If I’m caught in a story, then perhaps I can use my knowledge of
them to write my way out. When it comes to
fantasy, prophecies are bound to come
true, but there’s always a twist. Let’s take Macbeth for example. The Weird Sisters promise Macbeth that no man
born of woman can kill him, and a few acts later,
Shakespeare presents a character born by a Cesarean section to slay
him. In Henry IV Part II, the character has
been prophesied to die in Jerusalem, and guess what? He dies not in
the city of Jerusalem, as you might think, but in a room named after it.
Prophecies come true, but in a way you wouldn’t expect them to, it’s
just good story telling. So the trick is to look back a few years ago and see which of those prophecies have already
come true and how unexpectedly that happened .
Exhausted in a new chic coffee shop I decided to try out, sitting in front of a poster listing each Roman
emperor – either the decorator was a big roman
era appreciator, or this is a new aesthetic that flew over me - , my
friend challenged me to guess them
all. Since I love a trivia challenge and love losing even more, I acquitted myself rather
well, losing the thread around Alexander Severus, another roman emperor who has been assassinated. This
was the point of all that dreaming; not living out
these fascinations, but sharing them with other people. In conversations, in stories, in late night improvised writings like this one.
450MAD and a Red Box
Looking back, as a kid, the highlight of my
days was to run to my bedroom, close
the door, then open my secret red box I
keep under my bed and inspect my
money. I’d count it two, three or four times, more to
revel in the amount than to double
check. The total would have been 450Mad more or less. It had accumulated from grandparents, aunts,
and uncles across years
of birthdays and holidays. I remember
feeling that slight griminess money can have. The baroque-like patterns framing each bill enchanting my young mind
with their complexity, the coins and how
beautifully they were engraved. The smell of it: a musk somewhere between my grandparents' apartment and the comic
books I read. The way I could roll it up into a tight cylinder, a figure
eight forming at its top and bottom. The mass of it charmed me. While each bill and coin was slender
on its own, they grew fat and heavy when collected together.
I was enthralled by the idea that this mass
had meaning outside of itself, had the
possibility of being translated into any number of things. Generally, though, I didn't want the things—I wanted the
possibility. It hardly ever occurred to me that I might spend the money. When I did get up enough courage to spend
it, I found the purchase
anti-climactic. Buying any one thing meant casting away everything I could have
bought. That same 100Mad might have bought a Pokéball, a Nerf gun, a Swiss army knife, a month’s supply of Yu-Gi-Oh
cards. The items left unbought always dwarfed the Lego set or Pirates of the Caribbean board game that I’d
actually
purchased. This was the thing about possibilities: they stretched on
as far as my mind cared to go.
Realities, though, were disappointingly finite.
The Red box held my other treasures as well.
When Emperor Augustus strode into the
Temple of Saturn and saw the Imperial treasury, he could not have had more wonder or awe than I did with my box.
Standing in the Aerium, the sneer of cold command
surely on his face, August must have seen mounting hordes of denarii cast in silver at Ticinum or Ostia, hard specie
liberated from the vaults of Rhodes or Corinth,
ornate jewelry forged at Alexandria. Sitting on the carpet of my room I saw equal, if not better treasures: a sewing
button, a bullet casing, a cube of pool chalk
with a dent in it from use, a political party pin, and some balloons.
These were not quite treasures but
the tokens of treasures, icons that pointed to the real wealth stored in my mind’s red box. The button must of
had been given to me by my Mom, the bullet
casing had once housed a real, actual bullet which my uncle had fired during one of his many hunting trips. To hold the
casing in my hand was to hold lethal power
itself, or at least the idea behind it. I had done a project on
Morocco’s independence and the logo
on my pin was one of the political parties that played a role in it, the pin itself was thus not just a pin, but a
memento invoking our history. The balloons were the ammunition I never used during water balloon fights and they
were an attempt to hold onto the good
times past the good times, to keep past times with me into the present.
