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GTDreamsmith

Out of Phase

Commentary on the story The Call of Speed.

"So, why do you race?" he asked.

"Because I'm a racer," I said. He gave me a look. He thought I was being a smart-ass. "What, you thought I was a racer because I race? That's backwards. Is a fish a fish because it swims, or does it swim because it's a fish?"

The waitress arrived with our beers. "Congratulations, Tom! Another one for the mantle, eh?" she said, commenting on my latest trophy, sitting in the center of the table in our booth. Another customer waved to her, and she sprinted off with a "Gotta go!" before I could reply.

Reporter-boy seemed to have recovered from my last answer. I'd hoped he'd come up with a new question, but no, he'd come up with a way to rephrase the last one. "Okay then, why are you a racer?"

Why are you a racer? Why not ask, "Why are you a human?" as if I had a choice in the matter. I was sure he didn't want to hear that answer either. But how could I explain it to someone like him? How does a man who's left Plato's cave explain what he's seen to those still chained to the wall?

If you've read The Call of Speed, and even better if you understood it, you might find it interesting to hear how well it faired as a presentation to a 400-level college writing workshop. In a word, "poorly". I received all kinds of suggestions on how to "improve" it, but most of these would in fact destroy it. What I truly learned was the frustration of trying to present a work to a group hostile to the ideas it attempts to communicate. And I learned a valuable lesson about how easily people can misinterpret, twisting what they read into something more easily acceptable to them.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that most people wouldn't "get it". The story is both very spiritual and very pagan. It draws heavily on a Platonic worldview, which most people don't understand or find absurd (usually both, actually), and on elements from pagan rituals, none of which were recognized by any of the readers.

Some authors are afraid that if they use metaphor, some people might not understand, and try to take it too literally. It seems there is no danger of this. The reverse seem to be the problem -- no matter how explicitly you say something, some people won't take it literally enough...

There's a real world out there. No, not this stuff you see around you right now. I'm talking about the real world. A world of eternal things, perfect things, not these imperfect, ephemeral shadows you see around you. Plato understood. He knew what was real. Perhaps you find his views far-fetched. It doesn't matter. The real world is there, whether you believe in it or not.

There's a road in the real world. It stretches from infinity to eternity. Something races down that road. Can't you feel it? Concentrate, during some quiet moment, and you can hear it. No, not with your ears. Ignore your hearing, and your vision, and your smell and taste and touch. Use your other senses, and you will hear him racing down that road. (Him? Her? Does it make sense to talk about the gender of a god?)

Does he have thoughts like you and I? Does he see the world the way we do? Do you ever wonder what it's like to have a god's-eye-view of the world? I remember the first time I saw through his eyes, and caught a momentary glimpse of reality. I thought to have a pleasant daydream, but I went too far. I went completely through the world of imagination and came out the other side. I walked out of Plato's cave and saw the real world. And I remember. I was just a child, but I remember it more clearly than anything else, before or since.

The idea behind The Call of Speed revolved around a small boy who, without conscious effort or even real understanding of what he is doing, invokes a god. The inspiration for this comes from certain pagan rituals, where during the height of the ritual one of the members becomes for a time the god/spirit that is invoked. This is common in things from Wicca ("drawing down the Moon") to Voudon and native African religions, where one is "ridden" by the god/spirit that is invoked in the ceremony.

The story also purposefully uses shamanic imagery. The "traveling down a tunnel" phenomenon to reach a spiritual destination is mimicked by the "traveling down a tunnel" effect one can get while traveling at high speeds. At the end of the tunnel, one finds a different world. This story actually travels through three different layers of reality. We start in the world of appearances (the empirical world, what most people call "the real world"), journey through the world of dreams (with the boy's daydream), and emerge for a short paragraph into the world of eternal forms (what Plato would call "the real world"), after which we reverse the trip, ending up back in the empirical world (although the final line of the story obviously reflects back to the world of the forms).

I knew full well that many readers would not be familiar with these things, and not see the connections with the elements of the story, but I still figured, with enough clues, they would catch on to what was happening, especially if I outright said it. And, failing that, they'd at least get some idea of what motivates the boy who becomes a racer, what draws him to it. Thus, full of optimistic hope, I launched into my tale...


	I had an idea. "Let me tell you a little story," I said to reporter-boy, "maybe it'll help you understand." I launched into my tale...

The most common complaint I received about the story centered around this paragraph:

I am Speed, a pagan god in a modern chariot, clutching the symbol of infinity in my hands. The road ahead extends forever, and I race down it faster than the wind has ever blown. I have always raced down it, and always will. My worshipers are legion. From the astronauts strapped into the tip of their rocket to the hawk diving out of the sky with the wind in his feathers. From the cheetah feeling the African soil torn up beneath her paws to the little boy playing in his garage. I am Speed, and my call is eternal and irresistible.

Number one comment? "It's beautiful, but it's out of character ... it doesn't sound like a small boy speaking." I found this particularly interesting given "...to the little boy playing in his garage..." -- I thought the use of the third person here would make it obvious that the person speaking is not the little boy. Having realized that, one ought to ask, "Who is?" The answer I hoped would be obvious, given that it's stated explicitly! TWICE!

Of course, another possible answer is that the narrator is in fact the man who grew from this boy, and sometimes in retrospective, the person we were then seems very different from the person we are now, and it seems reasonable to refer to that other self in the third person.

