Planning a novel – 2

The origins of the idea

In the last post I wrote about my thoughts on the so-called “meaning crisis”, and how this thinking structured the characters of Delevin and Nassurellaya for the novel that I was planning to write.

I had imagined a scene with Del and Nass sitting in a forest clearing, with Nass telling Del a story in order to motivate him. A story about magic.

Magic seemed to be a short-hand for things that seem to me missing in our material-based view of the world: one of random chance and dead atoms and a helpless watching consciousness trapped therein. 

I intuitively believe that the world we inhabit has meaning. Like Tolkien, I believe that fantasy allows us to re-enchant domains where the mystery of life has been dismissed.

For these reasons, I didn’t want magic merely to be a plot device in my story, just a system of abilities, a substitute form of technology, but to speak to something else, to do with meaning and enchantment.

I see magic, story and meaning as being three inter-related concepts: stories re-enchant worlds by revealing the meaningfulness that underlies reality.

Nass in my story comes from a culture which already takes for granted the existence of magic. Her people’s basic assumption of life is that it is an unfolding story. She sees her role in this story in a particular way (perhaps a misguided way), but she is convinced that she needs to motivate Delevin to help her in own quest: he is someone that the gods, fate, destiny, the Tao has placed in front of her for a reason.

She tells Delevin a mythological story from her own people about the human hero Norinos and the goddess of light Akallaya. Together, these two overthrow a “dark lord”. This Dark Lord once ruled the world, and he maintained his rule partially by blinding everyone to their own true natures, and in so doing he made them his slaves.

This Dark Lord used the power of an idea to enslave people.

I believe it to be true that ideas have their own existence: non-physical, sure. But real nonetheless, and sometimes powerful enough to seize control of whole cultures.

Autonomous ideas

Carl Jung once said that people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.

At first I thought it was one of those cute pseudo-paradoxes you sometimes see, in imitation of Oscar Wilde, which turn out to be quite meaningless. But it turns out that I was wrong.

Many of the ideas that shape the world exist outside of any one person’s head, and they are often not generated by any particular person. Nevertheless, individual people may be controlled by them. These meme complexes are – by now – becoming impossible to ignore. They are fanned by social media, which is a problem that didn’t exist in the 1930s, but have always existed. 

I spent much of 2020 and 2021 watching, at first with bemusement and then increasingly with concern as the culture seemed to lurch from one memetic “idea” to another with almost no discussion:

• The idea that the premises of the Black Lives Matter movement was of such relevance to British public life that it was, unique among political positions, to be endorsed at every England and Premier League match for the better part of a year.
• The idea that disquiet at this position can only be predicated in a belief in racial superiority.
• The idea that “preservation of public health” overrides all other considerations, including that dying people be allowed the comfort of their families and loved ones.
• The idea that disquiet at this position means that you’re essentially advocating for the slaughter of the elderly.

These are just a few such memes that spread around the country in the space of a year, but I could list another ten without even thinking too much about it. Nothing about how these ideas appeared, spread, were enforced, or eventually faded away had anything in the least to do with rationality.

Indeed, I started to wonder if there were not a hierarchy of such ideas: some clearly more malevolent than others, which used these individual meme-complexes as a means to achieve their greater goals (the undermining of social cohesion in general, for instance). 

These memes spread around the population with far more virulence than covid-19, and with no real discussion about why anyone believed any of them. I suspect because no one really knew why they believed them.

We wonder at the excesses of the 20th Century and its mass delusions and psychoses in two world wars, as if in the meantime we had learned to become ruled by reason. 

The truth is that humanity is as susceptible now as it ever was to mass psychosis, the madness of crowds.

Ideas, it turns out, very much have people.

I no longer see it as far-fetched to think of some forms of collective idea as ageless and powerful. They are so much like ancient spiritual entities that it seems almost foolish to call them anything else.

Some of these ideas are neutral. Some of them are good. Some are very clearly bad. There is a war on, for the soul of humanity, and it takes place in each individual in terms of how they react to these forces.

I think this is what Nass’s story was talking about. A time when humanity was under a mass delusion that prevented them from seeing that they lived in a magical cosmos. This delusion served the ends of some Dark Lord: a spell they were under. 

It needed a collaboration between human heroism and divine intervention to end. That was the story of Norinos and Akallaya, and the story that Nass believed she and Delevin were also currently living through. The timeless world of myth intersecting with the temporal world.

Such thoughts in my head, I arrived in China: a place not immune to its own mass insanities, although perhaps susceptible to different ones than my own country.

I grew interested in the culture and tried to learn more about the philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism, which led me to Alan Watts, and to the second of the Akira the Don videos I want to share.

The musical cosmos

In the West (and in places influenced by the West, such as modern China) we sometimes see life as a journey. Like cats in a tunnel, we are goaded onwards with “here, kitty kitty” morsels, and the promise of some reward at the end. 

But what if life isn’t a journey? What if life is better understood like music? Music isn’t a journey, it’s a thing that exists in order to exist, and the goal isn’t to reach the end, it’s just to be.

Watts says:

Akira layers these thoughts in beautiful, thoughtful melody and video both adapted from Castle in the Sky from Studio Ghibli. The two things merge together so seamlessly (Watt’s words even fit the melody) that it’s hard to imagine them apart, having experienced them together.

Delevin learns that the gods exist in the form of the patterns of being that make up reality. The gods are patterns formed from the interplaying dance of duality in the cosmos, but that even that is not its final truth. 

He must learn to leverage his own love of story to commune with the gods of Story and Memory, and in so doing he begins to understand how his experience of the world fits into the greater drama.

Around him, other stories of personal loss and civilizational struggles reflect the same underlying themes.

The Khedasiri are the technocrats who want to guide mankind away from any indulgence in magic. They deny its existence at the same time as trying to leverage its effects in the form of their technologies. Their proteges are the Masentan Empire, of which Delevin is a product. The Masentans see it as their duty to spread their philosophy across the world, which has led them to conflict with another great empire to the North.

Within this empire, though, which has always had an acceptance that magic exists to some degree, are those who have found that it can be wielded destructively, despite the Khedasiri’s best efforts to suppress the forces that allow it. By making a pact with some of the patterns of reality that represent some of the more negative traits of reality they are able to win an advantage over the Masentan’s technological superiority. The world that the Khedasiri were trying to avoid seems to have been made inevitable by their tinkering and plots.

But some people, including Nass’s own people, have retained fragments of another form of wisdom: of how to live in such a way as to guide the dance of these competing forces harmoniously.

Next steps

Well, so much for a simple swords-and-sorcery romp, with some heroes bashing the skulls of orcs. The more I reflect on it, the more it seems that Delevin’s story is in fact the story that I live in too: trying to understand a reality that no longer seems to me to be a simple case of blind matter, with little globs of consciousness narrating the random and irrelevant happenings.

My process of planning the world for my story has mirrored my own developing understanding of my own story, of the world I live in. The one you live in too.

I would like readers of the story to reflect on some these themes, as they encounter them through the lives of Delevin, Nassurellaya, Ralamund and Ayune, and the other characters who have presented themselves.

For my part, I still need to work out the specifics of their stories in more details. Some chapters are written, some will need re-working as my ideas develop. Whole new plot threads need to be worked in.

I will add more thoughts to these pages as I work on it more.