Notes (III)

What I would like, and what I can’t seem to find, is a flattering example of Aaron and Marsh going at it. What I’m finding, as I re-read these old threads and try to see them with an outsider’s eye, is that the more interesting their argument becomes, the more unpleasant they come off as people.

Of course that was not how I saw it at the time, not at all. What I want to capture is the sense that there was something—something heroic about this quest to understand, in something like the conventional fashion, a thing that seemed to have been designed as an exercise in evading conventional understanding. How much of this was in my mind, and not on the page?

After all, as 2003 passed into 2004, where was I? In a dingy apartment, living alone, with a job I disliked, and no friends left in my college town. The future was a bleak plateau. I would turn on the news and the pundits seemed like aliens. And here were these people—these earnest, comprehensible people, applying their rubric of comprehension to the most alien thing we knew. What could I do but look up to them?

I didn’t feel like any of the idols that had been proposed to me, as an adult man, remained viable as idols, and there was something perversely wonderful about the prospect of idolizing this frivolous thing, this argument over a series of “children’s books,” which was significant to no one’s livelihood and would never find its place in any catalogue of cultural achievements. But forget all that: I understood these people, word by word (well, except for Lugnut!), and I felt a warm kinship with them, because we shared a common ground, and a simple manner of plodding, step by step, word by word, along that common ground.

God, this is self-indulgent. Need something that can be at least possibly used in the report so I don’t feel like I’m just wasting time. Keeping a journal is all well and good but the report has a deadline.

I need to form, at the very least, a skeletal outline of material covering the major events. I need to move the plot along. Marsh makes his discovery, and we begin the road to Spelunk 04!

But I’m dogged by the feeling that no one but us—maybe not even the other forum members, not even the best among them, not even Jim, say—will understand quite what I want to say. And that the shape of the misunderstanding will inevitably make us seem sad and broken, when I don’t think Spelunk 04! broke us. Quite the opposite, in fact. (Not that it wasn’t horrible—but it didn’t break us.)

Here is another angle of attack. Perhaps the quality that attracts many of us to Salby’s work is the sense of ferocious inevitability that pervades it. The lack of romance in Chesscourt is a key example. It isn’t just that no romance occurs, which would not be too unusual in a series of this kind. It’s that it feels like it never could have occurred. The characters, by virtue of being the heirs of the Manor, are afflicted with a kind of terrible noblesse oblige whose full weight emerges steadily across the course of nine whole books. There is no time to stop and enjoy what are, for the rest of us, the ordinary pleasures of life—everywhere, Weightier Things beckon, and they only beckon louder and louder with time. (As the cherub said to Sally: “You must not imagine that for beings like you and us there can be laughter. The low men laugh, and we envy them. But for us, the higher ones, there is no laughter, only an unending vigil, purely serious, stretching on into the night” [The Sea of Glass, p. 759].)

What makes this poignant, and what is—I think—responsible for the “Salby fandom” in its present form, is the largely suppressed counter-theme that runs alongside the “unending vigil.” Again and again we are presented with moments that suggest, tantalizingly, what could have been. The Lorrums have, or appear to have, a fascinating and perhaps even wise culture, but soon enough the narrative leaves this subject behind, driven ever on to Weightier Things. There are moments of ingenious humor—Aunt Mirth, whatever her other faults, is true to her name, and Charles is a master of delicious, grotesque invective—which hint at the bursting human comedy that we might have witnessed, had the cherub been wrong.

So each of us, I think, latched on to Salby because we were, in some way, anti-Salbian. We wanted to stop the relentless forward motion, turn back the clock, find some way to let our characters rest a moment, laugh for a moment, take a moment to notice how beautifully the light gleams off each other’s hair. (Etc.) Jenny gave the Lorrums the development that they deserved and that Salby denied them, precisely because he was himself. I involved myself in the possibility of Sally cut off from the world of Chesscourt, living out an un-Salbian life. I imagined Charles and Sally recognizing the deep kinship which was all too obvious in their every interaction, but which the iron law of the vigil proscribed.

As for Marsh, I think he has always—until now, at least—been anti-Salbian on a deeper level. He does not believe in inevitability, and sees Chesscourt as a kind of wondrous lie, wondrous because obviously false, which will have to eventually give up its act and give in to the forgiving logic of everyday life. Marsh could play in this upside-down playground with glee, knowing that after all it was manifestly unreal.

Aaron, of course, may have been the most anti-Salbian of all of us—or the most Salbian. But I mustn’t get ahead of myself.

Can the fandom remain? We are all Salbians now, all of us who went through Spelunk 04!, and I do not think we can go back. It falls to me to break the news to the Cafe (my burden is heavy in so many ways) that it is obsolete. The torch of anti-Salbianism would be a very hard one to bear, after Spelunk 04! I fear it would take a kind of devilish genius beyond Aaron or Marsh or Jenny, some new prodigy not yet seen by any of us, to bear it now, and I would not place my bets upon the appearance of such a figure.