Celebrating Strangeness // Kris Bone
This month, Kris Bone guest edits on the theme "Truth Is Stranger than Fiction," challenging readers to push themselves out of their comfort zones and embrace strangeness."
“Truth is stranger than fiction” is an absolute hum-dinger, so far as boilerplate truisms go. Too often, the phrase is reduced to pablum, offered up as low-cal conversational filler when one has no particular interest in responding to events witnessed, recounted, or read about—a proclamation that clarifies nothing and provides no salient input. It’s a claim so broad that it’s essentially impossible to disagree with, and so hackneyed that it isn’t worth answering in turn with anything more than one-syllable affirmations (“sure;” “true”) or elegant grunts. And yet, in that irritating way that trite little aphorisms always seem to have of being far more potent at their core than we might like to admit, it’s worth chipping away at the husk of banality that has built up around the saying to get at its centre. While it may not be great dinner conversation material, the aphorism contains a potent reminder of one of life’s most beautiful and ridiculous truths: that over a long enough span of time and a wide enough field of observation, the universe presents us with endless possibilities—and that, contained somewhere within the wide berth of those possibilities, there will always be things that will surprise us, for better or for worse. And more than just that: if one really sits with the phrase, “truth is stranger than fiction,” one may eventually find themselves considering the nature of strangeness in life itself. Which, as a writer, is a somewhat dangerous thing to do.
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Consider the following. Last year, a hound dog in Elkmont, Alabama, snuck out of her owner’s garden and joined a half-marathon that began in front of the property. Despite multiple investigatory forays that sent her sniffing into yards along the race route, the dog placed seventh. In 1975, a British man named Alex Mitchell was so delighted by an episode of the television program The Goodies that he laughed for 25 uninterrupted minutes and then promptly died of heart failure on his sofa. His widow sent the show a letter, thanking them for having made her late husband’s final moments so pleasant. In San Francisco, there is an as-yet unapprehended serial killer known only as “The Doodler.”
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At the next table over, a man in the cafe near my apartment has just described a book he’s reading as “a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction book” (which he seems to be insisting is a genre). This strikes me as a beautifully appropriate coincidence, given what I’m reflecting on this afternoon. It’s neither easy nor particularly helpful to attempt to draw borders around the dark northern lands of strangeness. What qualifies as “strange” is more a matter of what pushes us out of our own comfort zones, I figure. Sometimes that means behaviour that doesn’t conform to the norm; sometimes it means events or experiences that force us to reconsider what we thought possible; sometimes it’s just that feeling of unease or uncertainty when we find ourselves on the receiving end of a coincidence that seems like it should have been impossible. Strangeness is funny (sometimes), disconcerting (sometimes), and fascinating (sometimes). The beauty of strangeness is that it can always be found just on the other side of the fence that pens in whatever we consider “normal”—and that, no matter how many times we knock down and rebuild that fence further out, there’s always more strangeness stalking in the darkness beyond. As a writer, I relish life’s stranger moments, and here’s why: while I work very hard to come up with events in my stories that are memorable and original, there’s always an unspoken balance beam to walk in work like mine—how does one maintain harmony between believability and originality? In other words, what are my readers willing to accept? Life doesn’t have that issue. When something strange happens in real life, all rules go out the window. It happened, full stop—so instead of wondering if people will believe that my fictional circumstances are realistic, I start to wonder if I’ve been wrong about what “realistic” has meant all along.
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Consider the following. Though he might be best known for the melting clocks of his painting The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali’s most ubiquitous work, in terms of sheer recognizability, is probably the bright red-and-yellow logo for Chupa Chups lollipops. The average cumulus cloud that you see floating gracefully past across the sky? It weighs over a million pounds. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a popular candy designed to serve as an appetite suppressant for people trying to lose weight. By the late ’80s, however, sales of the product had dropped more than 50 percent and it was subsequently discontinued. This is largely credited to the product’s unfortunate name: by sheer, inauspicious coincidence, the candy was called “Ayds.”
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It seems to me that we too often treat moments of strangeness as uncomfortable or uninvited, rather than as an opportunity to cross the arbitrary borders of our comfort zones and learn more about the world and our place in it—and to adjust our outlooks accordingly. With that in mind, for this month on the Town Crier blog, I’ve invited several different writers from across the country to reflect on strangeness in whatever form they see fit, whether that’s strange human behaviour, the strange experiences that have shaped (or re-shaped) them, or highlighting the kinds of strangeness that often go unnoticed in our day-to-day lives. This week, Richard Kemick reflects on empathy and our relationship to the objects in our lives; next week, Walt Palmer takes a look at the nature of strangeness itself, while Napatsi Folger forges a path into strange emotional territory; and the rest of the month will see pieces from writers such as poet Rebecca Salazar, creative non-fiction writer Ashish Seth, and horror novelist Brendan Vidito, among many others. The world is a much larger, more complicated, and stranger place than most of us ever appreciate—so, this month, let’s push ourselves out of our comfort zones a little and celebrate that fact. Consider the following: in an era in which we are obsessed with documenting and knowing all we can—by some estimates, we create as much new information every 48 hours as we did between the dawn of humankind and 2003—we are still discovering brand-new things about this world we inhabit every single day. With that much room to clamber over the fences of hum-drum normalcy in our lives and run into the opaque lands beyond, maybe we’ll never reach a place of total certainty—and maybe, just maybe, that’s a wonderful thing.
Kristopher Bone is a writer, reviewer, and humorist in Toronto. He is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program and can drink his own bodyweight in coffee. His writing has previously been published by Broken Pencil, OxMag, and The Puritan.
