Tick tock tick tock tick

This post is about a little thing I've been thinking about for a long time. It's not a story thing, it's more of a complexity thing, but I'm allowed to talk about that here because I said I would.

I spend a lot of time looking out of windows. Most of the time when I do this I'm watching the branches and leaves move around. Sometimes there are squirrels, and then it's called squirrel TV. Our dogs were big fans of squirrel TV before they lost the ability to see as far as the window. I watch it now in their memory. But the squirrels are only on the set once in a while; the leaves are 24/7. You might think there would be nothing to watch in the winter, but the beech trees keep some leaves on all winter, so I'm good. I find that when I put on the right music (physically or in my mind's ear) the experience can reach cinematic production quality, as long as I maintain the concentration to push out all other sensations. (I'm good at ignoring. It's a gift.) When I used to ride the train to the city I did the same thing: with the right music piped into my ears, and my eyes glued to the window, I could produce excellent "day in the life" montages as we sped along past people doing whatever it was they did all day.

One of the things I like to watch when I look out the window is how, when the day is mildly breezy, individual leaves will suddenly take up oscillating patterns, clean as clockwork, ticking back and forth on their little stems. Sometimes a leaf will do this for thirty seconds or a minute, and sometimes even for several minutes. I always watch to see if a leaf that stops oscillating will take it up again later, because, you know, now it knows how. They never do. What happens instead is that another leaf, on the same tree or on another tree, takes up the pattern and starts its own tick-tock movements, in perfect imitation of the leaf that came before it. I find it fascinating that in a sea of complex, erratic, unpredictable motion, these little islands of regularity appear and disappear so - I was going to say pleasantly, but that's not systemic enough. So regularly.

Those leaves remind me of a conversation I had once with a person with whom I was discussing the differences between complicated and complex patterns. He said something like, "You say a complicated pattern repeats and a complex one doesn't, right? But how do you explain the fact that complex patterns sometimes do repeat?" I said, "They repeat until they don't." What I meant was, when a leaf is oscillating, it looks like it's connected to some perfectly engineered device governed by a mechanical timer. But that's an illusion that bursts when the leaf suddenly stops. Complicated patterns repeat because somebody or something made them repeat. They stop repeating when somebody or something stops them repeating, or when they break down and need to be fixed (after which they repeat again, if somebody or something makes them). Complex patterns repeat because they started repeating, and they stop repeating because they've stopped repeating. Keep in mind, of course, that the patterns we see in our world are rarely purely complex or complicated. Even those oscillating leaves I see out of my window have been influenced by the complicated design of the house that separates us.

Patterns that repeat until they don't remind me of raising a child. Many of the patterns parents see in growing children repeat, and repeat and repeat, until suddenly, one day, they stop repeating. I remember when my son was two and three and four, he always begged to be picked up and carried instead of walking. Once my husband was giving in to one of these pleas, and I said, "Why do you keep picking him up? He can walk." My husband sagely pointed out that one day our son would stop asking and would never ask again, so he was going to enjoy the burden while he could. He was right: only a few months later the pleas to be picked up stopped, and that part of our journey together was over. I've come to expect such sudden changes to apparently infinite repetitions to happen frequently. I've also come to accept that I will never anticipate these changes sufficiently to be prepared for them to happen. It's always too much and too much and too much, right up until it's gone and you wish it was too much again.

Raising a child reminds me of ontological oscillation. This is one of my favorite concepts from Weick's writing on sensemaking. Says Weick:

If people have multiple identities and deal with multiple realities, why should we expect them to be ontological purists? To do so is to limit their capability for sensemaking.

Ontological oscillation is what happens when a person or group making sense of any topic does a tick-tock dance back and forth between views and methods and versions of reality. At some point they stop oscillating and make a decision. Then another topic, on that tree or on another tree, takes up the pattern and starts its own tick-tock movements. Is ontological oscillation complex? Sure, partly. It certainly has a lot of interacting parts, as we bounce around our lives encountering changes and viewpoints and experiences. And again, our expectations about repeating patterns don't always match what happens. People watching ontological oscillation sometimes mistake it for fickleness or "flip flopping" when it's just the way people think. I've been accused of changing my mind often. My sister once famously told me that I swing like a pendulum on any topic. But, I told her, eventually I come to rest somewhere, at least on that topic, at least for a while. The real question is not why we do this but why we think we shouldn't. You know what I think? I don't believe anybody thinks they should stop ontologically oscillating; they just wish everybody else would. It's inconvenient. People would be easier to figure out if they would stick to the same opinions.

Ontological oscillation reminds me of ice ages. My son and I were reading something about ice ages once, and it said something like this: "Small, or minor, ice ages have occurred fairly regularly about every ten thousand years, that is, up until about ten thousand years ago, when they stopped happening." We laughed; but actually, there is no way of knowing whether that statement is correct or incorrect. It is impossible to say whether an oscillating leaf is in fact oscillating when it is between oscillations, unless you know and can control why and how it is oscillating. It becomes a matter of habit to say whether something will continue to repeat.

Ice ages remind me of rocking chairs. I love doing anything that has a tick-tock beat to it: swinging, rocking, gliding, pacing, tapping. Some people say this is self-soothing, but that's not what it feels like to me. It feels more like participation. When I rock it feels like my tick-tock heartbeat has expanded out into and through my whole body, through the chair, and into the universe ticking all around me. It's not turning in; it's reaching out. My husband, on the other hand, never tick-tocks. When he sits on any of our rocking chairs or gliders or swings, he just sits on them. And he never paces, and he always thinks repeating patterns will stop repeating. I usually think whatever has been happening will keep happening for a while longer, because it's been happening, hasn't it? I used to think I was right and he was wrong, because, you know, we're married, but eventually I realized that we're both right. He's always right eventually, and I'm always right for a while. So here's my idea: Maybe if you enjoy regularity you find it in the world around you, and if you don't you don't. Or maybe it goes the other way around. Maybe the more you see regularity all around you, the more you want to participate in it. Maybe this is just another one of the many fascinating ways in which people can complement each other.

Rocking chairs remind me of Cloisterham. Actually, that one's more like, in the middle of writing this blog post I picked up The Mystery of Edwin Drood and read:

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity.

So there you go, a whole city that prefers repetition. Would it have more rocking chairs than a city with different expectations? Maybe.

Cloisterham reminds me of fads. Fads set up a pattern for a while and then mysteriously disappear. You might say fads don't oscillate, but I tell you they do, because every fad oscillates with its own anti-fad. I realized this the other night while my son and I were watching Cars for the twentieth time. When we reached the scene where the punks put on a Kenny G. song to lull the Mack truck to sleep, I paused the video, like I always do, to explain that this is funny to adults because that particular Kenny G. song was both loved and hated when it came out in 1986. Fads ricochet all around society, probably with a tick-tock pattern if you were able to map it but let's not, until they stop bouncing and fade away. Take the pet rock fad, which started bouncing around when I was nine. I remember going through my own private oscillations on this, alternately ridiculing the idea's lack of substance, wishing I could buy a pet rock myself, carrying around a real rock in my pocket pretending it was a real pet rock, throwing out the rock because the whole thing was stupid, then finding another rock that seemed even more like a real pet rock. By the time I had enough money to buy a real pet rock, there were no more pet rocks to be had.

