“Why are you trying to shatter my heart on every page?” Stephen asked George, to general laughs from the audience, before conversation turned to politics.
Why are all of the stories always about the darkest things? Why are we interested in the darkest things? I remember one time pondering on the nature of television fame, with images of The Kinks and Bela Lugosi drifting through the upper stratus, twinkling and beautiful in this lazy, tilting ephemeral spin, but, still these slightly gray things portending rain, clouds dreaming and crying.
I wondered why you never see someone taking a shit on television. For a while I wondered. While I looked at the clouds. I remember dropping a silhouette into that thought, this clothing store mannequin, watching the vapor regress from the spot where it landed. I remember it opening its eyes and thinking “Oh shit! I’m late for work.” It had a job. It worked as a plumber. And I found I didn’t care. “You’re a plumber. You set your hours. You make good money. You live a life of work without end, but a relative rest of ease. Your days don’t last longer than they should, and you eat well. Why should I care? I do that too.”
What I didn’t know was that he had a daughter through a previous relationship. Then I realized he’d had a previous relationship. One that was loving or at least intimate enough to give birth to a child he very much cared about. A kid that got off the bus after school and ate chocolate Snack Pack while waiting for her dad with Mrs. Gibson, the landlord that her father had met through his boss, when his boss first saw him struggling with a failing relationship that’d eventually land him in need of a new place to live.
I didn’t know that he used to deejay for his ex’s sorority parties when he and her were still together. That they had actually met one night when he was deejaying in a bar when she was in her second year of college, studying to be a dietitian, and that she caught him cheating on her once, much later, and while this was long before they were pregnant, and though she had thought she had worked it out in her own mind and come to terms with his infidelity, she was just never able to forgive him, and it eventually dissolved their relationship.
I didn’t know any of this until right now. And I find him progressively more interesting than the department store dummy I dropped on this page a few minutes ago. Not only that, now I find his ex interesting, I find his relationship with his boss and his super interesting, people I’ve yet to explore, definitely with their own sets of ordeals. Maybe Mrs. Gibson, a widow with no children, feels a little put out having to watch his kid after school, but can’t hold it against him too much, because he’s sweet, and pays his rent on time, and really cares for his daughter, and she just loves the little darling, a child that is a reminder of something she wishes she had had. But Mr. Gibson died several years after he got back from Vietnam, and her chances at starting a family, in her mind, died then too. He killed himself, Mr. Gibson, and the widow could never bring herself to get remarried. She had loved him so much. And Charlie, why… I’m so sorry.
There’s a reason no one wastes time taking a shit on television. It’s mundane. It’s normal. It’s work. It doesn’t have that emotional resonance that makes up a “story.” Which, of course, begs the question of how one is able to conjure emotional resonance (never mind the “why” one would want to or what a story actually is) and the answer goes into a bunch of psychological spin about how happiness and misery are relative concepts and enabled through the individual reception of an individual mind, and cognitive resonances are unique to everyone, but necessarily placed into a qualitative system where one emotive force is necessarily ranked alongside a multitude of others.
Which is all fine and good. But then why don’t all of the best experiences in reading fiction, in watching drama, come from the moments of relatability (like pooping), from qualitative systems in sync? Everybody can relate to everyday experiences. And so they should resonate very strongly, possibly strongest, right?
Well… no. To place the mundane alongside the mundane, regardless of whether they are relatable mundanities, doesn’t create that sort of qualitative matrix, that up-and-down, peaks-and-valleys, strikes-and-gutters sort of relationship that stronger emotions have, that is at the heart of real emotional power in a cognitive creature’s life. They effectively have a null value in that matrix. So to create a movement in that emotive matrix, to cause a stir in the response of another about things that are relatable, those things cannot just be relatable. They have to have some sort of positive or negative shift, something that when multiplied doesn’t come out to zero, some sort of pull outside of the comfortable emotions, the null values, something to fire synapses and really start monkeying with the cognition.
They’re dark because they have to be. The stories. They’re dark because they create contrast, create silhouettes in that matrix, imperfections that begin to give the uniform void some sort of shape, something that may then appear more relatable, more closely-aligned with someone else’s cognitive matrix, something a little less vanilla yogurt, something with flavor. They’re dark because the extremes of that cognitive matrix are far out, and exposed, and to touch them, vibrate them, make them resonate, requires going very far out too. Of existing in a space where things may be familiar, sometimes touching, possibly terrifying, but by no means mundane, by no means zero. There’s probably something to be said here about the joy of tragedy, of reminding yourself of what it actually, deep down, really means to be alive. But I’m not going to say it. Maybe I should give that plumber a name. Lot can be said about a name.