Maps and Drawings in a Desk Drawer
As soon as I needed it, my parents gave me a desk of my own. I began assembling my personal filing system. It
contained maps of Europe’s old plans, of Pangaea,
of my country’s rail transport . Also included were confidential battle plans I
had sketched myself, and drawings of
characters I had liked to add to Mario
cart ( a spy with a red cat, a tiger in a black and white
cap, a slow fox because why not ). In
East of
Eden, Steinbeck writes: “Always before, Cal
had wanted to build a dark accumulation of
things seen and things heard. A
kind of warehouse of materials that, like obscure tools, might come in handy”. The bottom drawer of that desk was my warehouse; these documents my obscure tools. At any
given moment, I might be called in to consult
on the next Nintendo game or to invade whichever country. I had to be ready, I
must be ready. I may have been seven, nine, or twelve, but I already considered myself a top of the line tactician. I
studied the diagrams of single and double envelopment
with careful attention. In these little maps, little colored rectangles stood for
whole units of armed men; ten or twenty thousand soldiers—their sticks, swords or guns prepared for combat, their brass
buttons shining or their helmets plumed with
feathers. The mapmaker took all the emotions, the grim, the blood, and had collapsed all of it into a block of color
not half an inch long. Here it was again: the
thing was not the thing, but
pointing at something outside
of itself.
Drawstring Bag, Books, Skull and
a Pocket Knife
When I asked my Mom to give me her Swiss army
knife, she turned me down. I was surprised: I knew
my mother wasn’t a people
pleaser, but was kind enough
to give everyone anything, and I’m yet to know if I’m like her. If I wanted to borrow her phone, she'd hand it over without even
asking why. If she saw a stranger walking to
work, she’d give them
a ride. When my cousins
wanted to take some of my mother's
loose buttons home with them,
she gifted them the whole collection. I was annoyed
that she hadn’t given me the knife, of course: I had wanted that pocket knife. Stronger than the annoyance, though, was a new
feeling of closeness to her: she had wanted the knife too. She must also have enjoyed how the Swiss army knife
was packed with functionality, the
way the blade slid perfectly into its place next to the saw edge and the bottle opener. The way you could flip
the corkscrew up and down. This red little round-edged
rectangle was so dense with possibility in the same way money was. In the same way money could turn into so many
things ( Pokéball, a Nerf gun , Yu-Gi- Oh
cards), this Swiss army knife could fold out into being a knife, a corkscrew, a toothpick, scissors, or a belt
hole puncher.
Whatever possibility I saw in Swiss Army
knives, I saw three times in Batman's
Utility belt. He had extra batarangs, lock picks, a flashlight he could carry
with his teeth if necessary, a camera for gathering evidence, a grappling hook
with 15 meters of cable attached, and
each of these had its own designated spot. The utility belt turned his waist into a personal supply depot. Perhaps that
was the draw of Batman for me: he was
ready for anything. Those cowboy belts with rings for bullets also held
a certain charm for me,
though they lost points for being so repetitive.
Lacking a utility
belt, I settled for my red drawstring bag. My Mom had taken a
sharpie and written my name on the back. Pull open the bag’s straps and you would find a comic
book, a journal where I kept my field notes, a toy skull, a flashlight, and the
Swiss army knife my parents finally got me. Strolling down the streets outside of my small town , I was always disappointed with the
monsters I never came across, the villains I never met, the pirate ships I never boarded. When you're ready for anything, you desperately want something to happen.
Comic books
More than the comics themselves, I loved the
idea and the books about the comics. I wanted to know exactly how many
cars Spiderman could lift, can Superman beat
his kryptonite, the name of the one sword that could actually kill Wolverine. This is why I loved comic books. They were
Spiritual descendants and the child’s version
of Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings;
they gave you all the facts on all the fiction.
I liked my history books the same way. Books with stories in them tried my attention span. The comic books drew me in
because they anticipated my tendency for distraction
and allowed for it. Stories just didn't interest me as much as facts, events, things I could add to my inner filing
cabinet. Rather than suffocating small pages with prose, these were wide books with massive wingspans. Each
double page spread splayed facts and
pictures out for me. On one page, you’d see a Roman gladius and pilus. On the next, a map of occupied
Gaul. That Roman javelins (pila) were designed
to bend on impact so that they couldn't be thrown back, that World War
II would gone Germany’s way if not
for misinterpretation, that the Battle of Stalingrad lasted five months. These were the things I was hungry
for. The D'Aulaires book of Norse Gods spoke
to me in a similar way. I loved knowing the names and specialties of each of
the so-called gods in the Norse Pantheon.
