Poetic faith melts away in the heat of a direct gaze, but it can change your life when you let it work in its own time and in its own way. I am confident Grant Morrison did not try to shoot Superman when they met, to check whether the guy was indeed bulletproof. Then again, it was not a bulletproof bodyguard Morrison needed, it was a helping hand with inspiration, and that was exactly what he got. A real hero helps in whichever way help is needed.
Poetic faith allows us to travel between fiction and reality, bringing back here what we found there. It is a magic of extraordinary potency, which Scheherazade trusted with her life. We must be careful, though, because the stories we trust will become the reality we live.
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The third thing Scheherazade knew is that reality is only wondrous when it is declined in the plural.
There was a time when we believed in Father Christmas, which means that we believed in the stories we were told about him. Then there was a time when we stopped believing, and our sense of wonder started to fade. There was a third time, though, which does not get enough attention, when we didn’t quite know what to make of the whole business. This was when we slowly came to understand that the cheery man with the sack and white beard was not real in the way we had thought, and yet we could not quite bring ourselves to believe that we had been lied to so blatantly. It was a time in-between, a time of doubt and questioning, occupying a liminal position between two different types of certainty. Tales of wonder reconnect us to the vital energy of that time.
Belief in Father Christmas is not an either/or switch. Even after I had admitted the sad truth to myself, I pretended to go on believing in him for a year or two, before telling my family I had worked out what was going on. I had felt conflicted. Given the effort they went to in order to create the illusion of Father Christmas’s visit, I didn’t know how to tell them they might as well stop; and also, I wanted to keep the magic alive for myself. As long as I didn’t say out loud that I knew that the magic gift-giver was in fact a credit card, the presents I received would still be sprinkled with fairy dust.
There was another reason, as well, not to come out as a Santa denier: although I knew that Father Christmas was not real in the same way I was real, declaring that he did not exist at all seemed disingenuous. The joy he had brought me had been real enough. To disown him would be a betrayal.
The time we stop believing in Father Christmas as a jovial fat man living at the North Pole is when we start to grow up; the time we proudly announce it to the world is when we start to get old. The preciously brief time in-between, when we dwell in ambiguity and we can’t make up our minds as to what to think, is the one we need to reconnect to.
As grown-ups, we know that the moon is a grey rock in space. It lacks plants, animals, books and basic comforts such as oxygen. It is not that interesting unless you are a geologist. Once upon a time we could imagine that it might be made of cheese, or that it was a treasure trove of all the things that had been lost on Earth; but now we have sent spaceships to explore it, we know that the moon is just a large lump of rock.
But the moon is also a goddess. She is Hecate, with a torch in each hand and three heads, mysterious and fearsome; she is Diana, the virgin who hunts in the woods with her pack of dogs, and who has a temple, still standing, on the shore of Lake Nemi, not far from Rome. In ancient times, the lake was known as speculum Dianae, Diana’s Mirror, because she is reflected in its waters in the form of the moon. Those waters are still there and the moon still reflects in them, and on special nights, someone still knows the lake as speculum Dianae.
The moon is a rock and the moon is a goddess: these are truths of different kinds, but equal value. The mainstream position of our culture is, more or less, that seeing the moon as a rock is a truthful perception because it is useful, while seeing the moon as Diana is not a truthful perception because you cannot do anything with it.
But Diana is useless only in the sense that we can’t land on her or mine her for minerals, only in the sense that a goddess is not a resource. She is a friend, and as a friend she can shine on us after a difficult day at work, she can make us fall in love, she can inspire bad and sometimes even good art. She can soothe our darkest moods.
The healthy thing to do is hold to both truths at once. If we see only the rock, we might quickly grow disenchanted; if we see only the goddess, we might come to deny the weight of the rock. Every story we tell grows stale after a while, if it is the only story we tell, and hardens into another certainty. We need many different stories, every one of them true, but none of them offering a sole truth.
Here lies the genius of Scheherazade: she saved the sultan by telling him not one story, but hundreds. Each new tale was a new possibility, the seed of a new doubt; each offered a new point of view.
When we are completely sure that something is true, it is because of the pull of that particular story. You might have a poetic faith in the idea that you have a talent for tennis, or that the moon is just a rock. The story of your talent and the story of the rock appeal to you, and they might have some basis in reality, but make no mistake, they are still just stories. Believe in them too much, without awareness of their poetic layers, and you might end up shooting at a guy dressed up as Superman just to demonstrate that he is not bulletproof.
We are not poetic monotheists, but poetic heathens; not monogamists, but polyamorous. Which leads us back to Scheherazade, her many stories, and her many joys.
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The fourth thing Scheherazade knew is that the root of story is pleasure.
Ray Bradbury, in a splendidly titled essay ‘Run Fast, Stand Still, Or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, Or, New Ghosts from Old Minds’, says that the question writers are asked most often – ‘where do you get your ideas? – makes him laugh. ‘We’re so busy looking out,’ he says, ‘to find ways and means, we forget to look in’: in other words, we are full of stories that we don’t see, seeds of wonders we misplace and lose for ever.
In his early twenties, Bradbury started keeping a list of nouns. Just that, nouns: stuff like, ‘the lake. the night. crickets’. These were simply words that came into his mind and which he wrote down, without thinking twice. In time, a pattern emerged: these words made him remember childhood enthusiasms, forgotten feelings. In these humble nouns he found some of his best ideas, which he would make into short stories and novels. Those nouns are floating in your mind too, unrecognized.
Bradbury could do something with them for the simple fact that he enjoyed doing it. In another essay, he says that ‘zest’ and ‘gusto’ are a writer’s best friends. Stephen King is on similar terrain when he says that writing is ‘about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.’
In my own way, I have been writing professionally both fiction and non-fiction for fourteen years now, and I agree with Stephen King with all my heart. Writers try to write their way to better mental and spiritual health – even when we impressively fail. Even those of us who are keen on making money rarely have money as our prime motivator. We want to heal our hurts, feel things more intensely, and we want to do that together with readers – which means, other human beings. We write characters with zest and gusto because we want to have more of both, a lot more, we want all the zest and gusto we can find. The quest for pleasure is the ultimate form of wisdom.