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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Continuation of novel_concept, sort of:
David and I talked for two and a half hours on Saturday. Part of it was about my mere 1.5-hour talk with Janet. She's my creative writing teacher, sometimes editor, and the indirect instigator of David and I meeting.
He was being ornery: what's if Janet's advice would lead me oversimplify the novel? Make it "just about one thing"?
I don't think so, I argued back. I think it was helpful. Focus doesn't mean sole focus. And then I told him what I'd said here about my novel_concept not being original, about Carol being like Frankie in The_Member_of_the_Wedding: thirteenish, plagued by anger problems, concerned about acceptance among new places/people. And possibly bisexual.
"Like Anne Frank," David said.
Blink. I accepted the connection. "But I meant in a novel, not in a real person." I wasn't looking at his face on the screen because I was sorting small beads. And then, "Since when did Anne Frank have anger problems?"
Shrug. "I was joking."
"Oh, okay...?" And to his joking I added seriousness, mentioning why I'd read her short stories but not her diary. The blathe anne_frank explains my arbitrary feelings, cough, Logical Reasoning, about reading her other stuff first: I wanted to encounter her as a writer and not just as some well-known tragic symbol. She deserved/deserves better. But I'd read an intro to the diary, and so I shared half-remembered facts: "She wanted to write a novel based on her experiences. That's why she wrote alternate versions of some of it. But why the later published version was longer was also because her father didn't include some stuff where she talked about sex and puberty."
He'd been serious. Now he was goofy again. "Oh, oh, here's a conspiracy theory you could post on blather!" (He has some knowledge of the site, though he prefers writing offline.) "You could say she started World War 2 so she could write a novel and get famous."
"Explain why she died in it, then?"
"The thing got out of hand." He nodded solemnly. "It's a cautionary tale."
"Well, now I'm rethinking my plans to start World War 3. Though if it's the nuclear sort, my book's copies could all get destroyed..." Or something like this. I wasn't considering the Internet, although I was speaking through it. Then, serious again, I blurted, "In school, did you learn about Sadako Sasaki?"
"Oh! With the paper cranes?"
And I felt a sense of belonging, of connection. Which feels wrong when the actual Sadako Sasaki suffered terribly (radiation-induced leukemia) and, like Anne Frank, made art out of the seemingly unendurable. But the "connected" feeling was because many other people I talked to hadn't come across her story in school - before that, I'd thought it was some Standard Canadian Curriculum thing.
"Yes!" I went. "And I was shocked because I'd already heard basic facts about that war but not about the U.S. dropping atomic bombs. I learned that for the first time in grade five. I remember thinking, 'This is wrong, how could they do this when they were on OUR side??'"
And I tried to make it funny: you heard about the one where Moral Complexity dropped a bomb on my almost-11-year-old brain? But now he met my light tone with seriousness, asked questions, and I moved to my experience editing a high school student's essay about whether the atomic bombs were justified - she said yes, while all of what I felt and a lot of what I learned pointed to "hell, no" (see a_morbid_sense_of_powerpoints, before the powerpoints).
He's interested in that from a philosophical point of view, too, and wanted to hear her arguments. One of them was something like "people learned how bad it was, so they didn't launch even more destructive versions in the Cold War" and I wanted to know whether there was "a kind of fallacy for that." He said he didn't know exactly, but he could point out a problem: if you acknowledge nuclear war is bad, why do it even a little bit?
I said I was oversimplifying by saying "bad," that Victoria's wording had been better. And part of the argument was that the effects of radiation weren't completely known in 1945 (I'm not sure of the history/science behind this, but I assume people didn't predict someone would get cancer from radiation 10 years after a nuclear attack. Not that people don't get cancer from other things, but still.)
Now, you can do a "pro" argument without going Well, We Never Did It Again - So Far At Least: the imperial government of Japan surrendered soon after; a ground invasion would have killed many more on both sides.
Counterargument: Soviet Russia had just declared war on Japan; probably it would have surrendered anyway.
Counter-counterargument: The U.S. didn't know what effect the Soviet threat to Japan would have. They didn't want to take chances.
Counter-counter-counterargument: They didn't want the Soviets to extend their influence too far. The bombs were also a warning to the USSR.
And so on.
But since we both were on the no-nuke side (to put things simply), we went on to something we disagreed about!
...
Now, does this blathe have a "focus"? Moral dilemmas? Conversations? Can conversations change anything for the better? It's true you indulge in them at leisure, usually, but I find the good ones bring new thoughts, help refine opinions, even improve one's capacity for empathy (which doesn't have to be only a feeling or only a thought - it can be both).
Blather is that kind of conversation, even when it isn't an obvious back-and-forth. (Now I feel like shouting, "Intertextuality, motherfuckers!" while riding a motorbike down a highway and waving a checkered flag behind me, but going to sleep is an acceptable substitute.)
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