The Pnictogen Wing

I feel like maybe I have at least one more Cohost post in me about A Wind in the Door, a book that's genuinely haunted us all these decades—there are many other books and movies and other things that haunt us still, probably thousands of things. both Frisk and I consumed gigantic quantities of media; in their own experience of life in Hometown, no doubt Kris also watched tons of movies and TV and read lots of novels and comic books and other things.

it is only natural. all three of us, all three of the Pnictogen Wing's KFC Gang as they've been called—Kris, Frisk, Chara—have known abuse and misery in childhood, and we took refuge where we could. usually that meant fiction. and we don't want to lose the memories of having consumed so much fiction, because we feel we owe so much of our lives to what we learned from fiction. yes, it's fiction, but it's still educational.

hence we've wanted to remember all the fiction we've ever encountered, especially the stuff that gave us trouble—the stuff that left us feeling unhappy and dissatisfied, and A Wind in the Door is just such a story. why does it not quite work?

perhaps it's simply because it dares to portray something that seems almost impossible for the mainstream American mind to grapple with, and that's forces of unbridled destruction. the United States and its culture are immensely destructive and love using destruction and threats of destruction to manipulate people, and I daresay that this is possible because conventional American culture has simply feared dealing with cosmic forces of destruction. there is a kind of joy to be had from artful destruction that the American mind has been taught to reject as simply insane or diabolical.

I've struggled with this myself. I've perceived for a long long time that I have a peculiar gift for destruction; I can utter words that crush spirits. it would seem that I crushed my RL parents' spirits. they hated how I turned out and yet I succeeded in persuading them, as it turns out, that it was their fault. the result was an unhappy mutual destruction and an uneasy armistice. it was a Pyrrhic peace, you could say...

anyway...I've felt guilty about destroying my family. and about a lot of other things. I've felt guilty about abandoning books without fully understanding them. I'm not done with A Wind in the Door because, merely by writing these words, I find that I remember more about it—I remember more about just how strongly I felt about that book. we continued to believe in dragons because of A Wind in the Door.

~Chara of Pnictogen

finished A Wind in the Door. it feels like L'Engle was trying to write her own Perelandra and not quite hitting her mark (though perhaps Perelandra is also faulty).

it wants to be a fable about choosing to belong to something greater than oneself, accepting one's part in a divine harmony, or being tempted into selfishness and disharmony. I don't quite buy it but I am having difficulty articulating why. maybe it's because the society of the farandolae seems completely arbitrary: it's fantasy biology, like "midichlorians", and thus the farandolae only have such traits as are needed for L'Engle to make her heavy-handed moral point with them. it's difficult to feel any emotional investment in Sporos and their temptation, because Sporos barely makes sense as a character. they're like a generic sinner in a Christian mystery play, there to be tempted by generic devils.

Proginoskes was cool, though. when reading this in middle school, I really wanted to believe (like Meg) that they were still alive, somewhere.

~Chara

a while back I wrote a post or two about starting to read Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wind in the Door, the immediate sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. both books had some importance for us in youthful years, although Wrinkle was the one that really made an impression. I recall reading A Wind in the Door in middle school (got it out of the school library in fact) and liking bits of it while mostly thinking it was a frustrating read and, in some vague way, not what we wanted out of a Wrinkle in Time sequel.

more than three decades later, I'm finding that A Wind in the Door at least makes a lot more sense. we're far better equipped to handle freaky metaphysical material. and I feel like L'Engle at least has some sort of grip on a fascinating idea: what if a force of destruction, an enemy to living things, could somehow interfere with the endosymbiotic relationship that binds human beings to their mitochondria? L'Engle is aware of the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria; she knows that mitochondria were once independent organisms with their own lives. Wind in the Door postulates that a supernatural entity could somehow interfere with this endosymbiotic relationship and persuade a human being's mitochondria to fuck off and do their own thing—which, of course, they can't do without killing both themselves and their host. It's an outlandish premise but I don't hate it. Once you accept the premise that people's lives and even their biochemistry might be the battle-ground between forces of Creation vs. Destruction, of Harmony vs. Chaos—and that's a premise I'm willing to accept for at least as long as it takes to read a novel—then A Wind in the Door doesn't seem that farfetched to me.

the difficulty I'm having is that she sees fit to populate the interior of mitochondria with a quite fictional landscape of submicroscopic "farandolae" with a complex life-cycle, and maybe this sort of thing would work better in a story that was more explicitly fantastical, but L'Engle also tries to imply that "farandolae" are entities that can be detected by sufficiently refined physical science. L'Engle's trying to have it both ways: she wants a metaphysical battle in a fabulous landscape of mythical creatures, but she also wants to dangle the possibility that this metaphysical battle could somehow be proved to exist, if scientists looked hard enough for it. I don't think it quite works, and thus the story has a discordant quality about it. I'm uncomfortably reminded of how right-wing Christians have looked for "objective" evidence of sin and devils and such things in psychology and criminology.

anyway we're not even a third of the way in, and we're bogged down.

~Chara

the awful, terrible thing about A Wind in the Door is that it doesn't suck. it's genuine, I don't think its metaphysics are rubbish, and occasionally it soars through passages of great power. and you can see L'Engle struggling to improve on "A Wrinkle in Time", to give more substance and complexity to Meg's moral conflicts. some of it works, anyway.

maybe it's just that the time for this sort of thing has passed. we've practically been trodden to death under the feet of great heavy abstractions like Good and Evil, Creation and Destruction, and cosmic fates hanging in the balance—threatened by single persons, single actions, single decisions. we've been beaten over the heads with cruxes, and I've done some of it myself. why? because our popular media is saturated with this stuff, and I ate it up.

Charles Wallace's mitochondria are tied up with the fate of the whole Universe; he's not just sick or even dying, he's earned the special attention of the cosmic forces of destruction, as if Aŋra Mainiiu decided to grease Charles Wallace personally. L'Engle makes it scary and anguished, but...well, we're not that far off from "gender transition challenges the very throne of God" territory. Western entertainment hasn't done itself many favors with its habit of amping up every crisis into yet another reënactment of the battle between Good and Evil, between blissful salvation and total annihilation.

I like the angel so much, though.

~Chara