your kid," said Delany's father, Jacob Krings,
It was a parade of hundreds for one special little girl on her special day -- Delaney Krings' last birthday.
I find it a bittersweet read. On the one hand, the community feeling and family determination is lovely. I wish there was more of it, not just nationally but globally.
On the other hand, it's all you can do. Cancer doesn't care.
And that puts us in deeply unhappy territory once you realize the scope of the problem.
Anyway, returning to the opener, because quoting a fantasy series and then talking about a young child's cancer could be seen as a tad tangential:
Back in the 90s, when subversive entertainment was on the rise - The Simpsons was actually good, Jurassic Park reminded us not to play God, Space Jam did unspeakable things to the Looney Tunes, and Disney had found its second wind before near-terminal sequelitis kicked in - there was a comic British fantasy series called Discworld (it actually started in the 80s, but most of the best titles came out in the 90s, post-Guards! Guards!).
Discworld was a huge series: so huge that it had series within series. One of my favourite subseries - which is admittedly like picking your favourite essential organ - was the Death series, in which the Discworld's satiric incarnation of the Grim Reaper who logically has no natural voice and so talks the talk with supernatural aplomb basically becomes more like a guardian angel, going from a dutiful apathy via growing curiosity to an outright affectionate interest in humanity.
This subseries tends to the creative, as Death not only can interact with the mortal plane, but with other supernatural entities who run the universe behind the scenes. In one special book - the only Christmas-themed book (sort of: it's called Hogswatch and blurs with Scotland's Hogmanay, the Winter Solstice, and the New Year) - Death finds that someone has managed to assassinate the jolly fat man himself, and so in an effort to prevent Christmas Hogswatch from collapsing into a nihilistic black hole, he takes on the red mantle.
Large sections of the book are basically Death doing Santa's the Hogfather's job, with little to no idea how this "Christmas Hogswatch" thing normally works, and if you can't tell yet, it's one of my favourite Death books because it's bloody clever and bloody charming and absolutely bloody funny. Just wait till he tries a brief stint as a Mall Santa Hogfather.
In the same book, his granddaughter Susan (by adoption, though genes on the Discworld work in more straightforward ways than they do on Earth) refuses to abandon her normal life and help him, partly because she's fed up with the supernatural realm interfering with her normal life, partly because she has no idea how serious the stakes are if Hogswatch collapses.
So naturally she abandons her normal life and helps him, because the nice thing about no-nonsense types like Susan is that they are too no-nonsense to ignore nonsense for very long.
Which, gradually, leads to the quoted section at the top of today's post. I haven't quoted the full speech, as I'm caught between massive spoilers for the book's themes and going massively off-topic into philosophical waters that are too hot for my current mood. Needless to say it's a speech I come back to, regardless of my own stance on its substance.
It's more that throwaway section in the middle of it (largely to clarify that the theme is more complicated than it seems) that's preying on my mind at the moment.
In other news, last time I posted on my blog, I was reacting to the sudden news that a small child had cancer, and I was reacting badly.
Why? Apart from the obvious, I mean. I'm talking about context.
Picture this: you've given yourself a goal in life.
Well, actually, it's more an ongoing purposeful progress than a goal, because the way I've set it up mentally, it'd be an eternal job of writing, publishing, learning something, writing, publishing, learning something, etc. And that sounds great to me, because I frequently tell myself "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."
I am extremely attracted to a "goal" that's never-ending, because then it means I don't treat the massive journey as some kind of tedious blockade, don't burn up a year just to celebrate for a day, and then fall into existential listlessness once I've done the thing. Don't believe the naive hedonists: actually having a mission statement to structure your life around is like building a house out of titanium scaffolding.
Well, in theory it is. Depends on...
Sorry, picture this: you've got a goal. All things considered, you've got it relatively good, or will do once you have better control over your writing hobby.
You enjoy it, when it isn't biting you in the ass. Point is: you sleep, you eat, you spend time with family, you have a solid job, you write/try to write/think about writing/plan to write/daydream scenes to write/read interesting things to write about/et cetera, et cetera. In the narrow spotlight, thanks to lucky circumstance, you have it comfy compared to most.
Oh, and you take an interest in the wider world.
Wars. Famines. Diseases. How many people die every second.
And you do this on the basis that, if you want to judge how good a universe is you've been born into, you immediately look for the worst cases and put a pin in each of them saying "Note to Self: Needs Attention".
And it turns out there are millions of the things. At least.
On top of this, I have a fundamental problem: an automatic suspicion of the phrase "ignorance is bliss". I mean, how do you know? Tell me I'm better off ignoring something, and I'll immediately pay it special attention. Tell me something I believe is too horrible, nihilistic, or soul-destroying to be true, and I'll still suspect it's true regardless. Tell me to shut my eyes and I'm instantly on the alert. Call it existential paranoia.
All that sits very awkwardly in a mind that also loves escapist fiction.