When Emerson tells us that: “All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder
slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be
true of himself”, he articulates what brought me to
comic books. I was that yonder slip of a boy. The powers I read about were not
Storm’s or Colossus’s or Wolverine’s, but my
own. When I needed to strike
down a foe, I knew that thunderbolts would attend to my demands,
that my skin would turn to steel, that blades would
unsheathe from my knuckles. Reading the introduction
of a Captain America novel, they explain
that they added in the character of
Bucky because they thought that if the reader didn't have the audacity or the courage to dare imagine themselves
into the role of the Captain himself, they would
at least be able to imagine themselves as his sidekick. I was impressed—I hadn’t thought that adults could think
this far ahead. At the same time, it felt a little presumptuous of them to just assume that I was reading this book
to fantasize about being one of the
main characters. Did they really understand the psyches of their audience that well? Apparently they did.
Presumptuous or no, they had presumed correctly.
I thought I was reading these comic books, but it turns out they’d read me ahead of time. Comics were designed with
the adolescent mind in mind. Again, what I
was reading had anticipated my desire to put myself into this world,
claim it as my own and structure it
to give me as many ways in as possible. They weren’t the only ones to
see the psychology behind it.
GRRM himself wrote:
“We read fantasy
to find the colors
again, I think. To taste strong spices
and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us,
to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night,
and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and
north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their
heaven. When I die, I’d sooner
go to middle Earth.
The Problem
This was the problem. The things I loved as a
kid were pointing at something else. I stashed money away to spend it later. I
collected maps and made battle plans for
some future military expedition. I stockpiled knowledge because I expected to later wring some wisdom or cleverness from
it. I read comic books out of the tacit assumption
that these powers and exploits would one day be my own. Emerson tells us “man postpones or remembers; he does
not live in the present, but with reverted
eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future”.
There I was, living my childhood on tiptoes, forever seeking
that future me in whom all these possibilities would converge into realities. I
was
certain that I would see Shangri-La, that I would hunt the forests of the
night, that I would have my own
utility belt. Maybe this is why I so often tried to sever my childhood and declare myself No Longer a
Kid. I used the usual markers: first job, first
girlfriend, first driver’s license. None of these stuck. No ending felt like
The Ending. The past always bled into
the present: I still liked comic books, ancient history, and adding new tokens to my red box. Perhaps I was right to disregard books of stories in favor of books of facts. A fundamental
part of the stories is that they end. Life doesn’t
have an end, until the big one. At 22, I suspect that we never really reach adulthood, only become older and older
children. So the big change is to get off of my tiptoes. I was saving all my knowledge
for later? Very well. It’s later now, time I used my knowledge
to write my way out .
Exhausted in a new chic coffee shop I decided to try out, sitting in front of a poster listing each Roman
emperor – either the decorator was a big roman
era appreciator, or this is a new aesthetic that flew over me - , my
friend challenged me to guess them
all. Since I love a trivia challenge and love losing even more, I acquitted myself rather
well, losing the thread around Alexander Severus, another roman emperor who has been assassinated. This
was the point of all that dreaming; not living out
these fascinations, but sharing them with other people. In conversations, in stories, in late night improvised writings like this one.
450MAD and a Red Box
Looking back, as a kid, the highlight of my
days was to run to my bedroom, close
the door, then open my secret red box I
keep under my bed and inspect my
money. I’d count it two, three or four times, more to
revel in the amount than to double
check. The total would have been 450Mad more or less. It had accumulated from grandparents, aunts,
and uncles across years
of birthdays and holidays. I remember
feeling that slight griminess money can have. The baroque-like patterns framing each bill enchanting my young mind
with their complexity, the coins and how
beautifully they were engraved. The smell of it: a musk somewhere between my grandparents' apartment and the comic
books I read. The way I could roll it up into a tight cylinder, a figure
eight forming at its top and bottom. The mass of it charmed me. While each bill and coin was slender
on its own, they grew fat and heavy when collected together.
I was enthralled by the idea that this mass
had meaning outside of itself, had the
possibility of being translated into any number of things. Generally, though, I didn't want the things—I wanted the
possibility. It hardly ever occurred to me that I might spend the money. When I did get up enough courage to spend
it, I found the purchase
anti-climactic. Buying any one thing meant casting away everything I could have
bought. That same 100Mad might have bought a Pokéball, a Nerf gun, a Swiss army knife, a month’s supply of Yu-Gi-Oh
cards. The items left unbought always dwarfed the Lego set or Pirates of the Caribbean board game that I’d
actually
purchased. This was the thing about possibilities: they stretched on
as far as my mind cared to go.
