Hopi folklore and deus ex machina

I’ve been reading a compilation of Hopi stories called Hopi Stories of Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Magic. It’s mostly been a lot of fun, and the stories come straight from transcriptions of Hopi storytellers hoping to document their endangered oral tradition. There are some puzzling editing choices; I’ve come across 3 sets of stories that are almost identical and separated by a couple of chapters, but given the author and editor’s apparent qualifications and reverence for the Hopi culture, I’m reluctant to attribute it to any sloppiness, I just haven’t discovered the logic behind it. I haven’t spotted the important differences, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. I hate to catch myself yadda-yaddaing through 20,000 year old stories, it may very well be that the little things that matter greatly in a context like this, so I will tiptoe around the idea that I haven’t been patient enough to A/B the similar tales to spot the important differences that justified keeping both versions.

Anyway, I’ve rediscovered my own interest in writing and have been exploring the normal stuff; free writing, exercises from The Artist’s Way, and a fresh eye toward the stuff I read and watch. I’m a chronic overthinker to begin with, and the ability to overanalyze things is not consistently endearing to the group of people around me who just want to enjoy a story or movie without spotting historical inaccuracies, poor character development, or lack of verisimilitude. That group of people embraces basically everyone, even me, most of the time. Anyone who enjoys movies or books enjoys them first and foremost for some version of “entertainment value.” In the same way that I know a lot of music theory – it can enable me to appreciate things I like to begin with in additional ways – I have to like the music first in order to take the time to acknowledge the deeper values. A Beatle’s song might be outwardly simple or technically simple (although even that could be argued in most cases), but that doesn’t decrease its value or enjoyability. Stockhausen might be technically or conceptually stunning, but that doesn’t automatically make it enjoyable to listen to, and if you don’t enjoy something viscerally first, you probably won’t seek to enjoy it academically. Just one guy’s opinion.

So the line I try to walk is one where I don’t lose sight of what I really, firstly enjoy about something, but in the event that I do enjoy it, I want to learn more about why I enjoy it and I start to break it down and maybe find something I can use for my own expression. I carefully avoid the word DECONSTRUCT; partly, I don’t want to be identified as a postmodernist, and partly because I don’t totally understand what it means despite my research on the matter. I’m not sure if I lack the capacity for a certain kind of insight or I just lack the patience to absorb Foucault; it’s all very interesting, but most ‘isms sound the same to me after a while. I may read a fair amount, but I’m still a Philistine and a Luddite at heart. (A Luddite with an iMac.)

Anyway, as I dig into fiction these days, I’m thinking of it in more than one way. What do I like about this? What could be done better? Is this an idea I can steal and disguise and pass as my own? The one thing in the Hopi stories that leaps out at me is the extensive use of deus ex machina, and I, an ethnocentristic pig, had always thought it was bad form to do so. In modern circles, it’s almost always seen as an eye-rolling groan-inducing copout. Tricky situation – more pressure – alarming new devlopments! – character growth!!!! – WHEW, God finally came and fixed everything. (That was close!). However, in this particular set of Hopi folklore, almost every story has the hero saved by Old Woman Spider or Uncle Rattlesnake, or one of various kachinas, or the emergence of a grandmother previously unknown to possess great shamanic powers. I’d have to make a chart or something, but out of the 15 or so stories I’ve read so far, I can’t remember a single one that didn’t have the protagonist saved by some unexpected and miraculous external force, often at the last minute. And it’s so regularly repeated that it has to be either a consistent mechanism in the Hopi system of storytelling, or that particular kind of story was filtered out by the guys who put the book together. Either way, there’s a method to the madness, some kind of logic.

When I think about it, the notion that only poor writing ever has some kind of “all-powerful external entity saves the day” component, and that in a good writing, the characters live and die exclusively by their own choices is a pretty bleak and Western slant. In some of the Haruki Murakami novels I like, as well as authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the characters can be dynamic and malleable and changeable, too, but you can’t start one of their novels with any guarantee that some Godlike force isn’t going to interfere with the story at some point. I’m not saying I’ve even identified my own preference in the matter, but the idea that external forces never, ever, ever, touch our lives doesn’t ring true to me, and it’s curious to find that I’ve unconditionally yanked any form of deus ex machina from my bag of tricks, and only because it’s somehow proper to do so, not because I’ve thought about it and agree. I’m very gunshy with organized religion and have carefully dodged using the idea of God to embody that external force, but why not? I cannot say without hesitation that some kind of godlike force hasn’t guided my life from time to time. Buddha? Jebus? Flying Spaghetti Monster? I can’t say, but I have reason to believe that the universe we live in isn’t the bleak Newtonian void of empty space with occasional pool balls hurtling unbeknownst to all the other isolated pool balls and interacting according to precise mathematical laws at all times. At the end of the day, I’ve been as turned off by the dogma of atheism as by the dogma of, say, the Catholic Church, and I’ll make up my own mind based on my own experiences. I distrust any system that completely bypasses logic when it’s convenient, and I distrust any system that completely disregards subjective experience. I’m made up of both. At the end of the day, when they come to pry my light saber out of my cold, dead hands, the sound that that tree made when it fell in the forest will only matter to me if I had been there to witness it and remember it.

