Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: writing

• The Magic of Santa Claus

  Posted at 3:00 pm by michellejoelle, on December 24, 2013

  In some ways, I never believed in Santa Claus. In other ways, I still think he’s as real.

  I figured out pretty early that it was impossible for Santa Claus, as a physical human being, to do all the things he was supposed to be able to do. I crafted every version of magical theory I could to try and make sense of it all, but I couldn’t come up with anything internally consistent enough to be satisfying. My parents agreed, and so the story in my house was that Santa used to be a real person who gave out presents, and parents then carried on the tradition in his name.

  Nothing was ruined for me. I had just as much fun imagining historical Santa Claus as I did magical Santa Claus, and I loved playing the game – I wrote letters knowing they would go to my parents, and I left them cookies too. I pretended I heard reindeer on the roof, and listened for my dad to shake the jingle bells I knew he had by his bedside. I was in on the joke, but it still worked for me. And I think, actually, that it still does. As an idea, Santa Claus carries more weight (no pun intended), depth, joy, and truth than he ever could as a “real” person bound to the particularities of lived experience.

  What it comes down to, really, is that Santa is magic, in the same way that linguistic concepts are inherently magic. Words are magic spells cast on our minds, calling up all sorts of ideas and connections and connotations without us having to move a mental muscle, allowing you to participate in an idea that goes far beyond any quantifiable or physical referent. Rousseau expresses this most clearly when he explains, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, that concepts can only really exist in your mind as words or phrases. The reality of thought is purely linguistic:

  If you endeavour to trace in your mind the image of a tree in general, you never attain to your end. In spite of all you can do, you will have to see it as great or little, bare or leafy, light or dark, and were you capable of seeing nothing in it but what is common to all trees, it would no longer be like a tree at all.

  While this leads Rousseau to disdain the overtly philosophical for its total remove of the referent, I think there’s something more positive – something beautiful – at work here. The turn to the ideal concept is a turn to knowledge that goes beyond the limitations of your immediate surroundings, and lets you participate in something larger.

  To grab onto a general idea like “tree” lets you use that signifier to speak to anyone who also has that idea, whether the trees that are real for you have ever been real for your discussion partner. The physical, quantifiable things are only real for those who see it, while they are able to see it. Ideas marked by words and phrases can be real for everyone, everywhere, for all time – even if the linguistic marker shifts, it is still part of a larger network, wherein eventually, the word and the idea it represents meld together indecipherably, granting the power of the idea to the word by which it is signified.

  Says St. Augustine, in his dialogue De Magistro (The Teacher):

  To handle words with words is to interweave them like interlaced fingers: rubbing them together makes it hard to tell, except by each finger on its own, which is doing the itching and which the scratching.

  In this way, words pull you subconsciously into a network of knowledge and community and history without you ever having to think like a philologist. I think that images can do much the same thing, and have real power over the way we think and see the world. As ideas need not have a physical presence in order to be real, neither, I think do characters and stories. And so I believe in Santa Claus, because I believe in everything he represents – imagination, joy, giving, tradition, magic – and because I believe in images that let us hold so many ideas together in our minds at once without us having to break them down into disparate parts.

  And in this way the idea of Santa can become more real than just a collection of ideas held together under a jolly umbrella – it creates something new, something that can exist apart from the particularities of its inception and take a life of its own.

  That’s the reason I believe in ideas, in stories, in magic, and even in Santa Claus.

  Related articles

  • Why I believe in Santa Claus (chrismarkham.wordpress.com)
  • Why I still believe in Santa Claus (buncheslife.wordpress.com)
  • The Wonders and Physics of Santa Claus [Infographic] (infotainmentnews.net)
  Posted in Essays | 5 Comments | Tagged christmas, harry potter, language, Metaphysics, stories, words, writing

• A Tail of Bravery

  Posted at 10:00 am by michellejoelle, on December 12, 2013

  For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on my courage. My new year’s resolutions have been various iterations of “be bold!” and “be brave!”. I don’t mean anything too big by this. For me, this (at this stage) means stepping out in front of people. It includes teaching dance lessons, submitting papers to conferences, and seeking out criticism on my work, rather than hoarding it away because I know it is flawed. I’ve also started this blog to force myself to put my writing and my thoughts where people can see them. It’s scary – I agonize over posts, afraid I might be missing something important from my view, adding something extraneous to waste a reader’s time, or that I might be oversimplifying complicated things.

