#clearning out my drafts | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

paulgadzikowski · 2 months ago

Text

This is an interesting argument to me because of one of the mashups I did in the 90s-00s between my own fanfiction crossovers and world myths and legends. Everyone reading this blog or my retired tumblog will remember that the first step in the genesis of Arthur, King of Time and Space was me globally replacing all the proper nouns in my Usenet Star Trek/Doctor Who crossovers with proper nouns from the Matter of Britain - Arthur for Kirk, Merlin for the Doctor, etc. But there were also other Doctor Who crossovers, resulting in e.g. Hercules for Superman and Robin Hood for Sisko.

With the Hercules bit I established that the Age of Heroes on the planet Helles was analog to the 20th century as British space was to Kirk's Federation. So, what to do with M*A*S*H? Obviously, adapt a war story. Obviously, adapt the war story. Of course, M*A*S*H is about surgeons, not soliders, so the warrior characters in The Iliad had to become doctors. Front-line surgeons, at the 1st Hellene Occupational Relief Surgical Effort at Troy, the Trojan H.O.R.S.E., which was - and here's where the Le Guin quote about Homer not taking sides makes me think of it - the first wartime military hospital staffed by surgeons from both sides.

Helen is the chief nurse, Odysseus is the mastermind and commandant of the base, and Patroclus is the company clerk. Hector is shipped home and replaced by Aeneas. Patroclus is killed in battle while off on R&R after Achilles goaded him into sowing some wild oats, and is replaced by Tiresias.

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.

#kaitas #h*o*r*s*e #cartoon reply #friday night clearning out my drafts

3K notes · View notes

paulgadzikowski · 2 years ago

Text

you’re twelve years old and you break your father’s hand when he hi-fives you. the first thing you learn is that the smallest slip up can hurt the people you love. your (foster) father smiles and says it’s okay (it’s not).

your parents are not your parents. the idyllic farming community that raised you is not your home. you’re a You-Don’t-Know-What from You-Don’t-Know-Where. all you know for sure is that you’re not human.

so you can fly. so you can run fast. so you can lift cars. so what? why do you even have this power? what should you even do with it?

your father said do what’s right, so that’s what you do.

you stop a robbery. the man’s knife shatters against your skin and you see the same fear in his eyes that you saw in your father’s when you were twelve. you catch a falling child before it can hit the water. his mother looks at you like you’re a god.

they love you, even though they don’t know you. the most powerful man in the world hates you because they love you.

you wanted to write when you were younger. you wanted to tell stories that needed to be told. you never wanted to star in them. you never wanted super-geniuses and demi-goddesses looking to you for advice; like you have any idea how to handle threats to reality itself. you’re just a kid from smallville who’s trying to do the best he can with what he’s given.

you try and get back to the farm as much as you can. it feels normal being back among the open wheat; where everyone smiles because you’re that nice Kent boy.

when you were younger, you pretended to fly, hands out to your sides and running through the tall grass by the river. it doesn’t look as beautiful from on high; the details get lost and the colors of your hometown blur together from a mile above ground.

the problem with flying is that it puts you so far above people you care about

#lemon squares #bruce wayne #clark kent #martha kent #impossible to write for ha #dcu #cartoon reply #friday night clearning out my drafts

51K notes · View notes