Behind the Curtain

'tis the building season

Hi all! It’s been one of those weeks that’s long on work and short on time, which is I guess most of them these days, with the holidays ticking closer. Ticking, I guess, like a bomb. Of good cheer and family feeling. Yes, that’s a great analogy. Let’s go with that.

I was about to tell a story and then checked myself. After many years of regularly thinking “out loud” online, I start to wonder whether I’ve told the same story before, or made the same analogy. Everything circles back. In human company, we may feel silly if we notice ourselves telling the same story again, but repetition has positive value: it inscribes identity, and sustains and develops it, particularly in community. When I am Back on my Bullshit, and my friends notice it and joke about it—that’s a moment of seeing and being seen. A good joke (Howard Tayler told me this once) plays around the line of safety and transgression: it’s funny because you can’t just say that, AND because we’re all in this together.

That’s true in person, anyway. Blobs of meat and mind standing around together. After so long online, I still don’t know if it’s quite the same, this process of reading one another’s lexical units across vast gulfs of experience.

Anyway, the story: a friend once observed (in the process of very gently encouraging me to volunteer for a science fiction convention) that when he reached his late twenties, he began to realize that the parts of his social world that he cherished, those games and conventions and dinners and Christmas presents and yea the great globe itself, did not happen by accident. They were all the result of an immense amount of sustaining work. So he decided to join in.

I love this way of thinking. It turns the conventional story of growing up from one of disenchantment (parents not Superman! no Santa Claus!) to something like a game of sardines: when you find the Truth, when you see the man behind the curtain, sure, you can choose to walk away. But you can accept the responsibility to get in there yourself, and start helping.

Which is not to say that the figurative Person behind the Curtain necessarily has any idea what they’re doing, or is doing it particularly well, or that once you understand what they’re doing and why you’ll necessarily agree! There’s a funny sort of inverse-Oz conceit that shows up in 1984, in Snowpiercer, in a lot of anime—the weirdly reassuring suggestion that when you finally reach the secret room from which the absurdity, chaos, and evil that besets your life is orchestrated, you will find a suave, well-read sociopath who explains, as they commit atrocities, precisely why these atrocities are justified and this end state is the only one that makes any sense. (When in fact, the regime that produced O’Brien is unlikely to outlast the decade, unlikely to outlast O’Brien himself—posing a different challenge, where any post-Ingsoc society must find a way to handle, channel, contain, or deal with all the out-of-work O’Briens.) It turns out that when we see the emails even of those few folks who do a good job of presenting themselves as suave, well-read sophisticated sociopaths, we find that they’re by and large absurd, venal, illiterate goons with a middle-schooler’s sense of humor, protected and glazed (in others’ eyes and their own) by the historical accident of their power. Dangerous, yes. Immensely. Worthy of the kind of awe fiction so easily bestows on, say, Hannibal Lechter? No. Even Mencius thinks revolution is justified at times; sometimes the most helpful thing you can do when you see behind the curtain, is to pry clawed hands off the controls.

That’s an extreme case, though we must consider extreme cases. But much of the time, in our lives and families, we live in-between: with our wonders and our disappointments, core memories and experiences that mean so much to us and might have passed unnoticed in the life of another. And so often when we peer behind the curtain of our own lives we find neither devils nor angels but well-meaning folks trying as hard as they can, with no more clarity or certainty of salvation than we ourselves possess. And from this kind of desperate and conflicted work done by imperfect people, come so many of the sustaining graces of our lives.

This, it seems to me, is a core story of adulthood, thrown into stark relief when parenting in the holidays but by no means limited to that experience: we come to realize that magic is real, for good and ill, and we in all our weakness and folly, are the ones who must do the work of it. Wrapping the presents, booking flights, arranging pickups and drop-offs, washing dishes, washing dishes again, brushing teeth, patching that hole in the plaster, being the change we want in the world, writing the books we want to read, bending the arc of the universe toward justice.

I hope y’all have a wonderful week. I’m off next Friday (traveling, family, hence this post), back after that. I’m also taking a serious and much overdue run at scooting this newsletter over to Buttondown; I don’t know when exactly that will hit, and will try to give one last round of warning, but in the meantime, if you want to go there with me, I’d strongly suggest subscribing to the email list (as opposed to following me through the Substack app). For the overwhelming majority of you who receive this newsletter in your inbox as DARPA intended, you should move with me auto-magically, though, as always, keep an eye on your spam filter.

Happy trails, and happy reading. Stay strong. Work some good magic.