The Thread I Didn't Know I Was Following
The Accidental Education of Linda Clement
I started out helping the parents I was babysitting for understand their kids, from a teen's perspective – I remember (still) being 6 years old, and 4, and even 18 months old. This is a perspective many adults lack, I know. I understand that Ray Bradbury had similar recall of early childhood, and used it in some of his writing.
More than episodic or narrative memory, I remember how I felt, and what I thought –usually about what the adults were doing and saying.
Most of what I felt about what the adults were doing and saying was confusion. This confusion led to curiosity, and the relentless search for some way of making sense of it. Some of it simply didn't make sense.
Smarten up!
Don't be smart with me, young lady!
Oh...kay?
Starting in late grade school, I read a lot. A lot a lot. I had discovered that adults told stories, and shared information about how they thought, which might explain, finally, what they said.
I read a library of psychology, a fair amount of philosophy, the Golden and Silver Ages of science fiction nearly completely, and murder mysteries ... oh, my, yes, murder...
I was drawn to a specific type of writing: authors who seemed to understand what I was struggling to understand, trying to figure out: people... and what are they talking about?
It turns out, the authors I read over and over were those whose stories were founded on high fidelity observations of people responding to their environments. Almost, 'People seem to be this way.'
I leaned heavily toward people like Agatha Christie, Andre Norton, and Joseph W. Campbell, who all seemed to have a deep respect for people, and a real understanding of how the external and internal forces in life opened them up to making mistakes. These authors seemed to be able to create novel but realistic situations (sometimes entire worlds,) set their characters into those situations, and 'watch them go' almost like they'd been wound up like toys. Circumstances, knowledge the character was privy to (or not) and the settings seemed to lay the path that by the end of the novel seemed almost inevitable, mistakes and all.
The authors who seem timeless –Shakespeare who is still funny today (for the love of all that is jolly, please see it on stage, not in print, it's a million times better) and Sir Terry Pratchett, who skewered everything about the modern world, through a lens that looked very much like the Shakespearean Era – seemed to simply understand how people are.
While some of the language of Agatha and William is outdated, their understanding of humanity is still spot on.
At 13, my older brother and I discovered Monty Python in a 24 hour marathon, and nearly died laughing (or possibly of a lack of sleep...) and I was immediately driven by a deep internal need to understand why Monty Python was so hilariously funny, in its unhinged correlations. By taking perfectly normal situations and adding bizarre people or ideas, or taking perfectly normal people and setting them into completely bizarre situations, they cracked open the idea of disconnected humour and comedy of the absurd. I will forever, happily, blame my twisted ability to create deranged metaphors on the fly to this troupe of lunatics.
Shortly afterwards, I met up with Star Trek, and Gene Roddenberry's embedded study of ethics that flows from 1963 through to the most recent movies, as an unbroken thread: what do people do – what should people do– when faced with ethical dilemmas?
Later, I noticed Jerry Bruckheimer's work; CSI, has a very persistent trope. With uncanny regularity, the murderer misreads something from incomplete information, and acts sensibly given what they knew and how they interpreted it. Tragically incorrect, with terrible consequences, but lawfully – in the sense of 'making total sense given the constraints of the situation.' Not deterministic, but logical, sensible ... human.
Threading through all of this – my memories of being 4 years old, Agatha Christie, Monty Python, Sir Terry, Star Trek, CSI, and helping parents understand their kids more accurately – has been a persistent sense that under it all, behind it all, or maybe surrounding it all, there was a sensible, teachable, somewhat obvious-when-you-see-it structure that more accurately explained behaviour, beliefs, decisions and even emotions.
I didn't know what it was. I didn't even know I was looking for it.
But these authors, producers, comics and thinkers kept showing me the same thing, from wildly different directions, until eventually I could see it:
What if everything we've been calling motivation, discipline, emotion, and behaviour is just people responding sensibly to the reality they can perceive?
And now, looking backward, I can see what those influences had in common.
They weren't teaching me a theory. They were writing from inside something they understood but didn't need to name. They knew people made sense. They put people into circumstances, gave them particular histories, information, beliefs, fears, desires and misunderstandings, and let them go.
And the people behaved. Not predictably. Not deterministically.
Lawfully.
The architecture was already there.
They were simply standing on it. They wrote based on it, or immersed in it, or simply knowing it was there... but never described it... like how all their books were on paper that is never mentioned, not even once, in the writing...