End of the Year Blues
In the last few years, I tended to get a bit somber as the year winds down. Looking back at what I’d gotten published that year, and worry about awards season. I’d love to think this particular anxiety’s more common among writers but who knows? Maybe I’m telling on myself a bit, here.
In any case, it’s gotten to the third week of December, and while I wish I could’ve gotten something published this year, I can’t say that it was on my mind much. Our lovely old dog had a truly frightening decline in her health. A couple of nights there, it was really tough. Seeing how pain could erase those glimmers of her personality so quickly, and needing desperately to hope because even though no one’s ever really ready, I sure as hell wasn’t. But good news: it was something painful, but treatable, and she’s been slowly getting better.
As one might imagine, I’m also feeling better myself and coming to accept that I should really treasure our remaining time together. Watching her go from bedridden to seeing her halting, wobbly steps grow more confident has been moving. Perhaps it’s maudlin or corny of me, but it feels like a miracle.
Its perfectly natural explanation not diminishing my feeling that so many things that could’ve gone badly simply. . . did not.
Small and perhaps everyday it might be, but miracle is a good a word as any. How much of our lives are an accretion of these small things going our way, after all? In the daily churn of one damn thing after another, we can lose sight of that. Often, it’s only when something happens to alienate us from our lives that we begin to notice how much we depend on those synchronicities.
It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about after rewatching Satoshi Kon’s humane and hilarious, Tokyo Godfathers (2003). Long story, short - On Christmas Eve, three homeless people find a baby while scrounging for gifts to give each other. They decide to return the baby to her rightful parents. Mayhem ensues.
If pressed for a one-word description of Tokyo Godfathers it would be “madcap.” Not a word often associated with homeless people. While Kon doesn’t shy away from the real dangers homeless people face, he keeps it light and very funny.
However, I recently ran across Kon’s philosophy for the film:
What Kon was conscious of in his direction was "meaningful coincidence", in other words, to create a chain of miraculous events to move the story forward.
Reading this brought a shock of recognition because it’s a mode I often strive to emulate as a way to make the world the characters live in seem almost alive and full of magics. Sure, it’s the small magics, the everyday miracles that we might take for granted, but as an outside observer - a reader - we might begin to put together that it sure is lucky things happened that way. It’s something I strove for in a lot of my writing. I know that I wanted to play with that ambiguity in How Juan Bobo Got to los Nueba Yores. Hell, even the grand and dark miracles of As the Shore to the Tides, So Blood Calls to Blood are subdued:
A blinding flash of lightning lit up the sky. I squeezed my eyes shut against it, but burned against my eyelids was a glimpse of something enormous flying out of the air towards us.
It looked like a hand.
A hand that dwarfed The Sea’s Promise, huge the way the voice I’d heard on the wind sounded. As vast as Ostred and I used the imagine the god as children and hide because we thought he was angry at us for leaving him down there at the bottom of the sea.
Slight spoilers, but it’s not a giant hand.
I suppose that type of thing can feel like a rug-pull, but I view it as showing the limits of human comprehension in these situations. In our own world, we know more now than ever in humanity’s history. . . and even that knowledge is vanishingly small compared to what we do not know.
It’s all quite humbling.
I suppose that’s the correct mood for the season, at least.
One More thing. . .
Next time, I hope to write what I’d been planning - something about Nadia Bulkin’s defense of “The Price” in fiction. I may also talk a bit about my re-reads of Le Guin’s Earthsea books (currently on The Tombs of Atuan, which is lovely).
I finished writing a new short that’s another Tropical Weird story in a similar vein to Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground. After editing and polishing it up comes the hardest part: figuring out what genre (aside from Weird) it is.
In any case, please watch Tokyo Godfathers - it’s now one of my favorite Christmas movies. If you do, let me know what you thought!
And that’s all she wrote!