  It’s safer to keep everything locked up tight because you’re scared to lets your flaws be seen, but if you put yourself out there and are ready to handle opposition and criticism with grace and generosity, you’ll actually get better. Avoiding criticism just allows you keep and protect your errors and confusions. More often than not, others will be more constructive. My inner critic says “see how terrible everything you write is?”, while the outside perspective says “here’s where your argument is flawed.”

  One of these things is way more useful than the other.

  So here’s to bravery – even my small, tiny, minute form of it. In honor of this, I’m posting a little children’s poem I wrote on the subject.

  A Tail of Bravery
  by Michelle Joelle

  There once was a cat who was sweet and was brave,
  But his courage was all in his tail.
  The rest of his body was always afraid
  and he always would hide, without fail.

  He ran at the clanking of dishes and spoons,
  and he couldn’t abide pots and pans.
  He quaked at the swish of the mop and the broom,
  and the whir of the old ceiling fan.

  The places he’d hide often varied.
  He was as clever as he was afraid.
  When he found what he thought was an excellent spot,
  there’s no telling how long he would stay.

  He’d always choose someplace comfy and warm,
  a place well-equipped with a view,
  so he could happily sit and wait out the storm,
  and know when it was safe again too.

  Now recall what I said at the start of this tale:
  that this cat was both sweet and so brave.
  In spite of his fright (and his subsequent flight)
  there was something keeping him safe.

  It would rise like a beacon – a flag, no – a sign!
  from the edge of where ever he hid,
  ready to face whatever danger it’d find,
  while the rest of him stayed where he hid.

  It’d lay down and keep still, and slink slowly aside
  with the patience of a ferocious great snake,
  then strike all at once with a terrific loud thump.
  What a startling noise it would make!

  It could ward off intruders with a deliberate wag
  or entice you to come rather near.
  This part of the cat, regardless of fact,
  would never succumb to its fear.

  For wherever this cat would run or would hide,
  he was protected each time without fail.
  While the rest of his body was always afraid,
  he was always kept safe by his tail.
  Posted in Poems | 10 Comments | Tagged courage, my work, poetry, writing

• On Allegory and the Death of the Author

  Posted at 10:00 am by michellejoelle, on November 26, 2013

  After thinking about my post the other day, “It All Comes Back to Stories“, I wanted to come back to the ideas I started at the end. Basically, when it comes to dealing with clearly stated messages, we have a tendency to recoil and retreat back into examples, images, and stories. A dense philosophical text makes more sense to us if we can turn it into a story in our minds. I’m all for this.

  However, I mentioned in the second part of my essay “Sacramental Imagining” that I agreed with Tolkien’s assessment of allegory – that it exacts a kind of tyranny on its readers that was a little unsavory, and eminently harmful for the story. I’d like to qualify that sentiment. While I still think that stories work better as applicable metaphors than as rigid allegories, I do love the cave in Plato’s Republic, Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and even Tolkien’s own Leaf, by Niggle. All of these are allegories.

  The thing about these allegories is that with the exception of The Cave, they are great stories as much as they are devices, and as such they can be reapplied to different situations or messages, or taken just as stories in themselves. Leaf, by Niggle can tell us as much about art as it can the afterlife, and Animal Farm is as much a lesson in the perils of power as it is a lesson in Russian history. And they’re eminently entertaining as mere stories.

  On the other hand, Plato’s Cave may not have much of a story by itself, but it is employed not subversively, but openly – it makes no pretense to trickery, but instead serves as explanatory example of principles argued for conceptually in previous books. It seems less tyrannical for its honesty. Beyond this, you can easily find ways of seeing lessons in the allegory of the cave that go beyond merely illustrating Socrates’ point in context. People take it out of context all the time, to great effect.

  But allegory is hard to get right. You want the message to work without dominating the reader. You want to be able to see the message, but still have the story work if you don’t. But in the latter scenario, is it still the same story? In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, he develops an idea of historiography as a dialectical disruption, an academic move which tears a moment in time from its both its place in the temporal flow, losing sits places in chains of cause and effect, as its lateral context. It becomes something new and different when ripped free and concretized by the outside observer who is mired in her own flowing context. You want to disrupt the one-to-one comparison just enough to allow for some imagination in interpretation, but if you’re trying to say something specific, something you think is important, it can be tough to let it be so ripped from you and its intended context. It cannot be easy for an author to send their story out into the world, where it might – or will – be torn from them and created anew by readers. Overt allegory is one way of planting firm contextual ground in your work, one way of keeping an auteurial hold on a story so it cannot rip free and be cast off alone into the wind.

  Posted in Essays | 0 Comments | Tagged Allegory, Animal Farm, Chronicles of Narnia, Plato, reading, tolkien, writing

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