Playmates
There is one story in my file of unfinished stories that has been troubling me for some time. I began it when I was seventeen, and it was among the most vivid of my beginnings. Since then I have shown it to many people and worked on it often, but could never find just the right note to strike in it.
The story is about a girl.... her name is still unknown to me... who rides ogres. The way the story is set up, this is an incredibly difficult and frightening thing to have to do, but it is also extremely lucrative and prestigious. Anyway, the girl is being slowly destroyed by her profession, and one day a young gardener-boy on her estate becomes her friend. Gradually he tries to draw her away from her work, to make her want to give it up, because he can see that it is destroying her. But she won't go, because her pride and her desire to be significant are involved. She aches to go away with him, but she can't. She is consumed with self-love.
The real sticking-place in my story was the boy himself. You see, the story is unique in that he is not in love with her. Rather, he loves her. That's important. I never got the sense that he would marry her; only that he would make it possible for her to be free.
I tried for years to make the young man and the girl fall in love. I thought that a romance was the only suitable way to resolve their relationship. Now, though, I'm not so sure. I've been reading C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves and have been trying to sort out kinds of love. Somewhere in the midst of this, I realized that this boy and girl are not meant to be sweethearts---at least, not in this story. They are something younger and simpler. They are playmates.
I don't know what you would mean by the word "playmate," gentle reader, but I mean by it something only slightly different from (and in many ways related to) the word "soulmate." A playmate is an incredibly important person, because a playmate knows how you play, and is able to play with you.
Have you any idea how significant this is? In our lives we work, and we need people who work well with us. But there is another kind of work called play (for what really good play does not involve a large amount of complex doing, which we might use as a synonym for "work"?). This kind of work is the kind to which everybody longs to escape.
Our hours of ordinary work are satisfying, perhaps. They are bronzy and warm. But our hours of play are golden and radiant. They are the hours that matter. For this reason, it matters immesurably that one have a playmate who really knows how to play, and to play with oneself as one is created to play.
These characters, I realized recently, are playmates. They are not meant to be lovers. What the boy does for the girl is simple: he makes her play. He teaches her the best kind of play, which is worship. He plays with her. He understands how she plays and it is the same way he plays, and so they play together. This is what I wrote originally (remember I was still seventeen and therefore almost a child myself), and this is what I later dismissed as "too simple" and tried to replace with a love interest.
But what I missed completely is that playmates do have a kind of love for each other---not the grownup kind, but another kind that is, in its way and at a certain age only, equally important to the two people involved. Playmates have to have an affinity for one another's souls. They have to be able to respond to the lightest touch of each other's imaginations. They have to expose to one another their own real fears, real dreams, and real vulnerabilities. Playmates learn together, grow together, and go through experiences every bit as vivid as those you read of that belong to people who have swum rivers and survived wars with one another.
A really good playmate is as rare as a blue moon. I have had a few in my entire life. One, my little brother Danya, knows about Heaven. That won't mean anything to you, gentle reader.... but you see, your not knowing only shows how special a playmate can be, and how much playmates understand about each other's inner lives.
I wonder very much what would become of my story if I went back and lived in it as I began to live, but had not the will---whether wisely or unwisely---to go on living. What would happen if I wrote the story of playing... what if I used that model to breathe life into this pair? She, the girl character, has been waiting such a long time to be set free. I wanted to give her a lover, but I think now that she is too young, and that I wanted to give her a lover because "every girl should have a lover."
But what if she doesn't need a lover, doesn't even want one? What if she only needs her playmate back? What if instead she needs and has missed her playmate, now changed into the absurd form of a half-baked lover (for what do I really know about writing a lover)?
What if I have been robbing her, these seven years, of her playmate?
The story is about a girl.... her name is still unknown to me... who rides ogres. The way the story is set up, this is an incredibly difficult and frightening thing to have to do, but it is also extremely lucrative and prestigious. Anyway, the girl is being slowly destroyed by her profession, and one day a young gardener-boy on her estate becomes her friend. Gradually he tries to draw her away from her work, to make her want to give it up, because he can see that it is destroying her. But she won't go, because her pride and her desire to be significant are involved. She aches to go away with him, but she can't. She is consumed with self-love.