Realities, though, were disappointingly finite.
The Red box held my other treasures as well.
When Emperor Augustus strode into the
Temple of Saturn and saw the Imperial treasury, he could not have had more wonder or awe than I did with my box.
Standing in the Aerium, the sneer of cold command
surely on his face, August must have seen mounting hordes of denarii cast in silver at Ticinum or Ostia, hard specie
liberated from the vaults of Rhodes or Corinth,
ornate jewelry forged at Alexandria. Sitting on the carpet of my room I saw equal, if not better treasures: a sewing
button, a bullet casing, a cube of pool chalk
with a dent in it from use, a political party pin, and some balloons.
These were not quite treasures but
the tokens of treasures, icons that pointed to the real wealth stored in my mind’s red box. The button must of
had been given to me by my Mom, the bullet
casing had once housed a real, actual bullet which my uncle had fired during one of his many hunting trips. To hold the
casing in my hand was to hold lethal power
itself, or at least the idea behind it. I had done a project on
Morocco’s independence and the logo
on my pin was one of the political parties that played a role in it, the pin itself was thus not just a pin, but a
memento invoking our history. The balloons were the ammunition I never used during water balloon fights and they
were an attempt to hold onto the good
times past the good times, to keep past times with me into the present.
Maps and Drawings in a Desk Drawer
As soon as I needed it, my parents gave me a desk of my own. I began assembling my personal filing system. It
contained maps of Europe’s old plans, of Pangaea,
of my country’s rail transport . Also included were confidential battle plans I
had sketched myself, and drawings of
characters I had liked to add to Mario
cart ( a spy with a red cat, a tiger in a black and white
cap, a slow fox because why not ). In
East of
Eden, Steinbeck writes: “Always before, Cal
had wanted to build a dark accumulation of
things seen and things heard. A
kind of warehouse of materials that, like obscure tools, might come in handy”. The bottom drawer of that desk was my warehouse; these documents my obscure tools. At any
given moment, I might be called in to consult
on the next Nintendo game or to invade whichever country. I had to be ready, I
must be ready. I may have been seven, nine, or twelve, but I already considered myself a top of the line tactician. I
studied the diagrams of single and double envelopment
with careful attention. In these little maps, little colored rectangles stood for
whole units of armed men; ten or twenty thousand soldiers—their sticks, swords or guns prepared for combat, their brass
buttons shining or their helmets plumed with
feathers. The mapmaker took all the emotions, the grim, the blood, and had collapsed all of it into a block of color
not half an inch long. Here it was again: the
thing was not the thing, but
pointing at something outside
of itself.
Drawstring Bag, Books, Skull and
a Pocket Knife
When I asked my Mom to give me her Swiss army
knife, she turned me down. I was surprised: I knew
my mother wasn’t a people
pleaser, but was kind enough
to give everyone anything, and I’m yet to know if I’m like her. If I wanted to borrow her phone, she'd hand it over without even
asking why. If she saw a stranger walking to
work, she’d give them
a ride. When my cousins
wanted to take some of my mother's
loose buttons home with them,
she gifted them the whole collection. I was annoyed
that she hadn’t given me the knife, of course: I had wanted that pocket knife. Stronger than the annoyance, though, was a new
feeling of closeness to her: she had wanted the knife too. She must also have enjoyed how the Swiss army knife
was packed with functionality, the
way the blade slid perfectly into its place next to the saw edge and the bottle opener. The way you could flip
the corkscrew up and down. This red little round-edged
rectangle was so dense with possibility in the same way money was. In the same way money could turn into so many
things ( Pokéball, a Nerf gun , Yu-Gi- Oh
cards), this Swiss army knife could fold out into being a knife, a corkscrew, a toothpick, scissors, or a belt
hole puncher.
Whatever possibility I saw in Swiss Army
knives, I saw three times in Batman's
Utility belt. He had extra batarangs, lock picks, a flashlight he could carry
with his teeth if necessary, a camera for gathering evidence, a grappling hook
with 15 meters of cable attached, and
each of these had its own designated spot. The utility belt turned his waist into a personal supply depot. Perhaps that
was the draw of Batman for me: he was
ready for anything. Those cowboy belts with rings for bullets also held
a certain charm for me,
though they lost points for being so repetitive.
