Stairway To Heaven: Dream Logic vs. Mythological Reclamation [How to Explain A World]

image by Jalen Amir King 

“It may simply have been that I had grown tired of coming and going. It is terrible to forever remain in-between.”

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

My novel began with an image, a sound, and a separation. At the top of 2021, while watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I felt immense empathetic sadness watching old Dr Dave Bowman rot with the monolith at the foot of his bed. I imagined a life where one was perpetually trapped in that moment of isolation, confusion, and loss. A room took shape in my mind, mired by the promise of being alone and being forgotten. Based on what I’ve learned about prisons, from reading and hearing first-person accounts as well as research, the primary obstacle in cases of restraint is often the self. As a Black man in the United States, restraint is a permanent state that I am well-accustomed with and I’m equally versed in the gratuitous internal mental battles. The protagonist of my novel was born from that understanding: a Black male trying to navigate his burgeoning nonexistence. 

But a character isn't a story. Narrative is a structure of desire that requires a driving force. According to Susan Stewart’s On Longing: 

I look at two devices for the objectification of desire: the souvenir and the collection. The souvenir may be seen as emblematic of the nostalgia that all narrative reveals- the longing for its place of origin. Particularly important here are the functions of the narrative of the self: that story’s lost point of identity with the mother and its perpetual desire for reunion and incorporation, for the repetition that is not a repetition. The souvenir seeks distance (the exotic in time and space), but it does so in order to transform and collapse distance into proximity to, or appropriation with, the self. The souvenir therefore contracts the world in order to expand the personal. (page xii) 

Stewart postulates that narrative assumes a return and while this is extremely relevant to contents of my novel, this reading isn't where my story grew from. I’d scribbled preliminary notes and doodled a series of rooms in the weeks after I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey but nothing else had come to mind. I found my answer while listening to “Stairway To Heaven” by The O’Jays. I knew that I had to introduce a striving component to my nonexistent character in order to give them body and life. The O’Jays’ song is about ascending through life to an idyllic, godly stopping point. I combined this with my concept of the lonely room and found a tragedy of man: one destined to fall short of becoming. This man would be ignorant of his falling and fall because he’s ignorant. It’s a cycle of many. 

W.E.B. Dubois wrote about the cycle in his essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” published in his 1903 collection, The Souls of Black Folk. The central idea of the essay was that of double-consciousness. He writes: 

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

These fighting souls are characterized by Dubois with a metaphor of a veil and a mirror. One half of a Black soul only sees themself through the eyes of others and the other doesn’t see themself at all. Dubois describes the spiritual striving of the Black soul as a desire to “go from two to one. To escape death and isolation.” My character has two selves occupying two different worlds in the story: an ignorant self and an absent self. I built this dichotomy based on the question: how many slices can you take from a pie until it becomes not a pie but a slice of pie? Once I recognized the separation sustained by the cycle I’d dreamt up, I had: a character, a situation, and the desire necessary to spark those elements into narrative. However, I did not have a world or better yet; the means to explain the world and render it completely. 

Fantastical stories were always the ones that held my attention. As a child it began with Anansi the Spider folktales and eventually spun out into the Harry Potter series. As an adult reader I’ve been attracted to the works of Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zadie Smith, Yoko Ogawa, Toni Cade Bambara, and more. These authors are known for pursuing magical realism and fantasy in an “elevated” and literary fashion. While I respect their influence on my writing, that seed of Anansi is always there for me. I write with a trickster spider in my head driving me nuts, a spider who according to some Akan tales was responsible for the very moon in the sky. The distortion necessary to animate and communicate my ideas were rooted in fantasy. For me, the fantastic has been split into two distinct modes: dream logic and mythological reclamation. 

Dream logic is a well-understood and well-studied idea but what does it mean when applied to narrative and world-building? In the context of my novel for instance, the room eventually evolved into a plane of dis-reality. This is the “world” of my protagonist’s absent self. Dreamers employ the capacity to create, perceive, recognize, and destroy in an instant. This transient quality was essential to capture both in the prose and explanation of the world I was creating, a place that was essentially no-place at all. A dream renders, distorts, and betrays with bizarre certainty. It has the gumption to ask “what if?” rather than offer an alternative that fits nicely within what we consider logical. Reason is abandoned but so is time and space. In a narrative sense, this allows for an escape of linear thinking or plot and the ability to recognize the fantastic as it is rather than question how it came to be. 

