Guest Post -- Dreams Come True, by Longish (Hannah Long)

Dreams Come True

When I went to visit my grandmother the other day, she said, out of the blue: "Leah died."

"Huh?" I mentally ran down a list of people we both know.

"Princess Leah," she explained. And then I understood. Carrie Fisher.

Public mourning is a weird thing, especially for actors. In the last weeks of 2016, a spate of celebrity deaths caused many fans to engage in something...not quite like grief, more like nostalgia. Carrie Fisher was not Princess Leia, but it can't be denied that what most people are missing about her is the white-clad space rebel she portrayed.

And that's even more strange, because Princess Leia is not dead.

It’s true that art and artist aren’t entirely separate things. The image we have of Princess Leia is inextricably connected to the image of Carrie Fisher the actress. But the temptation to blur the line between fantasy and reality is strong.

That's the reason everyone oohed and ahhed over Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in The Revenant—“he really did those things!” and Tom Cruise’s airplane stunt in Mission: Impossible. It's the reason for Galaxy Quest—a film in which actors from a Star Trek-esque TV show must fight real aliens and become their on-screen selves. It’s the fantasy fulfillment of a deep desire: we want heroes and look for them on TV screens. We transfer that hope to real-life celebrities.

At heart, we want to believe the stories are true. We want to believe in heroes.

Understandably, this temptation to mix up story and reality has worried Christians over the years. We care deeply about truth, and acting legitimizes a type of lying—actors pretend to be what they’re not. Even more than theater, cinema fragments reality, a process exacerbated by a celebrity culture that scrutinizes the private lives of famous actors. Where does one end and the other begin?

Recently, an article in Catholic World Report cautioned Christians against mistaking Carrie Fisher for her on-screen alter ego.

We should be able to appreciate actors for the entertainment they provide, without confusing that entertainment with heroic virtue or even ordinary human greatness. I can appreciate the plumber’s skill in fixing my plumbing without canonizing him.

It’s an important warning, and one we should remember in this era of celebrity-worship. But we can glean more from this phenomenon than just a warning. Escapism can be dangerous, yet it’s also evidence of longing for real goodness in a world that increasingly denies goodness exists. These heroes and their stories are the modern day equivalent of legends. And it's not the Wild West anymore - we don't believe, as they did in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that "when legend becomes fact, print the legend."

But...what if it was true?

What if legend really did become fact? Can you think of a more unexpected and joyous idea?

What if we woke up one day and all the stories had come true?

What if Carrie Fisher really was Princess Leia? What if there were actual intergalactic wars in space and noble knights wielding lightsabers? What if the Force was real? What if every beautiful story - "lies breathed through silver," C.S. Lewis called them - was not a lie?

What if the blind could see and the lost be found and the dead come back to life?

Sounds like a pretty crazy, escapist, wonderful world. But it's the one we live in.

The stories we write don't just spring from nowhere. We look for the truth and beauty of myth where we can find it - sometimes, erroneously, in the form of actors. But that's not completely misguided, because there was a time that a myth really happened.

J.R.R. Tolkien explains it thus:

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories....But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of [fiction] has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation.... 

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed....The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

(On Fairy-stories, ¶ 104-05)

I don't intend to whitewash the harm that can come from misplaced escapism. It's important to develop the ability to discern between fantasy and reality, but our desire for stories to come true is not a bad thing: it's an arrow pointing to Truth. The inexplicable, irrational joy we feel when stories come true, when a character exists in the real world, echoes the moment when the Author of all stories took on flesh and became a character in his own novel.

Longish

Mythmoot IV -- A New Hope

Here it is, folks, the very first, entirely unofficial, totally parodic, commercial for Mythmoot IV. (That may or may not be Harold Bloom's house at the end.)

Goodbye, David. Goodbye, Carrie.

