And, so, concludes the beginning of The Powwow of Myth. As mentioned elsewhere, it’s nearing completion and stands at around 250,000 words. Two things I remember Orson Scott Card saying (I’m paraphrasing):
1. The first page better be enough to make someone want to read the next one,
2. If you want to improve your writing in the fastest way possible, edit really bad writing. The time spent on the online writers group gave me a lot of practice doing that.
And maybe I’ll just post the initial pages of my stories and see what kind of “let’s turn to the next page and find out” traction they have.
And to that person on that online writers group (and it may have been the same one who pooh-poohed “myths becoming reality” stories as a hackneyed plot device) who said about Desi, the main character from Venezuela in The Boy Who Could Step Sideways, that no kids thought or talked that way:
1. You need a bigger sample size, because I thought and talked that way and it provided me with lots of entertainment when dealing with teachers from K through 12th grade, and
2. If you’re faced with a threat to the very existence of the universe from an outside agent making its inroad through Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Boys Preparatory School and aiming for the scientists and engineers in a DARPA lab through their kids at that school, then you’d better hope there are some seriously smarter-than-fuck kids who can see things for what they are and figure out what to do before the kids pass through what Desi’s best buddy, Ben Al Azraque, newly arrived from Colegio Hebreo Sefaradit in Mexico City, referred to as the Veil of Ages, that short window in adolescence when the doors of perception and direct intuition of the fresh new mind become obscured by the increasingly symbolic representation of the most common things in their experience, gradually becoming incapable of seeing anything else, and then assuming that there can BE nothing else.
So, I guess I’ll append below that discussion between Desi and Ben about the Veil of Ages after they narrowly escaped the fate of Miguel, the asshole boss of Desi’s dad at the DARPA lab, who had been involved with Desi’s kindergarten teacher, the alternate Miss Johnson that Desi’s seen sporting sparkly things instead of eyes, from then until just a few hours before on the same day in 5th grade during dodgeball when he first met Ben.
Desi is still having difficulty in coming to terms with something apparently wholly outside his experience, that is, seeing Miguel getting eaten by yet a different sparkly-eyes Miss Johnson, as well as how he and Ben could possibly be mulling the whole thing over in such a calm and analytical way.
Chapter Twelve
By nine o’clock both boys had had their supper, had bathed, and were getting ready for bed.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Desi asked and pointed to the top bunk.
“After today, it’s not heights I’m afraid of,” Ben said and crawled up the little ladder to the top bunk. “What do you suppose your dad meant when he said he and my father used to be close friends?”
“I don’t think he meant that they’re no longer friends—otherwise why would your dad let you come stay here tonight—just that they haven’t seen each other for a long time,” Desi answered as he sat on the edge of his bed. “Did it seem like something more to you?”
Desi heard a rustle of paper and looked up to see the drawing of Miss Johnson hanging in front of his face from the top bunk.
[Description of drawing from earlier in the story: “It was done in a style spookily like his own. It looked almost a double to the picture he had drawn all those years ago but he could tell that the boy in this picture was not Todd but Todd’s little brother, Eric. It was a portrait of Miss Johnson at her desk smiling speculatively at an oblivious little blond boy working diligently at his desk in front of her, tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. She had sparkly eyes behind her rhinestone glasses and a mouth as deadly and full of teeth as a shark.”]
“Jeez, Ben! That’s not fair!”
“Well, I did that for a reason. Everything seems like something more to me now. I can’t help it. Everything I hear I wonder about in three or four different ways. And what is really weird is that although seeing may be believing, believing is not necessarily understanding, whereas not seeing something can lead to understanding, regardless of how unbelievable it is. For instance, if you had seen this picture this morning, would it have seemed different to you than seeing it now?”
Desi didn’t answer.
“See?” Ben asked. “Just like that. Since this afternoon, no answer, or non-committal answer, or ambiguous answer. All that in the context of something or things that are so bizarre that I don’t even know what they mean or could mean or ought to mean. Know what I mean?”