Fads remind me of an iPad game called Slingshot Racing. What you do is, there are these tiny cars that run around a tiny oval racetrack, and you have to click on the screen (tech faux pas! tap on the screen) to tether the cars to tiny towers that slingshot them around the corners (ends? short sides?) of the oval. It sounds easy but in fact it's devastatingly hard to tap and release at exactly the right times to start the tether and stop it without smashing your tiny car into a tiny wall. That's kind of like catching and riding a fad. You have to discover that the potential for a fad exists, and not just any fad; one you can make money on, say by selling rocks or playing the saxophone in a particular way. You have to tether the fad to you at just the right moment, then hold onto it just up until the moment when it's about to fade, at which point you release it before you start looking stupid. Few succeed at this game. Some tap too early and suffer ridicule, that is, until after they're dead and gone and suddenly on the tip of everyone's tongue. Some tap too late and, say, put out Scrabble for the iPad at the out-of-touch price of ten dollars, only to reduce the price after being scooped by every programmer with half a brain. Some release too early and sell their rights to the next big whatever for a hundred dollars, then die in flop houses. Some release too late and become parodies of their own former successes. Riding the wave of a fad depends on predicting accurately when the leaf will start tick-tocking and when it will stop.

Slingshot Racing reminds me of blogs. Blogs are repeating patterns that repeat until they stop. They are to some extent under the conscious control of their creators; but then again, there are complex forces at work in them as well. Readerships change, lives change, fields change, media change, methods of communication change. When to tap, when to release? Or maybe tapping and releasing doesn't matter. Maybe what matters is finding a rhythm that feels good and not worrying too much about how long it will go on. That's what the leaves do. I like it.

Support the Mistake Bank book! Right now!

Hey everybody, John Caddell's Mistake Bank project, about which I've written here before, has swung into high gear in the final days of getting it out as an awesome book, with a Kickstarter campaign. Drop everything and go get your advance copy!

The book is called The Mistake Bank: How to Succeed by Forgiving Your Mistakes and Embracing Your Failures. Here's what I like best about it.

• The book contains more than fifty real stories John has gathered about mistakes and learning from them. Actually I think John has collected far, far more stories than that over the several years he has been working on this project. But he has selected fifty of the best, and organized them to illustrate lessons we all need to learn about benefiting from our mistakes. If the stories in the book are anything like some of the ones I've seen on his Mistake Bank blog over the years the book will be excellent.
• This whole project is an excellent example of narrative work: real stories about real people collected and arranged in order to help real people meet real needs! It's not lectures, it's hard-won experience! This is bringing stories to where they need to go. And it's participatory too, because John has carried on correspondence with many people about the project over the years (I'm happy to count myself in that group). So this isn't just what John thinks you should know about mistakes, though that is certainly a lot; it's the product of broader experience than that.
• I expect to learn a lot from reading the book, even though I've read a lot of the Mistake Bank blog posts. Seeing the stories selected, organized and illustrated, making up a coherent presentation makes a big difference. I can't wait to see what sorts of lessons he has in store for me in my own work and life. (At this point I've got the making of mistakes down pat, but it's that follow-up part about using them fruitfully that I'm keen to get some insight into.)

John was the first person who ever wrote to thank me for writing my book, years ago, so let me be the first to ... ooops, lots of people have already thanked John for his great work. So please, get on over there and help John's Kickstarter campaign push over that final line. It'll be a mistake if you don't!

Neverending

My last post on this blog was nearly two months ago. That's the longest gap I've had so far in, what is it, three years? I am writing nearly every day, but it is all going into the book. The book? It's still plodding along like the dear little dogged thing it is. It says to say hello. But the issue I wanted to tell you about is, I can't seem to come up with anything to write about on the blog.

I have tried to come up with things to tell you, and I have come up with things, but they've all been the sort of everyday thing you tell the people you live with. Do you really want to hear about The Pickwick Papers (unexpectedly enjoyable), the new iPad (still in the it's-my-turn-can-I-have-it phase), the wonders of laryngitis (do not whisper; it makes it worse), circular knitting looms (anybody want a hat?), the undying love affair between cats and boxes? Of course not. At least not on this blog. It's supposed to be about something. I could start a "funny little things I think of every day" blog, but that would probably bring to an end the funny little things I think of every day. Besides, other people think of funnier little things.

There is exactly one thing I have noticed in the past two months that I think is worth mentioning here. It's about noticing things worth mentioning here. I keep a list of 30 some blogs that I skim every so often, using my ... button you push in the thing at the top of the window. The other day I was looking at one of those blogs, and the blogger said, "The other day I was looking out the window and realized this little thing that I'm going to tell you about now." When I read that, I realized this little thing that I'm going to tell you about now.

I'm not the only one running out of things to say on their blog. Lots of other people are seeking fodder for blogs and coming up with nothing but dregs, like little things you realize while looking out the window. Here's an idea. Maybe there is a limit to the number of witty yet profound observations any one person has in them about any one topic. If blogs are like serialized novels, why don't they end? And when they do end, why is it always apologetically done? Why should anyone need to apologize for being done talking?

The whole thing reminds me of marriage. In the first few days and weeks and months of a relationship (that is going well) you tend to have those long, soul-baring conversations in which you explore in detail landscapes of thought and belief and fear and aspiration, the kind of conversation where you get together over dinner and it's suddenly morning. But after a few years of married life, there is no point doing the same thing over and over, and time presses, so the ratio of reference to content increases. Sometimes I joke that after being married twenty years we can just say, "Honey, how about we have argument number twelve today?" Though in reality words never need cross the air: a gesture or glance, or even an object out of place, can say the same thing.

(And here I simply must insert a reference to Through the Looking Glass:

'We must have a bit of a fight, but I don't care about going on long,' said Tweedledum.
'What's the time now?'
Tweedledee looked at his watch, and said 'Half-past four.'
'Let's fight till six, and then have dinner,' said Tweedledum.
'Very well,' the other said...

The fight being more reference than content in that case as well.)

I'm starting to think the same thing happens on blogs. After you read fifty or a hundred essays written by anybody, you start knowing what they are going to say before they say it. Some of the blogs I used to read every word of I still look at, but I'm mostly just checking to see if they are still saying the same sort of thing they said back then. They are.

I am too. The other side of it is that, as a blogger, you start to get tired of explaining everything over and over. I've noticed that the longer people blog the more they increase their own ratio of reference to content. I do it too. Instead of spending paragraphs explaining a position, people just say something like, "Regular readers of this blog will know I advocate X." (Meaning, I don't chew my cabbage twice, so the rest of you can go look it up.) Maybe above a certain ratio of reference to content a blog has turned into ... a book. And guess what? Books end.

So, am I done talking? The real question in my mind is, am I allowed to say that? Why do I feel like it's not a blog if I end it? (That would ripple back through time, of course, so that it never was a blog either.) I've tried to follow "blog etiquette" when writing this blog (respond to comments, feed the blog, include links, feed the blog, fix typos, feed the blog), but I can't find any etiquette about how to stop talking gracefully.

So off I went to see my helpful friend Google. I typed "how blogs end" and got ... not a thing. "How blogs start" gets tons of relevant links. "How many blogs get started every day" also came up (unbidden but welcome). A search for "how many blogs end every day" got, again, nada. The only relevant thing I got was an article called, "Too Many Blogs?" It reminds me of all the junk in our garage that seems destined to follow us for life.

