Director's Notes: 229 - The Accused

A writing exercise I use a lot for myself is to describe something common in a way that is completely absurd, or obtuse. The rules are 1) that you can’t call it what it is, and 2) that you must not lie. There’s no real right way to do this exercise, but I try to do it in a way that makes it like an easy/medium difficulty puzzle for the reader/listener. At the start of the description, I want the audience to not know what it is at all, but before the end, I want them to fully know what I’m talking about. That way they can appreciate a different way of comprehending the quotidian object.

I’ll try that exercise right now, because it will feel like a productive way of procrastinating on my other writing work. See if you get what I’m talking about before the end. (Hopefully you do, otherwise, I will have done it wrong):

It’s like cake, that sand. Cake is lumpy ooze, but when you put it in the oven, it becomes a fluffy solid. It becomes a beautiful brick or disc that you can put into your mouth. And sand when you put it through intense heat it becomes a beautiful object you can put onto your car doors where it electronically slides up and down at the touch of a button. I have burnt sand cut into little discs that I rest upon my nose, and because of the sand, once opaque and brown, the world comes into focus for me. In the mornings I drink my coffee from a cup made of sand and I stare at a square of my wall that is also made of sand, through which I can see the sky and the trees and the birds.

You get the picture, I hope.

Anyway, this exercise is something that came out of writing Night Vale over the past 12 years. Night Vale is absurd and obtuse, and often Cecil will describe normal things in convoluted prose. That’s part of the fun, and part of the vibe of the town.

So, with the arrival of Dr. Janet Lubelle, we have an antagonistic force that wants to use semantics as a weapon, to realign how the town understands itself into normal language. Dr. Lubelle is trying to make Night Vale fit a Grand Narrative of How the World Should Work. It’s heightened drama because it’s weird fiction, yet it’s what most of us do in our everyday lives. Astrology’s not real. There are only two genders. Alcohol is legal, yet LSD is not. The Star-Spangled Banner is sacred.

Human brains do not like incomprehension. We need an explanation for what that creepy sound is late at night. We need to know what kind of bird that is in the garden. We need to finish this fucking crossword puzzle. But there’s a line we cross between understanding and correcting.

Existing Grand Narratives pervade our daily thoughts, and it’s hard to know when to say “oh now I get it” and when to actually affect change. Once we understood why global temperatures were rising, some chose to correct our absurd environmental practices, while others chose the sematic battle instead. Let’s just re-read these charts, change this language, etc, and we’ll see that everything is fine.

Still others get confused about gender fluidity or transgender people or non-gendered people. And rather that say “oh now I get it,” they took action against the thing itself.

Semantics and obtuse concepts aside, it all comes down to your moral compass. If you let the Grand Narratives guide your sense of right from wrong, I believe you’ll end up like Dr. Lubelle, destroying the world that doesn’t conform to your explanations. But if you can decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong, then it doesn’t really matter if you call it a glass window or a square of sand. There are more important issues at hand.

-Jeffrey Cranor
June 1, 2023