The Angel Learns To Dance

This week has been very introspective. This introspection was triggered by the Cirque du Soleil show, Varekai, which is now cemented as my favourite Cirque show. It has made me think about the nature of story, the history of my life, and who I want to be as a person. Pretty heavy stuff for a show about acrobats doing flips in colourful unitards.

A single post can only cover these topics briefly, like the trailer for the movie rather than the movie itself.

The Nature Of Story

Lately I've been reading a lot of TV Tropes. This is an excellent exercise for understanding the intellectual side of story craft, where tropes are like Lego bricks and the writer is a craftsman sculpting a house or spaceship with the pieces. This is important to becoming good at the craft.

But it's not what makes audiences feel a story. Feeling and emotion are intangibles and not easily described in terms of tropes. You can arrange the Lego bricks in all manner of intellectually stimulating patterns without necessarily generating a single Watt of real emotion. We can look at structures to an extent, such as the Three Act Structure or Dan Harmon's plot circles, and those help by showing us the nature of conflict. But conflict, critical as it is, isn't quite the same as emotional connection.

Varekai is intellectually very simple. A young man and a young woman are fascinated by each other, then overcome trials that keep them apart, and then find lasting love together. That's tied for "oldest story ever told" alongside the Hero's Journey--or rather, it is the Hero's Journey as applied to romantic love, one of the oldest subjects ever fictionalized. The gender roles are also very conservative. Men are physical and brash. Women are beautiful, ranging from delicate prettiness to confident sexuality.

It would be easy to criticize the plot on its simplicity. But that simplicity is also why it is effective. Unburdened by any desire for originality, it is free to emphasize only honesty. It captures the timidity of the lovers in their first meeting. It captures their feelings of loss when being separated. It captures their celebration when re-united. Adding a bunch of twists to the classic tropes would just interfere.

In my own fiction, I've often felt this conflict between the intellectual and the emotional. I've probably even blogged about it before. And time and time again, I find myself drawn to the emotional more. Something that is unoriginal but has good emotional content is still gratifying. Something that is intellectually clever but lacks emotional connection feels like a practice exercise, intricate but in itself pointless.

Cleverness and emotional connection are not mutually exclusive, of course. But sometimes decisions must be made that will take one path at the expense of the other. For now, I will follow the emotional path in most cases.

The History Of My Life

One of the characters in the story is called the Limping Angel, and spends the whole show on crutches. Icarus, the male protagonist, is unable to walk after his fall. I interpret the Limping Angel as the manifestation of Icarus's own spirit, or perhaps a physical manifestation of Icarus's injuries.

There's a powerful scene, not long before the lovers are reunited, where Icarus and the Limping Angel lend each other strength, giving the Limping Angel the power to dance despite his injuries. Icarus, meanwhile, struggles to regain his ability to walk. The Limping Angel's dance is the struggle to heal, to become whole again.

I feel a strong connection to the Limping Angel. For a variety of reasons, I have been injured in the past. I see Icarus's inability to walk as akin to the depression that held me to the ground for many years. And while I feel that I am now walking, metaphorically, I still have a limp.

These thoughts caused me to think back on my life. Many of these memories are distressing, causing me feelings of intense shame or guilt or jealousy. To cope with the distress, I have forced myself not to dwell on them. This is, I now realize, what it means to repress a memory. And the problem with repression is twofold: a) it doesn't actually make the pain go away, it just numbs it, and b) it carves holes in your identity. Bereft of your own history, who are you?

But the Limping Angel succeeds in dancing in the face of his demons. Icarus learns to walk again. I think it is time for me to deal with these memories.

Who I Want To Be As A Person

This is the part where things start getting hard to describe, so I'm not going to try to cover everything. Here are a few random thoughts:

• Facing the memories I don't like is difficult. It requires an emotion I have not often felt before, but allows us to take action when we want to avoid that action: courage.
• Remembering these things is allowing me to see my own past again, which is allowing me to see who I am again.
• It is difficult, but I am learning to accept the person who inhabits these memories, even when he failed or made mistakes or behaved poorly.
• Many of these memories are incredibly petty, like times I said something slightly mean to someone in high school, or when I met someone who I didn't manage to win over--someone who might not like me, oh no!
• I realize now that part of why I have lacked pride is because I've often lacked a male role model, at least in terms of popular culture. The male role models of the 80's and 90's tended to be anti-intellectual assholes who were always grim and violent. This is only marginally better now. Albertan men are still expected to be, in most cases, gruff, loud, and ignorant. I could never and will never identify with this. So I assumed, most of my adult life, that I must be weak and unmanly, and was ashamed. Recently I've been changing my definition of manliness. A couple of years ago, my dad gave me the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling, which is a much better way to see manliness. My dad himself, the male half of the super-team that held our family together in the face of extreme difficulty, exemplifies this definition.
• I am going to continue to have courage, to remember my past, and to accept the person I have been. This is how the Limping Angel will learn to dance, and how I will learn to have pride in who I am.