Lacking a utility
belt, I settled for my red drawstring bag. My Mom had taken a
sharpie and written my name on the back. Pull open the bag’s straps and you would find a comic
book, a journal where I kept my field notes, a toy skull, a flashlight, and the
Swiss army knife my parents finally got me. Strolling down the streets outside of my small town , I was always disappointed with the
monsters I never came across, the villains I never met, the pirate ships I never boarded. When you're ready for anything, you desperately want something to happen.
Comic books
More than the comics themselves, I loved the
idea and the books about the comics. I wanted to know exactly how many
cars Spiderman could lift, can Superman beat
his kryptonite, the name of the one sword that could actually kill Wolverine. This is why I loved comic books. They were
Spiritual descendants and the child’s version
of Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings;
they gave you all the facts on all the fiction.
I liked my history books the same way. Books with stories in them tried my attention span. The comic books drew me in
because they anticipated my tendency for distraction
and allowed for it. Stories just didn't interest me as much as facts, events, things I could add to my inner filing
cabinet. Rather than suffocating small pages with prose, these were wide books with massive wingspans. Each
double page spread splayed facts and
pictures out for me. On one page, you’d see a Roman gladius and pilus. On the next, a map of occupied
Gaul. That Roman javelins (pila) were designed
to bend on impact so that they couldn't be thrown back, that World War
II would gone Germany’s way if not
for misinterpretation, that the Battle of Stalingrad lasted five months. These were the things I was hungry
for. The D'Aulaires book of Norse Gods spoke
to me in a similar way. I loved knowing the names and specialties of each of
the so-called gods in the Norse Pantheon.
When Emerson tells us that: “All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder
slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be
true of himself”, he articulates what brought me to
comic books. I was that yonder slip of a boy. The powers I read about were not
Storm’s or Colossus’s or Wolverine’s, but my
own. When I needed to strike
down a foe, I knew that thunderbolts would attend to my demands,
that my skin would turn to steel, that blades would
unsheathe from my knuckles. Reading the introduction
of a Captain America novel, they explain
that they added in the character of
Bucky because they thought that if the reader didn't have the audacity or the courage to dare imagine themselves
into the role of the Captain himself, they would
at least be able to imagine themselves as his sidekick. I was impressed—I hadn’t thought that adults could think
this far ahead. At the same time, it felt a little presumptuous of them to just assume that I was reading this book
to fantasize about being one of the
main characters. Did they really understand the psyches of their audience that well? Apparently they did.
Presumptuous or no, they had presumed correctly.
I thought I was reading these comic books, but it turns out they’d read me ahead of time. Comics were designed with
the adolescent mind in mind. Again, what I
was reading had anticipated my desire to put myself into this world,
claim it as my own and structure it
to give me as many ways in as possible. They weren’t the only ones to
see the psychology behind it.
GRRM himself wrote:
“We read fantasy
to find the colors
again, I think. To taste strong spices
and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us,
to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night,
and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and
north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their
heaven. When I die, I’d sooner
go to middle Earth.
The Problem
This was the problem. The things I loved as a kid were pointing at something else. I stashed money away to spend it later. I collected maps and made battle plans for some future military expedition. I stockpiled knowledge because I expected to later wring some wisdom or cleverness from it. I read comic books out of the tacit assumption that these powers and exploits would one day be my own. Emerson tells us “man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future”. There I was, living my childhood on tiptoes, forever seeking that future me in whom all these possibilities would converge into realities. I was certain that I would see Shangri-La, that I would hunt the forests of the night, that I would have my own utility belt. Maybe this is why I so often tried to sever my childhood and declare myself No Longer a Kid. I used the usual markers: first job, first girlfriend, first driver’s license. None of these stuck. No ending felt like The Ending. The past always bled into the present: I still liked comic books, ancient history, and adding new tokens to my red box. Perhaps I was right to disregard books of stories in favor of books of facts. A fundamental part of the stories is that they end. Life doesn’t have an end, until the big one. At 22, I suspect that we never really reach adulthood, only become older and older children. So the big change is to get off of my tiptoes. I was saving all my knowledge for later? Very well. It’s later now, time I used my knowledge to write my way out.
Article by : Mohammed Ismaili
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