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The
Maplewoods Mirror #21 - December 2007
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and
writing. If you want to see my website for past issues and other
news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.
There is a common theme this issue: magic. It’s
not the “nothing up my sleeves” variety (which my nephew Micah Lasher is
particular great at; his book The
Magic of Micah Lasher is still available). Rather, here it’s
about the magic of thinking. You can send yourself to Pluto or into
the arms of a movie star—it’s all in your noggin.
In This Issue:
MAGICAL THINKING
It’s nearing Christmas and Santa is loading up
his sleigh with toys created by little elves. Is Santa the head of a
cheap-knockoff ring where children get Nintendos and Barbies and other
major brands without Santa paying royalties? Is Santa giving away my
books, too, and I get squat? And how does Santa get to 2.14 billion
Christian people in an evening in one sleigh and to people without
chimneys?
Of course, as an adult, I’m deep into what
Swiss psychoanalyst Jean Piaget called the formal operational stage, the
last of four stages after sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete
operational stages. Piaget recognized that human beings not only have
physical growth stages but also cognitive development ones.
In the first stage, everything is “me” based and when something is gone
from one’s senses, such as Mommy, it doesn’t exist.
That’s why Peekaboo is so amazing to a
baby. The object is gone then, poof, the person is back. In the
last stage, one has the ability to think abstractly, reason logically, and
draw conclusions from the information available. Thus the information
on Santa is suspect. In the first two stages, however, Santa and
everything magical (the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Iraqui WMDs) is
perfectly reasonable.
When I happened to mention to a psychologist
friend that my stepdaughter, Ellen, at age nine still believes in Santa yet
is asking about how do babies come to be, the psychologist said, “Oh,
that’s so sweet. She’s minutes away from fully being in the concrete
operational stage.” I felt my friend’s wistful longing.
What she said, too, goes to show how our world
view is shaped greatly by what we do. Most people don’t ponder which
stage of thinking they’re at—or what rung of Lawrence Kolberg's moral development ladder
they may be on. This also reminds me of how the professors at CalArts
are different from those at Caltech who are different from those at the
Harvard Business School. All think dissimilarly. (This makes me
imagine what if they had to create a project together? Perhaps they’d
create a dance to the science of Voodoo Economics.)
The psychologist and I then had a brief conversation
on magical thinking. It seems to me that what I do as a fiction
writer is slip among the pillars of the four stages of cognitive
thinking. It allows me to make up stories that have meaning that, at
their best, also have a sense of magic to them.
I also mentioned to my friend that adults need
magic, and it’s why so many people, for instance, believe in the astrology,
reincarnation, the power of the coin toss, and the movie The Notebook.
“Oh, I love The Notebook,” said my
friend.
“Yes, but come on: a guy without any great
means of support restores a seaside mansion to perfection, writes 365
letters without a response, and morphs from Ryan Gosling to James Garner?”
“But I love it.”
Many people do. Wouldn’t it be great if
we could keep a passion for a person with the intensity of Gosling and
Rachel Adams and with a love so strong that when we’re old and gray we can
decide to lie in bed together and die at the same time without any use of
drugs? We want to believe in such romance.
Roger Ebert in his review said, “The
Notebook is a sentimental fantasy, but such fantasies are not
harmful. We tell ourselves stories every day to make life more
bearable. The reason we cried during Terms of Endearment was
not because the mother was dying, but because she was given the opportunity
for a dignified and lucid parting with her children. In life it is more
likely to be pain, drugs, regret and despair.”
As I see it, storytellers are a type of brain
surgeon who bring back a little of the magical thinking we lost in
childhood. It’s where, as Garrison Keillor says of Lake Woebegon,
“All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the
children are above average." We need our stories.
ARTHUR C.
CLARKE ON MAGIC
The above reminded me how technology can seem
like magic. When cell phones first came out, didn’t it seem like
magic? We could carry a phone smaller than the one at home, yet
someone dialing our cell number could find us no matter where in the
country we were? (“Hello,” you whispered. “I’m in the movie
theatre watching The Notebook…)
I think of my grandparents who, at the
beginning of the 20th century when they were kids, “zipped”
around by horse and buggy and were entertained by theatre. By the
time they died in the 1980s, they’d driven their Mercedes-Benz, had
regularly watched color television, and had flown around the world.
