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reenkawah. at the very end of reading `his dark materials', and i'm rather tired. tiiiiired. and it's funny because the more tired i get from the continuous reading, so that sparkles aren't shooting out of my eyes all the time, the more i read cautiously, not entirely so, but enough to notice the dents. there aren't enough to disturb me, of course, but there's almost enough to give me pause. mostly it's a sort of rueful amusement because sometimes i can just tell when the author's being more transparent and hurrying things along and things click into place because they -have- to. there's very much a sense of control about this sort of storytelling, and you just have to ride it, look past the mechanics and through to the spirit of the greater story.
i'm not used to things being so intricately plotted-- or maybe i've grown unused to it... but mostly, it's this sense that connections are made between people because they -have- to be made, because otherwise things won't move forward. not always, but sometimes that's particularly clear. that was my problem with hp, too. things were this way or that way because they -had- to be, in order for all these other things to happen. do human relationships actually work like that? can you look back on the "plot" of your life and see how of -course- you liked or disliked that person, and is there ever this sense of inevitability about it all?
i mean, yes, sometimes things just -are-, instinctual and immediate, but there isn't really a -reason-, no way to actually -explain- it, is there? that's what bothers me, the intricate linkage of explanations all clinking together. not clumsily like in fanfic, where one rails against telling-not-showing, not clumsily at all. less like a writing defect and more like a way of understanding the world as a series of chain-linked connections. it's like in those old anthropology books, i imagine, where they outlined the way to behave among "those people" in order to get "those results", as if people are in some sense predictable and you could kind of play them like a game of chess.
of course, the whole series is a game of chess in more ways than one-- and this doesn't make a bad story at all, in fact plenty of stories (lewis carroll being most obvious) depend on a rigid architecture, all the components in their exact place, playing their exact role. maybe this is what "plotting" is all about, i don't know. but it's been a long few days, and my head hurts, and i could use some chaos right now, i guess. not all stories are like this, but a lot are, i know that-- a lot of the best, even. everything in its place, a ballet of movements all building towards a cascading sets of results that eventually combine to inevitably come together in some sort of finale. without ophelia there would be no hamlet, that sort of thing. funny because in this case, this is a struggle against destiny, in a way, and it's brought about by this intricate set of necessary coindidences. i mean, the very concept hurts my mind, kind of. necessary coincidences.
and by the end, i am holding all this in my head, and the weight of all these inevitable coincidences is mighty indeed. there was some conversation at the beginning of the book about destiny-- and someone questioned the idea of it. it's hard to separate the reality of how everything happens from the eventual goal. you can't really escape destiny if your destiny is to escape it, can you. and if you -have- to make certain connections, and everything kind of depends of this connection being made at this exact time, and you can't make it at any other time, and you -have- to do this-or-that now and not later in order for a 100 other things to be able to happen and link together-- that's just kind of disturbing, isn't it?
in my own stories, things kind of amble along and maybe they happen and maybe they don't. obviously, my plotting is never very rigid, and there's room for error and doubling back and restructuring at virtually any point. if i wanted, i could rewrite any story with a different ending, though truthfully i usually feel the one i write makes the most sense, all things considered. but it's an organic sort of thing. the result grows out of the conditions i create as i write, in a continuous process of what might be thought of as evolution, rather than the conditions being necessary for the result. the result, in other words, is an emergent property, not a destiny that has to be fulfilled.
naturally, this is hard to make happen regardless, if you're talking about a book about a prophecy. i wrote a story like that once-- i was rewriting genesis using the given of adam being a fallen angel in love lucifer (the serpent). the same result had to occur-- the story had to end with adam being with eve, lucifer leaving heaven for good, humanity fallen, etc. my story was a small one, with only two players, basically, so it was easy to kind of let it tell itself. i mean, there was the basic given of "adam loves lucifer", and yes, i kind of explained it, but the character of adam kind of grew -out- of him loving lucifer, so it was all tangled together. so yes, their actions and responses defined their character and there was a definite emergent inevitability there (besides the inevitability of the Fall hanging over me). they were doomed, but meanwhile, they could feel and do whatever they felt like. i mean, in my mind there are a 100 different ways to get adam to fall, and as long as that happens, he could take his sweet time, basically.
and it's funny that in a story so dependent on the quantum many-worlds theory, there is this sense of minute necessity that spreads beyond event and to emotion itself. sure, any event can have any number of near-infinite results, but there is a definite sense that the story only follows the right result in order for the final movement to occur. and i haven't finished yet so i don't know the whole structure, but in some basic way, my mind rebels.
it gets mentioned more than once that lyra has a vital function, and the the fate of all the worlds hangs in the equation. and almost all the variants in this equation besides lyra are aware of their own function, and ready to go to any lengths to fulfill it. they even say it: well, if my function is fulfilled (and lyra is thus alive-- or conversely, dead), what else is there? what else is important? and yet, there's this dual message that life itself, everything to do with the 5 senses, breathing and feeling and -being-, that's the most important and true function one can fulfill. and it's like, everyone's accepting these chains of prophecy (or plot) in order for humanity itself to no longer have a story.