Again Desi didn’t answer.
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” Ben said. “Let me give you a list. First, that house. You asked me what I saw and I told you. Then I asked you the same and you said it was essentially what I said and then asked how I knew it was High Victorian Gothic Revival. So I never did get a straight answer. Anything to add?”
“Well, actually, it varies with the holiday. I mean, the house looks pretty much the same, but everything is decorated differently depending on the season. Weird, huh?”
“What about Hannukah and Rosh Hashana?”
Desi shook his head. “No difference and I don’t know why.”
“Then, when I asked about getting into trouble going back into the school and then saw your backpack way over by the fence and asked what it was doing there, you just went to pick it up. Something happened to make you run straight for the fence hard enough to cut your forehead on it and then leave the backpack. I’d say that you dropped it there to easily get over the fence.
“And since that was right after you hit the fence, you must have wanted to get over it really fast. But I was already on the other side with my backpack. Since we both came out of the school at the same time it doesn’t make any sense that you’d just stand there for a long time waiting for me to go around to the gate and since I’m smaller than you I couldn’t have gotten over the fence that quickly. So the weird conclusion is that I must have walked right through the fence and you thought you could do the same and ran into it. Anyway, I don’t remember why it was so important for you to get over there, but after everything that’s happened, it’s got to be something connected with that. Questions? Comments? No?
“Then just before we went into Miss Johnson’s room, you said I should get ready for weirdness. When I asked what kind of weirdness, your dad knowing my dad in Mexico City weirdness or that house kind of weirdness, you said the second without any more explanation. You wouldn’t answer about whether you’ve seen Miss Johnson off and on over the years since you were in kindergarten and whether or not you’ve seen weird stuff with her before. Then she said that some kid had asked her that afternoon why she didn’t have sparkly eyes, which seemed to point directly at the second Miss Johnson whose eyes were burning like a fucking furnace when she was up there on the landing. So someone other than you has noticed something weird about Miss Johnson. And, finally, after you said you didn’t think we’d be seeing Michael again like Miss Johnson, I asked if you had seen her going into that place 6 years ago and if today was her first year back, you diverted my attention by pointing out your dad driving by.”
Ben leaned over the edge of the bed and looked at Desi upside down. He waved the drawing of Miss Johnson back and forth.
Desi looked at it and then at Ben and gave him a sick smile.
“Okay,” Ben said. “I’m going to hypothesize again and then pause for comment. If I’m right, just say, ‘check.’ Okay?”
“Okay.”
Ben leaned over the edge of the bed to look at Desi.
“You’re supposed to say ‘check.’ Okay?”
Desi mumbled a weak, “Check.”
“Well, I guess that’ll have to do for the time being,” Ben said. “First, I’m going to lie back on this pillow because leaning over like this is killing my neck. Here. Take this drawing and lock it up somewhere and let me know when you’re ready.”
Desi took the paper from Ben, folded it back up, and then opened his closet and walked inside.
A whir of soft clicks followed and then a click of a latch, a slight creak of hinges, and a second click of a latch, and then everything in reverse.
“Oh, Jeez, Desi!” Ben said. “You have a friggin safe in there?” He started to laugh. “That is just so symbolic! Inside your house you have a room. Inside the room you have a closet. Inside the closet you have a safe. Inside the safe you probably even have a locked box!”
Desi shut the safe and spun the dial. He went back into the room and flopped down on the lower bunk.
“How did you know?”
“Dude, once you have two points you can draw a line and then see what else it’s going to run through,” Ben said. “I’m sensing in you a great reluctance to show your hand. All sorts of weird crap can be coming down around you but you’re still very, very careful about what you say, how much you say, and who you say it to.”
Desi said nothing.
“I’m waiting,” Ben said.
“Check. Wait a second,” Desi said, listening. “Did you hear the phone ringing?”
“I think so. Your dad probably got it. Hey, maybe it’s Miss Johnson calling.”