This method of creation did not go over well in my MFA fiction workshop at all early on, the mature educated mind has been trained to seek rationality, even in real circumstances where there are none. Being believed is often the first hurdle of any writer who wants to write respectable magical realism and I bypassed that, completely disinterested. I wished to fail at creating a world that worked and held no belief in coherence in the early draft. I’d abandoned what bell hooks described in conversation with Alison Saar in Art On My Mind as a “longing for linear order,” both in my writing and my life. In a way, I went into the class and said, “let’s all agree the sky is red” and everyone pretty much screamed back, “fuck no, fuck you!” Even worse, the separate world of my protagonist’s ignorant self also contained irreverent departures from our reality and my workshop had come to the conclusion that those departures needed to be parsed from the narrative in order to anchor the belief of any [respectable] reader. Intellect scowls at negative capability. I was somewhat devastated, not because they didn’t like it, many confessed to being enamored by the prose alone. I was let down because I felt as though the spider in my head drove me too far from a point of strictly logical connection.  

I was uncertain of my novel at this point and considered shifting to solely writing short stories, where the weight of suspended disbelief is borne for less time. Then my thesis advisor, who’d returned with similar notes as my workshop after reading the first eighty-five pages of an earlier draft suggested I read The Famished Road by Ben Okri. I was familiar with Okri from short stories and selected excerpts of his fiction from essays written about ideas present in his work but I was completely uninitiated with the text. How thrilled was I when the text was lush with language and asynchronous and tear-jerkingly imaginative. Here is an excerpt from the novel and a strong example of dream logic imposing itself on fiction: 

I said nothing. She lifted me on the shoulder. I could still see the head of the woman. I could still hear the voices in passionate gardens, could still hear their sunflower cantatas. I saw delicious girls dancing tarantellas in fields of comets. The woman’s head turned to give me a last smile before she vanished altogether in a Milky Way of music, floating across a lake of green mirrors. Mum took me home over the mud and wreckage of the street, over the mild deluge, under the arpeggio of watery stars. She was silent. I smelt the gutters and the rude plaster of the corroded houses. Then all I was left with was a world drowning in poverty, a mother-of-pearl moon, and the long darkness before dawn. (page 308)

Upon reading, I found that the dream logic I was set on wasn’t doomed but I did need to reorient how it worked. As I mentioned earlier, a pivotal action of the dreamer is recognition, and I needed to collect souvenirs that the reader could recognize even in the world of my protagonist’s absent self. Susan Stewart wrote in On Longing, “...narrative here seeks to ‘realize’ a certain formulation of the world. Hence we can see the many narratives that dream of the inanimate-made-animate as symptomatic of all narrative’s desire to invent a realizable world, a world which ‘works.’ In this sense, every narrative is a miniature and every book is a microcosm, for such forms always seek to finalize, bring close to, a totality or model.” There needed to be impositions of time and space and memory- which are present in dreams- but instead of obeying these impositions, I had the responsibility to destroy them and their connection to the protagonist. To realize the absent self, it was pivotal that I communicated what was being lost by the ignorant. 

The world of the protagonist’s ignorant self is less ambitious and closer to the one we know but is well-acquainted with the surreal and the uncanny. Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her craft essay “A Master Class in Disrupting Realism and Making Magic”:

I use supernatural elements in my stories and novels because they most adequately render what I notice about memory, trauma, disability, class, ongoingness, and what we mean to each other. Many of my stories are in present tense with present tense flashbacks because of what I’ve noticed about life and memory, that to remember something feels like reliving it.

At a different point in the essay, Bertino explores a method she’s employed to gauge levels of magical fiction. The scale goes from one to ten. One designates a story that could plausibly happen in real life exactly as it is told, nothing false is rendered except for the circumstances and characters. A ten would be assigned to a fantasy story where the entire world is invented and bears no immediate relation to reality. Bertino’s examples of a “one” include: the work of James Baldwin, the work of Jane Austen, and the work of Edward P. Jones. Bertino’s examples of a “ten” include: the work of Kelly Link, the work of Stephen Graham Jones, and the work of Octavia Butler; specifically Blood Child. My MFA fiction workshop and thesis advisor essentially came to the conclusion that because the dream-like nature of the protagonist’s absent self’s world was a “ten,” then the ignorant self’s world must be a “one.” The suggestion struck me as rational and logical and I almost relented until the spider in my head started bouncing around and suddenly I’d written thousands of words about an ignorant self that occupied a world at odds with nature itself. There are plagues, biblical storms, rough beasts slouching every which way, and curses aplenty. I hadn’t produced a “one” as they’d asked but maybe a “five” or “six” at the lowest. However, I did discover a way to give the surreal elements from the ignorant world a different texture than the absent one. All the surreal elements of the ignorant world employ a tool I’ve named “mythological reclamation.” 

