When you are insecure about your writing, it helps to start off with someone else's. Apart from assisting me to slip into the groove, Douglas Adams sets a certain tone: light & frothy, witty and not too pompous. That's my aim too. And when I proofread, I'm immune (at least for his bit) to the temptation of endlessly exchanging one word for another.
In the lead-in to The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you read, or hear narrated in a voice with a BBC accent:
‘And then, one Thursday, nearly 2,000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
‘Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace by-pass, and so the idea was lost forever.
‘This is not her story.’
Disconnect.
Where am I?
I had everything clear in my head just now—wonderful lines that swept and swooped and slid across the page, but they’ve emerged chopped and broken. They clatter upon the page, clunkenly.
This damned conspiracy doesn’t want me to succeed. It resists and hinders me. It swivels my head towards the window and glazes my eyes over. Window-gazing. Windows glazing. I’m turning into a zombie. No, foul spot, no! I need to finish my story during the day before the clock strikes midnight and I turn into a vampire. Forgive me if I sound a little rushed (or stoned) but if you’ve accompanied me this far you’ll understand.
I scramble back to our original point of departure.
“This is not her story,” wrote Douglas Adams, alluding to the Rickmansworth girl. I’ve since revealed that her story is mine—and yours too if you want a slice of the action.
But if time and opportunity are so limited, why do I bother with stories at all? Why not tell it to you straight—do an article, write a thesis, or take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times? Isn’t a narrative just a work of fiction? Why spend all that time, you ask, on something that isn’t even factual? A good read is all a work of fiction can aspire to, surely.
Not so. According to John Michael Greer, stories are extremely powerful. He claims that they’re the tools we use to understand the world. Not only do they contain lessons and morals, but as myths they shape the way that we relate to our environment and to life itself.
So don’t worry. This isn’t a narrative in the conventional sense. By attacking the larger philosophical questions, I’ll break down—seven with a single blow—the straw, stick and brick huts of our cosmology. And then, never fear, I’ll go on reconstruct the wreckage into a giant beanstalk that will win us the golden goose. How’s that for a Grimm day’s work?
From your perspective, I’m not worth knowing. So forget me. After all, I may not even exist. What evidence do you have? We’ve never met. You haven’t seen me in a photo. You’ve only these pages printed with words. For you, it’s far more important to establish your own identity.
In The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are, Alan Watts refers to identity as an ego in a bag of skin. David Crosby (from Crosby, Stills and Nash) calls the body a meat suit. Dave Pollard, a blogger, thinks of himself as “the space through which stuff passes”. Don Juan, in the books by Carlos Castaneda, sees a luminous egg with tendrils. Me, I’ve conjured up the jabberwocky.
I acknowledge input from Lewis Carrol, of course, but more especially Robert Heinlein. In Life Line, his first-ever published story, the dean of science-fiction writers describes a four-dimensional body:
‘You are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen eighties. Imagine this space-time event . . . as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here, and the cross-section we see appears to be a single discreet body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.’
Well, Heinlein’s idea lodged in my mind in much the same way (and location?) as Adam’s Rickmansworth meme. I grant that it’s not exactly glamorous to reduce life to a worm, sausage or tube, and you may feel inclined to turn up your nose. Please don’t.
Because consider just what that model accomplishes. By shaking hands with the jabberwocky we’ve taken time out of the equation and elevated our position to that of Czerner’s photon! For us in the now—in the know—time no longer exists. It “stands still, eternally”. We stand, like Dr Who, outside of time.