And this I wouldn't really mind. In fact the story in several ways suggests a retrospective, and I left this interpretation as possible deliberately. But I did seed the story with several clues as to the reality of the experience, particularly at the end, where I refer back to the things Speed mentions as being real, things occurring in the world at the time of the story, things that the boy could not have been aware of, nor the older man ever have know about, but things that would have been known to someone with a genuine god's-eye-view of reality. In the end, the neither the dreamy boy nor the retrospective man may see the reality of the situation, but the reader ought to. Or so I thought...

"Ah! So you're a racer because of your father!" he said. "I kinda figured that, when I researched your bio. He won the grand trophy at Twin Cities Motor Speedway in '67 and again in '68, right? He must have been quite an inspiration."

I looked at him closely. He'd settled back against the wall of the cave, no longer straining to turn his head, to see the real world outside. I could almost hear his chains rattle as he scribbled in his notepad.

"Yeah, sure, that's it," I said, and sipped my beer. It was obvious he didn't understand. He'd never buy the truth, but at least he'd buy my beer.

Perhaps I should feel guilty for lying to him, but what more could I do? He wanted some trite story about what in my past I was running from, or what events in my life led me here, or some other patently ridiculous nonsense. He didn't want to hear that the cause of my racing was something external to myself and my life, something outside time and space. He didn't want to hear about anything real.

Another complaint, particularly indicative of how far the story fell short of the mark, was the complaint that the story failed to explain the boy's motivations. At one point, the professor said that one thing she wanted to know was what led the boy to want to race, even "what was he running from?"

I explained that he wasn't running from anything. The cause of this desire to race wasn't something that was pushing him, but something that was pulling him. She was looking for an "efficient cause", as Aristotle would put it, whereas I was offering a "final cause". Her response to this was to ask, "then what is it that is drawing him to racing?"

At this, I was speechless. What could I say? It is, after all, precisely what the whole story is about, even the title explicitly states the answer to this question. I drove around for a couple hours afterwards (I often just get in my car and drive when I want to think), questioning how I could have failed so completely as an author. The whole story was constructed precisely to answer that question. If, after reading it, one still has the question, I have failed to communicate the most central message of the story. It didn't bother me much that people didn't catch all the nuances, particularly the more religious ones, but to have missed the whole point?

Later, I realized the problem wasn't so much that she didn't see the answer but that she wasn't willing to accept it. The call of Speed is like the call of any other god, a calling to one by a god/spirit external to oneself. At least one reviewer did get and note this. But this is an external, pulling, "final" cause, whereas once again the mindset of the professor and many readers, children of the scientific age, was to not accept any kind of cause as explanatory unless it was an "efficient" cause.

The suggestion, from her and others, was to insert some efficient cause into the story. This would, of course, destroy it utterly. I'd be "cutting-me-own-throat", undercutting my own message, since the whole point was to explain the cause as something outside of the boy/man, something greater than either, something eternal. Something real, as Plato would consider it.

I return down the mouth of the cave, and tell you what I've seen, but you don't understand. I say, "Turn and look! See him silhouetted against the sun!" But you cannot. You are chained to the wall, head facing this way, unable to see anything but me, his reflection on the wall of the cave.

But close your eyes and open your minds. Perhaps, if you listen, in some quiet moment, you too will hear the roar echoing in the wind. If you watch carefully, you may see the blur of his passing in the corners of your eyes. Touch the wall, and perhaps you will feel the rumble that shakes reality to its core.

The roar fills my ears, always, and in it I hear his call. He races down that road, and I feel the vibration in my bones. He rushes by, and I feel the wind, blowing through my soul.

What other explanation could I give? What other real explanation could there be?

I did attempt to revise the story. The bits you see between my commentary are from that attempt. I figured maybe if I framed the story properly, I could get the point across. I still didn't realize what was happening, that the point wasn't so much not getting across as encountering a solid wall of resistance at the destination, and no amount of explanation would make the story acceptable to those who did not see the world the same way as a pagan neoplatonist like myself.

In the process of writing the revision, though, I realized what the real problem was. I never did submit the revised version. I didn't care for it. I had resorted to beating the reader over the head with the point, and I didn't figure that would make for an enjoyable experience. Also, it was pretty clear that "reporter-boy" was the professor and other critics, and that the narrator didn't think much of "reporter-boy". In the end, it came off sounding like an attack on my critics, and that wasn't what it was meant to be. And the parts that didn't sound like an attack sounded like a philosophy lecture, which wasn't what it was meant to be, either. It was meant to be philosophical, but it was not meant to be a lecture.

I finally realized how out of phase my own world was from most of theirs. I was trying to bridge the gap, open a line of communication, but in the worst possible place, in an area where there simply was no overlap, no common ground, no starting point where we could begin together and I could lead them on the journey to show them what I wanted to see. No matter how I phrased it at the beginning, their starting point would be in their world, not mine, they would translate whatever I said into their language, and anywhere I tried to lead them would be similarly translated across that gap into a place in their world, where the features did not match the features in mine that I was pointing to. Even if we were all on the same bus, we'd see different things as we looked out the window. The things the tour guide pointed out would leave the passengers straining their eyes and scratching their heads, unable to glimpse what appeared simply and plainly to the guide.

My second submission to the class was much better received. It was a typical piece of fiction. It was fun, and I did manage to slip in some spirit, and a message or two, but ultimately it was pedestrian and relatively pointless.

It got the better grade...