Episode 55 - Momentum

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  The show must go on, as they say. Whoever “they” are. And in any event, that expression has practically lost all meaning across time and space. Or so I think, anyway. I can’t really say I have much expertise on the subject. I’ve just heard that expression before. Maybe too much and maybe in the wrong contexts. But do I really know? It just always seems like that expression is meant to justify ignoring the need for a stop. Someone might be hurt or dying. Some pivotal piece  of the ensemble might be down for the count but no one is ready to acknowledge how important that singular person is. To do so would fly in the face of that great maxim: Everyone is replaceable. For that to be true, the figurative show has to be able to continue on without a piece or two. Maybe even several. The whole has to be so great that these small omissions cannot be real breaks. And so, no matter what, the show must go on or else the lie will be revealed. 

And even though it would be better for them to admit the truth and stop the show, the various players, cast and crew still able to see the show to its conclusion, try to do just that. They do their best to keep going even if there was something to be said about stopping, for their own sake. The larger picture–the venue, its owners, and the general concept of an audience–might be disappointed, but the integrity of the larger structure or of human dignity itself could remain intact. So it would be worth it, in all likelihood. It would be worth it because that dignity would be protected, that thing which is at the core of all of us would be safe, but that’s a hard thing to see. It’s hard to see that part of the picture. Or, rather, it’s hard to fully believe in it. 

(Music ends and new music fades in)

So the show goes on anyway, ignoring the gaps in the formation, the missing lines or props that don’t make it to where they need to go. Everyone tries to push on, just to keep the status quo that someone told them to place their trust in. 

Then again, the world always moves on. It doesn’t care about loss or gaps or broken chains of thought or action. The world moves on without thought or feeling to what loss we might have endured or the heartaches we might carry. That disinterest is another layer to our pain, but I would suppose it’s somewhat inevitable. It’s the way things often go. It’s the way the world around us will always go. It’s the way things have to be, and we can adapt to its coldness or it can freeze us alive. It may still freeze us alive even if we do cooperate. But our willingness to fall in line is the only offering we can make to alleviate our suffering. 

So welcome to the podcast, I guess. My feelings aside, this show, whatever it is, must go on. To what end, we’ll have to see. 

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When I think about the stories I want to write or actively am writing, I find that momentum often lies at the heart of whatever I’m trying to do. Whether it’s the act of outlining or writing or editing, all of these things somehow link back to the notion of momentum. And it’s not just the momentum I have to keep as a creative to keep projects alive and in motion when I have so much I want to work on and do. 

Rather, there’s something to be said about the motion inherent to characters, usually and especially humans or humanoid type things who have a consciousness capable of understanding their circumstances and how they are good or could be improved. You can think of the pre-inciting action state as having a momentum that protects the status quo. Or what our characters know as the status quo. They don’t want things to change. They have no reason to seek change out. They are propelled along by their own contentment or by the forces around them otherwise unspecified. They are fine following that order of things. Maybe things could have been better, somehow. Maybe there is more to want, but no one–regardless of their position or story or anything like that–has everything they desire. We just find ourselves content in the level of desire we have or know. Things for us are not perfect. They might not even be good by the standards of other people, but we find that they are good enough for us. 

Or we’re just comforted by the movement by the push forward into something familiar and not something unknown. The consistency, as it were, the consistent push forward, this momentum that is leading us in a set and well-established direction with a specific destination in mind. It’s not the best thing. It might not be something we picked out ourselves, but there are certainly worse things. 

And as human beings, we aren’t inclined to like change, anyway. Or many of us don’t. There’s always a risk that comes with it. The familiar has proven it does not wish us harm or cannot do us direct harm. Or that it can be persuaded to not harm us if we check certain boxes and do what it wants. But the new or the novel, even if there is reason to think it will be better, doesn’t offer that guarantee. In fact, it might even threaten the opposite. 

So what is the inciting incident but the thing that forces us from that comfortable and familiar state, but the thing that disrupts that momentum. It’s jarring or it should be jarring. It should leave the main character unsettled in some way. And it often does. 

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But that little girl, Jade as I have come to call her, did not feel that way. She wasn’t afraid of this interruption. Rather, she embraced it. She went straight towards it, which was the real problem because that’s the moment when she wanders off alone, the thing she definitely should not have done. That is the point in which she puts herself in very real danger. The point that things all start to go wrong. The point in which you wish she would have turned back or done something different. 

After all, other kids might have. Then again other kids still might not. In this situation, it is hard to say what is normal or expected, but you certainly know which outcome you would have rather had. You certainly know which would have been better for Jade even if it wouldn’t have made for a good story or wouldn’t have created the conflict a story needs. You know what you wish Jade would have done, and sometimes, that’s all you can focus on. 