I first became aware of David Bowie when I was a fourteen year old in high school, in those endless battles we had across lunchroom tables over which band was great and which band, frankly, sucked. We were teenagers. We didn't know from shades of grey. To us, so incandescently young and so very cloistered by years and years of Catholic School, Catholic Nuns, and Catholic Mothers of WWII vintage (God bless them), and only beginning to realize there was something called FM, where they played whole album sides at a time, almost nothing in the Top 40, and talked about Rock and Roll like it was life itself, David Bowie was quite a shock. With his Diamond Dogs look of androgyny cultivated like pearls, he seemed a bit of a freak, and often got called far worse by children like us who scarcely knew the meaning of the insults we hurled at him because he didn't seem to fit in any of the categories we knew.

So a freak he seemed. And yet his blazing talent forced my eyes open, and compelled me to look into the heart of the sun that was his music. Whatever he looked like, whatever he played at, he could not be denied. One stunning, powerful performance after another, one masterful song after another flung into my uncomprehending, awestruck schoolboy face. Songs of beauty, works of art, anthems of raving youth. And they never stopped coming until last January.

So a freak he seemed. So what. He was Bowie. And in the end he was no more a freak than the rest of us. Much less so in fact. 

Everybody knows how they first saw Carrie Fisher. In the first scene she is ensuring that the all important plans to the Death Star escape her doomed ship, in the second she is shooting it out with the bad guys, in the third she stands fearlessly up to someone who could break her body like a twig. So, clever and determined, putting first things first, unflinching and intrepid, not just a pretty face (as pretty as she was). This was no window-dressing damsel in distress. This was no one's Disney Princess. 

Her own life was full of far more upheaval and turmoil than her most famous character's, though given her struggles with addiction and bipolar disorder, there were surely days when it felt like someone had blown up her whole planet.  But her performance as Leia evidently drew on strengths she didn't know she had yet, and she fought her way through to the other side of her troubles. For the many in this world -- and of course there were thousands of Star Wars fans among them -- who shared the same troubles, Carrie Fisher was a success and a model. And if we looked at her from far away, paying attention in after years perhaps only because she had been that Princess, still we smiled and nodded and were glad. We took comfort in her winning through. For women she clearly meant far more than I could ever grasp. I wouldn't even dare try to express it. But I don't have to. Their voices are loud and clear enough. If you can't hear them, you're not listening. 

I am not sure if what I've written here explains, even to myself, why I will miss David Bowie and Carrie Fisher more than so many of the others.  He enabled me to see music differently, and see that differences of appearance, whether parts of the act or parts of the person, are essentially meaningless. She did not so much make me see women differently as she made me see that I was right to see them differently. I was already a bit of an oddity on that score: I was a teenage boy who actually wanted to talk to girls and hear what they had to say. 

There's a photo on my dresser of someone from those days. Every day when I sit down on the edge of my bed to take off my shoes, I look at it and sigh and miss her. That's the way I'm thinking of David Bowie and Carrie Fisher as this year goes down into shadow.  

They were heroes. 

The Uncouth Name of Shire

At the Council of Elrond Gandalf recounts his meeting with Radagast near Bree:

'Gandalf!' [Radagast] cried. 'I was seeking you. But I am a stranger in these parts. All I knew was that you might be found in a wild region with the uncouth name of Shire.'

'Your information was correct,' I said. 'But do not put it that way, if you meet any of the inhabitants. You are near the borders of the Shire now.'

....

'I have been told that wherever they go the Riders ask for news of a land called Shire.'

'The Shire,' I said.... 

FR 2.ii.256-57, emphasis original)

Why is the name 'Shire' uncouth?  The OED shows nothing in the history of the word to suggest the least whiff of disapproval.  Even setting aside all thoughts of The Hobbit films, Radagast lives in Rhosgobel near southern Mirkwood, which hardly seems likely to be a hub of urbanity.  Be that as it may, it is the name Shire the wizard is commenting on. To be sure, Radagast also calls it a 'wild region,' but again he lives in the Wilderland, himself.  Gandalf does not seem to be offended by the description, and indeed he calls it correct, but cautions Radagast about the reaction hobbits might have to hearing the Shire called uncouth.  For, as the narrator (Frodo) tells us elsewhere '[t]he Shire-hobbits referred to those of Bree, and to any others that lived beyond the borders, as Outsiders, and took very little interest in them, considering them dull and uncouth' (FR 1.ix.150). Ironically, given that Buttebur calls Frodo and company 'Outsiders -- travellers from the Shire' and instantly apologizes for doing so, the Breelanders clearly have the same opinion of Shire hobbits as Shire hobbits have of everyone else (FR 1.ix.154)

