A mental picture I’ve been amused with and enjoying for a while. I like to think and talk about the Hero’s Journey, about dungeons and dragons and trials and triumphs and so on. And I have a bit of a thing for sci-fi and fantasy and all those cool things. So I tried to think about my own life and how that would map onto some sort of narrative.
Which reminds me of the funny problem of the first novel I tried to write. I tried to write about some sort of hero figure (his name was Cyrus Blackthorne). The problem was, he was too heroic. He was perfectly well-adjusted, perfectly smart and wise, strong, and able to do everything. There was no conflict. He was from some Kingdom that was turning evil or something, and he showed up in a tavern where he was challenged to a fight, and in all his badassery he won the fight, and then he left the tavern and continued to be a badass.
I was never able to finish the story, because there was no conflict. There was nothing interesting. There was no loss, no pain, no suffering. Just a cool guy going around being cool. Years later, some guy on Facebook would ask me to critique his novel, and he had the exact same sort of character. Ultimate Badass. In our eagerness to describe a badass, we forget that people only sympathize with characters who struggle and suffer. We care more about people’s efforts than their successes.
Maybe one day I’ll rewrite the story of Cyrus Blackthorne, just for kicks. But in the meantime I’ve been thinking about my own life, my own narrative. And I realize that of all the classes, I’m mostly a bard, a jester. At least that’s how I started out. I’d be the village idiot, the village fool, entertaining and annoying people with my clever tales. I’d get all the Village Likes, sometimes getting into stupid arguments, sometimes pissing people off, generally being an annoying but entertaining fly of sorts.
But eventually this village idiot started to disrespect his audience, and himself. It seemed too easy. In The Game, Neil Strauss talks about how pickup artists tended to disrespect their targets just as standup comedians start to disrespect their audience when they can practice a canned routine and get canned laughs. The whole experience becomes canned, predictable, formulaic, robotic. That was the fate of my village idiot. The village idiot decided to spend some time alone in his room thinking about what he wanted to do with his time. Platitudes like “you only live once” started to seem a little meaningless if he was spending all his time mocking and entertaining the drunks.
What was outside the tavern? What was outside the village? What do you really know if you spend all your time in it? Do you really want to be the greatest village idiot ever known in the tavern? Well… you know, once you begin that line of inquiry you’re kind of fucked. You have to get out just to answer that question. And once you get out your context changes, everything changes.
So the village idiot decided to do the most idiotic thing of all– he gave up his act. Well… his mind still ran acts on him, and would continue to play those old scripts inside his head. It was his way of seeing, his way of navigating reality. So that will probably never leave him entirely. Decades from that moment, when he got into serious circumstances, his mind would still probably offer him silly bawdy jokes.
But anyway so the idiot decided to go into the woods, to see what was essential, truly live, blah blah Thoreau. Once he was in the forest he found it hard to figure out what his original intents and motives were. Was he angry? Frustrated? Bored? Curious? Maybe all of that. But his context had shifted so radically that his old language seemed inadequate.
And the woods seem kind of boring too, though maybe that’s largely just a matter of perception. He’s used to the village and all its noise and color. There’s a lot of artificial validation back in the village, lots of people talking shop all the time. But none of it seemed to really matter so he felt like he had no choice but to leave. He returns to the village for a couple of days from time to time, but finds that he can no longer enjoy himself there. Everything suddenly feels fake, contrived, trivial. Everything is trivial, of course, but having answered the “call”– not exactly a call to adventure, but a sort of call anyway– his perspective has changed. The only way he can find any sort of meaning– insofar as “meaning” itself matters in any way (and it’s dawning on him that it pretty much doesn’t)– is to head further into the forest.
But the forest isn’t the interesting, pretty, wonderful place that he was hoping it would be. He knew that it probably wouldn’t be, that the tales of heroes and great folks who bravely voyaged into it would likely be a little overblown, a little dramatized… but he wasn’t quite prepared for just how mundane it would be.
It’s dawning on him that that’s all “enlightenment” really is. It’s just about survival, about appreciating the little things– the streams and the woods and the sunshine. But he gets tired and hungry and itchy and muddy and gross. Maybe from time to time he might catch a glimpse of some sort of exalted elegance, being one with nature and all that– but really, most of it is boring and mundane.
Inside his head, things haven’t really gotten very quiet. He’s still overthinking. He’s still longing for validation despite realizing that it’s all manufactured, it’s all a game, and that everything simply is– purposelessly, just drifting. He has to learn to live with himself and the story doesn’t get very much more interesting than that, for the forseeable future.