A search for "ending a blog" was more fruitful, with all of three relevant links. An I'm-ending-the-blog post said, "I regret closing the blog and I owe readers an explanation." Another, similar: "It's been a hard decision, but I feel it's time I move on to other things. Like an even better blog!" (So, not an ending at all.) Elsewhere, a blog post gave advice on "options available to bloggers who have decided to end their blog but who don’t quite know how to do it." Why the stigma?

You've probably noticed how most people end blogs: they don't end them at all. They just post less and less frequently, with an increasing ratio of apology to content, then fall off entirely and stop trimming the spam. Eventually the whole thing ends up looking like a secret garden, abandoned and overgrown. I'll bet you've stumbled onto a few of these abandoned blogs on the web; I have. I usually back out quickly, careful not to disturb any ghostly cobwebs. In their day these blogs were happy, healthy places. Could they not have been put to rest with more respect?

And why do people consistently use the language of life and death to describe blogs? Why do we say a blog has "died"? (I just did, without meaning to, when I said "put to rest with more respect.") If a blog is over, if a person has got to the end of what they have to say about a topic, hasn't the blog succeeded rather than failed? I guess you could ask the same question about a person's life. If a person has got to the end of all the years they had to live, have they succeeded or failed?

So far the web has been all about growth, but life is never only about growth. I wonder if there are more societally healthy ways to move past the initial growth stage of the web than we are using now. Like ritual. Don't you think it's strange that we have rituals around starting blogs but none around ending them? What causes the atmosphere around blogs to be so fixated on starting and growing, but never ending? Is it some sort of collective denial that we might run out of interesting things to say? Is it fear of the ultimate drop-off in posts that is coming to us all?

I do have one hypothesis. Most books are written by one person, and we expect books to end. Magazines and newspapers, however, are rarely written by one person, and we don't expect them to end. What if the one-author blog is a misplaced confusion of writing into the space of collaborative, systemic endeavor, in which an expectation of continuance makes sense? What if two distinct species of writing have become confused?

What? You say. Do you really think nobody should write a blog unless they write it with other people? What about the opportunity blogging brings to the individual to be heard, to speak about unpopular topics, to break from tradition, to leave herd mentality behind? I'm not countering any of those things. What I'm saying is that maybe we need two sets of expectations about blogs, or two kinds of blogs, or two words for blogging. One should be for institutions populated not by individuals but by roles taken on (and then passed on) by individuals. Such a system could indeed last a very long time, and often does.

A separate word and set of expectations could then apply to the individual blog, which would be understood to come about because a specific person had some specific things to say about a specific topic. Such a blog would naturally come to an end when the person had finished saying the things they had to say (and we would no longer pretend that any one person had an infinite number of things to say, though a revolving membership certainly could). Then when the individual blog came to an end, we would not say it "died" but would say it was completed. Or that it succeeded. Why not? Think of the guilt dividend.

I will end the post with an appropriate joke.

A head walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a drink. After he is finished, bang! a torso appears. So the head asks for another drink and after he finishes, bang! arms come out of the torso. So the head asks the bartender for another drink and when he has finished, bang! legs appear.

The head is thinking, ‘Hey, this stuff is great,’ so he asks the bartender for one more drink for the road and bang! his whole body disappears.

The bartender turns to him and says, ‘You should have quit while you were a head.’

Postscript: dinner, bath, turn using the iPad, maybe not in that order. I feel a rising need to stand in the way of a probable event while I still can. For some reason I have never been able to fathom, I often have the following conversation.

Me: I'm dealing with this issue right now. Isn't it interesting? What do you think of the issue? Isn't it interesting?
Well-meaning lovely people: I'll help you, person in distress.
Me: I'm not in distress, I just think this is interesting.
Lovely people: I'll help you, person in distress.
Me: Sigh.

It's like I have this big "Save the idiot" sign stuck to my forehead. So, if your hand is poised to add a comment saying something like, "Don't stop blogging! We like you! You can do it! Have confidence in yourself!" Stop: think: then tell me what you think of blogging and how blogs end and how we talk about that and what that means about ... anything you like, really. Just not about me. (No offense intended to the lovely people, who know who they are and how lovely they are.)

What has never happened to you?

Here are some ideas that have been bouncing around in my mind for months. I've tried to write them down a few times now, but I keep being held back because the ideas are not fully formed. However, today I correct myself on that point: such thoughts are against my rule on this blog. The rule I set up at the start was: when an idea gets caught in my head, then starts banging to be let out again to travel the world, "I am not worthy" and "I am not finished" are inadequate excuses for keeping it locked up. This is catch-and-release thinking. So here goes, ready or not.

The playful lies of spam

As I have said here before, I love reading spam. I know it's a scourge and a crime, but it's still fascinating. You have to admit that. Not only does spam have an uncanny ability to mesh up with my anxieties of the day (Interested in Your Product! Are you taking on new clients? Comment on your blog!), it is wonderfully generative of new ideas.

So one thing I've noticed lately (without meaning to) is something I shall call the Inverse Law of Spam. It goes like this:

All Spam Subject Lines Mean The Opposite Of What They Say.

I invite you to try this with your own magically convenient (and free!) flow of spam. Some favorite recent examples:

• CAN I TRUST YOU?
• WHERE ARE YOU???
• Urgent notification
• Claim your prize!
• Alert! Alert! 
• I'm in trouble!
• End of August statement required
• Funds for immediate investment
• Best prices

Trust? No trust. Where are you? Nobody wants to know. Urgency: no urgency. Prize: no prize. Alert: no alert. Trouble: no trouble (and no "I" either, at least not in the "I and Thou" sense). Statement required? No statement; no requirement. Funds: no funds. Prices? No prices; nothing to price. And so on. Even a simple "hi" spam means its opposite: nobody is actually greeting me. Thus, spam is a running catalogue of everything that could happen that is not happening. It's amazing, really.

The subject lines of emails I want to get are rarely contradictory. They actually are happening. If the subject says, "Your Amazon.com order of Really Raw Cashews has shipped!" there really are cashews, and they actually have shipped, and in a few days they will actually be at my house for me to actually eat. If a friend or family member sends an email that says, "How are you doing?" they actually do want to know that, and about me. Recently I got an email from Gardener's Supply, one of the few catalogs I use and enjoy. It said, "Put a Candle in the Window!" I'm not planning to do that, friends, but I believe that there is a candle, and that I could buy it and put it in my window. It's not a lie.

So why is spam inverted? Here's my guess. The people who write spam are trying to get some tiny fraction of the people who receive it to click on it, to sell them something or to deliver a virus or to use their computer as a processing "zombie" or other things I understand too little to even guess at. To do this they try to tap into the wishes and hopes most likely to be contradicted by reality, because they want to create a sort of pull, an attraction, to the lie they are telling.

The pull of spam reminds me of the pull of the Nothing in The Neverending Story. Anyone who got too close to the Nothing got drawn in and found themselves running toward it against their own will. The lies in spam are attractive lies, because they feed on our hopes and disappointments. All confidence artists know how to find and tell these attractive lies, and that is what makes them so dangerous.

But attractive lies are not always a bad thing; sometimes they can be useful elements of play. As a child I remember lying in the woods waiting for a door to Narnia to open (or any other fantasy world I had read about), knowing it was impossible yet wanting to pretend, just for a while, that it wasn't.

