Was I Just a Symbol?
This comment on my previous post from sildra is thought-provoking for me. I would agree with her that there are a lot of elements from my dream that are similar to elements in Season 4 of Angel. Racing to the manifestation of a deity, the manifestation of a deity bringing about a golden age, the deity eating people. . . it is relevant. And yet, I didn't even think of Angel as a possible source of elements for the dream - it never even occurred to me. Part of that, I'm sure, has to do with intangible things like the tonality or emotions behind my reaction to the dream versus my reactions to the various things that I did or didn't consider as sources. But the more intellectual, if equally subjective, aspect is that I have always read Angel's fourth season, to the degree that it intersects with philosophical concerns, as dealing with a debate about normative ethics (somewhat shallowly, by my standards, although I find that speculative fiction that deals with normative ethics tends to do so on a level I find really shallow), whereas I was equally unquestioning in seeing my dream as dealing with a debate about meta-ethics. So when I was thinking of the sources, my mind immediately jumped to other narratives that I see as dealing with debates about meta-ethics, like Hitherby and PKD's writings about God eating people, and it didn't even occur to me at all to link it to a story that I thought of as touching on normative ethics.
I think my preconceptions are kind of justified in that PKD and Jenna Moran are both dealing much more explicitly with a Christian heritage and way of thinking about deities in their work - Jasmine in Angel is more the superpowerful alien kind of deity and is pretty blatantly not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, so it never even seems to be implied that she's omnibenevolent - that's not something that it ever occurred to me that the season was trying to put up as a point for debate. Nonetheless, I certainly think that the surprise that sildra's comment was to me points to a certain limitation in the way that I understand stories - that I am often too ready to look for the philosophical implications or arguments implicit in the narrative, that I seek out symbols too quickly rather than spending enough time understanding the other aspects of the story. On the whole, I usually don't mind. The author was killed long ago, and so if a story has meaning to me, then I'm happy to accept that meaning as a gift, even if its light causes other things to fade into the shadows. But the one thing that this tendency does mean which I find a shame is that it makes me a pretty bad writer of narratives myself - this is why I find essays or poetry, where narrative, if included as all, is explicitly subordinate to other goals, easier to write than narratives, despite the fact that my love for narrative is so strong. I recently read this very interesting blog post about a survey of famous writers' attitudes towards symbolism, done in the early 60s by a high school student who wanted to prove that his English teachers were irrelevant. The writers have a lot of different kinds of responses - Ayn Rand's response is more or less exactly what you'd expect - but I found Ralph Ellison's and Ray Bradbury's to be the most personally intuitive - both of them suggesting that ideally symbolism should arise in works but should not be imposed on them consciously. I don't actually start out writing fiction, when I do write fiction, by thinking of the symbols, but I think I tend too often to figure out the symbolic elements so early in the writing process that it swamps all the other elements of writing, making my narratives poorer as narratives because they are less organic. I've been told this by crowleycrow himself, and I do kind of trust him to know enough about the craft of writing to be worthy of my attention.
One reason why I actually wrote out that story inspired by my dream, which, brief as it is, quite possibly is the first narrative I have written in a good six years (my normal dream journal pieces were more essays about the dream, describing the narratives rather than recounting them as well as describing other aspects of the dream), is because that wasn't going to happen with that story. Yes, there were blatant symbolic elements, but they were all, by definition, subconscious, given that they all came to me in a dream, so I couldn't be said to be distorting the story in order to consciously impose a structure. But, of course, now that I've given a moment's thought to the issue, I guess you can't really say that the dream was a narrative containing symbolic discussion of philosophy, either, since. . . I think it's clearly dealing with a meta-ethical debate, but it's not dealing with that debate symbolically. The debate about meta-ethics is more or less specifically what the story is. In fact, it's less of a story at all and more of a philosophical thought experiment, an intuition pump. I mean, in writing it up, I was interested in the language use and the style that I put into it. When I went back and edited it after my first draft, it was partially in order to clarify some ideas but partially in order to make it read better. It's pretty telling that I totally perceived it as a story, though, when it's got so many elements of an intuition pump.
Which obviously, to get back to Hitherby, reminds me of "A World of One", only, you know, in reverse.
I think my preconceptions are kind of justified in that PKD and Jenna Moran are both dealing much more explicitly with a Christian heritage and way of thinking about deities in their work - Jasmine in Angel is more the superpowerful alien kind of deity and is pretty blatantly not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, so it never even seems to be implied that she's omnibenevolent - that's not something that it ever occurred to me that the season was trying to put up as a point for debate. Nonetheless, I certainly think that the surprise that sildra's comment was to me points to a certain limitation in the way that I understand stories - that I am often too ready to look for the philosophical implications or arguments implicit in the narrative, that I seek out symbols too quickly rather than spending enough time understanding the other aspects of the story. On the whole, I usually don't mind. The author was killed long ago, and so if a story has meaning to me, then I'm happy to accept that meaning as a gift, even if its light causes other things to fade into the shadows. But the one thing that this tendency does mean which I find a shame is that it makes me a pretty bad writer of narratives myself - this is why I find essays or poetry, where narrative, if included as all, is explicitly subordinate to other goals, easier to write than narratives, despite the fact that my love for narrative is so strong. I recently read this very interesting blog post about a survey of famous writers' attitudes towards symbolism, done in the early 60s by a high school student who wanted to prove that his English teachers were irrelevant. The writers have a lot of different kinds of responses - Ayn Rand's response is more or less exactly what you'd expect - but I found Ralph Ellison's and Ray Bradbury's to be the most personally intuitive - both of them suggesting that ideally symbolism should arise in works but should not be imposed on them consciously. I don't actually start out writing fiction, when I do write fiction, by thinking of the symbols, but I think I tend too often to figure out the symbolic elements so early in the writing process that it swamps all the other elements of writing, making my narratives poorer as narratives because they are less organic. I've been told this by crowleycrow himself, and I do kind of trust him to know enough about the craft of writing to be worthy of my attention.
One reason why I actually wrote out that story inspired by my dream, which, brief as it is, quite possibly is the first narrative I have written in a good six years (my normal dream journal pieces were more essays about the dream, describing the narratives rather than recounting them as well as describing other aspects of the dream), is because that wasn't going to happen with that story. Yes, there were blatant symbolic elements, but they were all, by definition, subconscious, given that they all came to me in a dream, so I couldn't be said to be distorting the story in order to consciously impose a structure. But, of course, now that I've given a moment's thought to the issue, I guess you can't really say that the dream was a narrative containing symbolic discussion of philosophy, either, since. . . I think it's clearly dealing with a meta-ethical debate, but it's not dealing with that debate symbolically. The debate about meta-ethics is more or less specifically what the story is. In fact, it's less of a story at all and more of a philosophical thought experiment, an intuition pump. I mean, in writing it up, I was interested in the language use and the style that I put into it. When I went back and edited it after my first draft, it was partially in order to clarify some ideas but partially in order to make it read better. It's pretty telling that I totally perceived it as a story, though, when it's got so many elements of an intuition pump.
Which obviously, to get back to Hitherby, reminds me of "A World of One", only, you know, in reverse.