It's not that I literally can't tell the difference between going along with fiction in the moment, and actually denying real life on the bigger picture. Some people have described fiction as "lying", which angers the hell out of me because it's pseudo-macho fallaciousness. There's a massive difference between playing pretend for the fun of it, and actively attempting to deceive people, and nothing is gained conflating the two: you either downplay the seriousness of lying, or accuse innocent people of a serious charge.
Regardless, picture this: a mind simultaneously juggling millions of persistent yet unpleasant facts about the world, on the one hand, and actively engaged in indulging fantasy worlds, on the other. An uneasy alliance, to say the least. It's one of the reasons I want to write fiction with more of a purpose than just pure entertainment (or, theoretically, for making money later on): it's the most obvious way to negotiate between two mental extremes.
And then I came onto a site about escapist fiction and read a plea on behalf of a child with cancer.
Is it any wonder I did not react well? And I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to do about it.
Hence the quote at the top of the page.
Despite the larger theme of the book Hogfather, that quoted section comes back to me a lot. It's hard to tell if Death's "no" meant "no, in this specific case I'm not saying that, because that misses my larger point" or "no, I don't agree with that at all", but more than once I've wondered if there is something to the Pink Pill Hypothesis of Fictional Appeal.
We call it "escapism", but never mind (for the moment) what we're escaping to: what are we escaping from?
Well, for me, it's simple: I'm escaping from the wretchedness of realizing there's a child out there with cancer and I can't do a damn thing about it.
Not the knowledge: I've got that wherever I go. I don't even know anyone involved personally: all I've got to go on is whatever I sit down and try to imagine from scraps of second-hand reports. And I don't stop there: in the past week, I've sat down and looked up - out of growing morbid curiosity - how many children get cancer annually (answer: an estimated 400,000 - given an age range up to 19 years) or how many children die regardless of cause (answer: an estimated five million annually) or how many people die of cancer at all (answer: roughly ten million estimated annually, or one in every six deaths). Personal connection is not much of a barrier to a curious completionist.
And even in the worst-case scenario, I don't hold with "ignorance is bliss". I despise wilful ignorance, and have no interest in the other kind. But it'd be nice to know about a universe that didn't suck so much.
The Pink Pill Hypothesis is a wholly different beast from what I call the Journalism-In-Disguise Hypothesis: using fiction as a way to comment on and expose real-life problems, injustices, and general areas of high concern.
Not that we can ignore the obvious problems - that Journalism-In-Disguise can be unpleasantly preachy, superfluous to just straight-up writing a non-fictional alternative, or twisted into biased propaganda - but a part of me can't help feeling more inclined to the latter hypothesis than the former. If something's bothering me, it seems more "final" to just tackle it head-on than to pretend I'm really more interested in something flippant, like mocking Christmas tropes or spotting recurring gags.
Moreover... well, think about this show, for instance, and where it sits on the spectrum. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, capable of turning lives around.
It's a glorified toy commercial with "lessons" so platitudinous and bland, you'd swear its philosophy department was run by greeting cards. Its forays into such niche topics as "Fandom things" have been controversial to say the least, never mind its having no chance of explicitly tackling such heavy issues as How To Cope When Your Parents Die And You Have To Run The Family Farm That's Regularly On The Verge Of Bankruptcy.
And yet it turned lives around. And more broadly, it spread the realization, via its unexpected fanbase, that some people actually like entertainment that's not GrimDark Mature AntiHero Serious Business, and that good is good because it feels good to be good. And wasn't total crap in the process.
As far as I can tell, it didn't set out to be some kind of New Idealism editorial, or Revived Optimism, or whatever the philosophy's called. If it's just a case of "it made me feel better" and that's it, we're firmly in Pink Pill territory. But I'm not sure it's that simple, even if the show at face value is.
Whether the seeds were there and people helped it grow, or people just used it to plant seeds of their own (I remember once when there were fans who didn't watch the show but devoured the fandom spin-offs), you could argue it loosely became a kind of Journalism-In-Disguise. It's hard to make the case because the show is blatantly fantasy and, even within that framework, is unfussy about such things as psychological realism.
But the structure's there - arguably automatically so in any communication, whether or not you want to examine it precisely. There's still the obvious bedrock of feminism, the promotion of a particular optimistic attitude, the friendship-oriented virtue ethics, the broad, bland acknowledgement that life isn't tea parties and black-and-white thinking. No one said a philosophy had to be sophisticated.
Not enough to shift the Pink Pill Hypothesis. Likely moreso: I'd be willing to bet - rhetorically speaking, as I don't gamble - that more people get into the show for straightforward entertainment reasons than in an attempt to mould a worldview out of it. Heck, I've rewatched the show these last few years plenty of times, and I don't mean for research purposes. For no higher purpose than to devote some hours to the cause of actually smiling and engaging with something that has more meaning than just popping some literal pink pills - rhetorically speaking, as I don't do drugs*.
* Beyond paracetamol for the occasional headache.
I guess what I'm leading up to is this:
Currently, I'm writing next to nothing because I'm still undecided. To what extent do I want to lean towards one hypothesis or another?
