The origins of the idea
In the middle of 2021, I accepted a job offer in China, to start the following year. Specifically, I was going to be stationed in some small town in the boondocks, with nary a “laowai” in sight. Not knowing any Chinese, and not fancying my chances of learning it in a few months, I realized that I needed a plan for how to entertain myself.
Although I intended to see as much of that incredible country as I could (and, despite covid, I managed to see a fair few things), I also had to think about those wet Wednesdays in Wuhan when you couldn’t just go somewhere. What was I going to do with all that free time?
I decided I’d write a novel.
Originally I imagined this as a throwaway swords-and-sorcery romp, in a world of uncomplicated goodies and baddies. A popcorn movie kind of fantasy novel. However, like many things I do, it ended up being a bit more complicated than I intended.
Complicated, but interesting in its own way. This post tries to document the thought processes that led me to where I am now, contemplating a “magnum opus” three book series, with an optional prequel, working title: Akallaya’s Song.
Hiking thoughts
I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to write a fantasy novel, but didn’t really know where to go from there. Where do you start with such a thing?
I ordered some books on creative writing, but they mostly seemed to assume that you already had an idea. Other books seemed to imply that the idea didn’t really matter much: it would figure itself out as you wrote. Just fly by the seat of your pants.
That may work for some people. Apparently it works for Stephen King. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of just writing and finding out why later. I wanted to write about something that mattered to me. Something that I could be invested in. But what did matter to me?
It’s one of those questions that I dread. Even before it is fully formed in the mouth of my persecutor, my fight-or-flight mechanism is already engaging. See also: “why do you want to work for us?” or “if you could be any type of tree, which would you be?”
I may spend a disproportionate amount of time philosophising, but not so much that I can answer things like that.
I tinkered around with a few ideas, but got nowhere. The virtual wastepaper bin was overflowing with discarded drafts and doodles.
One day I was hiking across Dartmoor looking for a stone circle, as is my way, when I suddenly had a vivid image in my mind: A forest clearing. A young man and a woman beside a fire. The man was despondent and felt he shouldn’t be there. The woman was impatient with him. I somehow knew this was a central scene in my story.
Whatever else I wrote about, this would be part of it.
I spent a lot of time between then and now, including the majority of my time in China, working out exactly who these people were and what it meant for my story: What was their quest? Why did it matter? How was it connected to any story I wanted to tell?
A lot of that thinking was fairly abstract in nature, and I was joined in my navel gazing by, among other things, the music of Akira the Don.
For those who don’t know, he makes electronic music that samples speeches by some wise thinkers: giving a new way to listen to some profound thoughts. Luckily for me, Spotify more or less still worked in China so I was able to spend a lot of time wandering around backstreet Yanliang listening to Marcus Aurelius, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson.
They all had some input, in one way or another, on the following thinking.
Jung: anima and animus
As a teenager, I had a series of vivid dreams. A party of people, including myself, hiking along a coast beside a roiling, angry sea, searching for abandoned fortresses hewn into the rock… a hospital ward in which I was the only patient, watching myself… exploring an abandoned castle, knowing that it was my ancestral home.
They were extraordinarily vivid, and nearly 30 years later I can recall them. They had a numinous quality, the sense that I was being shown something deeply profound, but which I was not yet able to understand.
Curious, I took out everything I could find in the library about dreams and their meanings.
Predictably, most of these books were blatant hokum: lists of objects that supposedly mapped onto interpretations: if you dream about a hair dryer, it means you’re worried about blowing all your money away. That type of thing. I was disappointed.
But one book (“Living with Dreams“, I still remember it) was different. It was by a Jungian analyst, Dr Roderick Peters, and it used a series of dreams from a patient to draw out and exemplify many of the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung.
I can’t explain why, but Jung’s idea of the archetypes: images and associations that are baked into us like instincts, just seemed to be obviously and self-evidently true. So true that I was amazed that I had lived 15 or 16 years and never heard about this. I couldn’t understand why these ideas weren’t more widely known. I became a teenage Jung fanboy and started reading everything I could by him and about him.