I find that spam has this same effect on me. I sometimes find myself clicking on email spam not because I think there is any possibility it could be legitimate, but because it's nice to pretend, just for a second or two, that it could be real. Call it a playful lie, a lie that invites play. I've won a million dollars! Strangers trust me to handle their inheritances and collect commissions! I can buy designer replica watches for next to nothing!

One of my favorites is the email I received recently from God. (No joke, this is the actual email.)

This planet is in danger and I need to know where to go to help you.  You were suggested as someone who may have heard of God (Allah) and it was suggested I email you, personally. I am God Allah and looking to people for purposes previously explained by the Holy Bible. If you want to help or learn more, get in touch with Me.

Emergency Message,
ALLAH
Lord of the Worlds
Author, Holy Qur'an / Bible

Thunderbird "thinks this message is junk mail." Clearly Thunderbird is unaware of my importance in the grand scheme of things!

The playful lies of self-representation

Now a second observation, which followed unbidden some weeks after the first, as the result of several mini- and near-observations in several separate conversations (no names need be named). Let's say you and I meet, and we haven't seen each other in a while, and I say, "So, how've you been?" Very often, I have noticed, the response to a question like this will include one of two categories of playful lie.

The first form of how've-you-been lie is the wish-it-were-true aphorism. These are statements like "It takes all kinds" or "The older I get the dumber I get" or "Youth is wasted on the young" or "Old age isn't for sissies" or "You gotta take the good with the bad." If you listen to the stories people tell before, during and after the these aphorisms, the lived experience of the person making the statement often contradicts the aphorism itself. For example, people say "it takes all kinds," then go on to explain how the kinds they have been dealing with lately are precisely the kinds "it" does not take, if "it" is their well-being and happiness. Or people say "youth is wasted on the young," then go on to explain how they are just as stupid now as they were then, only they wish they could get a do-over anyway. Or people say "old age isn't for sissies," then go on to explain how they haven't been able to cope with the changes of age and feel far from courageous. The aphorism in context is not a statement of fact; it's more of an expression of a wish, a yearning. If only things were this way, people seem to say.

The second form of the how've-you-been lie is the here-I-am statement. Here the person makes a presentation of themselves as being a particular sort of person. Then, as with the aphorism, they go on to tell story after story proving how they are actually the opposite of that particular sort of person. A few examples: "I'm not interested in fame or fortune" (followed by accounts of fame and/or fortune); "I can't complain" (followed by complaints); "I wish I could spend more time relaxing" (followed by plans for amazing new projects requiring massive outlays of time); "I get by on very little" (followed by stories about the great things they just bought). The meaning of the statement lies in the contradiction between reality and wish, though it usually takes some patient listening to find that out.

To give a more extended example, this second form of playful lie was the subject of an argument I had with my sister once. Some time in my twenties we went to a party in a city, and I was dancing with some guy, and he said what do you do, and I said I'm a writer. My sister heard this and berated me (for hours) for lying. She said I could only call myself a writer if I made my living by writing. At the time I was in graduate school for biology, and I wrote only in my journal. Now that I do make my living by writing (among other things), my favorite thing to call myself is ... a researcher. That's another lie, of course. By the standards of many I am not anything like a researcher. I didn't finish my Ph.D., and I don't work at a university or industry think-tank or government agency. I'm a stay-at-home mom with a little nearly-dead business on the side and a long crazy quixotic book project I wish I hadn't got myself into. A researcher? Come on. But that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

From these observations I hereby derive the Inverse Law of How've You Been Statements:

All Statements Put Forth In Answer To The Question "So, How've You Been?" Mean The Opposite Of What They Say.

I invite you to verify this law in your own conversations. I've now seen it happen something like a dozen times with various unsuspecting friends and relatives. One thing I've noticed is, the greater the length of time the how've-you-been answer needs to cover, the stronger the inversion. If it has been only two weeks people are less likely to invert their answers. If it has been two years the law is more likely to hold. 

So why do we do this? Why do we tell these playful lies? Are we spamming our friends? Are we trying to get them to do something they don't want to do?

I don't think so. I think the reason we tell playful lies to the people we know and meet is that we are trying to communicate something of the essence of ourselves. The essence of ourselves is not anything as simple or boring as what we are: it is also what we wish we could be. The "if only" of playful lies is a more complete representation of ourselves than the dull facts of our reality. When I say "I am a researcher" I don't mean I really am recognized as a researcher by any research institution; I mean something more like, if you want to know what I'm really like, ponder that word, because it means a lot to me. The same communication is behind our contradictory aphorisms. When you say "old age isn't for sissies," what you really mean is, I'm doing the best I can. It's hard, and I'm scared and I'm tired and I hurt. But I'm doing my best to hang in there anyway, and if you want to know me that's what you need to know.

So then why does this match up with the playful lies of spam? That's easy. Spammers try to catch on to the essence of what you are, because they hope it will draw you in, even when you know there is no point in doing so. Lies are the doorways to wishes and dreams.

The problem of fiction in story collection

As I said, these observations came to me unbidden. They just happened. After a while I began to think how I might apply them to story work, because, well, I try to apply everything to story work. The place I think these observations apply best is in the difficult problem of using fiction in story collection.

I considered rewriting this essay with the problem first, as though I had pondered the problem then ingeniously came up with solutions; but that's not how it happened. The fact is, I don't think much about the use of fiction in story collection. I've tried it, and seen it tried, enough times to know it fails most of the time. Sure, with a magically motivated and engaged group of creative people, you might get them to "move into fiction" and explore every wrinkle of possibility and impossibility in a story collection. However, most of the people who tell stories in story projects are neither motivated nor engaged. A thin paste of toleration is the best you can usually get.

Also, I don't think fiction, of the hero's journey style, is all that useful -- in the type of story collection that is a part of participatory narrative inquiry. If you can get people to talk about the things that have actually happened to them (which is hard enough) you don't generally need fiction. The truth is compelling and useful enough. I also think it's more respectful to ask people what has actually happened to them than it is to ask them to make stuff up. Asking people to "move into fiction" seems to me like it sends the message that their real experiences are not exciting enough, which means they are not exciting enough. On the contrary, the things that have really happened to people are amazing, and it's worth telling them that.

Why do efforts to "move people into fiction" usually fail? I think it's because people are not used to it, or are not used to it anymore, which is the same thing. When someone sits in a story collection session or fills out a form or sits for an interview, their main thought is usually, "What am I supposed to do here?" The setting itself presents them with expectations based on what people usually do in such circumstances. In the setting of a group meeting, a web form, or an interview, people expect first to be asked to provide opinions. Being asked to recount what has happened to them is a bit strange, but they can handle it with some coaching. But think about it: when is any adult today asked to make up a story? By another adult? Never. The request is so strange that people tend to reject it. They laugh nervously; they attack the questioner; they get busy with something; they attempt to transform the request into some other task; they fall back on formulaic answers; they try to pass the buck to someone else. The dances of discomfort and avoidance I have seen when people have been asked to move into fiction have convinced me it is not a tool useful to participatory narrative inquiry. It just wastes valuable time that could be better spent.

In some venues, like in a web form, getting people into fictional space is practically impossible. Written interviews are like messages in bottles: you have very little control over what happens when people encounter your entreating words. People may go one step of the way with you into the world of fiction, but if you move too far and too fast you are likely to find yourself walking alone down the yellow brick road, with your project participants still back in Munchkin land sitting in the upside-down house of reality. Just because you can see the colors doesn't mean they do.

