Tripod: Messages from the Staff

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<option value="http://tr2.freeshop.com/pg00024.htm">Home & Living <option value="http://tr2.freeshop.com/pg00025.htm">Health, Fitness <option value="http://tr2.freeshop.com/pg00025.htm">-& Sports <option value="http://tr2.freeshop.com/pg00029.htm">Completely <option value="http://tr2.freeshop.com/pg00029.htm">-FREE Offers </select></td> </tr> </table> </form> </center> </td> <td valign="TOP" width="100%">   <p> <p> <img src="../../../tripod/letters/img/www_subdomain/letter.top.gif" alt="from tripod..with love.." width="401" height="124" border="0"> <br> <p><blockquote> <b>From Christina Simmons, Membership Assistant:</b> <p> <font size="-1"> We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I<br> In a Berkshire bar. The big workman<br> Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe<br> All the evening, from his empty mug<br> With gleaming eye glanced towards us:<br> "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely. <br><br>  C.S. Lewis </font> <p> Sitting in my quiet living room, nestled into my favorite overstuffed chair, warm and secure under the quilted blanket that my aunt made for me, and watching my cats chase each other from kitchen to bedroom and back again (under the curtains, over the sofa, skidding out on the rug and damn the torpedoes), I am aware of the presence of dragons. All about me, rustling their great wings, peering down at the journal I write in (dragons are curious creatures). A sense of dragons is something I've come to know over the years, something soft and intangible, and fleeting: a sense of wonder that can come only in times of contentment, when one is willing to write, and daydream. <p> I have always walked the so-called "paths of wonder" through the pages of books. For the better part of my growing-up, I rode on the backs of dragons above Anne McCaffery's Pern. I stepped through mirrors and argued reality with unicorns. I knew Fiver and Hazel and the rabbits of Watership Down, roaming cross-country with them time and time again, and finally forcing my youngest sister to listen as I read it aloud, both of us tucked up on her bed with the battered old book. She never let me stop with only one chapter. <p> When I grew older, I made the acquaintance of faerie knights and the princesses who rescued them, learned of Black Dogs and boggarts, then climbed Yggdrasil, the World Tree, to meet Thor and Loki, and from across the seas Coyote, Hare, and Raven. I followed Joseph Campbell's thousand-faced hero on his journey. I sailed with Gulliver and learned how to pronounce "houghnyhynn." Coming ashore in colonial America, I heard for the first time the tales that were told on the porches of the South when "my granddaddy's granddaddy was a pup." Then I stepped back and slightly to one side, and became re-acquainted with the Hundred Acre Wood, with Pooh, and Tigger, and Christopher Robin, and learned the soft, quiet enchantments of children's books. I've never truly regretted that, not once. Much of my life has been given to fantasy  I write it, as well as read it  and it's given me back a comfort that few things in the tangible world can. <p> It's not for everyone. Many folks, sad to say, have forgotten what magic, what fantasy, is. They feel, for that reason, that it has no place in the work-a-day world. I've come to accept that there will always be those who look at the lovers of fantasy a bit oddly, as though the friends of heroes and dragons had broadswords in their own hands, or a winged saurian cousin calmly puffing smoke rings over their shoulders. One can't blame them, of course. Children's stories, fairy tales, adult stories grown out of those seeds, they're acquired tastes. After all, William Faulkner did argue that "the human heart in conflict with itself is the only subject worth writing about." I don't buy it. <p> One of my favorite quotes comes from Lily Tomlin (written by her longtime partner Jane Wagner): "Reality is the leading cause of stress in those who subscribe to it." Do I subscribe to reality? Of course. A person can't make a living by chasing rainbows. But, like anything, reality needs to be tempered, as good metal does, to allow it to reach its fullest potential. And fantasy is more tightly interwoven with reality than people might think. <p> Fantasy is our human heritage. Every culture, every people, had its fantasy before it had its history set. More people today would recognize the exploits of Arthur than they would the conquests of William  both kings of England. Children who can't name a handful of African nations can tell you who Anansi, the original spider-man, is. Generations of land-locked dreamers had heard of the Nautilus before the nuclear submarine ever made it to the North Pole  or became exercise equipment. Dates in a textbook are dry and unappealing, but heroes like Harriet Tubman, George Washington, and Chief Seattle come alive in the body of a tale. As a people, we are the tellers of tales, after all, and we make our own magic  our own fantasy  from the dust of reality. <p> And then there's the Internet. It's true: Fantasy has a tighter hold on this conglomeration of wires and monitors than it has on the children's section of a library. It is the heart's blood of the Internet, and its mathematically-inclined cousin, science fiction, is the more visible muscle  particularly after the advent of cyberfiction and William Gibson. Both are magic, still, and their power is potent, even over the computer lines. <p> It does make sense, in a way. Those who take comfort in the unseen world, who have learned to trust in the power of imagination, are the very people whose vision shaped this Internet, blending the tangible and intangible, creating a genuine world that sits as parallel to our own as the kingdoms of faerie ever did in ballad or tale. Here there be friendly dragons, and monsters, too  though the utilitarian user may never see them. <p> The Internet is a realm apart from our own, almost a living fantasy, with its own customs and inhabitants as strange and fantastic as any fantasy or science fiction novel. It has, as Shakespeare might forgive me for saying, given "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"  and the portals are easy for mortals to pass through. Constantly shifting and infinitely strange... and wonderful, in parts, if the traveler chooses her path wisely. And it has its tales, too, folklore as potent as the traditional stories all children used to know by heart, sadly neglected in the electronic age. Maybe, in years to come, children will hear tales of fantastic beasts that roamed the ether, invisible to the corporeal eye, or the goblin viruses turned loose by evil wizards who delight in their own mischief. Maybe the casual user will be warned of gremlins who steal files, reroute command paths, or sever connections  and vanish without a trace. Maybe there will be stories of a new sort of White Knight, or even a virtual Round Table, the anti-hackers who battle the aforementioned wizards for the sake of the many. <p> Maybe there already are. Fantasy is all about us, though many choose not to recognize it. Books or films, real world or virtual reality, it is there. Its magic waits. Those who have read through this letter and find themselves smiling or nodding know it, and it's for those people I've written this. We are, after all, in the presence of dragons  and it's pleasant company to keep. <p> <p> <ul> ~<a href="/">Chris</a> :) (2/21/97) </ul> <br><p> Artwork by Dee Dreslough <br><p> <hr width="330"> <p> <center>Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the <a href="../../../www_subdomain/tripod/letters/archive.html">archive</a>.</center> <p> <hr width="330"> </blockquote> <br> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body>