Of Tricksters, snacks, and sunny Santa Barbara
In my time and place in earth’s history, water costs money but stories are essentially free. And yet, and yet…in the not-so-distant past, sitting around and hearing a story told was paid for by the material gifts that enlivened the community and created the full bellies and listening ears that gave a story lithe life in the dancing night. I have been there. I should know. I have sat around the fire and waited for steaming hot tea and chicken with cold rice at midnight and I have also pressed play on Netflix, and I am here to tell you the difference is not mere sentiment.
We have become a community who can make any kind of story, and mostly we spend our time on cheap ones. Not cheap in the sense that they cost little to film or write and create, but cheap in that you and I spend little of our life energy to consume them, because we already know them by heart. Friends is not a show that will challenge you if you are watching it for the sixteenth time, and the desire to be cocooned in familiarity is precisely why Friends was valued at something like half a billion dollars even in 2019 (pre-pandemic isolation).
It’s not that I want stories that suck you dry and leave you enervated as a contrast to the cocoon you and I both need in these dark times, nor am I suggesting that an individual moral failing is responsible for your affection for Friends and my affection for Psych. It’s that meaty stories require full bellies to contemplate with equanimity, and I want us to again feel full enough to attempt big, interesting stories, as authors and as readers (or watchers). I want stories that dare to be problematic, and I crave the supportive, communal stage needed for their being. I don’t, by the way, mean ‘problematic’ in the usual sense, in which we assume a sort of straight ninety degree response to a particular vision of the mores of the moment and mistake orthoganality for courage—no, I want stories that are problematic because they engage with the foggy complexities of real life.
Let me give you an example: I am not speaking to my mother these days. Also, I want my children to have some kind of memory of their grandparents. In this context, any attempt of mine to act with integrity is problematic precisely because there is no right answer in the first place. This is fine so far as it goes, and I have no trouble creating similarly difficult settings for my characters. But where I think my own imagination falls short is in supposing that being problematic means being depressed. It doesn’t, or certainly depression is not a requirement for leading a complex life while negotiating multi-dimensional moral and relational ambiguities.
The best tales are clear about the mess but not afraid to make bold choices to navigate the mess of life either, and that is a quality my own stories fail to demonstrate, at least to my satisfaction. My stories tackle ambiguity and hard choices head on, but seem to lack the rudder and the propellor needed to push from the morass of the initial setup to new oceans afforded by bold choices on the part of the characters (or the author). I fail to break the rules, and while I admire Trickster (à la Lewis Hyde) he has not yet snuck into my world and made off with a plot.
I want him to, desperately. I want stories that sneak up on me and go on interesting road trips and all I seem to be able to find are stories with ambiguous settings and characters frankly overwhelmed by the sheer concatenation of events. No wonder Psych appeals. Shawn Spencer may inherit much from Trickster’s world, but the show is packaged in a way that assures me that this is Shawn’s world and the chaos he creates centers him more surely in it. All my worlds are off-center and spinning rapidly toward a gulag of the mind or body. And so I find Shawn’s Trickster contemplatable and enjoyable regardless of how empty my belly is because—fundamentally—his Trickster makes tame trouble. Shawn specializes in snacks and sunscreen, confident of the ground he stands upon. That’s balm to me as an author who can’t seem to create a character that isn’t horribly suffering with no end in sight.
I aspire to more than Trickster-tasty snacks, though. To borrow from a different Lewis, I want stories that make good trouble, and I don’t know how to write them yet. Wanted, then: one Coyote (man, woman, or being), one havoc-wreaker, one wrecker of mead hall benches. Part to play: of your choosing. Setting: an ambiguous Jerusalem, a conflict zone, a world on fire with a fever of banality and baked-in conflicts. Our own, naturally. The plot: you make it up, you shake it up, you burn it all down if you want, but whatever you do you try something new. (Snacks are fine, too.)
So, myths and monsters, beings and non-beings (undead or mostly alive), fiends and enemies, human beings of nautical and tricksy persuasions, and robots with an instinct for carnage: any takers?