For example, consider this question:

You are at work one day and you get a call from an old friend. They have an interview at your firm next week, and they'd like to know whether you think it's a good place to work at or not. What experiences you have had at work might you tell them about to convince them either to work there or not to work there?

Cool question, right? Not so cool answers. This sort of question creates a fictional journey through two linked rooms. The first room is the story of the conversation with the old friend. The second room, the one you hope people will follow you into, is the story about what happened to the participant at work. What I've seen is that people are often willing to go into the first room, but few people will follow you to the second room. The most common response I've seen to a question like this is, "I'd tell my friend that they should work at our firm. It's a great place to work!" That is a story, but it's not the story you were after. You strode ahead, but they stayed behind. I've seen projects where a question like this has failed to produce useful stories in eighty percent of responses. That's a waste of the valuable time and attention of participants, who might have been perfectly willing to recount their experiences if they had been asked about them in a more straightforward way. In story work the time and attention of participants is the gold you cannot replace, no matter how much straw you spin.

This is only if you ask for fictional stories straight out, mind you. If you help people through a complex sensemaking process the result of which is a fictional story, you can get something worth using. But that requires time and cooperation and and presence and facilitation. Sometimes you have that in the collection phase of a project, but usually you don't. In the simplest case, where you are just asking people questions to collect stories, I haven't yet found any way to get the majority of people to tell fictional stories of any value to the project.

The response I have evolved to this dilemma, of how to get people into fictional space in story collections, is not to. I simply put it aside and focus the collection on what has actually happened to people; and that's fine just as it is. Fiction sounds wonderful, but once you've read through hundreds of non-responses the excitement of its potential fades. It's like they say: falling is not so bad; it's just that little bit at the end that hurts.

But still, I have often thought that it would be nice to find a middle way in story collection, something that falls between fact and fantasy, an ante-chamber to the fictional world, you might say. Something that goes deeper than just the facts without moving into full fabrication. I do sometimes use questions that hint in the direction of fictional states. This question, for example, is one of my favorites:

Have you ever seen somebody do something, and thought to yourself, "If everybody around here acted like that things would go a lot more smoothly than they do now"? Or conversely, have you ever thought, "If everybody around here acted like that things would fall apart"? 

That sort of question doesn't elicit fiction. It only elicits true stories. But it does ask people to step close to the door of fiction, through the implied scenarios of utopian or dystopian states. Similarly, sometimes I'll ask this question:

What's the most surprising story you have ever heard about [the topic of the project]?

That question also opens the door to fiction, because the "surprising story" doesn't have to be true. Few walk through the door, though, open or not. It's not what they expect.

Playful lies in story collection

Now. As a result of the above reflections about playful lies and representation, I would like to put in front of you three questions a practitioner of participatory narrative inquiry might be able to use to invite people to lie playfully in story collection, as a halfway house to fiction. Like I said at the start, these are incomplete thoughts, but I think there might be something useful here.

Consider this question:

If you look back on [the topic of the project], can you think of a proverb that summarizes your experiences in that area? What is the proverb? Next, can you give us an example of a moment in which you felt that proverb was important to you?

Do you see what this question does? It sets up a situation where the participant is invited to tell a playful lie using a how've-you-been aphorism. Here is where they can say "it takes all kinds" then tell a story about how it doesn't. I'm not sure they would do that, but I wonder if some might, the way I've seen people do in conversation. It's an invitation to self-present using a pair of statements, which may or may not be paradoxically revealing of the tension between reality and wishes.

Similarly, you could use this question:

Finish this sentence: With respect to [the topic of the project], I am a/an ___________. Now think: in what moment of the past year did what you wrote in that space matter most to you? What happened in that moment?

This is an invitation to tell the other how've-you-been playful lie, the lie of labeling. Note that (in both questions) I ask for a moment in which the label of self-representation matters most, not a moment in which it applies most. That leaves the way open for a playful lie about contradictions between self-representation and experience. For example, I might say "I am a researcher" then tell a story about child care. (Or, equally likely, "I am a mom" followed by a story about work.) Telling? Of course it's telling.

Once I received the responses to these questions, I would look for agreement and contradiction between the labels and the stories. Then I would link those things up to other things people said about their stories, like that they turned out well, or that the story's protagonist acted admirably, or that they would remember the story for a long time. It could be revealing, don't you think?

This also makes me think of story titles, because those are labels people use to represent their stories. I always ask people to give their stories titles. It's usually meaningful, and it helps in catalysis and sensemaking because it's easier to find titled stories again. But I've never thought before to look for contradictions or tensions between stories and their titles. I have noticed, without meaning to pay attention, that sometimes people give their stories titles that seem ironic or sarcastic. They might tell a story about being shouted down in a meeting, then call the story "Every voice counts." The next time I sit down with a batch of stories I want to see if there are patterns in the titles given to stories. Tensions between titles and plots could be useful information. Maybe I have been collecting playful lies all along and didn't know it.

The third question that comes to mind is the one I put in the title of this post. For a project with a topic and a goal I would write it thus:

With respect to [the topic of the project], what has never happened to you? (Describe what the event would have been like had it happened.)

I thought of this question because of an idea I read about many years ago: that your first memory is probably not really your first memory. It's something called "autobiographical memory," which is essentially a story you tell yourself about your life. Selecting which memory to say was first is an act of self-representation, a selection of one story from the many possible stories we could tell ourselves but don't. The selection of what memory to say came first reminded me of the selections I saw people making in their how've-you-been self-representations.

So I thought: Is there an analogous selection task we could embed in a story collection? How about asking people, not about what has happened, but about what has not happened? That gives people a similar task of choosing one story from the many millions of didn't-happen possibilities. The selection of which story to tell should reveal something about them and their needs and cares. It also edges closer to fiction without causing people to over-react and run away from it.

I have conducted extensive field trials on this technique, and can report that -- ouch! Stop twisting! Okay, okay, I asked my husband and son the question. I used the unadorned version as in the title of the essay, not the topic-specific version I would use in an actual project. I just walked up and sprang it on them. I can't tell you what they said -- it was that telling -- but I can tell you that both of them (a) were taken aback by the question, (b) visibly reflected on it, and (c) told surprisingly meaningful fictional stories, seemingly without discomfort or avoidance. The stories had good solid plots and conveyed meaningful information about the characters of the people who told them (which I happened to know, so I could verify it).

So I think this could be a good idea for story elicitation. It's certainly worth playing with. I invite you to surprise people with it and see what happens (then tell me what happened).

Some other never-happened questions that could conceivably work:

• What is something that has happened to you in the past that will never happen to you in the future?
• What is something that everyone assumes has happened to you, but that has never actually happened?
• What could never happen to you in a million years?
• What do you never want to happen to you?
• What shouldn't have happened to you, but did?
• What should happen to you, but never does?

And so on. On thinking about this I remembered something I wrote in the first chapter of my book:

When I think of people and stories I always think of that line from the Bible: "Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." That's what people do. We treasure up things that happen, and things that could and couldn't and should and shouldn't happen, and we ponder them in our hearts.  

Even though I wrote this, I never before thought of asking people about "things that could and couldn't and should and shouldn't happen." I don't know why I never thought of it before. It seems perfectly obvious now.

A final warning. I would still tread carefully when using questions like these. Some people will still walk away from these journeys, even though they don't go all the way into fiction. I would still expect to see lots of "this is stupid" answers if such a question was asked straight out, with no other option, on a web form or other one-way conversation. I would only use any of these questions in story collection if people had the opportunity to either negotiate the meaning of the question (with an interviewer or small group) or choose the question from a list that included other, more factual questions.

