Everybody wants a nice little story, because they like to think of their lives as stories. They want a beginning, middle, and end, because they can grasp that. They understand that. But that's nuts. There is no end, necessarily. Not until the final one.
We want to know we have some modicum of control. We want to have someone we can overcome, because that means we can, in fact, overcome.
But the truth is sometimes things just happen and sometimes there's nothing you can do about it, or maybe there is something you can try to do about it but it doesn't work, or there's something you can do about it but it's not enough to "win" or succeed.
Nobody wants to hear that though. They don't want to read that. They don't want to see it on the TV. They don't want to pay money to see it on the stage or screen.
If I were writing a book or movie, I would have a brilliant, courageous protagonist and a dastardly villain, and I would fill it with love, loss, betrayal, redemption, victory, and defeat, and it would end with a culminating battle for the fate of men's souls.
And then BAM! A super-volcano would erupt and everyone on that side of the planet, participants in the story and disatisfied plumbers unclogging toilets hundreds of miles away, would all be incinerated together at once.
And then I'd finish by showing the other side of the planet as some pauper-woman was doing the wash in a stream and she'd look up at the fast-encroaching, ominous clouds.
And that movie or book would be an absolute failure.
And if that were too esoteric, I'd set it in Aztec times and a sick Indian would come into Tenochtitlan, and he wouldn't be a character and his arrival wouldn't be a plot point. The characters wouldn't know about him and I might not even mention him. All that would happen is that in the heat of the moment, the climax, the showdown between the hero and bad guy, nearly everyone would die of smallpox, no matter how noble or despicable they might be.
And Cortes, oblivious, would enter as a conquering hero as the Aztecs coughed and sputtered to death around him. And then I'd finish with an widower dumping his chamber pot out the window and onto the street in Edinburgh.
How do you think that would be received? The intelligensia would claim it was a War and Peace knock-off, if I were lucky, and normal people would avoid it in droves.
We put ourselves in books or movies to escape what we already kind of know and suspect. We don't have that kind of control that typical characters have. But then we come out of the book or theater and subconsciously want life to be like what we just read or saw and we lie to ourselves that life is always controllable. And a lot of it is. So we convince ourselves that, in fact, all of it is. And we are dead, damn wrong. Believing something that isn't true and can't be true is insanity.
When it comes to the world and everyone else in it, all we can really and truly do as individuals is (possibly) influence. The only thing we can control is ourselves, and I don't even mean our bodies since some of us go bald and some get cancer. I mean our thoughts, and behaviors and attitudes. That's an amazing realization. And yet it's not enough. It depresses people. They don't want to have control over themselves. They want to control everything else.
Because if we try to control others and they succumb, we get to gloat in our domination. And if we try and fail, they were too blind to see what was good for them and we can relish masturbatorily as though martyrs to wisdom . "If only they'd listened..."
But self control? That's terrifying. Sure, all success is ours if we achieve, but, so too is failure. People would rather avoid success than court failure. Failure to control oneself means very little if one never sets about trying to in the first place. But to acknowledge our innate impotency by failing to control the one thing we possibly can? Nope. Not gonna happen.
If there's anything I've learned on this marble, it's that nobody likes to feel bad about themselves and nobody, readily, likes to acknowledge that they're powerless.
We want to know we have some modicum of control. We want to have someone we can overcome, because that means we can, in fact, overcome.
But the truth is sometimes things just happen and sometimes there's nothing you can do about it, or maybe there is something you can try to do about it but it doesn't work, or there's something you can do about it but it's not enough to "win" or succeed.
Nobody wants to hear that though. They don't want to read that. They don't want to see it on the TV. They don't want to pay money to see it on the stage or screen.
If I were writing a book or movie, I would have a brilliant, courageous protagonist and a dastardly villain, and I would fill it with love, loss, betrayal, redemption, victory, and defeat, and it would end with a culminating battle for the fate of men's souls.
And then BAM! A super-volcano would erupt and everyone on that side of the planet, participants in the story and disatisfied plumbers unclogging toilets hundreds of miles away, would all be incinerated together at once.
And then I'd finish by showing the other side of the planet as some pauper-woman was doing the wash in a stream and she'd look up at the fast-encroaching, ominous clouds.
And that movie or book would be an absolute failure.
And if that were too esoteric, I'd set it in Aztec times and a sick Indian would come into Tenochtitlan, and he wouldn't be a character and his arrival wouldn't be a plot point. The characters wouldn't know about him and I might not even mention him. All that would happen is that in the heat of the moment, the climax, the showdown between the hero and bad guy, nearly everyone would die of smallpox, no matter how noble or despicable they might be.
And Cortes, oblivious, would enter as a conquering hero as the Aztecs coughed and sputtered to death around him. And then I'd finish with an widower dumping his chamber pot out the window and onto the street in Edinburgh.
How do you think that would be received? The intelligensia would claim it was a War and Peace knock-off, if I were lucky, and normal people would avoid it in droves.
We put ourselves in books or movies to escape what we already kind of know and suspect. We don't have that kind of control that typical characters have. But then we come out of the book or theater and subconsciously want life to be like what we just read or saw and we lie to ourselves that life is always controllable. And a lot of it is. So we convince ourselves that, in fact, all of it is. And we are dead, damn wrong. Believing something that isn't true and can't be true is insanity.
When it comes to the world and everyone else in it, all we can really and truly do as individuals is (possibly) influence. The only thing we can control is ourselves, and I don't even mean our bodies since some of us go bald and some get cancer. I mean our thoughts, and behaviors and attitudes. That's an amazing realization. And yet it's not enough. It depresses people. They don't want to have control over themselves. They want to control everything else.
Because if we try to control others and they succumb, we get to gloat in our domination. And if we try and fail, they were too blind to see what was good for them and we can relish masturbatorily as though martyrs to wisdom . "If only they'd listened..."
But self control? That's terrifying. Sure, all success is ours if we achieve, but, so too is failure. People would rather avoid success than court failure. Failure to control oneself means very little if one never sets about trying to in the first place. But to acknowledge our innate impotency by failing to control the one thing we possibly can? Nope. Not gonna happen.
If there's anything I've learned on this marble, it's that nobody likes to feel bad about themselves and nobody, readily, likes to acknowledge that they're powerless.
