I spent last night with an old friend that I hadn't seen in years.
It's an episode of The Twilight Zone titled 'A nice place to visit.'
Most of my childhood is a vague blur, but some stories, and the first
moments that I spent with them, are with me every moment of my life.
It doesn't matter if I read them or watched them, and truth be told a
hell of a lot of them came from my many hours of watching TV.
The first time I saw this sad story about a man named Valentine I was
lying on the floor of my aunt's apartment in Washington, DC. My
mother, sister, and I were up there on vacation, and while seeing all
the monuments and pieces of history was incredible, any time spent
with my mother's sister was tense. Children didn't really fit in her
world, either the physical one around her or in her head, and her
reaction to me and my sister always seemed to imply that we were the
problem. One that she took personally. To stay occupied and away
from her, I watched almost as much TV that summer as I would have at
home, and I was always on the lookout for magic.
Bits of magic that you find when you're young stay with you, and you
feel them when you encounter more. Once you've seen a young, pretty
girl tell a priest that his mother is performing intimate acts in
hell, or seen a freckle-faced boy turn a man into a bobbing
Jack-in-the-Box, well, your concept of children is going to be a
little more complicated than the 'innocent and helpless' archetype
that gets used so frequently.
If, after sampling this magic, you become inclined to start
practicing your own, you tend to first want to duplicate what you've
seen. If you paint, and it was Munch's 'The Scream' that made you
pick up a brush, you're probably going to try to paint something that
evokes the same feelings, and your first tools are going to be the
colors, lines, and shapes that Munch used. If you see Criss Angel
levitate or see Penn and Teller make the same card appear out of
nowhere three or four times, those might not be the first tricks that
you learn, but they will be milestones that you judge your own
ability by.
Likewise, if you start telling stories, the stories that make the
strongest impressions on you are going to be your handholds when you
start that uphill climb.
See how cleverly I connected this back to that Twilight Zone episode?
It's almost like I saw someone else do that bit of slight of hand
and decided I could do it too, isn't it?
My opinion? Our minds don't grow like the bodies of a cat, cow, or
chicken, producing new cells that are a little different each time
and letting the old ones die, until we're left with something that
only bears a resemblance to the original form but is obviously more
advanced. My opinion? We grow like trees, keeping that first
fragile growth and adding layer after layer on top of it. We grow
like this as we learn more and push higher, becoming stronger to deal
with what the world throws at us. We all carry everything we ever
were inside us, and we still have all the dozens or hundreds of
contradictory points of view that we ever developed. They are part
of our inner structure whether we like it or not. A child who steps
out into the deep end before they're ready and gets that cold, wet
sensation of water trying to push itself over their lips and nose to
drown them will carry that impression with them for the rest of their
life. What will they do with it? There are infinite possibilities
in infinite directions. They could do nothing and just have
nightmares of opportunity every once in a while. Or they could
develop it into a paralyzing phobia. Or they could get an attitude
about it and learn to swim so well they compete professionally.
From what I can remember, I might have seen the ending of 'a nice
place to visit' coming. That mocking, insulting laugh out of someone
who had been nothing but cuddly and polite the whole time was the
perfect, final touch. Every story I write that has a 'twist' ending
where the hints have been provided, owe something to this tale. If I
can provide for someone what was once given to me, I've done my job.
Some post-viewing research revealed that it was Charles Beaumont who
wrote that story, and that he produced some other damn good ones too.
It also showed the sad, unfair way that he died. In the end, he
couldn't write.
That's going to stay with me. Think I'll go write.
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