In summary, inviting people to tell playful lies of self-representation has the potential to draw people closer to fictional exploration in a way that could be useful to everyone involved in a participatory narrative project. That's as long as you remember the words of James P. Carse:

If you must play, you cannot play.

If you try it, let me know.

Do that to me one more time

This is going to be one of those rambling blog posts where I start by describing an experience I've had which nobody but myself could possibly care about, and end by making statements about life, the universe and everything that ... nobody but myself could possibly care about. So if you came here while hopping around the internet looking for bright shiny things: this is not one of them.

The experience I want to tell you about has to do with a quandary I have often pondered: why I can't stand to read novels written since the early 1900s. Yes, it's about that again. If you are interested in reading, and what goes on when we read (okay, when I read), read on.

As our story begins, I was getting close to the end of Dickens. I had only three novels left to read: The Pickwick Papers (not a real novel), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (only part of a novel), and A Tale of Two Cities (read as a teenager and dimly remembered). I always reach a point in my reading of any novelist where I try to draw out the last few books to prolong the experience, and I had reached the drawing-out point for Dickens.

So I went to my bookshelves and began scanning for anything fictional I hadn't already read. I came across a book I had been given (all right all right! lent) by a co-worker a dozen years ago. I knew exactly why I hadn't read it: it was written in 1969. Nearly every time I've tried reading something written recently the attempt has been a disaster and I've gone running back the the "classics" where I apparently belong. But my Dickens needed thinning, so I pulled the book off the shelf and carried it into the bathtub.

The tissue-paper famine

The book I took off the shelf was Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City. As I expected, it explored fascinating topics, raised persuasive points, developed compelling plots. As I expected, I couldn't stand reading it.

Curious about why my co-worker had so strongly recommended this book, I looked it up on Wikipedia. The book is well respected and considered important. It has many fans. Its author won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for goodness' sake. Chastened, I returned to the book, resolved to continue reading in hopes that I would discover its latent wealth. A hint that the book would become post-apocalyptic at some point also helped me keep going. (Love me my end-of-the-world plots.)

The month dragged on. My baths got shorter and shorter. In the tub, I found myself holding the book and pretending to read it while my thoughts were actually wandering far away. I even found myself avoiding the bath entirely by making randomly generated excuses (the enormity of this aberration is difficult to express).

The fact was, reading The Four-Gated City felt like stuffing tissue paper into my mouth and trying to chew it. Nevertheless, I dragged myself through the entire book. The post-apocalyptic bit at the end was disappointingly brief, but even that part, though intellectually interesting, was physically unpleasant, even painful. Normally after I finish a good book I enter into what I call a "refractory period" of a few days where I take a break from reading to respectfully reflect on the wonderful ideas bouncing through my mind. After this book I didn't have a refactory period: I had a recovery period.

The feasting table

After licking my wounds for a few days I felt it was time to return to Dickens. One evening I carried A Tale of Two Cities into the bathtub and settled down. The first few pages ("It was the best of times") were not so much fiction as establishing preamble. But at the moment when I encountered the first description of events in the book:

He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.

I tell you, people, I nearly burst into tears. I found myself hugging the book (briefly: wet). I was overcome with joy and gratitude. After a month of famine I found a feasting table set before me: succulent meat, thick deep gravy, vibrant vegetables, lush fruits, strong wine.

Why, if these novels were both so well respected, did one leave me feeling as if I was in prison, while the other freed me with joy? Were these both not stories? Were these both not good stories?

Curious, I asked myself as I read: What am I feeling, exactly? The first word that came to mind was euphoric, and the second was endorphins. With this in mind I watched myself read:

The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea.

All of a sudden it dawned on me. The difference was in the metaphors. Dickens' work, and the work of many authors of his time, is pumped full of metaphors. The Four-Gated City, and nearly every other recent work, has far fewer.

The tethered reader

After this thought about metaphors I re-read the passage about Dover while watching myself again. I noticed that I was doing what the words were doing. I ran my head into a chalk cliff and felt the white chalk rub off on my face. I tumbled wildly about, becoming the beach, the stones, the sea. I thundered at the town; I felt the thunder impact my house fronts and cliff faces. I dipped myself from the land into the sea and from the sea into the land.

This was exactly what I had stopped doing while I was reading The Four-Gated City. With one book I was running around doing what it said, and with the other I was just ... reading it.

I recalled a passage in The Four-Gated City that had particularly bothered me. It went like this:

Margaret was almost smiling: she was humouring Martha.

Who now stood up, confronting Margaret. Who stood up, ready to leave. The women were furious with each other.

When I read that the women "were furious with each other" I threw the book out of the bathtub in frustration. This was similar to my "Philip was sad" book-throwing event while reading The Pillars of the Earth (which I wrote about here a while back). In both cases I felt immobilized, disabled, like a dog tied to a stake with nothing to do but gnaw its own feet.

Another example of a frustrating passage in The Four-Gated City sprung to mind:

This, particularly, was the room, which had become, in the last six months, her home. The moment of greatest pleasure in every day was waking in it, beneath the window, which framed the tree whose leaves she had seen stand in solid leaf, then thin, then fall. It was a sycamore tree. 

That sycamore tree reappeared several times throughout the book. That sycamore tree haunted me. I could not do anything with that sycamore tree. I could not touch it or climb it or become it. It was tantalizingly close, yet frustratingly unreachable.

Scope for the sensation

There, lying in the bathtub hugging Dickens and remembering Lessing, I felt I was finally starting to get an inkling of an answer to my decades-old why-these-books question. Maybe I need metaphor-rich writing because metaphors give me something to do when I read. Maybe reading Dickens feels euphoric because the activity of running around while reading feels more ... alive, somehow. Maybe the metaphors are somehow releasing endorphins in my brain, or making it feel more energetic, or ... something that feels good or right or worth doing.

Next I did what any reasonable person would do today: I jumped out of the bathtub and rushed to the computer. I typed into Google "metaphors endorphins."

The third result in the list was an article by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times called "Laughter as a Form of Exercise." I clicked to read it, probably more because it was from the Times than any other reason. I skimmed down the article, and this sentence caught my eye:

But laughter is fundamentally a physical action.

That's exactly how I feel about reading, I thought. It's a physical action. It's more like sensation than thought. So I went back to Google and started typing in "metaphors sense." The word "sensory" came up in the auto-suggest thing, so I chose that. (Google usually knows better than I do what I mean.)

That query drew forth a whole slew of articles like this one reporting on recent research done at Emory University in Atlanta (which turns out to be only one part of a much larger research program finding out similar things). Rather than describe the research I'll just quote a bit from the linked ScienceNOW article.

The right turn of phrase can activate the brain's sensory centers, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that textural metaphors—phrases such as "soft-hearted"—turn on a part of the brain that's important to the sense of touch.

Using functional MRI, the researchers found that:

The language-processing parts of volunteers' brains became active regardless of whether the volunteers listened to the literal sentences or the metaphors. But textural metaphors also activated the parietal operculum, a region of the brain involved in feeling different textures through touch. That part of the brain didn't light up when listening to a literal sentence expressing the same meaning as the metaphor.

