Conversations with the Past

 I lost some words last night to a save glitch, and I’m still too angry to write new fiction, just now, so I’m going to take a little bit of time and write a blog post I’ve been sitting on for a bit.

It doesn’t take a particular awareness of the world around us to recognize that there is a lot of weird going on, right now.  The world that we’re going forward into might not look like the one we came out of.  Normally that happens gradually enough that you don’t really notice it until you find the stack of VCRs out in the garage that you’d planned on getting working again and now… they literally have no value at all.  Right now it feels like that change is happening all at once, and I find myself frequently troubled by it.  That isn’t the frame I’d had in mind for this blog, but that’s where my mind is, tonight, so that’s how we’re doing this.

There are certain members of this household for whom ‘Glowing Eyes’ is presently their favorite song.  I’ll post the YouTube of it here shortly, but this is old-school Twenty-One Pilots, and it’s charming and insightful and entirely on-brand, but listening to it a few weeks ago, I found that there were things that I wanted to tell Tyler Joseph in response.  Not his today self.  His then-self.  Simply that a woman this many years later would be sitting and *experiencing* that music, not just as background noise and entertainment, but as an honest-to-goodness conversation about the known-unknown and the unknown-unknown.  That his words have meaning and value and impact, this far down the road from when he wrote them.

Because I think that kid deserves to know that.

I feel like I can watch him grow up and evolve through the perspectives in his music, and there are points along the way, constantly along the way, when I want to answer him.  It’s clearly one half of a conversation.  My voice goes in as the other half.  How is that not obvious?

And I realized, perhaps not for the first time but in a new *way*, that that’s what art is.  Art is the present talking to the future.

And the future can’t answer back, at least not into the past. Only into its own future.

I write books.

Some of them are quite silly.

Some of them are more or less worthy than others.

But they have the capacity to pick up that conversation with someone ten, twenty, a hundred years into the future.  People I will never meet, whose names I will never know, and whose stories I will never get to hear.  Sometimes I like to imagine them, not in their masses, but as an individual here or there.  I don’t know how they feel.  Being the writer of a story gives me an entirely different *feeling* as I’m working through plot, even as a pantser who doesn’t know what’s going to happen.  Someone told me how *emotional* a scene was to them in one of my books and I boggled at it.  It was intense, but to respond to that moment with emotion was… not what I did.  I’m learning how different it is to experience a work from the creative side as opposed to the consumption side, and I don’t pretend to imagine what a reader might feel, through most of the span of a book.  But I wonder about it.  I hope.  I hope that it has something to say that’s useful to them, that makes them feel safe or validated or emboldened or challenged or seen or… connected.

When I distill what it is to be human, what humans *want*, when you get past the things that are about physical survival, I think that what people want – what I want – is to know and be known.

And everyone can only exist in the instant that is right now.  You remember the past and you are shaped by it, but your existence is constrained.

Art has the ability to transcend that, to speak in a (maybe imperfect?) half of a conversation with the future.

And that’s more than just a little bit of magic.

Hello from the past.

I may not know you, but I see you and you matter.  These words are my proof.