But Jade does leave the spot her caregiver placed her in, wherever her caregiver might have left her. Every episode, she does stand up. She pats down her dress of whatever color (it changed from episode to episode) and wandered off into the unknown. That, to her, seems fine. It seems like the sort of thing that she should do. It made sense for her to do it. And that should make you wonder why, right? What leads a child to just embrace the unknown so wholeheartedly when her sense of normalcy, the momentum that operated her life should have kept her situated?

I wish I could tell you, right? I wish I was setting up for that reveal, but that’s part of the memory that’s hazy. I don’t think we’re ever explicitly told what Jade’s home life was like. Yes, we could draw some conclusions, but those were entirely our own assumptions. 

Except they felt well founded. Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Or, at least, I won’t explain. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

Okay, I… I can say that I’ve always suspected, right, Jade was trying to escape something. It’s another type of momentum, some might say. It was one that was just contained. It was waiting for a chance to burst through the restraints. It was pushing out, somehow, waiting for the slightest shift that it could then use to free itself. 

And that’s where the inciting incident comes in. That’s the thing that breaks this new direction out, that nudges you and sends you on a new path, a better path, you want to believe. You had your doubts about where you were. You were looking for something else. Some part of you were ready and hoping for something else. You just couldn’t break free from the path you were on, from the momentum that was pushing you forward. You weren’t able or ready to move on your own. But something else made that possible. Something else took that step for you. You were weak. It was strong. And so it did what you could not do for yourself. It made that change and gave you that chance.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

If that sounds absurd, I apologize. I know that feeling. I know it all too well. I know it so well that I struggle to explain it. I struggle to explain what I take for granted as my normal, but I doubt that I’m the only one who knows that feeling.

It’s something every child is at risk of knowing. Or so I suspect. I probably shouldn’t be so bold when I talk about something like this. I shouldn’t be so presumptuous to think that you can–in any way–conceptualize the deeply unhappy childhood I had as normal by any stretch of the imagination. To me, that seems naive, but I might be wrong. I am probably wrong. Or you can hope I am wrong.

And I might be reading too much into these opening scenes as well. Maybe there isn’t some grand journey here. Maybe there isn’t some grand mystery for the viewer to read into. Maybe it’s just a poorly thought out premise with no real substance underneath. I suppose that’s possible. And given how hazy my memory is and how you–dear listener–have probably never heard of or seen this show, neither of us will ever truly know. So take or leave my theory at the door. 

However, I suspect that Jade might have been trying to escape something. 

But okay, I know how that sounds. A small child doesn’t understand the concept of an escape, you might want to say, but to that, I would argue that there is something instinctual about it. Fight or flight, the expression goes. And as a small child, only one of those options feels feasible. You’re too small to do much of anything that looks like fighting, after all. Especially when one considers just how big the world around you is. 

But maybe that still seems incomprehensible to you. A child needing to escape? Unless a situation is truly dire, that might not seem possible. And by “dire” you might be thinking fire or earthquake, something truly random and sudden. Your brain allows you to acknowledge that part. It is willing to accept that those things can and unfortunately do exist. There’s nothing we can do about that, though. It’s not human influenced or manufactured.

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But other situations, specifically abuse and neglect, those are human created, created by specifically people that we should be able to trust. Family, friends, parents. Parents, which I know would be considered part of “family” but also needs to have their own emphasis just because the stakes are so much higher when it’s our parents. When we’re born, we’re small and helpless, completely dependent on them for our survival. They bring us into the world, and in that act alone, there is some sort of unspoken promise, an assurance that they will look out for us, particularly when we are small and helpless. 

But they don’t always do that though, do they? And there’s something extra heinous about that failure. There’s something about it that cuts at our very core. It’s an attack on not just the way we understand the world to be but on the way we need the world to be. We need there to be some sort of safety net. We need to know that safety nets exist. We need to know that we were safe when we were helpless. 

Or that’s what we do when we’re adults, of course. This is the thinking we have. As adults, we can reject ideas and construct our own nests of lies and beliefs, telling ourselves that these are, in fact, the truths, simply so that we can nestle ourselves within. As adults, we have some control over our lives and ourselves. We have options. We have means of coping. But as a child? As a child, we had… nothing. No means of coping besides the tears that we may be unable to shed. So what else are we to do but run? 

But no, Jade didn’t look distressed as she wandered off. I suppose that’s one of the main weaknesses in this theory. Her face was relatively blank. There was no reason to think she was distressed. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

Or if there was, it’s not in the actual text, as it were, of the show. It’s not something you can pull from the art itself, from what you can see in front of you when the episode is playing. The reason I still think that, insofar as I have a reason, is entirely within me. It is something that I carry that fuels this theory of mine. Or many things I carry. The greatest of which is this need to find some sort of purpose or intention behind what Jade did, the harm she might have put herself in, or the intention behind taking this risk. I want there to be a purpose to it. 