I am generally careful when reading accounts of neurological research. For one thing, this particular study was done on a grand total of seven college students, which is hardly a representative sample of humanity. Still, the fact that this sort of cross-linking could even be possible was exciting, because the idea of other parts of the brain "lighting up" connected perfectly with my feeling of "running around" while reading metaphorically rich texts (and sitting frustratingly still otherwise).

One more discovery spoke even more directly to my Dickens-Lessing problem. At the bottom of the first page of Google results for "metaphors sensory" I found a link to an article in the New York Times by Annie Murphy Paul, called "Your Brain on Fiction." That article takes the same metaphor-to-sensation neurological results and connects them to the experience of reading novels -- all novels.

Says Ms. Paul:

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica.

I agree that some fiction produces a vivid simulation of reality, but I'm going to have to disagree that all fiction does this for all people. Not all fiction is thick with metaphor. Only the kinds I like are. For the most part, only older fiction is written in this way. This is the crux of the issue.

Yanking books off the shelves

At this point I bounced out of the computer, excited to think that I might have finally found a reasonable explanation for my extreme difficulty reading fiction written in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the writing of nearly every author from time periods before the last century, the metaphors come fast and thick. To read Dickens or Eliot or Dostoyevsky or Hardy or Gaskell is to move among jostling crowds of metaphors.

But not crowds: more like organized workers moving hand in hand. Often the same metaphors reappear many times in the same book. Sometimes they reinforce each other, building web-like structures that support recurring themes. From A Tale of Two Cities:

It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if they were buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected from them until they were dug out. 

This is the rented room of a young lady who believes her father to be long dead. The description of the room repeats the same funereal metaphor no fewer than ten times. The effect is like a deeply resounding bell calling out the name of death, death, death. This use of metaphor (which as I said was once too common to mention) goes far beyond simple connection and is better described as complex.

Metaphors can even extend their strands across the boundaries between books. If you have read much of Dickens you will remember his demonic personifications of the thick smoggy mists of London, and how they seem to drift malevolently from one book to the next.

To test this idea, I went to my bookshelves and started plucking out books I have loved reading and books I have dragged myself painfully through. Some contrasting examples follow.

Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.

When I first read this, I remember spending some minutes just holding the idea in my mind that the day might "succeed in breaking" only with great difficulty. I played with that metaphor as a child would with a ball.

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen. Excellent book, powerful emotions, strong characters, deep lessons. Very hard to drag myself through.

That January, when they delivered the hospital bed, leaving the den in disarray and the living room crowded with furniture, leaving a long scratch in the oak floor of the hallway because they were careless with a metal side rail, she didn't say anything. She just got in and turned on her side so that she was looking out the window, out the window that looked out on our driveway and the side of the house next door.

Years after reading that book, the one thing that stands out in my mind is that hospital bed. But I remember it in the same way I remember Lessing's sycamore tree: as something seen from a distance, behind a transparent wall. Something I wanted to touch and explore but could not.

George Eliot's Silas Marner.

The questionable sound of Silas's loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave off their nutting or birds'-nesting to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counterbalancing a certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense of scornful superiority, drawn from the mockery of its alternating noises, along with the bent, tread-mill attitude of the weaver.

The cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, the questionable mockery of the loom. Throughout that novel early industrial machine are given characters that make them part of the action, not just scenery.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.

I can't say what you see in that passage, but I see a scene on a painting, or behind a window, inaccessible. I can't go there because I have not been given any way to touch what I see. What if the excerpt went like this:

The broad, capable back of the valley stretched powerfully up to the hillside, inviting Tom to leap astride. A stream like a shining rivulet of warm sweat flowed down its back. There, where the valley could support his weight best, he would build his house.

Okay, I'm no novelist, we can all see that. But I can go to that sentence. I can leap onto and into that valley. I can feel its strength and safety. That's the kind of reading that feels like reading.

Not all the books I pulled off the shelves matched up perfectly with a simplistic pattern of old-rich new-poor. I found a few cases in which my forays into contemporary fiction have gone well. However, all of them were written by people known for their strong use of metaphor.

Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Out of the dimness of the room in which they sat, a white staircase climbed toward the blue-and-white wallpaper of the second floor. Paul D could see just the beginning of the paper; discreet flecks of yellow sprinkled among a blizzard of snowdrops all backed by blue. The luminous white of the railing and steps kept him glancing toward it. Every sense he had told him the air above the stairwell was charmed and very thin.

I don't remember viewing that staircase from afar. I remember touching it, walking up and down it, breathing that "thin" air, climbing the wall myself as the staircase. That staircase is part of the story of Beloved (and part of my memory and experience of the story of Beloved) in a way Lessing's sycamore tree and Quindlen's hospital bed and Follett's valley are not.

Ursula K. Le Guin is a contemporary author whose every written word I have read. From The Dispossessed:

The large, calm room was shadowy and silent, darkening. Shevek looked around it, the perfect double arches of the windows, the faintly gleaming edges of the parquet floor, the strong, dim curve of the stone chimney, the paneled walls, admirable in their proportion. It was a beautiful and humane room. It was a very old room. ... I have been here a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here?

I can do something with this kind of writing. Not only can I see and feel this room, I can speak to it, and I can become it. I can run around holding it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

During that interminable night ... Colonel Aureliano Buendia scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude.

Can you feel that shell? Looking at this makes me wonder if this is why I enjoy surrealistic writing so much (Borges, Calvino, Kundera, Kafka). If the whole story sits inside a metaphor the experience is even more physical: not just things to run around with, but also to run around in.

A question: Do you send yourself messages in song lyrics? Do you ever find yourself singing a song not because you heard it recently but because you are trying to tell yourself something? (Just say you do so we can move on.) The morning after all this happened -- the bath, the chalk in my face, the googling, the frantic book-yanking -- I was making coffee, and I realized I was singing the great Captain and Tennille song "Do That To Me One More Time."

A detailed examination of plausible causes

At this point in my explorations a burning question entered my mind: Why on earth did Doris Lessing win the Nobel Prize for Literature? This fact can only mean one of two things: (a) I am the only human being who knows what good writing is, or (b) people read in a variety of ways, and some of them are not how I read. The first of these we can discard out of hand.

This leaves us with the next question: Why do so many people today, unlike myself, find relatively metaphor-poor fiction readable, even enjoyable -- dare I say it, even preferable?

Rather then actually try to answer that question, I'll just pull out my trusty pocket nature-nurture. It's a bit worn but still quite serviceable. Hold on, this latch is tricky to open ...

Perhaps there is natural genetic variation in the extent to which reading metaphors activates sensory parts of the brain. The study I mentioned above only included seven people. Probably there is much larger variation to be found in larger samples. Maybe I happen to be on the tail end of the distribution where metaphorical-sensory activation is so strong that reading metaphor-poor writing becomes painful. If this is true, many more people should inhabit the middle of the distribution, and some will be found on the other side, where metaphors are words and nothing more. Maybe to the majority of people, Lessing's sycamore tree is not blocked off because Dickens' tumbling rocks don't tumble. A thing can only be blocked if there is some reason to want to go to it.  

Or, perhaps the activation of sensory perception in response to metaphorical exposure is an acquired condition. I do read more than most people I know, obsessively so, and I started this bad habit at an early age. (Fond memory: the careful provision, on a winter's day, of the couch nearest the fireplace with a pile of books, a bag of pretzels or peanuts, and a jug of water, so that I need not budge from the spot for the entire day.)

