Blackmore points out that when it comes to a choice between doing good and spreading the meme, religious people tend to go for the meme. To most Catholics, and many other people, Mother Teresa was a saint (and she looks well set to become one in the fullness of time). Her work in the slums of Calcutta was selfless and altruistic. She did a lot of good, no question. But some Calcuttans feel that she diverted attention away from the real problems, and helped only those who accepted the teachings of her faith. For example, she was staunchly against birth control, the one practical thing that would have done the most good for the young women who needed her help. But the Catholic memeplex forbids birth control, and in a crunch, the meme wins. Blackmore sums up her analysis like this:
These religious memes did not set out with an intention to succeed. They were just behaviours, ideas and stories that were copied from one person to another … They were successful because they happened to come together into mutually supportive gangs that included all the right tricks to keep them safely stored in millions of brains, books and buildings, and repeatedly passed on to more.
In Shakespeare, memes become art. And now we move up another conceptual level. In drama, genes and memes cooperate to produce a temporary construct on a stage, for other extelligences to view. Shakespeare’s plays give them pleasure, and change their minds. They, and works like them, redirect human culture by attacking our own mental elvishness.
The power of story. Don’t leave home without it. And never, never, never underestimate it.
1 It then comes as quite a jolt when we discover that the animal is a chihuahua.
2 The ‘Shema’ prayer, which orthodox Jews must say at least three times a day, includes ‘And these words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk upon the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.’
3 Of course it ceases to be laughable if, despite its bizarre appearance, it happens to be true. And we’ve already agreed that all religions are true, for a given value of ‘true’.
THIRTY-ONE
A WOMAN ON STAGE?
IT WAS THE SMELL of the theatre Rincewind remembered. People talked about ‘the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd’ but, he assumed, the word ‘roar’ must have been taken to mean the same as ‘stink’.
He also wondered why this theatre was called The Globe. It was not even completely circular. But, he supposed, the new world might happen here …
He’d made a big concession for the occasion. He’d unstitched the few remaining sequins from the word ‘WIZZARD’ on his hat. Given its general lack of shape, and his robe’s raggedness, it now made him look far more like one of the crowd, albeit a one that knew the meaning of the word ‘soap’.
He worked his way back through the throng to the wizards, who had managed to get real seats.
‘How is it going?’ said Ridcully. ‘Remember, lad, the show must go on!’
‘Things are fine, as far as I can see,’ whispered Rincewind. ‘No sign of any elves at all. We did spot a fishmonger in the crowd, so the Librarian slugged him and hid him behind the theatre, just in case.’
‘You know,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, who was leafing through the script, ‘this chap would write much better plays if he didn’t have to have actors in them. They seem to get in the way all the time.’
‘I read the Comedy of Errors last night,’ said the Dean. ‘And I could see the error right there. There wasn’t any comedy. Thank gods for directors.’
The wizards looked at the crowd. It wasn’t as well behaved even as the ones back home; people were picnicking, small parties were being held, and there was a general sense that the audience looked upon the actual play as pleasant background noise to their personal social occasions.
‘How will we know when it starts?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘Oh, trumpets get blown,’ said Rincewind, ‘and then generally two actors come on and tell one another what they already know.’
‘No sign of the elves anywhere,’ said the Dean, looking around with a hand over one eye. ‘I don’t like it. It’s too quiet.’
‘No, sir, no, sir,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s not the time not to like it. The time not to like it is when it’s suddenly as noisy as all hell, sir.’
‘Well, you get backstage with Stibbons and the Librarian, will you?’ said Ridcully. ‘And try not to look conspicuous. We mustn’t take any chances.’
Rincewind worked his away around behind the stage, trying not to look conspicuous. But it was a first night, and there was an informality about the whole business that he’d never seen back home. People just seemed to wander around. Back home, there never seemed to be so much pretence; here, the actors played at being people and, down below, people played at being an audience. The overall effect was rather pleasing. The plays had a conspiratorial quality. Make it interesting enough, their audience was saying, and we’ll believe anything. If you don’t, we’ll have a party with our friends right here and throw nuts at you.
Rincewind sat down on a pile of boxes offstage and watched as the play began. There were raised voices and the gentle, subtle sound of an expectant audience ready to tolerate quite a lot of plot exposition provided there was a joke or a murder at the end of it.
There was no sign of elves, no telltale shimmer in the air. The play wound on. Sometimes there was laughter, in which the deep boom of Ridcully was distinctly noticeable, especially, for some reason, when the clowns were on stage.
The stage elves met with approval, too. Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed … creatures of blossom and air. Only Puck seemed to Rincewind to be anything like the elves he knew, and even he seemed more of a prankster than anything else. Of course, the elves could be pranksters, too, especially if a footpath ran beside a really dangerous ravine. And the glamour they used … well, here it was charming …
… and there was the Queen, a few feet away. She didn’t flash into existence, she emerged from the scenery. A group of lines and shadows that had always been there suddenly, without actually changing, became a figure.