One of the archetypes Jung wrote about was the anima: the female principle that calls the masculine ego to become something greater than itself: the “girl of your dreams” that you need to become worthy of. I think everyone who’s ever been called to create, or in any other way to try to produce, or to be, something worthy, knows what the anima is. Many young misadventures in love are caused by misunderstanding the nature of the anima (or animus: the equivalent process for feminine egos).
The forest clearing scene seemed to be, among other things, some kind of conversation with the anima. The man (let’s call him Delevin) was unwilling to do something and the girl (Nass) was trying to persuade him using every trick she had.
As I sketched out the story more, it seemed to me important that she didn’t speak his language very well, but she should know that he was motivated by stories. Sitting around the campfire, she told him a story: some myth from her homeland. This myth would have meaning for him, and somehow be reflective of the story as a whole.
A myth about people going somewhere, doing something. Quests. This was a fantasy story after all. Destroy the ring. Reclaim the throne. Find the gold. There needed to be an objective, and it had to be something only he could do. Otherwise she’d just go and do it herself and there’d be no story.
But what kind of quest?
Magic & (dis)enchantment
Well, I thought, if this is a fantasy story then presumably it involves magic somehow. So, perhaps the quest is about magic.
But what is magic? What do I mean by it?
My friend Sofia and I had had a conversation not too long before where we’d chewed over the same topic: that the world we live in, this world, is increasingly one with no sense of mystery at all. That it is becoming “disenchanted”.
None of our old stories seem to move us, everything is there to be mocked and knocked down, discredited and debunked.
As a result, we are left with a story about a dead cosmos with atoms bouncing off each other meaninglessly, while we – our consciousness – just sits and watches. That’s the story we are given, and yet somehow we’re supposed to motivate ourselves to get up and pay the bills anyway. It’s no surprise that we live in a world ravaged by depression and despair.
That’s what we’re asked to believe, but I’m not sure – deep down – that it is the world most of us inhabit. Most of us don’t think that life is – or should be, or can be – meaningless. There are very few committed nihilists.
From these two trains of thought:
- some kind of quest
- life has a kind of enchantment, even if we don’t know what it is
I started to foresee what this story might be all about. Delevin was disenchanted, disillusioned, dispirited, all the dis-s that modernity can throw at us. But Nass knew that he was wrong. She knew that he could help to re-enchant the world again. She was fulfilling her anima-role of motivating Delevin to do the thing that needed to be done to throw off the blindfold that prevented him, and us, from seeing the enchantment that already exists. The enchantment which she could see.
Escapism
The father of fantasy, JRR Tolkien, was accused by his critics of writing “escapism” – a charge that he took issue with in his essay “On Fairy Stories”.
Even in the early 20th Century he saw man’s estrangement from the land as the beginning of something bad, of some kind of “disenchantment”.
We paint meaning onto places, onto things. Try revisiting your old primary school, or childhood home, and compare that experience to visiting somewhere you’ve never been. One of them is inhabited by memories, associations. We might almost say ghosts of the past.
If you lived in the same patch of land that your great-grandparents had worked on to build, how much more would every rock, hill or tree be painted with these associations and memories?
Chased out of such a life that we have known for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, we might also yearn to return “home”, to a world like Middle Earth where every tree, river and stone had a story.
So, to the charge of writing “escapism”, Tolkien wrote:
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?… critics.. are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
In the end, he thought:
We make [create stories and invented worlds] because… we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
Embedded stories & underlying meaning
Tolkien was a convinced Catholic. My religious views were then agnostic at best, and Sofia’s even less charitable, but we both understood what he meant, we could perceive the enemy he was railing against.
In my story, if I wanted to say something about magic, I needed to express what we both felt: that magic is connected somehow to the meaning that we sense in the world all around us.
Magic is connected to language. In Ursula le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, we learn that everyone has a true name, and to know that true name is to possess mastery over the person who bears it. Be careful to whom you tell your true name. In Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, naming magic is the most powerful kind of magic.
From “abracadabra” to the most elaborated philosophies of the Golden Dawn, magic is connected to language.