Thinking more broadly, we get the attractions of the Pink Pill Hypothesis. Really, we celebrate it. To the extent that fictional binges are a sincere palliative, I don't think we have a problem with the idea that we need fantasies to make life bearable. I'd prefer it if life really was bearable, but no one consulted me before designing it, so for practical reasons we're stuck with it and have to make the most of it. Hence the Pink Pills.
But we also get the attractions (for want of a better word) of the Journalism-In-Disguise Hypothesis. We don't want our fiction completely divorced from real life, because on some level that makes us uneasy, even suspicious. Besides, we can't truly learn things - even subtle and subtextual things - from fiction if it divorces itself so thoroughly from reality.
They say art holds a mirror up to life. If it does, then it's a funhouse mirror you can buckle and twist to your heart's content, blowing some things out of proportion, shrinking others until the mirror can barely show them.
And there is something really attractive about conjuring caricatures in your mind for a moment, or turning it round a corner to see something you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
But it's still a mirror, and you still look into it to tell you something, and while I don't necessarily want to just make it an ordinary mirror that tells me pretty much what I already know (and don't like), I still feel like it should be aimed thoughtfully.
So that leaves an awful paradox.
In one sense, I want fiction to remind me children get cancer, and there is nothing I or anyone besides a medical expert can do about it. In another sense, I don't want fiction to remind me children get cancer. Or that anyone can get cancer. Or that there are millions of ways for people to die, and die horribly. I guess we all just want, for a moment, to feel good about something, anything: pleasant, important, valued, understood, however you interpret it.
I guess what I'm really saying is that we need fantasies to make life bearable. But in a weird reversal, we also need some life to make fantasies bearable. To be the place where the falling cynic meets the rising optimist.
And if there is a little girl dying in the snow, I'd much rather someone come in and save her before she passes away. I don't care who.
Geez, I hope that all made sense. I still feel like I'm missing something. Am I making sense?
That's all for now. Impossible Numbers, out.
Now that I look back at it, I'm not sure I like the "Journalism-In-Disguise" name. I had in mind a broad category, including not just reported actual events, but opinion sections and editorials and so on.
That said, I'm not sure it's broad enough. Don't know if there's a better word I could use, though. "Essay", too narrow. "Communication", too broad. Something tied to real life, in a sense, but not rigidly defined by literal concerns.
That's what I'm getting at.
Man, I don't know I could get into art with this sort of top down hypothesis. Why, for argument, do you need to decide this before writing?
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I'm honestly not sure how to answer. I didn't think of it like that: more "how does it fit with everything else, and why am I doing it?"
All I know is that writing fiction doesn't seem as fulfilling as I'd hoped, not in context. I feel kind of disconnected from it. And I'm wondering if I should be prioritizing something else instead, something bigger or greater or what-have-you.
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Well, you gotta do you; you're going to be the best judge of what fits for you.
I usually try to avoid unsolicited advice, but it kind of seems like this blog post is something of a solicitation. So I'll just take a moment to say that if you've lost connection with writing, it's not going to help much to say "I am weighing the balance between writing for serious purposes versus escapism purposes" without defining what your serious purposes are. Some of the greatest fiction in the world has been penned by people who say "I am going to tackle THIS (specific) BURNING ISSUE." But that's not what you're saying. You seem to be saying "what if what I write doesn't deal enough with 'real world issues' to be valuable" and screw that.
It's all valuable. All of it. What matters is what you want to write, deep down. Because that's the stuff that matters. Stories don't have to be based on Real World Issues (tm) for your readers to find actual, real, life-changing content in them.
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Very much this, weeks later. The world sucks, any of us aware of it know that things are bad and trending worse and while the dawn may come that doesn't really help in the middle of the night with the sharks hunting you
but unless you think yourself a god, then beating yourself up over everything you didn't do is silly. you win by living a fulfilling life and helping where you can, whether that is big or small or in between
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Never forget that you yourself may be the dawn you're waiting for.
Or as Aerosmith put it: Wherever you are, remember: the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.
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Oh, yea, that too. It is entirely possible to find it within yourself to save yourself, and quite powerful if and when you do
I believe the reason why Pratchett places art as something humans need to be human, is because the distinction between comforting art and didactic art is nonexistent for him. The stories he wrote addressed not only elitism, racism and fascism, but were also full of puns and silly references. Because that's how the world is. All the terrible information that you can't help but try to ignore exists alongside utterly nonsensical moments, for which the only sane response is laughter.
If a piece of art is without a moral, it is shallow. But if it exists only to service morality, it is useless, because anything said in art could be better said in essay form. Art is as much of a transformation as it is a documentation. Art which fails to transform is as easily forgettable as that which fails to document. Anyone can look at the world and know it is an awful place. It is not profound to realize this or to exploit it financially. It is profound to bring some measure of joy or catharsis, no matter how small, no matter how temporary, into a bleak and thoughtless universe.