The real sticking-place in my story was the boy himself. You see, the story is unique in that he is not in love with her. Rather, he loves her. That's important. I never got the sense that he would marry her; only that he would make it possible for her to be free.
I tried for years to make the young man and the girl fall in love. I thought that a romance was the only suitable way to resolve their relationship. Now, though, I'm not so sure. I've been reading C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves and have been trying to sort out kinds of love. Somewhere in the midst of this, I realized that this boy and girl are not meant to be sweethearts---at least, not in this story. They are something younger and simpler. They are playmates.
I don't know what you would mean by the word "playmate," gentle reader, but I mean by it something only slightly different from (and in many ways related to) the word "soulmate." A playmate is an incredibly important person, because a playmate knows how you play, and is able to play with you.
Have you any idea how significant this is? In our lives we work, and we need people who work well with us. But there is another kind of work called play (for what really good play does not involve a large amount of complex doing, which we might use as a synonym for "work"?). This kind of work is the kind to which everybody longs to escape.
Our hours of ordinary work are satisfying, perhaps. They are bronzy and warm. But our hours of play are golden and radiant. They are the hours that matter. For this reason, it matters immesurably that one have a playmate who really knows how to play, and to play with oneself as one is created to play.
These characters, I realized recently, are playmates. They are not meant to be lovers. What the boy does for the girl is simple: he makes her play. He teaches her the best kind of play, which is worship. He plays with her. He understands how she plays and it is the same way he plays, and so they play together. This is what I wrote originally (remember I was still seventeen and therefore almost a child myself), and this is what I later dismissed as "too simple" and tried to replace with a love interest.
But what I missed completely is that playmates do have a kind of love for each other---not the grownup kind, but another kind that is, in its way and at a certain age only, equally important to the two people involved. Playmates have to have an affinity for one another's souls. They have to be able to respond to the lightest touch of each other's imaginations. They have to expose to one another their own real fears, real dreams, and real vulnerabilities. Playmates learn together, grow together, and go through experiences every bit as vivid as those you read of that belong to people who have swum rivers and survived wars with one another.
A really good playmate is as rare as a blue moon. I have had a few in my entire life. One, my little brother Danya, knows about Heaven. That won't mean anything to you, gentle reader.... but you see, your not knowing only shows how special a playmate can be, and how much playmates understand about each other's inner lives.
I wonder very much what would become of my story if I went back and lived in it as I began to live, but had not the will---whether wisely or unwisely---to go on living. What would happen if I wrote the story of playing... what if I used that model to breathe life into this pair? She, the girl character, has been waiting such a long time to be set free. I wanted to give her a lover, but I think now that she is too young, and that I wanted to give her a lover because "every girl should have a lover."
But what if she doesn't need a lover, doesn't even want one? What if she only needs her playmate back? What if instead she needs and has missed her playmate, now changed into the absurd form of a half-baked lover (for what do I really know about writing a lover)?
What if I have been robbing her, these seven years, of her playmate?
posted by Praelucor at 10:26 PM
3 Comments:
But you said her heart ached to go away "with him." That sounds somehow innately romantic.
Does the story end before we find out what happened in their adulthood? Can they really help becoming lovers then? Or will other friends (a secondary playmate rank) surround them, all becoming one happy band? Will he seek her another protector? Can he bear to?
Your post reminded me of an chapter written by tolkien at the beginning of the compilation "The book of lost tales". I think the chapter is called the cottage of lost play. In particular, I am reminded of a the poem called the house of lost play. I wonder if you've heard or read it before.
I remember reading the start of that story. Yes, you need to finish it - and you are right. There is no need to bring in romance, even if the sort of "playmate" you describe implies a future romance. One never knows about that sort of thing, does one? And sometimes it can be more poignant to leave it "unfinished."
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