Adults who cast no shadow

I am frightened by the idea of sitting down to write a story. But I am not afraid to create a prose retelling of the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten.

I would like to think that the hesitation I feel toward creativity is the same anxiety I feel toward hallucinogenic drugs. I am afraid to lose control over the world I've created. It used to be miraculous: I had a secret identity, special powers; I could wish on a piece of pyrite and get a guinea pig; if you closed your eyes you could see the stars drop down to earth.

I could claim that all of us must of necessity abandon the oceans of childlike imagination for the dry land of adult practicality, that all of us are apples drawn to earth by physics' great laws.

* * *

I will never forget: It was 1992. I was at the movies with a beautiful oak of a boy. I was in love with love, but we were together solely because we were each gay. We had the polite respect for each other that strangers do, or perhaps the surprised camaraderie of two men from opposite continents who find themselves starving on the same abandoned isle.

He had already seen The Crying Game and wanted to share it with me. The scenes of abduction and captivity destroyed me. He nudged me. "This part's important," he whispered.

Jody is about to be executed. Fergus, the compassionate lackey of the group responsible for the kidnapping, gently encourages him to get some rest. Jody can hardly hold a cigarette in his lips. He asks for Fergus to tell him something, a story, anything. Fergus is no storyteller. "You mean like the one you told me—about the frog and the scorpion?" Jody wants something else.

Fergus breathes, thinks, begins: "When I was a child I thought as a child. But when I became a man I put away my childish things." Jody asks what that means. Fergus replies Nothing, and cries.

* * *

I did not understand then why my companion brought such emphasis to that scene. But the Author has written it, and it now has Importance and may now be Analyzed. Perhaps the Reader can see that it was at that precise moment that I, a character, let die the last few blooms of childhood—the ridiculous fairy tale of a prince in an enchanted forest, of stars that you can hold, of time that winds like a smooth path through purple mountains—and drew close my browning leaves for the winter of adulthood.

Probably it was not then, but sooner.

It was an abandonment of imagination. Where others seize the body and go off in pursuit of sustenance and pleasure, and where others seize material and pursue fame and wealth, I chose to follow a path of vague logic. I wanted to live in a world of testable theories and provable laws, where all that is observed is accountable and all that is possible is predictable.

I think this was the only rock with handholds sure enough to hold me against the winds and rains of an arbitrary but devilish powerful religion . . .