She was wearing a black lace dress hung about with diamonds, so that she looked like walking night.
She turned to Rincewind, with a smile.
‘Ah, potato man,’ she said. ‘We see your wizardly friends out there. But they won’t be able to do anything. This show will go on, you know. Just as written.’
‘… will go on …’ murmured Rincewind. He couldn’t move. She’d hit him with her full force. In desperation, he tried to fill his mind with potatoes.
‘We know you told him a garbled version,’ said the Queen, walking around his quivering body. ‘And a lot of nonsense it was. So I appeared to him in his room and put the whole thing in his mind. So simple.’
Roast potatoes, thought Rincewind. Sort of gold with brown edges, and maybe almost black here and there so they’re nice and crunchy …
‘Can’t you hear the applause?’ said the Queen. ‘They like us. They actually like us. We’ll be in their paintings and stories from now on. You’ll never get us out of there …’
Chips, thought Rincewind, straight from the deep fryer, with little bubbles of fat still spitting and popping … but he couldn’t stop his treacherous head from nodding.
The Queen looked puzzled.
‘Don’t you think about anything but potatoes?’ she said.
Butter, thought Rincewind, chopped chives, melted cheese, salt …
But he couldn’t stop the thought. It opened up inside his head, pushing away all potato-shaped fantasies. All we have to do is nothing, and we’ve won!
‘What?’ said the Queen.
Mash! Huge mounds of mash! Creamed mash!
‘You’re trying to hide something, wizard!’ said the Queen, a few inches from his face. ‘What is it?’
Potato cakes, fried potato skins, potato croquettes …
&n
bsp; … no, not potato croquettes, no one ever did them properly … and it was too late, the Queen was reading him like a book.
‘So …’ she said. ‘You think only mysteries last? Knowledge in unbelief? Seeing is disbelieving?’
There was a creaking above them.
‘The play’s not over, wizard,’ said the Queen. ‘But it’s going to stop right now.’
At this point, the Librarian dropped on her head.
Winkin the glove stitcher and Coster the apple seller discussed the play on the way home.
‘The bit with the queen and the man with the asses ears was good,’ said Winkin.
‘Aye, it was.’
‘And the wall bit, too. When the man said “he is no crescent, and his horns are invisible within the circumference”, I nearly widdled my breeches. I like a good joke, me.’
‘Aye.’
‘But I didn’t understand why all those people in the fur and feathers and stuff were chased across the stage by the man in the hairy red costume, and why the fat men in the expensive seats all got up and on to the stage and why the idiot in the red dress was running around screaming about potatos, whatever they are. While Puck was speaking at the end I definitely thought I could hear a fight going on.’
‘Experimental theatre,’ said Winkin.
‘Good dialogue,’ said Coster.
‘And you’ve got to hand it to those actors, the way they kept going,’ said Winkin.
‘Yeah, and I could have sworn there was another Quene up on stage,’ said Coster, ‘and she looked like a woman. You know, the one who was trying to strangle that man babbling about potatoes.’
‘A woman on stage? Don’t be daft,’ said Winkin. ‘Good play, though.’
‘Yeah. I think they could cut out the chase sequence, though,’ said Coster. ‘And frankly I don’t think you could get a girdle that big.’
‘Yes, it would be dreadful if special effects took over,’ said Winkin.
Wizards, like many large men, can be quite light on their feet. Rincewind was impressed. By the sound of it, they were right behind him as he sped along the path by the river.
‘Best not to wait for a curtain call, I thought,’ Ridcully panted.
‘Did you see me … wallop the Queen with a horseshoe?’ wheezed the Dean.
‘Yes … pity it was an actor,’ said Ridcully. “The other one was the elf. Still, not a complete waste of a horseshoe.’
‘But we certainly showed them, eh?’ said the Dean.
‘The history is completed,’ said the voice of Hex, from Ponder’s bouncing pocket. ‘Elves will be viewed as fairies and such they will become. Over the course of several centuries belief in them will dwindle as they are moved into the realm of art and literature, which is where the remnant of them will subsequently exist. They will become a subject suitable for the amusement of children. Their influence will be severely curtailed but will never die away completely.’
‘Never?’ panted Ponder, who was getting winded.
‘There will always be some influence. Minds on this world are extremely susceptible.’
‘Yes, but we’ve pushed imagination to the next stage,’ puffed Ponder. ‘People can imagine that the things they imagine are imaginary. Elves are little fairies. Monsters get pushed off the map. You can’t fear the unseen when you can see it.’
‘There will be new kinds of monsters,’ said Hex, from Ponder’s pocket. ‘Humans are very inventive in that respect.’
‘Heads … on … spikes,’ said Rincewind, who liked to save his breath for running.
‘Many heads,’ said Hex.
‘There’s always heads on spikes somewhere,’ said Ridcully.
‘The Shell Midden People didn’t have heads on spikes,’ said Rincewind.
‘Yes, but they didn’t even have spikes,’ said Ridcully.