The idea has been present for centuries, most pronounced in African and African-American folktales. Mythological reclamation is another word for “lying,” which is what the storytellers in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men call their craft. Rather than create a skewed thing from nothing, mythological reclamation substantiates and explains what already exists. It supplants, supports, fills in, takes back. Why does the snake have its venom and its rattle? They asked God for it because it ain’t like being stomped up. Why does the woodpecker have its red head? Noah struck it with a hammer for trying to poke a hole in the ark, which is where the possum lost its tail too- Noah’s son Ham used all its hairs to make a banjo! Broke the possum’s spirit. The gator and the dog stopped being friends because Brer Dog cut the gator’s mouth all ugly-like. Usually whichever lie was better or more interesting superseded what came before as the new truth. Some truth is very old. The first Anansi story I learned came from an Akan folktale and is about his six sons using their tools to save him from a bird. Each son contributed in a different but arguably equally important way. Afterwards, Anansi found a glowing white orb and wanted to give it to the son that saved him, but all six had saved him. He asked their God of All Things, Nyame, for help and Nyame put the orb in the sky and it became the moon. These are all excellent examples of mythological reclamation because they satiate unsolved curiosities but with the fantastic, not logic!

Another concept in the novel rooted in folklore concerns the protagonist. Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men describes the concept of Jack or John in the “lies” told by southern African-American storytellers: 

Jack or John (not John Henry) is the great human culture hero in Negro folklore. He is like Daniel in Jewish folklore, the wish fulfillment hero of the race. The one who, nevertheless, or in spite of laughter, usually defeats Ole Massa, God and the Devil. Even when Massa seems to have him in a hopeless dilemma he wins out by a trick. Brer Rabbit, Jack (or John) and the Devil are continuations of the same thing. (page 247)

I wanted to write about a Black wish fulfillment hero who is trapped in a vicious cycle of curses and blessings. There are no memories of his feats, neither internal nor external. I found a Moses moment deferred, a people who thought they were chosen but instead left behind. I was curious where that would leave a man, now woefully beholden to the adolescent sadness of isolation.  

The chief curiosities being reclaimed in the ignorant self’s world concern the history of families similar to my own. I grew up with one Grandpa and four Grandmothers. The disparity always seemed odd to me and as I grew older, I started seeking answers, thinking maybe it’d explain me to myself. But real life is jumbled and there is no linear order. I found more gaps than verified truth. The protagonist of my novel lives the exact same amount of days as my sole Grandfather did, the most I can expect as of writing this (following a hereditary tradition). I’ve consulted a composite of theology, theory, folklore, film, art, poetry, memory, lies, gossip, history, literature, scriptures, and traditions to explain the world I’ve been given and reclaimed everything else with my imagination. Through the surreal I am able to escalate annihilation and follow it to a natural, if not unrealistic, end point.  

The novel is currently incomplete and unsold. I have no literary agent. This essay may prove to be an exercise in futility. The narrative currently traces the history of a family curse from origin to eschaton and how a single man forgetting it all tries to restore himself to escape death and isolation. It’s about recurrence, awareness, motherhood, love, acceptance, music, sunshine, sadness, and where cathedrals form. It’s subtly inter-related. Sometimes I like to say I see the world as it was presented in [non-fiction] scriptures like the Bible or Qur’an: the Queen of Sheba, Adam, David, Solomon, Adam, Eve, Jesus, and Moses all doing incredible things through the will of God. All is possible. But I’m not sure I believe that. Like everyone else, I have things to reconcile. The novel is my attempt to explain why every change I've undergone in life has always felt like loss. Truth be told, I’m unsure if I’ve ever gotten over anything in my life. I dream and create things I don’t fully understand. This lack is where I feel most whole.  

I have a trickster spider in my head spinning stories, teaching me worlds, and turning everything to eleven.