Ink & Penwipers

Oops, I'm talking about friendship again. Let's take the traditional pause for all my longtime friends to groan.

[pause] And also with you.

So a couple of years ago I wrote a meditation on Friendship and Eros as motive forces in stories, which you can read if you like, but here's the gist.

In stories, romantic love (eros) tends to function on a mythic level to signify healing or mending something that was broken; representative reconciliation; and redemption for one or both of the characters. So much so that when we read or watch a story that has no romantic love, or in which romantic love is unfulfilled, we are tempted to think that the characters have missed their chance (sometimes literally!) at salvation. Or that the universe the story takes place in is still broken.

Likewise in stories, friendship functions to signify that which is unbroken or in some cases unbreakable. If you have a friend, you discover that something is right with the world, that something is right with yourself, that there is a part of you that doesn't need fixing, or that makes fixing the broken part worthwhile. A story about friendship isn't a story about redemption, it's a story about vindication. A universe with friendship in it speaks of stability in spite of the odds. Friendship is relief from a siege, a cleared path in a lane of mines, a point of perception that bypasses and sometimes even neutralizes chaos.

The point is, we want out of stories what we want out of the world. ( Here follows some aro patriotism )

All this is by way of saying that I just finished Megan Whalen Turner's Thick as Thieves, and now that I've resurrected myself from a death of flailing squee, I'm perpendicular enough to cry out my gratitude to MWT for writing in these times a book that is a paean to friendship. In a series that affirms friendship with its true mythical strength.

( Spoilers, obviously )

No mode of human love is watertight; and we wouldn't want it to be. But mythically speaking, we need robust, physical, unabashedly equal friendship, not just for the aromantic among us, but for everybody who wants breathing room for the love they love best.

There, that should do it for another couple of years.

I've had some thoughts cooking over the summer, about narrative theology and writing and eucatastrophe, and I've decided to spend the morning sifting them a little, so here is an essay which truly lives up to its name of something that is being tried. So:

The Writer and Eucatastrophe

As some of my readers may know (and indeed know better than I), narrative theology is a contemporary branch of theology that posits that our lives are story-shaped, and if we are made in the image of God, our experience with God, and the universe itself, is story-shaped. (This is equally true if God is made in the image of us, as non-theists might argue.) The question then becomes what kind of story it actually is, and how shall we represent it to ourselves. J.R.R. Tolkien says that the story of the universe is shaped like "eucatastrophe" -- a word he invented to describe the "good" catastrophe that redeems and even in some way reverses the horror and dissolution that have reached their most exquisite pitch. In Tolkien's view, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the eucatastrophe of human history, and the Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation, the story within a story that gathers up all the other stories. But when I began thinking about these things, this isn't where I started from.

( I started with the act of writing. )

You don't have to be a Christian to be attracted to and identify with the eucatastrophic pattern. And indeed, some people are Christians in spite of being attracted to the dyscatastrophic pattern. But it seems evident to me that the dyscatastrophic narrative is the master narrative of our age. It's been said about theology that we are generally right in what we affirm and wrong in what we deny, so we deny the narrative we are not aligned with at our peril. But what I have noticed recently is that dyscatastrophe can get away with "feeling" true where eucatastrophe cannot -- and this in the narrative of my own life ("I'm never going to get any better. I'm always going to be a useless self-preoccupied wretch," &c.) When a book or movie presents a eucatastrophic pattern, we are quick to say, "Well, it's factually flawed and thereby discredited." Why should we discredit a story on the basis of facts (either made-up facts or verisimilar facts)? Because we think the larger fractal pattern is borne out by doing so. (In different language, we think it keeps closer to the truth.) If we prefer eucatastrophe, we may discredit such stories because we fear our love will not prove to be the shape of reality after all. I dare not speculate on the processes of individual minds in this matter, but this seems to me the pattern of the public consciousness in our times.

There are two stories that Charles Williams told that I think reflect a larger reality. One is that salvation is immanent in relationships: the decisions we make about the people with whom we have to do are the very stuff that heaven and hell are made of, and those decisions have a concomitant weight. The other is that the alternative to co-inherence is incoherence. In Sacred Desire: Growing in Compassionate Living, Sally Severino and Nancy Morrison talk about the redemptive attuning that people bring into play in order to absorb, assimilate, and thrive after trauma; and one of the things they say is that people exhibiting redemptive attuning have a coherent autobiographical memory. That is, they know how to tell the story of their lives; they are not demoralized by the bombardments of sheer existence. Co-inhering, attuning, are creative acts that make it possible for our lives to mean something.

Without being so naive as to deny out of hand the compelling nature of dyscatastrophe, I think we need eucatastrophe. I think we need it desperately. I think we need it in the way we tell ourselves the story of our lives, and I think we need it in the way we tell the story of the countries we live in, and I think we need it in the way we talk about the larger reality of God and the universe. And therefore I think we need it in our fiction. I think we need to understand that eucatastrophe is not a saccharine denial of pain, but an encompassing of it -- the photo negative to "the light shined in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it." Eucatastrophe is not a denial of injustice; it is a breaking of the cycle of vengeance that puts a period to the myth of redemptive violence. Eucatastrophe is not a return to the naivete of Eden; it is the full-grown even-keeled circumnavigation of the world uncontained: "We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament."

So as a writer this is what I do; and as a reader this is what I adore; and as a person trying to do life, this is what I choose, when I recognize the choice -- to take up the all-but-impossible task of attuning to a co-inherent universe and the people in it -- learning to accept love and to give it, since it was there all along: uncreated, ever-present, and ultimately triumphant.