Tolkien is here again having a bit of fun with words, as we've seen him do before.  Our word 'uncouth' descends from the Old English 'uncúþ', which literally means 'unknown', and therefore 'strange.'  The Shire being unknown to Radagast and the Black Riders, they omit the definite article, because the definite article is used for things that are known.  Gandalf of course knows The Shire very well, as do its inhabitants, and so they include the article. To them indeed it is the one and only.

So for Radagast and the Black Riders 'uncouth' has its original sense; for the hobbits it has the more modern sense. Gandalf knows them both.

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Works Consulted

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I Hear the Tentacles Singing: Once More "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Babylon Five"

A Pak'ma'ra from Babylon 5

In chapter 11 of A Wrinkle in Time I came across what might be another link to Babylon 5. Having arrived on a new planet, Meg sees creatures like none she has ever seen before approaching her, her father, and Calvin:

They were the same dull gray color as the flowers. If they hadn't walked upright they would have seemed like animals. They moved directly toward the three human beings. They had four arms and far more than five fingers to each hand, and the fingers were not fingers, but long waving tentacles. They had heads, and they had faces. But where the faces of the creatures on Uriel had seemed far more than human faces, these seemed far less. Where the features would normally be there were several indentations, and in place of ears and hair were more tentacles. They were tall, Meg realized as they came closer, far taller than any man. They had no eyes. Just soft indentations. 

After Meg is healed by these beings, she quickly becomes quite attached to one whom she calls Aunt Beast:

"Please sing to me, Aunt Beast," said Meg. 

If it was impossible to describe sight to Aunt Beast, it would be even more impossible to describe the singing of Aunt Beast to a human being. It was a music even more glorious than the music of the singing creatures on Uriel. It was a music more tangible than form or sight. It had essence and structure. It supported Meg more firmly than the arms of Aunt Beast It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning. and only this melody was real. 

The first passage made me think at first of the Ood from Doctor Who, and of course nothing prevents L'Engle's description from having an influence on Doctor Who, but I was also reminded of the Pak'ma'ra from Babylon 5. Both of these species have tentacles on their heads in front of their mouths. Now, admittedly this doesn't match the description of the unnamed beings in A Wrinkle in Time, creatures who also have tentacles instead of fingers. It is unclear to me whether their voice comes from the waving 'finger' tentacles or from the tentacles on their heads. 

But it was the astonishing and uplifting beauty of their singing that struck me, and made me think more of Babylon 5, in the last episode of which the main characters are conversing over a meal:

"You know, Londo never liked the Pak'ma'ra. I mean, they're stubborn, lazy, obnoxious, greedy--" said Vir.

"They kinda look like an octopus that got run over by a truck," said Garibaldi. 

"That too, but .. one day Londo and I were walking past their quarters .. and we heard them .. singing."  

"Singing? They can sing?" asked Sheridan. 

"There's nothing about that in the literature,"said Dr Franklin. 

"Apparently," Vir continued, "it's something they only do certain times of the year as part of their religious ceremonies. You may not believe this, but .. it was the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. I couldn't make out the words, but I knew it was full of sadness and .. hope and wonder and .. terrible .. sense of loss. I looked at Londo and -- this is the amazing part -- there was a .. tear running down his face. I said: 'Londo, we should leave.' And 'This is upsetting you.' He just stood there and .. listened. And when it was over he turned to me and he said: 'There are 49 gods in our pantheon, Vir. To tell you the truth I never believed in any of them. But if only one of them exists, .. then god sings with that voice.' "

The additional detail of the sadness and the terrible sense of loss with which the Pak'ma'ra sing may also point to the influence of Tolkien and the third theme of the Music of the Ainur, whose beauty comes from its sorrow. 

But it's not every day you can point to tentacles and singing in support of an argument. This may be axiomatic.