One more for the road.
I really should be sleeping right now, but I can't get my head to sit still because Dust to Dust may have just healed itself. Or grown up or something.
It was missing the third step. The reformation. The making anew.
The whole story has been about alchemy on multiple levels. There's the nuts-and-bolts of Vojak's experiments to recreate life with the broken-down remains of his immolated son. There's the historical alchemical process of political upheaval that toppled socialism and unearthed democratic reform. And there was the whole "stunted alchemical process" of Milan's seemingly directionless murders, the closest thing to a spine this story has. Each level was meant to be explored through the prism of 1) know thy subject, 2) break it down to its elemental components, and 3) reform it into something new.
Vojak does it with the moth in the first scene. He attempts it with his creations. But that is as much alchemy as the children who use broken glass to project an impromptu Aurora Borealis onto an abandoned factory wall.
The missing niveau was the alchemy of human interaction, or that ability of people to, through the most mysterious of circumstances, alter the existence of another. Break down paradigms or shift perspectives or force reactions. It's all there. And at that point, there's the possibility for hurt to turn into healing, such that we can't be "fixed" by any stretch of the imagination. We are not being cured of anything because humanity itself is the terminal condition. But there is, if not a healing, then a reforming, a reshaping that happens.
And that was the lift that the end needed to drag it out of the emotional quagmire it had been mired in during its previous incarnations.
One of the primary qualms when the novella was first rejected was that it was so relentlessly intense and not necessarily pessimistic so much as hopeless. The promise of goodness and democracy and happy-ever-after was so distant a prospect it couldn't even be spotted on the horizon. And this new ending that I'm formulating doesn't look, on the surface, any more blatantly optimistic (because I think the story is meant to have an ending tempered by the "calm before the storm" essence in John le Carre's statement that now that we had conquered communism, we'd need to set about conquering capitalism), but it has that element of humanity's alchemical property figured into it, so that when democracy "arrives" and when Milan's spree is "ended" and Vojak meets his end, that last level, that last "scientific" equation is also solved. The reforming has been accomplished and whether Vojak realizes it or not, he has succeeded in his mission.
And the operating on multiple levels is what allows Radovan, in his final scene with Kundera, to unearth that clue. He's taking the dissident's ramblings about his wife and applying them to the humanity-alchemy equation, then grafting that to the alchemist's motives. In the process, he figures it all out and, thus, discovers the part he is to play in the whole drama. And he makes a conscious decision to change himself. To reform.
This probably makes no sense whatsoever to just about everyone else, but I wasn't going to sleep if I didn't write this all down. #isawriter
My Goodness, I can't wait until I can get paid to do this.
It was missing the third step. The reformation. The making anew.
The whole story has been about alchemy on multiple levels. There's the nuts-and-bolts of Vojak's experiments to recreate life with the broken-down remains of his immolated son. There's the historical alchemical process of political upheaval that toppled socialism and unearthed democratic reform. And there was the whole "stunted alchemical process" of Milan's seemingly directionless murders, the closest thing to a spine this story has. Each level was meant to be explored through the prism of 1) know thy subject, 2) break it down to its elemental components, and 3) reform it into something new.
Vojak does it with the moth in the first scene. He attempts it with his creations. But that is as much alchemy as the children who use broken glass to project an impromptu Aurora Borealis onto an abandoned factory wall.
The missing niveau was the alchemy of human interaction, or that ability of people to, through the most mysterious of circumstances, alter the existence of another. Break down paradigms or shift perspectives or force reactions. It's all there. And at that point, there's the possibility for hurt to turn into healing, such that we can't be "fixed" by any stretch of the imagination. We are not being cured of anything because humanity itself is the terminal condition. But there is, if not a healing, then a reforming, a reshaping that happens.
And that was the lift that the end needed to drag it out of the emotional quagmire it had been mired in during its previous incarnations.
One of the primary qualms when the novella was first rejected was that it was so relentlessly intense and not necessarily pessimistic so much as hopeless. The promise of goodness and democracy and happy-ever-after was so distant a prospect it couldn't even be spotted on the horizon. And this new ending that I'm formulating doesn't look, on the surface, any more blatantly optimistic (because I think the story is meant to have an ending tempered by the "calm before the storm" essence in John le Carre's statement that now that we had conquered communism, we'd need to set about conquering capitalism), but it has that element of humanity's alchemical property figured into it, so that when democracy "arrives" and when Milan's spree is "ended" and Vojak meets his end, that last level, that last "scientific" equation is also solved. The reforming has been accomplished and whether Vojak realizes it or not, he has succeeded in his mission.
And the operating on multiple levels is what allows Radovan, in his final scene with Kundera, to unearth that clue. He's taking the dissident's ramblings about his wife and applying them to the humanity-alchemy equation, then grafting that to the alchemist's motives. In the process, he figures it all out and, thus, discovers the part he is to play in the whole drama. And he makes a conscious decision to change himself. To reform.
This probably makes no sense whatsoever to just about everyone else, but I wasn't going to sleep if I didn't write this all down. #isawriter
My Goodness, I can't wait until I can get paid to do this.