love
I appreciate love. it's one of the best forces in my life. but what I was thinking about when I wrote it down above, is that it's what so many grownup stories are about. sure, there's a kitten to find, or a gold mine, or the missing shell casing for the evidence in a murder mystery, but that's what gives us the excuse for the story. what the story really is about is hero Y and heroine X falling in love, despite all the distractions of the story. when I was a lil kid, specifically a lil boy, stories weren't like that. Homer gave us a hundred lil kid stories that we've modeled a zillion others after, and no, I do not count fables and parables and other such travesties of stories. I mean real stories, tales that wrench your guts before they let you go, and let you go without a moral or a lesson anywhere in sight. real stories. but grownup stories, and again Homer gives us some of our earliest examples, involve remarkable adventures but are finally about love. (I don't know if that's true in other cultures, but in the culture that derives from what the Greeks learned about us as human beings, yes, love is what grownup stories are about.) I learned that too when I started reading grownup stories as a lil kid down in Brasil. no, we weren't immigrants trying to acculturate, we were missionaries bringing our superior truth to the inferior natives, so we had no Brasilian books in our house, no Brasilian kid-stories, and no Brasilian grownup stories. (geez, when I look back at how damned arrogant we were, I am amazed we won any hearts for Jesus.) but we did have the Saturday Evening Post every week, and it always had stories in it. and we had other magazines, that also had stories in them. and as a lil kid reading grownup stories, I was initially confused. did grownups really spend so much of their lives confused? did they really pretend to be looking for an oil well for an hour, only to fall all over each other, kissing and such like, just when the oil bubbled from the ground? I mean, I sorta knew that my grownups and people they called friends, people from "the States", were crazy, but I really counted on grownups somewhere, maybe in Brasil, maybe in "the States", giving me some other definition of "normal". surely I wasn't doomed to grow up into one of the grownups I knew about. but that's a different story and has nothing to do with love. no, in cowboy stories, in detective stories, in stories where the hero was a merchant, or a sailor, or a soldier home from the war, or in any kind of grownup story at all, what two people were really after, no matter what stolen statue or make-believe amulet or inhuman monster seemed to occasion the story, was the excuse to glom onto each other and say "I love you." so you may not be surprised that in my stories - and I have told you that I'm a story-maker - people fall in love, often despite themselves, and often while allegedly looking for a bogey-man or a scarab. they do. and several of my test readers have found some of my stories satisfying, so I think I'm onto something. in any case, I appreciate love, even though I don't pretend to understand it or to know how it works, only some ways that it might start. Lindy and I fall in love again every day, and that's worked for thirty-four years, so there must be something to that too. yes, I appreciate love.
No comments:
Post a Comment