#Literary alter-egos are always rich veins for discourse

[thecurioustale]

Ah, the highs and lows of being a Public Figure! I can't say I'm keen on being remotely diagnosed by total strangers, especially on a matter that I explicitly lampshaded as a red herring in the opening paragraph of my original post, but you do seem respectful and sincere about it, so I take your proposition in good faith.

I used to worry when I was a kid that I would go "crazy"; stories about surrealism and insanity always appealed to me. They were scary in a way that felt cathartic and good. And I do think my juvenile brain walked a very tenuous road in its development; I think I was close to developing in some seriously abnormal ways; but this stuff has a way of coming to a head one way or another as the brain goes through adolescence, and in my case everything seemed to shake out in the other direction. Not to say that I was ever normal, but eventually it became clear that I wasn't going to go crazy after all—at least not in the sense I had meant it.

I would go farther, even: I have observed through a lifetime of studying others that my grip on reality and consistent sense of self are in the very high percentiles compared to most folks'. By virtue of being fiercely self-aware, I've built up a good map of my sanities and insanities over the years, and the insanities are all stupid, boring things that feel actively disappointing for their complete lack of artistic value.

No, I know exactly what you're talking about, and I definitely see how I can casually resemble someone with some flavor of multiple personalities—especially in the eyes of people who, if you will forgive me, either don't understand the condition very well, or aren't very good at applying their knowledge of it.

(Tangent: This belongs to a larger complaint of mine about our cultural norm of oversimplifying psychological conditions, overfitting well-known "fashionable" conditions, and specifically diagnosing people—especially diagnosing total strangers whom one has never met in person—without any credentials or proper diagnostics. Not that I don't do it myself, too, in my efforts to understand deranged behaviors by religious and political extremists, so I suppose the charge of hypocrisy is pursuable, but regardless it is definitely a norm that I dislike. I'm not a psychologist but I had one for a parent and studied a fair amount of it in school, and I know enough about it to know that armchair psychology is little better than a scam.)

I'll even add some gas to the fire by mentioning that I talk to myself regularly and sometimes speak as though there are multiple conversation participants.

Nevertheless—and it's hard to overstate this—whatever it is that causes people to interpret intrusive thoughts as independent and possessing agency is nearly a polar opposite from the way my own head works when it comes to identifying what is externally real and what isn't. I have never, ever believed that any of my characters etc. were speaking to me independently, nor have I ever perceived them to speak at all (or communicate or attempt to communicate in any way that implies an independent agent capable of communication). This barrier is very thick; in the few times in my life that I have tried to imagine me sitting down with one of my characters and speaking with them (including Silence herself), it was always a challenging exercise in artificiality. It feels quite unnatural. I am always aware that these entities are figments of my imagination with no independent agency.

I do have intrusive thoughts sometimes—I mean, who doesn't?—especially through conditions like depression, and through this experience I have slowly traced out a sense of how it might work for other people to interpret these intrusive thoughts in a way that makes them feel like there might be other entities inside their head or penetrating into their head from outside. In fact our speciary grip on "reality" is extremely tenuous, and if anything I am surprised that separation-from-reality problems aren't more common. This may even point to a tradeoff advantage in being fundamentally less intelligent: less capability to go mentally haywire. But that's speculation and a digression.

I think the most interesting thing you said is (boldface mine):

Silence Terlais is probably actually trying to talk to you (from inside your brain), and/or possibly already actively talking to you in a mode that you do not necessarily consciously recognize as communication

This kind of conceptualization raises the question of where compulsions come from—and not just pathological compulsions but all drives. Where does my desire to compose stories in the first place come from? Where do my tastes come from? Why do my artistic and aesthetic desires take the form they do?

I spoke in my original post about my sense of Silence being like a form to encapsulate things that need saying, and I spoke of a desire to write my stories so as to bring Silence into the real world, and this sort of talk is almost certainly what tripped your "multiple personality" detectors. But that is a fundamental misreading, and in contemplating my reply here I have been trying to articulate why. I don't have a perfect expression for it yet, but here is my best shot:

I consider myself valid in a world that has often classified me as invalid. I posses existential confidence in myself; I "believe" in myself. I also have a deep sense of what is right and what is wrong, not just ethically but aesthetically and even metaphysically. I have spent my whole adult life asserting myself through storytelling and other forms of art—among other methods—thereby giving an outward, tangible voicing to the things that matter to me and underscoring my self-evidently self-validating position. It's a shame that the word for gaslighting is gaslighting, because otherwise I would want to say that through my art I act to fight the world's invalidating impulses by shining light on my ideas, feelings, and aspirations. Silence is my "If I were boss of the world..." character; she's how I express the convictions and principles that I hold most dearly, and she is also a vessel for exploring my own experiences and feelings—among her many other purposes befitting the main character of a sprawling work. I want to get Silence out onto the page because I recognize that I'll never get to have kids or make a conventional industrial contribution to humanity. She is what I perceive as my most meaningful and sincere contribution to the world, and is a distillation of all my treasures. I want to make monuments to her because I want to be acknowledged and remembered, like most people do. I don't build bridges or cure diseases; I tell stories. That's my profession as it were.

And I do recognize that this is still a phenomenon of neurodivergent space. It's not at all normal or typical to have a Silence Terlais in one's life—an idée fixe. I think most artists are weirdos of some flavor or another, obsessed with or compelled by this or that—be it drawing squiggles, or writing war stories, or composing very particular music. If I weren't so self-aware and capable of perceiving with passable-or-better accuracy my actions in the context of both their relationship with material reality and their reception by others, I could have very easily ended up being a crank. I think my self-awareness and objectivity inoculate me against a lot of problematic thinking and behavior.

If there is a "there" there when it comes to Silence, it is almost certainly some mixture of: 1) a desire for acceptance that I never received in the formative years that I most needed it; 2) an expression of my desire for belonging, friendship, and companionship; 3) various other stuff of lesser importance. (Perhaps I can write a post about it someday.)

To instead interpret her primarily as a manifestation of multiple personalities is a misunderstanding of and/or a misapplication of that concept, and of Silence herself.

Believe me, I'm aware of appearances! I've been aware from the beginning. And I have explored the possibility at great length over the years, especially long ago when Silence was more intensely and more frequently on my mind than she is today. (I actually don't think about her nearly as much as I used to, which makes me kinda sad.)

If anything, if I could snap my fingers and have her be an independent presence in my head for a day, I would do it in a heartbeat. I'd be intensely curious as to what that might be like. I've wondered, sometimes, if I would be as acceptable to her as I might hope, and if she would be as friendly to me as I would expect, or if it would be one of those ludicrously ironic "Undone by my own creation!" scenarios. Of course, I can only speculate; I'll never actually know; because the whole point is that she's not really here. It is in an error in the construction of the Universe, yet nevertheless a physical fact of the Universe, that Silence Terlais is not real. The best I can do is put her likeness in a book.

At any rate, there you go! My thoughts. I had a look at your page to make sure you weren't a troll or something, and you seem legit albeit new here (then again, I am kinda new here too), so, yeah...I hope this was of some interest to you! I don't really have any stake in what you actually think about me, but it's an interesting topic, and I presume that by fact of your taking the time and trouble to write your thoughts out and present them to me you must care about the issue and must have wanted to share the fruits of your deliberation with me. I see your effort and I appreciate it, even if I don't care for the fruit.

This also marks three posts in a row about Silence, lol. Which I guess is one of the reasons I'm on Tumblr, after all! So I must be doing something right.

the light, and the glass

So there's this particular quality I have, as a fiction writer, and I have very little sense of how common or rare it is.

The quality is closely related to that famous Michaelangelo quip, about his sculptures being "already complete within the marble block":

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

This is how I feel, too, about my works of fiction. They feel like "real things" that "already exist," in some important sense, before I write them down -- or, indeed, before I even fully know what they contain.

So, for instance, if I haven't yet thought of an ending for a story I'm playing with in my mind, I nonetheless have a vivid sense that this particular story has an ending, and that this ending already is whatever it happens to be. It's only that I haven't managed to "see" it yet.

To clarify the point, consider the contrast between this thing, and two relatively familiar ways of thinking about how fiction gets made:

Conscious, goal-directed craft/artifice.

Intending to write a Satisfying Plot in which each character has an Arc, the Story Beats follow logically from one another and are arranged with what is called Good Pacing, the proverbial Cat is Saved, etc., and "solving for" these desiderata in a conscious manner.

Or, intending to create something much more outré and unsettling than all that -- but having some specific set of (outre, unsettling) intentions in mind, at the outset, and concocting/arranging the elements of your work in a conscious way guided by these intentions.

