Cultivating uncertainty

In Haruki Murakami's haunting and surreal short story "Kino" (from his collection Men Without Women), Kino is a quiet and unassuming bar owner whose preferred way of spending his evenings -- splitting his time between serving his few customers and deciding which jazz record to play next -- is upended when a man named Kamita starts showing up.

It isn't every night, but when he's there it's always the same.  He orders a whiskey with water and ice, sits reading his book, then pays up and leaves.  Kamita, Kino tells us, "looks like he could be yakuza," but there isn't really anything concrete he bases this assessment on.  Although there is that one night, when two thugs seem to be intent on beating Kino up, and Kamita tells them to meet him outside instead -- then twenty minutes later Kamita comes back in, unruffled and unperturbed, and calmly tells Kino that the two "won't bother him again."

Other than that, Kamita seems to be a perfectly ordinary thirty-something, enjoying his quiet drink and his book.  But still, there's something off kilter about the whole situation, as if what we're seeing isn't quite real.  That sense magnifies as the story progresses.  Kino's cat mysteriously disappears.  Then he starts seeing snakes everywhere he goes.  He asks his aunt -- who had once owned the building housing his bar -- if she'd seen snakes around the place, and she says she hasn't.  But then she cryptically adds, "[Snakes] often help guide people.  But when a snake leads you, you don't know if it's in a good direction or a bad one...  [A snake] hides its heart somewhere outside its body, so it doesn't get killed.  If you want to kill a snake, you need to go to its hideout when it's not there, find its beating heart, and cut it in two."

All through this, we become increasingly unsure if what we're experiencing through Kino is real.  Murakami is the master at creating a believable Unreliable Narrator -- where we're never certain how much to trust.  Especially when the mysterious Kamita tells Kino one evening that it's absolutely imperative he close the bar "before the rain comes," and leave town.  Kino is instructed not to stay in one place for more than a day or two, and send postcards to his aunt -- no message, don't write his name, just his aunt's address and a stamp -- so Kamita will know he's okay.  "She asked me to keep an eye on you," Kamita tells Kino, "to make sure nothing bad happened...  When it's all right for you to return, I'll get in touch with you."

Amazingly, Kino accepts all this with few questions.  Closes his bar, and leaves... just as the rain starts to fall.  But a few days into his trip he ignores one of the directives, and puts his name and a short message on a postcard to his aunt.  That evening, there's a knock on his hotel room door, quiet but insistent.  It goes on for hours:

Kino pulled the covers up, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands.  I'm not going to look, I'm not going to listen, he told himself.  But he couldn't drown out the sound.  Even if he ran to the far corners of the Earth and stuffed his ears full of clay, as long as he was still alive those knocks would relentlessly track him down.  It wasn't a knocking on a door in a business hotel.  It was a knocking on the door to his heart.  A person couldn't escape that sound.

And that's where we leave him.  We never find out who's behind the door, or even if there was someone at the door.  We never find out who Kamita is, why he did what he did, or how he had a connection to Kino's aunt.  We never learn for certain the significance of the snakes and the disappearance of his cat.  It is weird, surreal, evocative, tantalizing -- and ultimately, we're left to figure out the answers for ourselves.

This kind of ending drives some people crazy.  Me, I love it.  It's the kind of story that stays with you, rather than just handing you the whole thing tied up in a neat package with a ribbon on top.  It keeps you working at it, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.  All the clues are there, it seems to say to the reader.  You're smart enough to figure this out.

It's why one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes in recent years is the haunting "73 Yards."  The Doctor's companion Ruby is being followed by an old woman who always stays exactly 73 yards away from her, making enigmatic hand gestures.  Ruby, of course, can't get close to her, but anyone else who approaches the old woman and speaks to her ends up terrified, running away in fear -- and then turns against Ruby, refusing to have anything more to do with her.  (In two horrifying scenes, this includes the stalwart Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and Ruby's own mother.)  We get hints at the end of who the old woman is and what's going on, but it's never really resolved completely; certainly, we never see the whole picture.

It's creepy, unsettling... but also brilliantly plotted and deeply intriguing.

One of the most critical things for developing an understanding of how things work is a tolerance for uncertainty.  The rush to find an answer -- any answer -- is completely antithetical to true knowledge.  On one level, I get it; it'd be nice if things were simple.  It'd all be so much less trouble.  But the basis of curiosity is in the suspension of that tendency, of allowing yourself not to know for a while, but to think, "Okay, I can do this.  Let's see how this all works."

The drive to fill in the answer blank and be done with thinking is a large part of what's gotten us into the political situation we now have in the United States.  It's the "All we have to do is..." mentality.  All we have to do is... put tariffs on other countries, and industry will come roaring back to our own.  Get rid of all the illegal immigrants, and our streets will be safer.  Cut the size of government, and waste and fraud will magically disappear.  Believe what Donald Trump says, world without end, amen.

And it's fed by the talking heads on the news, too, who give us little bite-sized pieces, nice and manageable -- and due to our tendency to gravitate toward the media we already believed, nothing that'll challenge our preconceived notions.  Nothing that forces us to question.  

Nothing that says, "Here are the actual facts.  Now, put them together.  You don't need me to tell you what to believe, you're smart enough to find the answer yourself."

Psychologist Todd Kashdan said, "If we are interested in producing a population of critical thinkers armed with courage, resilience, and a love of learning and discovery, then we must recognize, harness, and cultivate curiosity."  But the flipside of that is if you want to produce a population of people who will blindly follow an amoral autocrat, who will swallow every last bit of party-line propaganda from his mouthpieces, then make them incurious, unquestioning, and the unable to sustain uncertainty.

The frightening truth is that the last thing our current elected leaders want is a populace who asks uncomfortable questions, who probe deeper, who tolerate ambiguity, who examine their own biases and those of the people they meet.  No, they want followers who'll wear a gold pin with Donald Trump's face on it.  It's easy to get scared people to fall for hero worship -- and scared people are far more susceptible to bullying by the greedy and power-hungry.  

I get that we live in uncertain times, and as someone who has had a lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression, no one knows better than me how uncertainty can provoke fear.  But I'm asking you to hold that fear in your hands for a while.  Examine it and be curious about it.  Ask it questions.  Find out about your biases -- we've all got them, but they're not dangerous as long as you keep them where you can see them.  This approach may not be as instantly gratifying as having Fox News tell you, "Here's what to think," but in the end, it'll be worth it.

Believe me about this much, at least; in the final tally, a deep understanding is worth the anguish of being in the dark for a while.

Be brave.  I trust you to figure the answers out.

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The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, that I thought would make a great topic for this week's Fiction Friday: does a good story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest novel ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad." 

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot. 

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A couple that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looked at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  In the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, the episode "Orphan 55" pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me tell you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to see what the lesson was.  Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we'll figure it out.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Two of my most explicitly moralistic tales, the short stories "Last Bus Stop" and "Loose Ends" (both available in my collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows), are about the fragility of life and how we should look after each other because we never know how long we have -- but I think in both cases the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.  

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]