“Seriously, though,” Desi said. “How can something like this happen? Why can’t I understand it? It’s like—it’s like a snake starting to swallow something he thinks is small and it turns out to be the tail of an elephant and then the elephant starts to run off.”
“Imagine this,” Ben said. You’re walking across a big grassland. As you go along, the grass gets higher and higher and trees start to appear and after a while you’re walking through a forest and you keep walking and the ground starts to get hilly and the hills get bigger and bigger and finally you come to the edge of the forest and you look up and see a mountain so high you can barely see the top, except for snow blowing off it and you say “What the hell is that? It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.” So do you turn around and go back into the forest hoping that when you turn around and try again it’s going to be nothing but grassland?”
“I think I go forward and try to find a way over it or around it,” Desi said.
“Why?” Ben asked. “It’s something you’ve never seen before. It’s something you never expected. You should probably just give up, right?”
“Because if I go back it’s the same old thing and even though I’ve never seen something like it before, I can know that it’s big and high and that something else I’ve never seen before, something really good or really interesting, may be on the other side, so I’ve got to find a way and the only way is forward and upward.”
“So do you have to know everything about the history of orogeny and an exhaustive list of various types of mountains around the world before you can start walking in that direction?”
“No, I just have to start forward and figure it out as I go along, though it could help to know something like that.”
“Of course, it could,” Ben said. “But if you don’t have any knowledge, then you have to either stay rooted in the ignorance of one place or move forward and generate some knowledge through experience.”
“How can we even talk like this? We’re kids.”
“What? You’re already turning into a fucking adult with talk like that? Oh yeah, I forgot: children don’t know anything; adults know everything. And once you let enough years go by then you’ll know everything, too. Is that it?”
“Probably not, or you wouldn’t have asked me that,” Desi replied.
“And do you know what orogeny means?” Ben asked.
Desi sighed. “It means the forces involved in the building of mountains by the deformation of the lithosphere.”
“Okay, so case proved. How could you have even asked how we can talk this way? Obviously, we can for two reasons. The first is that we’re fucking smart for reasons that we have nothing to do with. The second is that we capitalize on that by choosing to do things to give that capacity something to work with. Obviously, if you just answered “mountain building” when I asked you what orogeny meant, I would have assumed that from your inherent smartness you had intuited the answer from the context of my comments. But your specific answer let me know that you’ve probably been reading since before you can even remember. But I’m talking about a lot more than accumulated knowledge through direct experience or second-hand knowledge through books and what you pick up from other people.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the way I describe it is the veil of ages.”
“Is that anything like the vale of tears?” Desi asked.
“They’re pretty much coterminous.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that someone struggling to find his way through the veil of ages is pretty much guaranteed to be slogging his way into the vale of tears.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that as a newborn infant you’re born aware of everything but understanding nothing. You see everything—well, no, everything that you see, you see as well as all the possible interconnections. But knowing nothing, you can’t understand any of those things or their interconnections. You’re aware of your nose and the flower and the smell as one single thing and after time passes most people start to have their percept divided until the only things they’re aware of is “a nose” and “a flower” and “a smell” and then describe them in terms of one thing, a flower, causing something else, a smell, to appear in something else, a nose. There may have been all sorts of things in between each of those “things” that they formerly experienced or saw or knew or intuited or sensed but now, after passing through the veil of ages, they see only those few things and those limited number of actions.
“Another example. The veil of ages results in someone seeing “a star” as some “thing” made of “hot gas” that “produces” “star light” but they’ve become oblivious to the fact that the starlight is as uniquely part of that star as the heated gases that emitted that light. We don’t live in a universe with a godzillion stars unimaginable distances away that produce light that manages to make it way over here. We’re bathing in universe of stars, the centers of some closer, some farther away, some already dead. But as long as we see the light or in other ways detect it, we are enveloped in the breath of billions of billions of stars. We live and move in a universe of stellar exhalation.