Language is connected to meaning: language is how we express our experience of meaning in the world.
And stories are also about meaning. Meaning is why we tell stories. And we need to use language to do it.
Stories, language, meaning and magic. They are a swarm of interconnected ideas. They are what Nass and Delevin were talking about, around the fire.
This brings me to the first of the Akira the Don songs I want to introduce. The “lyrics” are taken from an early lecture by Dr Jordan Peterson, in which he introduced the notion of embedded meaning in story.
I remember listening to it on my earphones as I was walking around downtown Yanliang in China, and wanting to rush back home to write down what it inspired: more or less the thought-stream above.
"Underlying Meaning"
Jordan Peterson & Akira the Don
Thousands of years ago, Plato proposed that all knowledge was remembering.
Of course we don’t believe that today, because we believe that we gather knowledge as a consequence of contact with the world.
But you’ll see today that the knowledge that I’m going to share with you will strike a deep chord of remembering, and it’s because everything that you’ve done throughout your life is in one way or another predicated on what I’m going to tell you today.
I’m going to demonstrate this in a peculiar way, I think, because I’m going to start by telling you a story.
And the reason I’m going to do that is because models of the world that include phenomena like consciousness and emotions and motivations and actions and interaction are generally portrayed formally in stories and not in scientific theories.
And it does turn out to be that stories themselves have an identifiable structure, even a grammar, that makes them comprehensible.
Furthermore it turns out that even the simplest stories, especially if they are elegantly constructed, have an unbelievably profound underlying meaning.
And you can frequently see this most particularly in children’s stories. I remember I showed my son when he was four years old the Disney movie Pinocchio which, on the surface of it is a very strange tale, right? It’s a wooden puppet who wants to become “real” so he has to rescue his father from the belly of a whale.
Pinocchio is a deep deep story. It has echoes that go back three or four thousand years to the earliest stories that we know, and it’s so rich with information that a child can watch it over and over and over and over. I think my son watched Pinocchio 30 times. But why?
Well, it’s either because a child can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, or it’s because there’s something to those stories that’s much more potent than we actually consciously understand. You’ll find that in the Top 10 highest grossing movies of all time, are 4 Disney movies that are animated fairy tales, essentially a retelling of mythological stories. They strike a deep chord. Why?
Well, Shakespeare was of course a great literary figure and said it perhaps better than anyone else has, which is not surprising because he said many things better than anyone else has.
He said “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts”.
And so following from that, you can imagine that a story is no more about the props in the world than a play that you go and see is about the props on the stage. The drama is about the manner in which people actually exist, the emotions that they feel, the motivational states they encounter, the problems they have to solve when they interact with each other. And the play’s the thing, from that particular perspective, in which we can capture those aspects of our experience that are not only real but essentially human.
The layering in of audio from the Pinocchio movie is artfully done. The album cover of grey-bearded Jordan, stormy mountains and red dragons speaks directly to the archetypal sense, and the music is a golden vehicle for these ideas.
And these ideas matter. It’s as obvious to me as the importance of Jung’s ideas was to me all those years ago. Story is how we relate to the world, and stories need to have a meaning or else they are just rambling, incoherent nonsense. I think I’ve always known this, and I do not think Plato would be surprised to hear me say so.
I think we are creatures of meaning, and I think the cosmos around us is full of meaning. In the past I would have said that it was a projection merely from our own minds onto this random, dead matter. But now I’m not so sure that that’s true.
I think this perception of meaning is deeply connected to the idea of “magic” or “enchantment”.
I think we are being prevented from seeing something fundamental about the nature of the world because of the way we’ve been enculturated.
I understood all of that, as I listened to the song above, in Xi’an, in 2022.
And I also knew why Delevin and Nass were sitting in the forest clearing. Delevin would have to come to understand, like Nass understands, that the physical world is the stage for a great drama of meaning unfolding around him. That he doesn’t need to yearn for the myths and sagas that he read about as a child, because he’s already living in one.
It is up to him whether he wants to take up his role in that. But that’s for next time.