mahiwaga

Yes, I realize that this is the title of a cheesy pop song by S Club 7, of which I have disgracefully written about quite a few times before.

• Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want • 2001 Feb 25 • Fato Profugus
• Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Boston, New York City • 2001 May 31 • Lunacy
• playlist • spring 2001 •

But I had another of those heartbreaking dreams where you wish it were true, but then you wake up and then realize quite sadly that you were just dreaming. Those kind of dreams actually used to fill me up with hope, until I realized that they were just dreams, and they never came true.

And then there were the disturbing dreams. I realize I have severe phobia of cockroaches. When I was 6 years old, I was all by myself in a hospital conference room, when a huge cockroach skittered across the room, freaking me out to the point where I was screaming and screaming and screaming, it wasn’t until I had tired myself out from screaming that someone came to rescue me. Looking back, I sort of wonder what kind of effect that experience had on my psyche.

The one time I can recall this phobia seriously affecting me was one of my trips to the Philippines. Of course they have those enormous cockroaches the size of mice, and they can fly sometimes, and I remember having to meditate in order to be able to go to sleep with those things on the walls of the room I was staying in. Of course, I ended up having nightmares about gigantic cockroaches the size of elephants (reminding me tangentially about the spice worms from Dune) and I think I ended up screaming in my sleep, which was unfortunate because I was sharing the room with two other people who were quite disturbed. Naturally, they thought it would be quite hilarious to put a dead cockroach in my bed the next night.

I still overreact to the sight of them, which I find ironic considering the sorts of atrocious things I’ve seen in my brief life thus far. I have had literally pints of blood spilled on me. I have seen grotesque cancers eating away at people’s faces. I’ve been barfed on, shat on, pissed on. I’ve gotten pus all over my clothes. I’ve seen dismembered body parts all over the place. And, really, I wasn’t really bothered by the little house lizards that crawl all over the walls in the Philippines. (Although I am disturbed by their dismembered, yet moving, tails.) But cockroaches will make me scream like a little girl.

Still it’s not as bad as an ex-girlfriend’s extreme phobia of birds, which makes her actually avoid certain places. I can handle cockroaches if I concentrate. But I have to concentrate.

So naturally, I also dreamt of cockroaches last night. Lots of them. Hundreds and thousands of them, crawling all over me. I may have screamed in my sleep, but these days I life by myself (albeit in an apartment complex) I remember realizing that I was dreaming, and I was able to wake myself up.

Maybe this was just a manifestation of my resolution to be more in control of my life. Faced with one of my (although quite uncomplicated) fears, I broke the spell. If real life were only that easy. If only the fears that kept me from getting what I want from life were as simple to conquer as cockroaches.

Don’t worry. I won’t get all Bruce Wayne-ish and start dressing in a cockroach costume. I’m not that crazy. At least not yet.

I’m too lazy to look it up, but I can’t help but feel that there is some cognate root shared by these two words.

I believe that we are the only animals on Earth who can think of things that aren’t real, and even better, strive to make these thoughts actually real nonetheless. We shape the world into how we want it to be, for better or for worse.

The only difference between this and magic is that with actual magic, you don’t have to sweat the details. But what if that’s what wizardry really is? What if it’s simply knowing all the details? Like Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Like Schmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn said, “That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening. The rest is technique.”

So I meditate once again on the value of the genre of fantasy. Thanks to writers like China Miéville, I think I can see how the genre can become an agent of social change, fantasizing about much more than simple escapism. It can be, in a way, a complete deconstruction of the actual world we live in. In a fantasy world, except for maybe the conventions of the genre itself (which also probably need deconstructing), there is very little than you can take for granted. Nothing can really be assumed. Everything eventually needs to be made explicit. This discarding of assumptions is the very act of deconstruction, and it is necessary to write good fantasy.

Sure, Tolkien railed against allegory, and perhaps it becomes too facile to simply make 1:1 relationships between your fantasy world and the real world, but I think there can be value in metaphor. By definition, because this is fantasy (and not science-fiction), certain elements of your story are never expected to be plausible, no matter how advanced technology ever gets. Complex fantasy can never be completely transliterated into the real world. But in a world where you can’t assume anything (meaning, you can’t assume that your reader will intuit what you are thinking), characterization becomes even more important. I think this is where fantasy can shine the most: the characters frequently get faced with extraordinary tasks, but good fantasy will let the characters actually take on these tasks, and either succeed, or maybe fail. Deus ex machina is simple laziness. It is characterization that will really pin down your world and make all the various rules of magic, all the fantastic cities, mountains, seas, and continents worth investing in.

Given that, in many ways, fantasy demands deconstructing our assumptions of the real world, it becomes easy to translate various real world problems into similar situations that characters can interact in. Again, it doesn’t have to be a 1:1 correlation, but you’re likely to get the point.

Anyway, my mind is flickering in and out, so I’ll stop here for now.