because in a way, as long as there is a predictable structure, a goal, there is a story, right. but if everyone is just existing and being happy fulfilling the function of existing kind of organically-- like the mulefa-- they would have no story. the mulefa remember everything, they say, up till the very beginning, and yet they can't -change-, they can't resist, really, they're not really people you could make story heroes out of.
heroism is one thing-- bravery, all that-- but being a hero or heroine in a story is something else. for that you need a purpose-- a destiny. something about you has to be predictable and trackable and dependable even in the changing, because the changing follows an arc, a function. this or that about you has to change, in fact, for the story to continue. this makes me think of metatron, and his inability to understand mrs. coulter even though he could see right through her. well, the problem is that he wasn't a writer, i guess. because he was only slicing her, seeing her atemporally in a sort of unchanging static state of being, as if there's some 'truth' about us that we arrive to. but there is no such truth. or rather, the truth of human beings is in the arc of movement, the angles and curves of it as much as any point on the line. because he couldn't see her as a wave and only as a particle, he couldn't see her.
anyway, now i'm completely off my initial irritable point and i'm sure i've lost the attention of everyone but myself (and that too is debatable). i can't be sure if the irritating inevitability of everything is intentional or not-- that is the nature of inevitability, almost. one -wants- to doubt it, because if one does there is hope, somehow. one hopes that even stories about destiny can escape it if they wanted to. maybe. and yet in a way, maybe no story escapes its destiny, and only deceives the reader into thinking that because it uses curves too complex to follow, i don't know. because after all, otherwise one supposes a story would become incomprehensible. obviously, things have to make sense and one thing tends to follow another in some sort of sensible pattern, if people are to understand it.
maybe that's why people have so many theories about the hp books, and yet i'm sure that in the end, what happens will be painfully inevitable and obvious. jkr writes with the same extreme inevitability woven into everything. sometimes (often) it drives me batty, but sometimes it makes me smile because there's just no freaking way anything else but X will happen, and to some extent we're all deceiving ourselves, trying to make the story more malleable than it is, in our imaginations. that was exactly the sense i got, reading the fifth book. i felt pleasure because i could see how inevitably it's moving forward-- though in `his dark materials', the pleasure of this is muted by the fact that it's not a rebellion against the mutability of fanfic, and there's only the sense of everything being a function of everything else, the inevitability of life and death and even a glance of understanding between two people. kind of depressing. but true in stories, at least.
i guess in this story about the end of god and destiny and all that, there's a sense that only authorial intent really matters. there -is- a god here, and he can be felt in every word, every step of the way, every emotion flying like an arrow to some target. mind you, i love this story to pieces (because it means to make snse, and it succeeds admirably), and i grew to love the hp books too (strange as -that- is, believe me). sometimes, in spite of everything, i wish things made a little bit less rigid sense, and then maybe... maybe... i don't know, see. but maybe, then. maybe draco could live again, or something.
i'm not used to things being so intricately plotted-- or maybe i've grown unused to it... but mostly, it's this sense that connections are made between people because they -have- to be made, because otherwise things won't move forward. not always, but sometimes that's particularly clear. that was my problem with hp, too. things were this way or that way because they -had- to be, in order for all these other things to happen. do human relationships actually work like that? can you look back on the "plot" of your life and see how of -course- you liked or disliked that person, and is there ever this sense of inevitability about it all?
i mean, yes, sometimes things just -are-, instinctual and immediate, but there isn't really a -reason-, no way to actually -explain- it, is there? that's what bothers me, the intricate linkage of explanations all clinking together. not clumsily like in fanfic, where one rails against telling-not-showing, not clumsily at all. less like a writing defect and more like a way of understanding the world as a series of chain-linked connections. it's like in those old anthropology books, i imagine, where they outlined the way to behave among "those people" in order to get "those results", as if people are in some sense predictable and you could kind of play them like a game of chess.
of course, the whole series is a game of chess in more ways than one-- and this doesn't make a bad story at all, in fact plenty of stories (lewis carroll being most obvious) depend on a rigid architecture, all the components in their exact place, playing their exact role. maybe this is what "plotting" is all about, i don't know. but it's been a long few days, and my head hurts, and i could use some chaos right now, i guess. not all stories are like this, but a lot are, i know that-- a lot of the best, even. everything in its place, a ballet of movements all building towards a cascading sets of results that eventually combine to inevitably come together in some sort of finale. without ophelia there would be no hamlet, that sort of thing. funny because in this case, this is a struggle against destiny, in a way, and it's brought about by this intricate set of necessary coindidences. i mean, the very concept hurts my mind, kind of. necessary coincidences.
and by the end, i am holding all this in my head, and the weight of all these inevitable coincidences is mighty indeed. there was some conversation at the beginning of the book about destiny-- and someone questioned the idea of it. it's hard to separate the reality of how everything happens from the eventual goal. you can't really escape destiny if your destiny is to escape it, can you. and if you -have- to make certain connections, and everything kind of depends of this connection being made at this exact time, and you can't make it at any other time, and you -have- to do this-or-that now and not later in order for a 100 other things to be able to happen and link together-- that's just kind of disturbing, isn't it?