‘You know,’ wheezed Ponder, ‘we could have just told Hex to move us directly to the opening into L-space …
They landed on the wooden floor, still running.
‘Can we teach him to do that on Discworld?’ said Rincewind, after they’d picked themselves up from the heap by the wall.
‘No! Otherwise what use would you be?’ said Ridcully. ‘Come on, let’s go …’
Ponder hesitated by the L-space portal. It was filled with dull, greyish light, and a distant view of mountains and plains of books.
‘There’s still elves here,’ he said. ‘They’re persistent. They might find some way to—’
‘Will you come on?’ snapped Ridcully. ‘We can’t fight every battle.’
‘Something could still go wrong, though.’
‘Whose fault will that be now? No, come on!’
Ponder looked around, gave a little shrug, and stepped into the hole.
After a moment a hairy red arm came through and pulled more books through the hole, piling them up until it was a wall of books.
Brilliant light, so strong that it lanced out between the pages, flashed for a while somewhere in the heap.
Then it went dark. After a moment, a book slipped out of the pile, and it collapsed, the books tumbling to the floor, and there was nothing left but a bare wall.
And, of course, a banana.
THIRTY TWO
MAY CONTAIN NUTS
WE ARE THE STORYTELLING APE, and we are incredibly good at it.
As soon as we are old enough to want to understand what is happening around us, we begin to live in a world of stories. We think in narrative. We do it so automatically that we don’t think we do it. And we have told ourselves stories vast enough to live in.
In the sky above us, patterns older than our planet and unimaginably far away have been fashioned in gods and monsters. But there are bigger stories down below. We live in a network of stories that range from ‘how we got here’ to ‘natural justice’ to ‘real life’.
Ah, yes … ‘real life’. Death, who acts as a kind of Greek chorus in the Discworld books, is impressed by some aspects of humanity. One is that we have evolved to tell ourselves interesting and useful little lies about monsters and gods and tooth fairies, as a kind of prelude to creating really big lies, like ‘Truth’ and Justice’.
There is no justice. As Death remarks in Hogfather, you could grind the universe into powder and not find one atom of justice. We created it, and while we acknowledge this fact, nevertheless there is a sense in which we feel it’s ‘out there’, big and white and shining. It’s another story.
Because we rely so much on them, we love stories. We require them on a daily basis. So a huge service industry has grown up over several thousand years.
The basic narrative forms of drama – the archetypal stories – can all be found in the works of the ancient Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles … Most of the dramatic tricks go back to ancient Greece, especially Athens. No doubt they are older than that, for no tradition starts in fully developed form. The ‘chorus’, a gaggle of bit-players who form a backdrop for the main action and in various ways reinforce it and comment on it, is of Greek or earlier origin. So is the main division of the form of a play, though not necessarily its substance, into comedy and tragedy. So, possibly, is the invention of the huge stuffed joke willy, always good for a laugh from the cheap seats.
The Greek concept of tragedy was an extreme form of narrative imperative: the nature of the impending disaster had to be evident to the audience and to virtually all of the players; but it also had to be evident that it was going to happen anyway, despite that. You were Doomed, as you should be – but we’ll watch anyway, to see how interestingly you’ll be Doomed. And if it sounds silly to watch a drama when you know the ending in advance, consider this: how likely is it, when you settle down to watch the next James Bond movie, that he won’t defuse the bomb? In fact you’ll be watching a narrative as rigid as any Greek drama, but you’ll watch anyway to see how the trick is done this time.
In our story, Hex is the chorus. In form, our tale is comedy; in substance, it
is closer to tragedy. The elves are a Discworld reification of human cruelty and wickedness, they are evil incarnate because – traditionally – they have no souls. Yet in their various aspects they fascinate us, as do vampires and monsters and werewolves. It’d be a terrible event if the last jungle yields up its tiger, and so it would be, too, when the last forest yields up its werewolf (yes, all right, technically they don’t exist, but we hope you know what we mean: it’d be a bad day for humanity when we stop telling stories).
We’ve piled on to elves and yetis and all the other supernatural aspects of ourselves; we’re happier to say that monsters are out there in the deep dark forest than locked in here with us. Yet we need them, in a way we find hard to articulate; the witch Granny Weatherwax tried to summarise it in Carpe Jugulum, when she said ‘We need vampires, if only to remind us what garlic is for’. G.K. Chesterton did rather better when, in an article defending fairy stories, he disputed the suggestion that stories tell children that there are monsters. Children already know there are monsters, he said. Fairy stories tell them that monsters can be killed.
We need our stories to understand the universe, and sometimes we forget that they’re only stories. There is a proverb about the finger and the moon; when a wise man points at the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, possibly out of a hope that this may be true, but the storytelling ape has a tendency to confuse moons and fingers.
When your god is an ineffable essence that exists outside of space and time, with unimaginable knowledge and indescribable powers, a god of boundless sky and high places, belief slips easily into the mind.
The Science of Discworld II Page 37