Willingly Trapped in Our Own Suffering

I’ve been hard at work on school things and some extra projects, so this blog is continually neglected. But I thought that this reflection, composed for my class on divine silence, might be interesting to you even though it’s not connected to speculative fiction aside from Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which comes in at the end.

I am fascinated by the way that Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone describes humanity’s strange attachment to its pains and limitations. In the introduction, he exactly nails the feelings of many young writers: “When you’re young, if you’re at all ‘artistic,’ despair has an alluring quality. You affect it, deploy it, stroke it gently like a sedated leopard” (3). He speaks of a young writer “attached to” his “toy despair” (57). This description makes me worried that he has seen the emotional, self-absorbed poetry I scratched into a small notebook in my lonely high school years. But Wiman generalizes this beyond just the romantic poets: he claims, “We are our wounds, it seems, and without them will not exist” (29). Quoting Emily Dickinson, he says that “A prison gets to be a friend” (59). 

This seems like a strange idea: why would we be attached to something that limits us, that causes us pain? Yet it’s so clearly the way our current culture works. Many young people self-diagnose various mental health issues to find a sense of belonging to an online community of people that is both misunderstood and marginalized. (I myself have been tempted by various videos explaining how female autistics are different and rarely correctly diagnosed, wondering if this could explain why I found it difficult to sustain friendships. I always ultimately decide that I understand people too well for this to be the case.) We seek to excuse our current behavior as something conditioned by past traumas inflicted upon us. The other week, I watched in mild fascination a woman in a YouTube short series who explained all the future behaviors of an adult based on the role they fulfilled in their family of origin. Were you (like me) the oldest child, the one who was responsible and never needed parental support, who became a third parent to the younger children? Then you would inevitably be someone who had trouble being emotionally intimate, who finds partners who need caring for, who never lets yourself have a bad day. Honestly, guilty on all counts, which is why this stuff is so insidious. By finding a prison we can hide within or a wound we can define ourselves by, we absent ourselves from responsibility for our present actions. We negate the ability or need to change. (Is this that different from blaming the devil (or God?) for our actions?)

From this perspective it’s easy to worry that the idea of Christian peace, “the notion that one could make a clean break with the furies of one’s time and mind,” (58-59) is a false optimism, a toxic positivity in the modern vernacular. How can we simply decide not to be affected by all these contexts that clearly affect us? Yet I’m reminded of something someone told me as a young adult which changed how I thought about my own wounds, my own prison: “As soon as we realize that all our problems come from the way we were raised, we become accountable for those problems and can no longer blame them on our parents.” Weren’t Laman and Lemuel raised by the same parents who raised Nephi and Jacob? All of them were dragged away from their home and suffered the privations of eating raw meat in the wilderness. Our experiences affect us, but they are far from being deterministic. Wasn’t Mormon raised in a godless society that seemed to know no accountability for its own actions? His parents certainly don’t make an appearance when he’s taken aside as a ten-year-old by Ammaron and entrusted with the future guardianship of the spiritual records. Were Mormon’s parents absorbed in the spirit of their times? Did they also feel the “sorrowing of the damned, because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin?” (Mormon 2:13) How did Mormon choose such a different path from the prevailing circumstances of his time?

an illustration of the dwarf and the tragedian in The Great Divorce, found here, artist unknown

Wiman finds some answers to this dilemma in the same place that I also found them: in the writings of CS Lewis. In Wiman’s poem “The Eft,” he references Lewis’s The Great Divorce. He specifically looks at the characters of “the dwarf and the tragedian,” who are actually one character split into two people. The tragedian insists that all of his troubles are caused by a lack of love and acceptance from his wife, while the dwarf becomes emotionally stunted by this refusal to accept responsibility. Wiman calls their state “the pleasure pain becomes when it becomes a thing to wield/a means of extracting meaning from someone else’s heart/when your own has run dry” (258). He resolves the poem by quoting Lewis again, who is in turn relating the words of his own mentor George McDonald in his fictional Virgil-guide form: “Hell is a state of mind—/ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind,/left to itself, every shutting up of the creature/within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell” (259). The only way to escape the prison we create of our own circumstances is to seek a connection with God, for “Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself./All that is fully real is Heavenly” (259). I had much the same realization reading Lewis as a college student: the unique suffering that the artistic youth becomes attached to is an illusion. All sinners are the same. But all saints become more and more themselves by letting go of their small obsessions, their little hurts, and coming fully into relation with God.

What I Read: August & September 2024

I don’t know why I’m constantly behind on these book reviews, but it seems to be a fact of life, so I suppose I should stop apologizing for it. August started out with my daughter was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s a big milestone for our family since she’s the youngest child. Now they are all in. The baptism itself was a really special event where both her grandfathers gave talks about their testimony of the gospel. Thanks to all the family who came to support her.

Also in August, my mom and I also went to go see Further Up and Further In, Max McLean’s sequel play to The Most Reluctant Convert. I didn’t think it was quite as thematically unified as the first play though he does a good job of piecing together CS Lewis’s works from the period surrounding the second World War. It was really interesting to see him portray Lewis in person. I sent the info about the show to the BYU campus event coordinator; I’m really hoping to get the show (or both of them!) to campus.

September saw the start of a new semester. I’m only taking one seminar class, a theory-based course on the concept of divine silence–meaning our reaction to not receiving the answers or comfort we may desire from God. You’ll see the beginnings of the reading for that class reflected somewhat in the reviews below.

I’m also starting work on my master’s thesis, which right now is going to be an examination of the Stormlight Archive as a post-secular epic fantasy. My prospectus was approved by my committee, and I’m having an absolute blast doing the research for it so far, which I think is a good sign that I’ve found the right topic to discuss. I’m also teaching first-year writing again and training to teach advanced persuasive writing. It’s been an interesting experience so far working with juniors and seniors instead of freshmen; it’s a lot easier to fill out a discussion because they always seem to have opinions on what to say.

On the research front, Carl and I handed in the final draft of our paper on religious clothing in the Mandalorian. We’ll be presenting that work locally at LTUE in February, and I’m thinking I may submit it to ICFA this year as well (either that and my thesis research).

This weekend, I’m presenting at VICFA, delayed slightly due to the hurricanes in Florida. The theme is on “Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems,” so I’ll be presenting my paper about LDS premortal theology in YA dystopias. I’m excited to see lots of other research combining an interest in real-world beliefs and fantastical literature as well. Perhaps I’ll write up a report for the blog, if you’re interested.

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Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury

Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master

Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.

This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.

A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.

But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.

Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:

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