Good Intentions
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was because of incidents like these that the Snarling Scarlet Hippo Tearer was eventually hunted into extinction. . . .
[ill-marginalia]
You know, I didn’t originally intend the story to turn out that way—what is it, some sort of morality tale? I don’t know, but it certainly is more sad than funny. It was supposed to be a macabre chortler, like Poe’s “Loss of Breath” or “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” But it didn’t turn out that way. It’s much closer to a macabre tear-jerker than a macabre chortler. How upsetting.
[ill]
When I told my wife this, she was surprised. She thought all that stuff about stories telling themselves was, in so many words, phooey. But no. Stories really must tell themselves or they become stilted and false. And a false story is worthless. It’s a lie. (Even more so than fiction is normally. If that makes sense.)
It has oft been said the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and it might be true. So watch out for those good intentions.
For instance, I thought I would write one of my Bible as Lit papers in a particular style of verse that was popular in pre-Revolutionary America and which we were concurrently studying in AmLit. I got this far1:
Theric “Edward Taylor” Jepson
English 350
2000.01.20 ad
Writing #3
Meditation 53,0912
John 8. 56. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.
The Jews found time to talk with God’s Son Christ
And Christ told them the truth would make them free
But being sons of Abraham sufficed
Or so they said directly unto He
They said that they had never been in chains
But maybe they just never had had brains
So Christ went on explaining unto them
And hinting simple facts, (He was the Son!)
Although His Father might be fine for Him,
For then old Abraham is still the one.
Soon Christ would say My Father Honour I
A man who keeps my saying will not die
But they were versed in Moses’s account
And being learned they thought that they were wise
They thought they knew it well inside and out
And what they thought Christ meant, that they despised
For Abraham had been dead a long time
The prophets too! So thy word can’t be thine
“Whom makest then thyself?” they then did prod
He said it was not Him, but “my father...
honoureth me...of whom ye say...is...God:
Yet ye...[don’t know] him”—this was Christ’s answer
And then He taught them about Abraham
Their “father” whom they placed above I AM
Referring back to the days of long ago,
He said, Abram “rejoiced to see my day”
But they did not quite get it (they were slow)
(This is where I finally [mercifully] gave up. I should’ve given up when I was forced to use “I” as an object to get my rhyme. Or even before. In fact, I never should have started. This is so pathetic it’s painful. I’m so glad I gave up and found a better way (prose) to write about John 8 and Abraham. It says a lot about my potential as an editor.)
Well, it doesn’t take a Harvard3-educated literary critic to tell that what I wrote was crap. I have never, as you might imagine, felt much motivation to finish it. If you’ld like to, go ahead. But it would be an awful waste of your time.
Although this clever (albeit misguided) good intention didn’t end up failing me, heaven knows it could have. But perhaps the worst kind of good intention is the question that shouldn’t be asked. Maybe it’s a bit anarchic of me, but I believe that if you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.
Case in point:
For one of Brother Backman’s classes, we were required to read one thousand pages of relevant material. At the beginning of the semester, someone asked and Brother Backman said, yes, of course relevant material read for other classes will count towards your thousand pages. Good. That, of course, made it easier.
But then, at the end of the semester, someone asked me if I remembered if Brother Backman had said whether or not stuff read in other classes would count towards our thousand pages. I said yes, I remember very clearly, in fact, I have it written down in my notes—let’s take a looksee. She was unconvinced however, and what-if-what-if-what-iffed all over the room, from person to person, filling the class with a sudden and terrifyingly severe case of doubt. So she asked Brother Backman, and he said no way would that ever be allowed—hahaha, what a hilarious notion!
But-but-but—
Never ask a question you don’t want the answer to! Never give someone the opportunity to change their mind on something like that!
I’m still mad about it.
You know, it’s not like I was counting everything I’d read in other classes. I didn’t feel I could include Huck Finn or a bunch of other stuff only just barely, tangentially related to “American History and the Rise of Mormonism,” so I had still had to read quite a bit just for Brother Backman’s class, but now I was suddenly about three hundred pages short with less than a week to read. I was ticked. Not at Brother Backman, mind you. I consider it a student’s responsibility to remember when a teacher provides a coursework loophole, and their opportunity to exploit as able. Is that a bad attitude? Maybe if you think education is life and death. But to me, it’s a game. See, I’m an English Major. And English Majoring is a game.
I was taught a little maxim some long time ago: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” (I personally think there should be a “Sometimes” at the front, there, but the maxim-makers never think to consult me.) It’s true, you know. If you really are planning to do something anyway, why ask permission? Then if they say no and you do it anyway you’re in a thousand times more trouble than if you just do it and say, “Well, I didn’t know. No one ever said anything.”
That was my philosophy in climbing the JSA’s smokestack. At what point in its history St. Mary’s really required a smokestack is not clear to me, and I never entered the building it was part of. On the outside of the smokestack was a ladder made of bent rebar that reached from the ground to the sky. I had been wanting to climb it for a long time, before I finally dared. (I’m not the bravest person at the edge of cliffs, on canyon-crossing tightropes, when unexpectedly pushed out of airplanes, etc.) Climbing the smokestack took a bit of daring, but I finally did it.
Going up I looked straight ahead, into the bricks, and sang, ¯Heavenly Father, are you really there and do you hear and answer every child’s prayer,¯ over and over again. Finally I made it to the top and was able to take some great pictures. Oddly, once there, I was no longer afraid. I put one arm through a rung and swung my body about taking all sorts of Nauvoo pictures from my fancy new vantagepoint. Heading down was something else again. I shook like an advanced case of Parkinson’s. I don’t know how I held on. I was shaking like a 50s rock star all the way down. It’s a miracle I made it alive.4
But had I asked for permission before my climb, do you think they would have let me? I doubt it. And that would’ve been sad.
Of course, what I have been saying sounds very much like total disregard of authority. But I really don’t mean it that way. But it is very difficult to distinguish between not asking permission and disrespecting those in authority. For instance, what if Brother Dahl had known that the top ten feet of the smokestack had been ruined by the Evil Mortar Munching Mockingbirds, and to go there would mean a plummeting doom? That would have been good to know ahead of my climb, don’t you think? But on the other hand, asking the scientific establishment for all the rules would have prevented some past discoveries. If you believe that mice come from old rags and not from other mice, and you never question this belief, you’re never going to genetically engineer mice with human ears growing on their backs.
Okay, maybe that was a bad example. But the point is I’m not getting all disestablishmentarian on you here. I’m all for authority and one star brighter than another and priesthood and respecting our elders and not stepping on pigeons in the park and spelling gray with an e and a whole host of other, really respectful things. But if you want to read a thousand pages with the minimum of effort or gain the best view on campus, maybe you should just do it. There are plenty of folks happy to make new rules, should you ask, so just stick with obeying the existing rules, and never ask someone to make a new rule prohibiting your goal.
Don’t act on this advice unless you really, truly know what I’m getting at, please. I don’t want this to be one more step down my personal path paved in good intentions.
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Thanks for revisiting Nauvoo with me. I would love to hear your thoughts.