Free-wheeling, self-expressive "creativity."

Just do whatever, man! Follow your bliss. The canvas is blank and anything is possible. Whatever you feel like putting into that empty space, go ahead and put it there.

(The key thing being that, after "putting something there," you'll look and recognize something with origins in you, and your own whims and feelings at a particular moment.)

For me, though, the process of writing, and even of "ideating" (plotting, etc.), feels like a kind of transcription or channeling, as opposed to either of the above.

When I say "channeling," here, I don't mean that I have some actual, mystical belief in a supernatural object revealing itself through me. Not in the woo-woo sense anyway; whatever is really going on here, I am sure it "merely" involves the mechanics of the human mind, as implemented in the physical human brain and body.

But I do mean that it feels a lot like that. Like the story -- and not just the story part of the stories, but the whole thing, the "art object" -- has some real prior existence outside of me, first.

Like I am merely doing my best to "get it right," to be a perfect transmitter for the radio signal. To "do justice" to the "real thing," in the secondary act of writing words onto a page.

To be a courier who transports a valuable object from some originary otherworld into a place which happens to be called "existence" -- and to ensure, as much as possible, that it suffers no disfiguring scrapes during the journey.

----

I should say, though, that there's a lot of the "#1" above in my process too, the conscious-artifice thing.

Except... when I do that kind of thing, the intentions all come from the "real object," and my goal is to fill in whatever I can't see of that object so that everything I can see is preserved.

So: I will come to know, surely and indefeasibly, that the story must have some particular feature. (An event, a little moment, a character feeling a certain way at a certain time, even a specific turn of phrase.) Better to say: I know the story does have this feature. I see it in the marble.

But I can't see everything that's there, already, in the marble. And sometimes these glimpses-from-the-beyond are strange, inconvenient, difficult to "fit" into the current story (or perhaps into any story) in a natural-seeming manner.

And that's my task, when I'm doing the conscious-artifice thing: to take this collection of axiomatically-present glimpses, and build a structure around them into which they can "fit," naturally and even logically, just as if they were ordinary story-building-blocks like their neighbors, being placed here and there for ordinary story-reasons.

----

This has various implications. For one, it determines which kinds of writerly anxieties I suffer from, and which types leave me alone.

Like, I have virtually no self-doubt about my "ideas." About the overall, large-scale goodness-or-badness of the thing I'm creating. At least, not when considered "in principle," in an idealized sense that abstracts away from my actual capabilities as a guy who puts words on pages.

"Was this story, as a whole, a good idea?" is a question I find difficult to ask myself. Even when applied to smaller units, like specific plot points, this kind of question simply goes nowhere when I attempt to think about it. Insofar as my mind can cough up any answer, that answer looks like:

Yes

(after a moment, with mounting bewilderment) Yes, obviously -- how strange even to ask!

(after another moment, and as an afterthought) ...but if it weren't any good, is that really my business? It's not like I came up with it. I was asked to keep it safe and bring it into reality, and I take that duty seriously, but once it has reached its destination I wipe my hands of the matter. Don't shoot the messenger!

It's not, just, that I feel like the "real thing" "already exists." I also feel, always, that the real thing is... really good.

I deeply, thoroughly trust the Muse / Higher Power responsible for originally "making" this stuff. (To speak in relatively woo-woo terms, for ease and clarity.)

The Muse / Higher Power is a seriously skilled artist, much more so than little-old-me; if She makes any errors at all, they are not really mistakes, but "are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

And what's more, there is a sacred, unearthly gleam to the artifacts She makes, perhaps having something to do with that Fairyland, that place-other-than-"existence," in which they are originally made.

It feels like an honor to be designated as a courier for these enchanted things. Perhaps not a deserved honor -- on which more below -- but it's never the nature and value of the transported goods that I doubt.

(There is a definite sense of ritual to the thing that I do, here; a sense of connecting with some other place, definitively apart from our mundane here-and-now, and likewise more important/primary/etc. than the latter. Hence, perhaps, my tendency to not-write for long stretches, and then write in long sustained bursts for many hours at a time, which need a good deal of preliminary building-up-steam before they fully get going; it takes time to pierce, and then fully cross, the veil between worlds. And the various imprints of this stuff on the works themselves are not hard to see, once you're looking for them; they are of course especially transparent in TNC.)