My memory of childhood reading is insufficiently detailed to reveal whether I "ran around" while reading back then, so I can't say whether my preference for metaphor increased with time. But I do remember two things: that around the age of twelve I went through a Greek and Roman period in which I read all the ancient stories I could find (more on that later); and that for a long time my favorite author was Ray Bradbury. Here's a quote I just found from an interview with that great man:

"I have an ant farm in my head," he says. "Metaphors and ideas crawling all over each other."

"I was born a collector of metaphors," he says. "Metaphors are the center of life."

So that answers that.

By the nurture explanation, what I read defined for me what reading ought to feel like, which defined what I would enjoy reading, which defined what I read. In other words, maybe I "run around" while reading fiction because I have spent so much time doing that. Maybe people who have not spent as much time reading run-around types of fiction don't miss it when it doesn't happen.

Where have all the metaphors gone?

How would each of these two positions explain the general decrease in metaphorical density between classic and contemporary novels? I don't think it's necessary to prove that there has been a decrease; anybody can find this out for themselves given five minutes in a library. With exceptions, of course, the overall trend has been monotonically downward.

The genetic-variation explanation provides the simpler story. By this interpretation, when Dickens wrote novels far fewer people read or wrote than today. Maybe at that time a small subset of writers wrote for a small subset of readers, and they all shared similar cognitive proclivities, because paying attention to prose was self-selecting. It was sort of like the early internet: because it was bare-bones technical, only the technical got involved with it. But today the reading and writing of novels has spread out to encompass the entire spectrum of cognitive styles. People with all ranges of natural tendency to connect metaphor with sensation (or not) are involved in both the reading and the writing. So a book that leaves someone like me trapped in sensory deprivation can still thrive in the marketplace of ideas.

If true, this can only be a good thing. In the same way that the internet more closely resembles humanity than it did in its early years, novels today more closely resemble the diversity of human reading styles than they did in their early years. I like this explanation because it does not mean anybody's reading apparatus is broken, yours or mine; it just means we are all different. And we already knew that.

The acquired-condition explanation provides its own story of the sea change in metaphorical density. This interpretation points out that the very first novel-length stories were not told by novelists. They were told by bards who kept their stories in their heads. It is reasonable to assume that this faculty depended in part on the use of sensory metaphors as mnemonic devices. So maybe the first novels carried the heavy use of metaphor over from ancient oral traditions.

Certainly if you read anything written "by" Homer you can see how strongly metaphor was used in those times. Here is a bit from the Oddysey in which I count anywhere from four to six sensory metaphors:

No sooner had I reach’d my ship beside
The ocean, and we all had supp’d, than night
From heav’n fell on us, and, at ease reposed
Along the margin of the sea, we slept.
But when Aurora, daughter of the dawn,
Look’d rosy forth, drawing our galleys down
Into the sacred Deep, we rear’d again
The mast, unfurl’d the sail, and to our seats
On board returning, thresh’d the foamy flood.

If metaphors in fiction are a historical remnant, it would make sense that the further we get from orality the less fiction will carry metaphors with it as a matter of necessity. At some point metaphorical density becomes a matter of style, not of utility. This seems to match the variety of forms we see in today's writing.

Concrete actions for the betterment of society

If people vary genetically in how strongly metaphors activate sensory regions of their brains, and if nothing can be done to change this, a certain set of actions and expectations will be called for in the fictional future (all futures are fictional, as are all pasts). The issue will become a matter of deep and abiding respect for metaphorical diversity.

To begin with, all locations on the Fictional Metaphoric-Sensory Activation Spectrum (FMSAS) will be treated with respect and equal rights before society. As a start, any official fiction prize award committee, or faculty of a literature or creative writing department, or literature curriculum, will be populated with verifiable, accountable diversity on the FMSAS.

Laws will be passed prohibiting discrimination against readers or writers of any persuasion, no matter how many or how few metaphors they prefer. The era of mistaken-yet-well-meant creative-writing advice such as "use metaphors sparingly" will end, though probably only as the prejudiced generations pass away. The mixing of metaphors will most likely continue to be seen as anathema for some time, but even this practice may someday find acceptance in a more enlightened society. Metaphor lovers may someday feel perfectly free to admit their proclivities in public without fear of blame or isolation.

Finally, both readers and writers will someday be encouraged not to beat their heads against the walls of their disinclinations but to follow their bliss(es?), metaphorically speaking. I foresee a world abounding with FMSAS tests, both self-administered and, for the more serious or encumbered with excess cash, fMRI based. People will test their dates; parents will have their children evaluated; workgroups will participate in combined Myers-Briggs-FMSAS workshops to improve collective productivity. The age of respect for metaphorical diversity will arrive in bounteous waves of mutual admiration (or, if you are at the other end of the FMSAS, in bounteous mutual admiration without the waves).

On the other hand, if the linking of metaphor with sensory activation is an acquired characteristic dependent on activity, everything can and should and will be done to shape the reading experience so as to expose all citizens to the widest range of metaphorical experience.

Someday, no intellectual thinker will be able to hold up their large, brain-filled head if they cannot demonstrate a superior facility at leaping nimbly from one end of the FMSAS to the other, and to all points in between. As we now speak of singers with perfect pitch, someday we will count among our heroes those with perfect metaphorical-sensory activation control. Prize award committees, faculties and curricula will be populated with the activities of these gifted individuals.

Training in the understanding and appreciation of literature, and in the writing of creative works, will include extensive exposure to varieties of metaphorical density. Flexibility immersion courses will be popular. In these, participants will be voluntarily confined in successive rooms filled with alternating courses of metaphor-rich and metaphor-free prose. Sophisticated medical devices will record stress levels, and participants will refuse to leave their "spectrum rooms" until they have succeeded in attaining their target equanimity matrices. For those less willing to undergo such rigors, metaphorical density coaches are likely to appear, aiding the stumbling as they advance their neglected skills.

There is a role for government in this scenario as well. No opportunity to educate the public in metaphorical flexibility will be ignored. All public signs and announcements will be posted in metaphorical and "plain speaking" forms. Even candidates, parties and referenda on voting ballots will be described both metaphorically ("Should roads be paved by the angels of solitude?") and directly ("Should road crews be composed of at least two members?"). All of this important and necessary work will contribute to the creation of an educated citizenry able to converse in all forms of prose.

It must be noted, if reluctantly, that in the first generation of this reform movement, some poor souls whose early years were spent squandering their potential in reading only one style of writing will need the help of a safety net. We can expect them to rely on remedial aid in the form of government vouchers for private counseling. Sadly, we suspect that few scholars will be willing to help these people, since the early damage to their potential flexibility may be irreparable (though everyone will be at pains to avoid stating the obvious). It goes without saying that those quixotic individuals who do attempt to help the metaphorically inflexible will be ridiculed as windmill-tilters (though their pupils may or may not follow the allusion).

However, leaving the relatively few misfits aside, the greater population in years to come will experience heights of reading enjoyment new to literary history. Never again will any middle-aged woman lie in her bathtub suffering at the hands of an award-winning yet frustratingly unreadable book. No, no. All books will be readable! All readers will be capable! In short, every free human being will enjoy every book ever written and ever to be written. This is the future we can foresee. This is the future we can create.

Or, the situation may have arisen from a combination of nature and nurture intertwined and inseparable. In which case we should just ignore the whole thing and go about our business.

That's what I plan to do.