I had a period when I studied jazz at a school with only a classical music program. I felt pretty marginalized, and I admit that I enjoyed my self-imposed role as the guy who had to question everything. If the composition teacher said “never use parallel fourths,” I’d go off and write something (for myself, not for his class) that exclusively used parallel fourths. I got to a point where I realized that the value in my studying something I didn’t enjoy – classical music – was that I could basically take what I was being taught, do exactly the opposite in my own practice, and end up with something I was happy with. And it wasn’t the joy of rebellion that made it fun or rewarding, there was really something to the idea that “the opposite of something I really don’t like might be something I like.” I wonder what the opposite of mushroom is?

You have to be careful about which opposite you choose, or how you frame you quest for opposite – it’s the framing that can liberate you from the original system, or it’s the framing that can keep you trapped. What’s the opposite of the number 1? In some contexts, it would be -1. But that’s not the only choice. You could frame it as something vs. nothing, so the opposite of 1, something, could be zero, nothing. Or you could frame it as numbers versus letters; the opposite of 1 could be ‘a’. Or you could frame it as small numbers versus big numbers, so the opposite of 1 is infinity; or any large number. Or you could drill down into real specifics; the opposite of “one” could be “eno”. Doesn’t really matter; I wouldn’t say which is the real opposite – even the term opposite is loaded. We don’t think of “an opposite,” we think of “THE opposite.” There’s exactly one perfect opposite, that’s it, end of story – if you can picture more than one, you probably don’t ‘get it’ and you just want to get entangled in meaningless semantics. Ahem.

So anyway, as a person who’s of a mind to learn more about writing during this period, it’s been really pleasing to catch myself in assumptions. Nobody thinks they make them. Everyone does. I walk around blind to my own, and I’m disproportionally pleased when I catch one of my own on my own. And with “writing,” this big, scary world that’s out there, separate from me, there are obviously sets of rules for doing it “correctly,” right? And as someone aspiring to write more, I should discover those universal, unchanging truths and learn them to the point I don’t even consider them any more, and then everything will be just fine. I will have reduced a dynamic, spontaneous, human, spiritual pursuit into a set of easily followed rules and then I’ll just be able to crank stuff out.

Dangerous stuff if you allow it to take root. And you don’t notice when it takes root.

Long and short of it, I’ve enjoyed finding that one of those sacred notions I picked up over time may be totally false, or at the very least, it should be a choice and not a rule. I’ll uncross the deus ex machina as a possible plot mechanism. That leads me to want to unearth and examine other “rules” I’ve unconsciously accepted over time. Maybe I’ll use it one day, maybe I won’t. But I find that I have the choice again, and as stupid and abstract and meaningless as it is on its own, it feels empowering.

In a world where it’s not “cool” to paint something that’s not a pure abstraction, a deconstruction of something, a concept that illustrates another concept, it’s could be pretty countercultural to paint an apple or a flower. Choices. Context. Individuality. Stubbornness. The lure of being different for the sake of being different, of seeking “devices” or “rules” as inspiration rather than inspiration itself. It’s a lot to think about, and it’s worth thinking through. As long as that thinking doesn’t come at the expense of doing “real stuff.” I don’t know. And that’s not to say I’m anti-abstraction, or anti-modernism, or anti-postmodernism. The only thing I feel opposed to right now is something that limits my freedom to choose. I secretly look forward to a distant future time when all that “choosing” will finally be done and I can sink comfortably into dogma, but that day doesn’t feel like it gets any closer.

Anyway, I just got offered a 47 million dollar a year job from a guy I don’t know from Nigeria, he found me on the internet and my body of work must have impressed him. It seems that this whole struggling-to-grow-up-thing is now in my past, I’ve just got to give my new employer unconditional access to all my bank accounts. Deus just intervened in my life, what could go wrong?

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