In this response you wrote:
“I think joy and hope also require consciousness. Hope is almost always a choice to value oneself, in my experience, and joy is almost always a choice to celebrate value in oneself or the world. Maybe itâs that order and kindness and hope and joy are connecting forces, and fear is disconnecting. Maybe itâs that simple. What do you think?â
My thoughts on the topic are probably not especially profound but, in the spirit of sharing a virtual pint, Iâll offer an answer. Iâd say that whether chaos, fear, etc. are breaking or bonding forces depends on which direction theyâre going: from the inside out, or from the outside in. Thereâs a scene in Ursula Le Guinâs The Dispossessed (Iâm guessing from prior posts that youâre familiar with her work) where Shevik says that the only source of brotherhood (or sisterhood, or friendshipâ¦) is shared suffering. I read The Dispossessed when I was a teenager, and it’s been decades since then, but that insight â that a brief period of shared suffering can forge a stronger bond than a lifetime of shared good times (not that good times should be avoided) â has stayed with me ever since. In other words, my feeling is that external negative forces, or negative feelings forcibly induced by external conditions, can help create the most enduring connections possible.
That said, I admit that confusion and fear emanating from the inside are disruptive. Nor do they require much consciousness; theyâre more like manifestations of instinctive self-preservation or panic. Also, I admit that external negative forces arenât intrinsically creative or connecting â itâs their catalytic effect on latent kindness, courage, and internal conviction that does the magic. So, in short, I agree with your view and feel no need to improve your definition. But agreeing with you straight out would have been too boring.
Besides, bringing up the Le Guin book sparked another question Iâd like to ask. Although there are exceptions, most of the stories that continue to resonate in my life have something that separates them from ordinary experience: fantasy, scientific speculation, a wide cultural gap, etc. Iâm guessing that those kinds of settings let me step outside myself, let go of my opinions, and be more receptive to other viewpoints â in much the same way that some folks who are allergic to mainstream religion can accept the teachings of a mystic from a remote land, even if the precepts are little different from whatâs preached by the pastor down the street. Do you agree, and do you find using unfamiliar settings valuable enough that youâre going to continue writing in the sf/fantasy genre?
Best Wishes
Anonymous
I don’t mind having my definitions improved. Conversations like this are more like cooking than like carpentry (oh, there she goes again with the metaphors….). I’d rather think of these ideas as a multi-course meal than something that must be nailed perfectly together. There are very few 90-degree angles in my approach to life.
It’s been interesting thinking about brother/sisterhood. I’ve really been chewing on it, because it’s not something I generally feel, and on some level that bothers me, I guess. I see it as loyalty based on a specific shared experience (or set of experiences), rather than on the character of the individual people we’re ‘hooding with. If we have seen things, done things (or had them done to us) that we believe other people cannot understand, then we have a bond because we were there. We know. That word know is tricky; it’s not about imagination or empathy or fellow-feeling, it’s about direct parity of experience. It’s an experiential kinship: you are like me because we shared this thing. We know each other in a way that others don’t know us.
And I think that’s true. I think in many ways we can never “know” each other, which is one reason we have art, and psychology, and ecstatic mechanisms like drugs or drumming or dance. Why we have ritual. Why sex means something different when the people involved wish to be emotionally as well as physically connected. I admire humans for all the ways we try to understand things we cannot know.
And yet I find that I much prefer to connect on the individual level, rather than the “we band of brothers” plane. Perhaps that’s because I see people (myself included) using experience to divide ourselves so absolutely from one another. You can’t understand, we say, as if it were the end of the discussion. Experience does differentiate us, absolutely, but does it always have to be divisive? Here’s a low-voltage but common example: when a new mother tells me with that particular combination of satisfaction and pity that I can never know what it’s like to be a parent because I have no children of my own, I want to punch her, I really do â she’s right, and she’s also involved in some sort of social and emotional point-scoring that I find bewildering and somewhat Animal Farm-esque. Why can’t we just acknowledge difference? Why does some difference have to be better than others?
I know it’s not that simple. I do know that. I’ve had someone diminish and devalue my experience because they don’t share it and don’t, in fact, understand it, and I don’t like the feeling. And when I meet someone who I believe “gets it” because they have similar experience, I do feel a resonance. We can connect in that way. And I have seen people almost certainly save their own lives by finding a “kinship” group to whom they did not have to explain, justify, or apologize for their own experience. A group who kept them safe and gave them respite.
I think most people do find brother/sisterhood in bad times rather than good. I worry that in this culture, which is so frightened of difference, the result will be a bunker mentality that only divides us further.
The thing is, I believe passionately that people can bond over shared joy, shared dreams, shared love as well as over the traumatic stuff. Suffering and enduring hardship can catalyze our potential for being bigger, braver, more ourselves than we might have imagined; but I really, really think that love and joy and hope can do it too.
So here I am, answering a question you didn’t ask and not the one you did. Hmm, setting, setting. I think for me setting is a tool rather than a goal: in other words, I’ll probably never write a novel just to create a cool world for people to wander around in. I wrote Solitaire as speculative fiction in part because it was the only way I could imagine getting Jackal into her own head in a way that would be an undiluted experience for her and the reader both. I also wrote it as spec fic because that was all I could imagine myself writing at the time â imagine my surprise to find myself splashing about in the mainstream. The Kansas book and the mountain book are set in the present day US because that’s how I can best support the journey of the characters. Putting these folks in Ko, or Darwath, or even 12th century China, would make it impossible for me to tell their particular stories.
Having said that, part of the fun of the new books is that the settings are unfamiliar, at least to me. I’m learning about different kinds of community and different ways of life. I’m having a whale of a time thinking how I can enter into the experience of someone who shares elements of my culture, but whose external landscape is so different from mine. I don’t think I need specifically to write sf or fantasy in order to go to unfamiliar places; and with those settings, my goal is not to say to readers Look how different this is, but rather See how our places shape us.