All that being said, I do suffer persistently from a different anxiety.

When Michaelangelo said the thing about the sculpture "already complete within the marble block," he said it as... Michaelangelo.

As a famous, incontrovertibly masterful craftsman. Not a guy likely to suffer from doubts about his ability to put the chisel to the marble block, and reveal precisely that shape which was already there, inside.

But I'm not Michaelangelo. I'm not even sure I'm a good craftsman, much less a great one.

Certainly I've never conceived of myself in this way, even aspirationally. (Well, maybe I did in childhood and adolescence, but that was a very different thing from what I'm talking about now.)

I don't do what a person would do, if they wanted to be a Writer, and strove to be the best one they could. I don't, for the most part, practice my craft. I write because there's a Real Thing that only I can see, and it's not going to make into Existence any other way.

And since I don't write by habit or as practice -- since I only write at times when a Real Thing is in need of some incarnating-work, and I'm the only one around to do it -- I'm not exactly an ideal candidate for the job.

I am like a man who never especially wanted to be a sculptor, never practiced the trade, and was never more-than-ordinarily good with his hands, even... who is then, suddenly, struck with a very literal version of the experience Michaelangelo described.

Who, suddenly and inexplicably, begins to actually see a sculptural masterpiece lurking inside, whenever he looks at a faceless marble block.

What is our protagonist to do? Naturally, he will find a chisel, and begin chipping away. He will feel that these things need to be freed from their prisons, released and revealed to all the world, so that all the world can delight in them as he already does.

But he will be very aware of the unfamiliar way the chisel sits in his hand; of the way that hand trembles, and fails to meet the mark, and sometimes shaves off precious bits of what was really and originally a beautifully formed hand -- so that the hand, in the realized artwork, forever bears some oddity of shape which was not a part of what he saw inside the block, but only a consequence of his own shameful incompetence.

He will feel that his works, such as they are, are an odd mixture of amateurish craft and direct, divine inspiration. Insofar as he is Great, it will be because he has had Greatness thrust upon him, from without. He will feel, sometimes, that his successes have been obtained through a kind of cheating, not won fair-and-square.

And he will feel, always, a particular kind of (justified) impostor syndrome: an awareness that what he is doing, when he sits down before the marble block with the chisel in hand, is a very different sort of thing than what is usually called "sculpting," and what is being practiced by careful, hard-working aspirants just down the road, at the local workshop. The students there call themselves "sculptors," and our protagonist supposes he must call himself a "sculptor" too -- but he knows that behind this coincidence of language, a vast and strange chasm is hidden.

(I worry that this metaphor sounds flattering to me -- I am divinely inspired, they are merely toiling away and following the rules -- when I don't mean it that way at all.

In particular, note that there is nothing in our story to rule out some of the "real" sculptors down the road from also being visionaries who see the finished work in the block. Indeed, I got the metaphor from Michaelangelo, who was precisely this way.

I am only saying that all the conceivable configurations of craft/inspiration are in fact possible: just as it is possible to be skilled but uninspired, it's possible for inspiration to strike someone who lacks the capacity to fully realize its content. And that is how I feel, about my own attempts to create.)

----

When I was getting near the end of Almost Nowhere, and struggling with this kind of feeling, Esther would often reassure me by saying: "you are the light, and you are the glass it shines through."

In other words: you are a transmitter, and you are the source of the transmitted signal. Remember that in actual fact, the "real thing in the marble" came from your own little brain, just as much as the rest of it did. In actual fact, if there is a Muse and a Higher Power, it is really just an additional part of the same creature that holds the chisel, and worries over its trembling hand.

I did, indeed, find this very reassuring. And that's a funny thought, in a way! I imagine that for some people -- and indeed for me, in many other endeavours -- the same sentiment could easily have the opposite effect.

"It's all on you. It's all your responsibility. If any of it is bad, there's no one else to blame. If there is any 'Higher Power' at all, it is only the one inside you at all times, and not able to save you through unexpected intervention, from some true outside."

But I already believed, thoroughly, in the magical potency of the goods I was charged with transporting. If I was (somehow!) their maker, too, then (somehow!) the root of that glimpsed, alien magic was in me.

And so, perhaps, I could trust myself to ferry them into Existence without ruining, without even much dimming, the fairy-gleam from elsewhere that made them what they were.