INSIDE TWICE - Kids These Days

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE SIXTY FOUR:

Hello subscribers! As I mentioned in this week’s illustration notes, it’s beginning to feel—around here, anyway—like Fridays are coming around every few days now! Anybody else having that experience—or is that just me? :D

This week, for all I’d love to ruminate on this somewhat pivotal episode of ‘Matt’s Tale,’ I think I’d just like to talk a little about the increasing challenge of writing this story at…this particular moment in history. I doubt very much that I’m unique in this respect, but ‘the world’ has been intruding more and more noticeably into my writing space and process. On one hand, as I bet you are also noticing, it’s just plain hard to pull away from—or stave off—the daily deluge of impossibly mind-bending news about how MANY crises are going on in the world. Not only is the pace of crisis and communal madness beginning to exhaust and distract me from ‘trivial’ creative tasks like writing—and everything else that used to define and structure my daily life, but it seems to be scrambling my very concept of ‘fiction.’

Shannon and I were talking the other morning about how nearly we’re now living as characters in one of our own ‘fantasy stories.’ Both the pace and the intensity of our actual world—and its impacts on our personal lives—even here in the relative sanctuary of these quiet west-coast islands—is nearly equal these days to that we used to construct to keep our stories engaging. Only…this pace and intensity in real life is not helping to keep me engaged! Quite the opposite. It is shutting me down—leaving me disoriented, in a fog. When ‘real life’ is like this…what is fiction? And what is fiction for?

Last week I talked about the way in which—for me, at least—speculative fiction, writing about the ‘unreal',’ was all about ‘stepping outside’ of the real in order to explore real life in the real world from otherwise unattainable vantage points. But where is ‘outside’ these days? And what constitutes ‘unreal’ right now? I’m not really kidding… It’s screwing with my head pretty deeply—not just as a person, but as a ‘storyteller.’

At a time when less and less seems clear to me, it seems more and more clear that a great deal of the social and political strife we’re currently seeing unfold is precisely a gigantic national and global crisis of dysfunctional storytelling. From county sheriffs warning people not to wear masks during a pandemic, to gun-toting vigilantes yelling about preserving law and order, to using the burning coastline of an entire continent as a political football, to insisting there’s no such thing as climate change as large chunks of both our poles disintegrate, to the wildly self-contradictory political maneuvers and justifications being traded in and out as convenience dictates on a nearly weekly basis—one thing seems extremely clear—none of this is about anything actually happening on the ground! Fire isn’t about FIRE anymore. Pandemics are not about disease or even death. Climate change is not about the weather, and law and order is indifferent to the LAW. It’s ALL about something ELSE now. And that something else is our stories. I am entirely convinced that what we are really seeing at this moment is a literal WAR of STORIES—long in the making.

BOTH what we now call ‘the right’ in this country, and what we call ‘the left,’ are broadcasting the ‘verity’ that if the other side ‘wins’ in November, life as we know it will end forever. Either we’re all going to be Nazis, or we’re all going to be Socialists…which is apparently something worse than Nazis, as evidenced by the hellish lives that Frenchmen and Canadians are imprisoned in… And NONE of it will be amendable again in any way for generations! I don’t see this stance as ‘meaningless irrationality.’ I see it as evidence of the real power and existential importance of ‘story’ in real people’s lives. It is not fire or flood, disease, political stability, or even economic prosperity we’re defending here—as, clearly, our conflicting and increasingly extreme behaviors are intensifying those threats, not minimizing or resolving them. What we’re defending here—at the cost of virtually everything else—is our stories. As if, should our stories be overthrown, we ourselves might perish…

Let that thought sink in for a minute. I’ve been letting it sink in quite a bit around here, and I can’t help wondering how differently things might start going—how differently we might handle them—if more of us more clearly understood what we’re really fighting over—and what’s really at stake for people. Why ‘stories’ matter THIS MUCH! I fear the ‘stated issues’ we are shouting at each other about these days may turn out to be more ‘masks’ for something else, something deeper and wider even than the very real and imperative crises that have been taken hostage by them. …?

What is less and less clear to me amidst all this is whether this situation makes powerful and effective storytelling by people who are aware of its mechanics and have some skill at it more important than ever…or less relevant than it was when human ‘story’ was an elusive, underground river harder to find and access, rather than a surface flood in which we are all flailing in search of shore. Does what I’m doing ‘matter’ at this moment like it seemed to once? Or can any ‘invented’ story at this moment in history hope to hold its own beside the one we are all living through? I wish I knew…anything anymore.

The times are playing with my attempt to craft this story in some other interesting ways as well, but I will save discussion of those for next week—because I, at least, find too much to think about above to just go blithely on to some ‘next item’ without letting the last one percolate a little.

FYI: This week’s episode is the last installment for a while in the ongoing narrative thread of ‘Matt’s Tale’—and I’ve left him at an important turning point in his story: the discovery of people and lives sufficiently compelling to wrest his attention from his own little life of vaguely shifting discontent, and the weird peccadillo it’s left him in. Might these times have some similar impact on some of us as well…? Who knows?

Next week, we return to the ‘current time’ threads of Dusty and Colleen, Thom and Anna, Amber, Piper, Rain, The Lady and Anselm. Remember them? :]

Until next week, I wish us all WELL—and spaces, in the chaos, for peace and contemplation, not to mention kindness to others and ourselves. I believe such things must be cultivated more intentionally than ever in the middle of all this. They’re going to be more and more priceless resources as we and those around us navigate this huge transition in the world. With that in mind, I offer you this little tune by a guy named ‘Brother James’ that’s been speaking to me lately in a pleasant and helpful way. :]

Hope to see you back here next week! Until then, thanks for coming along. ❤