Which is something we all want, right? We all want to have some sense of purpose behind what we do, some sort of meaning or direction to our lives or actions. And it’s not because we’re self-absorbed or want to find some reason or justification for exulting ourselves, lifting us up above all of our peers. It’s not that we are looking for the evidence to our superiority that we can then lorde over those around us. It’s that we need the assurances, the justification that we aren’t just acting aimlessly in a void we should have never been in. Purpose gives our lives and the lives around us structure. It assures us that we have a place in this world, even and especially when we might have our doubts.

And it also gives us momentum, you could say. You know that push forward that I mentioned earlier. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

Not that it’s always a great thing to have, of course. In my experience, it often isn’t. 

Okay, that’s… I don’t know what that is besides something I shouldn’t have said. We are supposed to want purpose. That’s the line, the line written in stone that I’ve agreed to say, that we’ve all agreed to say. We want some sense of purpose or direction by virtue of our nature. Especially for us creatives, right? As a creative person, I should have some sort of intention to what I make. I should have some destination in mind, some goal that I’m pushing towards. I have to have some sort of message that I’m just so desperate to give to the masses that I’m pouring myself out in my medium. And I am supposedly making something of value, right? The act of crafting my stories is meant to be some sort of service to the world.

Or that’s what I remember hearing throughout my life. That was the line I’ve been fed, the role I was cast into without my auditioning or much of a say on my part. That is the show I was thrown into. The one that must go on.

And some people would be grateful for it. Some people think I should be happy to have such a divine purpose or motivation pushing me along. But really? It’s a push forward that… Well… Um…

Okay imagine a car with an engine behind it. But not quite in the trunk. It’s more like another car strapped to the back of it. And that car is the one whose engine is running at full force, full blast. That second car, the one whose engine is running, is going at full speed. And you have wheels that aren’t locked in anyway. So you can, in theory, keep up. You can glide along as this push behind you moves you forward. The grip between you and this other car starts off securely, of course. The grip is sound. You are now intertwined together and one entity. You are moving forward with this second car. You are being pushed along. You are along for the ride.

And that’s all well and good for a while. Despite the high speeds and the danger it poses, you are doing fine for a while. For longer than some might expect. But when things slip, when things go wrong, it’s a nightmare, isn’t it? 

How dedicated do you want to be to the metaphor? How strong is the image in your mind’s eye? Can you imagine the slipping, and the front car losing its way because its direction never came from itself and now that it is adrift it is left with so much force and power that it never had control of, that it’s destined for a fiery end? How well versed are you with the consequences of such a thing?

(Music fades out)

The grip between the two cars was weaker than you expect in that metaphor. And that might be my fault. Maybe I didn’t go into as much detail as one might expect. Maybe I could have prepared you better for that. But it wasn’t something anyone thought about. It wasn’t seen as relevant. 

(New music fades in)

But relevant or not, certain facts remain. Once the grip the two cars slips, one the connection point is frayed or breaks whether by direct intervention or not, a crash will occur. The car being pushed along will not be able to handle itself. And it will meet its end. It will be a crash or some sort of tragedy otherwise unspecified. 

And if you cannot keep up with the force propelling you along, regardless of its motivations or whatever is fueling it, then you too will slip and veer off course or be outright run over, crushed beneath the wheel of what was behind you.

Forgive me for being blunt about it. Forgive me for inserting that image into your mind because I’m sure you didn’t want to think about how having a purpose to your life can go so poorly. But sometimes it can. Sometimes that purpose isn’t moving you along. Sometimes it’s threatening to crush you instead.

After all, having a purpose does not mean one will be successful with it. It doesn’t mean everything is going to work out. It doesn’t mean that you will manage to do that which is so important, that which some divine force or deity told you that you had to do. And even if it’s not divine, that doesn’t mean you have better odds at success. If there are odds. There might not be. There might be nothing you can do to guarantee you can accomplish whatever mission was thrust upon you. Maybe you were guaranteed to lose. And maybe if you chose it, your odds wouldn’t have been any better. But we don’t often get to choose whatever our purpose or grand mission in life is. It’s simply a push from behind, from some unseen force, from something that won’t be held accountable for the role it played in your life.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

Maybe Jade didn’t have a purpose in going on those adventures. Maybe she didn’t have a reason for stepping over that threshold and into this next phase of the story, into a slightly different medium or genre than the one she had been in. Maybe it wasn’t some grand escape attempt. Maybe she was just being a child without mission or duty. 

If so, I envy that about her. And maybe that was part of the reason why I loved that show so much. Maybe it was that type of escapism. But I don’t even know anymore. It’s been far too long for that.

(Music gradually fades out)

Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, produced, performed, and edited by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show, please leave a review, tell a friend, or post about it on some mysterious online forum. You do you.