“So, anyway, as the child grows he trades more and more of his great store of intuition, which he uses to compensate for his lack of experience, for the coin of the realm of whatever realm he’s growing up in so that, finally, he’s left with piles of this and that coinage that he arranges in different ways and combinations and imagines that the reason so many kids seem clueless is because they haven’t yet accumulated enough of the coin of the realm to start making proper intellectual transactions. In reality, though, the younger ones are seeing everything--backwards, forwards, sideways, up and down--unrestricted by the discrete denominations introduced by the coinage of the realm.
“The adult doesn’t at all remember what it was like and sees the child in terms of being a defective or incomplete adult. The child may look at the adult and wonder how in the world the adult can say that something has to be a certain way just because he says it’s a certain way.
“Each is hidden from the other by the veil of ages. It may be true that if you never get enough experience with a real world you’ll never be able to come up with ways of successfully interacting with it or predicting it or manipulating it. But it’s also probably true that if you go too far in the direction of exchanging all your direct experience for whatever happens to be the coin of the realm, you’ll be forever limited to those denominations and to whatever fractions of this or that they correspond to. Maybe this is why most big scientific breakthroughs are by the relatively young or relative outsiders. They’ve developed enough experience to control their interactions with reality so they can discover more about it but they haven’t yet locked themselves into the jail of believing their descriptions are the same thing as reality. What is it? You’re looking thoughtful.”
“Something Domingo tells my dad all the time and then laughs his ass off.”
“Domingo?” Ben asked.
“One of my dad’s post-docs at the lab. He tells my dad that the reason science can take so long to progress is not because no one is uncovering new things, but because everyone is having to wait until the older scientists get buried. And then he asks my dad where to send the flowers.”
“And that’s when he laughs his ass off,” Ben asked.
“No,” Desi said. “It’s generally after my dad holds up his hands and says he hasn’t heard Domingo complaining or moaning, though I don’t know why Domingo thinks that’s so funny.”
“Really?” Ben asked. “It’s because those older scientists have that field of science by the balls and won’t let go until they can no longer hold on.”
Desi laughed.
“Now you see why it’s funny?” Ben asked.
“No. I’m laughing over the idea of my dad having to use both hands to twist Domingo’s nuts,” Desi said. “Anyway, so what you’re saying is that kids have a more direct experience of reality but with less understanding and discrimination whereas adults are more likely to treat their characterizations of their experiences as a kind of shorthand that substitutes for reality.”
“Uh, yeah. Kinda. Except the adults don’t seen them as shorthand but as reality itself,” Ben replied. “I was talking general trends, though. There may be notable exceptions like those brothers who are grownups who can see large prime numbers or can scan almost instantly through a thousand year mental calendar to tell you what day of the week September 17th was five years ago or who can tell how many matches are in a box just by the way it sounds when it hits the floor or that guy who memorized the entire Grove Encyclopedia of Music just by looking at it and can tell you exactly what is on any place on any page.”
“Or that little kid who paints beautiful landscapes that make adult artists feel like crap?”
“Well, I think that’s more an example of a kid with an advanced ability to control the medium to represent what he actually sees at his childhood level outside of the veil of ages and that an adult who has developed that ability has only succeeded in getting back to the more direct impression of reality he had as a child.”
“So the veil of ages is not impenetrable,” Desi said.
“No,” Ben said. “Otherwise I would have called it the Iron Curtain of Ages.”
“So why are there adults who are complete morons,” Desi asked. “Like the principal at school?”
“And why are there kids like Todd?” Ben replied and started laughing.
Desi cast a glance back over everything that had happened since getting up that morning and, in spite of the horror they had experienced earlier that evening, joined Ben.
“Let’s go back downstairs and get some ice cream,” Desi said. “Okay?”
Ben answered by sliding down to the floor in one fluid motion.
“Won’t your dad tell us it’s late and to get back to your room?” Ben asked.
“Have you seen anything in my Dad to suggest that?” Desi said. He held up both hands and started laughing. “He’ll probably ask us to scoop him up a bowl, too. You watch.”
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