My grandfather could “dial up” and chat with people on his ham radio that
required three major-sized antennae on telephone poles. My
grandmother could make dinner rolls by merely bashing a cylinder against
the counter, and dough burst from the cylinder.
They missed iPods, TVs as flat as paintings,
and Howie Mandel.
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in
his book Profiles of the Future created three laws
that he said were true about the future. They are:
1.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist
states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he
states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2.
The only way of discovering the limits of the
possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.
Later he added, “For every expert there is an
equal and opposite expert.”
I often am amazed at how we adapt to new
technology without worry of how it might change us. Why is it when
I’m at a restaurant, I can see a table of two people and each person is on
a cell phone? Do you have to be far away to be close to a person
now? Why do I feel anxious when I turn off my cell phone? When
will the orgasmatron be invented?
I wish you a magical new year.
THE HABIT OF WRITING
(PART TWO)
Among a number of helpful websites devoted to
writers, one I particularly like is called Wordswimmer. Its
author and designer, Bruce Black, a writer, editor of children's books, and
writing instructor, has over the last few years asked writers to discuss
their craft. Click here for a handy list.
For instance, Steve Almond talks about
obsession. Carrie Jones discusses risk. J. Patrick Lewis muses
about “journey.” I happened to write for Wordswimmer last year on the
subject of energy and structure. You can read about that by clicking here.
Suzette
THE MAGIC OF MANNEQUINS
My wife Ann recently said, “In your newsletter,
are you going to write about Suzette?” Suzette recently popped into
our lives, thanks to the Internet and a UPS delivery. Suzette, a
mannequin, had not popped into my head as a subject, but, hey, when a funny
idea presents itself, run with it.
Years ago Ann had worked in a vintage clothing
store in Pasadena’s Old Town, which reinforced Ann’s love to dress with
flair and style. She left her employment with a mannequin,
Jacqueline, a dummy that her first husband did not appreciate, and it was
given away, much in the same way Ann’s three cats were turned into outside
cats and disappeared after a while. Janis Joplin may have crooned
that “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” but freedom
is also having a spouse who doesn’t mind the odd purchase and
animals.
One night after teaching at USC and I came home
energized, I was talking with Ann who had been reading in bed. As I
spoke, she looked particularly bemused, much more than during any regular
rundown of an evening. I said I was thinking of buying a
seaside mansion and restoring it, and when I did, we’d dress up and… no,
that was another conversation. I was talking about something else
when in the corner of my eye I saw someone, gasped and flinched. I
then stared at a woman frozen at the edge of the bathroom doorway.
Ann laughed and said, “This is Suzette.”
Suzette stayed in our bedroom the first month,
and the number of times I thought I was home alone, went into the bedroom
and jumped in surprise by Suzette, I can’t tell you. There’s
something so primal in our brains about the human form that even when a
mannequin is there, we first think “real.” I’ve noticed something
similar with my continuing sessions in a life drawing class. I can
take a cotton ball, dip it in graphite, and create a human shape, and
there’s something compelling about it.
Maybe that’s why I write stories, too,
animating human forms through actions, realizations, and remembrance.
Writing is an attempt to seek the truth in the mystery of our
existence. A big truth is that being human and organic is strange.
Suzette now is part of our living room décor,
watching vigilantly over the Christmas tree, whose ornaments the two dogs
and two cats play with and from whose water bowl they drink.
Suzette ponders benignly at them. She also seems to miss when our
newest dog, Scruffle, poops on the hearth. Between Scruffle,
Suzette, Ellen, Ann, the other dog and the two cats, I get no respect, I
tell ya.
Ah, but it’s never a dull moment here.
Isn’t that like Christmas?
Have a Merry one.
Scruffle
“Cats are intended to teach us that not
everything in nature has a function.”
Garrison Keillor
See
you next time,
--Chris
For
reviews or more information on either of my two books below, click on the
cover.
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