I used to love urban myths.
We all do, don’t we?
They are cheesy and incredibly naive sometimes, but they work so well in our culture. Especially the shiny promising ones, that just won’t go away. Our part of the Contagoras mining suburbs, nicknamed The Den, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at the early hours. Men, women and monsters with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many of whom have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails and the lines of their sunken faces. My mother’s parents were part of a small merchant class that caters to officials. They ran the apothecary shop in the nicer parts of the ‘Borrough. Since most of us couldn’t afford a doctor, apothecaries were our healers. My father got to know my mother because on his hunts he would sometimes collect medicinal herbs and sell them to her shop. She must have really loved him to leave her home for The Den. Anyway, one of the popular myths around now was already travelling our minds when I was a kid. Maybe you heard about it too. The story of that one mighty magician who got buried down in the deepest mines, in search for an artifact of The Twelve, called the wishing well. Sometimes it’s a lamp, like myths change with every instance they are told. Somewhere deep beneath the ducts there’s something that would grant you anything you could think of. When we were playing at the black markets near The Den, we were outsmarting each other with clever ideas about what we’d do if we found the well one day.
I don’t think it’s that I got realistic or something. Maybe it’s that I met this girl one day and that she left me again. Maybe it’s that I’d know very well what to wish for. The only thing I’d crawl down for was for her to stop and think about it. Think about that we had it all, in our way, and that it won’t ever be better again, not anywhere in this world. That all possible future shatters in the face of those memories.That ours was The Story, and there will never be another. Think about that I would cross all the oceans and slay all the kings, chop all my limps and crawl down all the darkest shafts for that to happen. That’s what wishing was invented for! And the idea of a nice afterlife along the way, that would be worth living through these days. Only, what kind of reunion would that be? Me, knowing she’s under this powerful spell, that she can’t resist. Knowing that it won’t ever be like then again, our shared eye level, higher than the skies. So what I’d really want was my wish fulfilling without me having anything to do with it. And that would be hard for any genie, wouldn’t it? But it still sounds so easy: Meeting each other again, some day, finding a way to get acquainted anew. It’s imaginable, after all, it can’t be impossible for certain, since nothing is! It would just have to happen in a world without magiqe, without wells, without me knowing about it. My genie would have to exist in a world without genies, my wish in a wishless universe. But there we think about a red green, a round rectangle. Hard to grasp, and yet: In so many hours I find myself trying to break the paradox, looking for something I’ve missed, thinking my way out of the round rectangle. There must be a door somewhere. Like the other option: Erasing my memory about the whole wishing-thing, this longing, so that I wouldn’t expect it, wouldn’t wait for it, wouldn’t crave for it… It would have to erase the better part of the last year with it, the better part of what defines me, wakes up with me, for all this time. I think that’s called lobotomy.
Three of the four pillars of my life are in perfect shape. Friends, Family, Occupation.
And no imaginable spirit in any world is of any use to me to fix the fourth, to fill the gap.
Magiqe doesn’t change the rules, it never did.
That’s what I was gonna tell you all along, brother!
The only urban myths I like, these days, are the ones I’m creating myself.
The ones others fall for.
Maybe I will believe my own tales, too, some day.
Ours is the greatest story that ever happened, after all.
Heartwarming story. Has BC become weak and vulnerable now? Lame!
heartwarming? No way. Sad, scary, hopeless – if you assume it´s the only possible truth. But that´s the good thing about fiction and magic and wells: they really don´t care if you believe in them or not.
Me observes, too.
Belief and myth, myth and belief. You say they work well in our culture; I would have to agree, Baruch. After all, what is culture without myth? Most of those concepts that we surround ourselves with are not so different from myths, in any case. After all, what is a myth, what is an urban legend? Why, a collection of concepts arrayed in an arbitrary fashion. Who decides how they are made? Nobody, not really. You might now say “the author”, but really, isn’t the author constrained by how his own understanding of concepts relates to itself?
No, nobody decides. Myths are collective, and they only work because they are collective. They involve a shared subjectivity, a similar view of how concepts themselves work and what they should look like. And whether your myths have the shape of stories, like the man who was lost searching for the well, or concepts, like the well itself… Myths they remain, meaningful only to those who share that basic cipher. Love is a myth. Your girl is one, too, beyond her physical existence – if we are to believe that she ever did exist, that is. These are powerful myths, but again, only subjectively so. They lack the power to touch those who do not share the understanding of their mythical nature with you.
And we’ve been here before, of course we have. If this meant nothing to you, you would not write about it, and if it’s worth writing about, it bears repeating. You chose to break away from those urban legends that you, by all rights, should have believed. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you succeeded. You have penetrated one layer, but penetrating them all would destroy you, as it would destroy anyone. Fiction exists because we need it to. You say you’re not fiction, but you’re still living it. I would also end if I gave up all my illusions, all my construals – what would be left of me?
But Baruch, some shared subjectivity has power exactly because it is shared. If everyone around you believes in wishing wells, and more importantly, believes that a wish might be a good thing for them, and you leave that line, why – what other myths might you question? Myths that are important to certain people, maybe? Myths about unhumans, or the Twelve, or White Knights, or who the Lawmaker is and what he wants? Myths about yourself and why you live the way you do? Dangerous ground to tread, to be sure. Easy to see why I keep on watching you. I wonder whether you’ll step around the mines or whether they will find you.
Don’t talk to me about myths, or belief. It just makes you suspect, in both senses of the word. I reject your tale as fiction, as something you are telling us with no real meaning – you weave a legend of yourself as somebody who deserves compassion, and it is a well played card. Many people who remain silent here will absorb it, and learn, and change. I will not absorb, but learning and changing, that’s more my style.
If you want to lobotomise yourself to break free of that clinging shroud that culture has become to you, by all means. I applaud it. It takes a great deal of willpower to put the knife to one’s own mind. And whether you end up healed or a halfwit, why, that depends on how successful you are, now doesn’t it?
I’ll admit that hurt for a moment. But pain is good, pain is a nice change. Still enjoying myself.