in my own stories, things kind of amble along and maybe they happen and maybe they don't. obviously, my plotting is never very rigid, and there's room for error and doubling back and restructuring at virtually any point. if i wanted, i could rewrite any story with a different ending, though truthfully i usually feel the one i write makes the most sense, all things considered. but it's an organic sort of thing. the result grows out of the conditions i create as i write, in a continuous process of what might be thought of as evolution, rather than the conditions being necessary for the result. the result, in other words, is an emergent property, not a destiny that has to be fulfilled.
naturally, this is hard to make happen regardless, if you're talking about a book about a prophecy. i wrote a story like that once-- i was rewriting genesis using the given of adam being a fallen angel in love lucifer (the serpent). the same result had to occur-- the story had to end with adam being with eve, lucifer leaving heaven for good, humanity fallen, etc. my story was a small one, with only two players, basically, so it was easy to kind of let it tell itself. i mean, there was the basic given of "adam loves lucifer", and yes, i kind of explained it, but the character of adam kind of grew -out- of him loving lucifer, so it was all tangled together. so yes, their actions and responses defined their character and there was a definite emergent inevitability there (besides the inevitability of the Fall hanging over me). they were doomed, but meanwhile, they could feel and do whatever they felt like. i mean, in my mind there are a 100 different ways to get adam to fall, and as long as that happens, he could take his sweet time, basically.
and it's funny that in a story so dependent on the quantum many-worlds theory, there is this sense of minute necessity that spreads beyond event and to emotion itself. sure, any event can have any number of near-infinite results, but there is a definite sense that the story only follows the right result in order for the final movement to occur. and i haven't finished yet so i don't know the whole structure, but in some basic way, my mind rebels.
it gets mentioned more than once that lyra has a vital function, and the the fate of all the worlds hangs in the equation. and almost all the variants in this equation besides lyra are aware of their own function, and ready to go to any lengths to fulfill it. they even say it: well, if my function is fulfilled (and lyra is thus alive-- or conversely, dead), what else is there? what else is important? and yet, there's this dual message that life itself, everything to do with the 5 senses, breathing and feeling and -being-, that's the most important and true function one can fulfill. and it's like, everyone's accepting these chains of prophecy (or plot) in order for humanity itself to no longer have a story.
because in a way, as long as there is a predictable structure, a goal, there is a story, right. but if everyone is just existing and being happy fulfilling the function of existing kind of organically-- like the mulefa-- they would have no story. the mulefa remember everything, they say, up till the very beginning, and yet they can't -change-, they can't resist, really, they're not really people you could make story heroes out of.
heroism is one thing-- bravery, all that-- but being a hero or heroine in a story is something else. for that you need a purpose-- a destiny. something about you has to be predictable and trackable and dependable even in the changing, because the changing follows an arc, a function. this or that about you has to change, in fact, for the story to continue. this makes me think of metatron, and his inability to understand mrs. coulter even though he could see right through her. well, the problem is that he wasn't a writer, i guess. because he was only slicing her, seeing her atemporally in a sort of unchanging static state of being, as if there's some 'truth' about us that we arrive to. but there is no such truth. or rather, the truth of human beings is in the arc of movement, the angles and curves of it as much as any point on the line. because he couldn't see her as a wave and only as a particle, he couldn't see her.
anyway, now i'm completely off my initial irritable point and i'm sure i've lost the attention of everyone but myself (and that too is debatable). i can't be sure if the irritating inevitability of everything is intentional or not-- that is the nature of inevitability, almost. one -wants- to doubt it, because if one does there is hope, somehow. one hopes that even stories about destiny can escape it if they wanted to. maybe. and yet in a way, maybe no story escapes its destiny, and only deceives the reader into thinking that because it uses curves too complex to follow, i don't know. because after all, otherwise one supposes a story would become incomprehensible. obviously, things have to make sense and one thing tends to follow another in some sort of sensible pattern, if people are to understand it.
maybe that's why people have so many theories about the hp books, and yet i'm sure that in the end, what happens will be painfully inevitable and obvious. jkr writes with the same extreme inevitability woven into everything. sometimes (often) it drives me batty, but sometimes it makes me smile because there's just no freaking way anything else but X will happen, and to some extent we're all deceiving ourselves, trying to make the story more malleable than it is, in our imaginations. that was exactly the sense i got, reading the fifth book. i felt pleasure because i could see how inevitably it's moving forward-- though in `his dark materials', the pleasure of this is muted by the fact that it's not a rebellion against the mutability of fanfic, and there's only the sense of everything being a function of everything else, the inevitability of life and death and even a glance of understanding between two people. kind of depressing. but true in stories, at least.
i guess in this story about the end of god and destiny and all that, there's a sense that only authorial intent really matters. there -is- a god here, and he can be felt in every word, every step of the way, every emotion flying like an arrow to some target. mind you, i love this story to pieces (because it means to make snse, and it succeeds admirably), and i grew to love the hp books too (strange as -that- is, believe me). sometimes, in spite of everything, i wish things made a little bit less rigid sense, and then maybe... maybe... i don't know, see. but maybe, then. maybe draco could live again, or something.
