And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?


He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?


And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.


And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.


But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?


And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves…

Luke 10:25-30, Authorised Version

You know how the rest of it goes. If another human is near you and in trouble, you're supposed to help them. You aren't supposed to ask, what do I get out of it? You aren't supposed to say, but I don't like that kind of person. You aren't supposed to whine about 'socialism'. Oh, and 'God helps him who helps himself'? It's not in that book. Nope. Nowhere. I've read it a few times, and it's not in there.

I thought about all that this morning. Our neighbour Pete came over with a wheelbarrow containing a couple of bags of garden soil. Elektra's doing some gardening when I let her (because it was 30C this afternoon and this is very rare in Pennsylvania), but the soil in our garden needs a boost. She went over to George's hardware place for the stuff, early, because George is only open mornings. The bags were too big for her to take home in her shopping cart, so Pete volunteered to drop them off. Pete works over at George's on Friday mornings.

Pete is retired. So is Rosie, who works with George on Mondays. Pete's dad is even older than Pete, and he comes in on Wednesdays. Lukundo, who is the assistant pastor's wife and from Africa and much younger than the rest of us, helps out on Saturdays. That just leaves George alone two mornings a week.

George retired during the pandemic, but the community missed having his hardware shop on Main Street. Truth to tell, everybody missed George, probably more than the potting soil and light bulbs. George missed everybody else. But George is in his eighties. So the neighbours help out. It's a win/win.

I was thinking about this in relation to the way people treat each other these days. Do the people you know reach out helping hands to each other? Or do they judge other people by how good they are at 'putting one over' on others?

This week, three of our serial stories are ending. I hope you've been reading them – or, if you haven't, that you will. The rest of us will get to the end of our tales eventually: it might take us another month. I should reach some sort of stopping place about then, even if I have to tell all of Mesopotamia to shut up.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the stories, and I have a question for you readers. Critics often worry about whether the stories pass 'the Bechdel test', which is a test Ms Bechdel set up for judging the gender balance of a story. It asks whether the female characters are sufficiently self-motivated by noticing whether they have conversations with each other that do not involve the male characters. This is a good test. You might enjoy applying it to our stories.

Spoiler alert: my main character doesn't count. You may not have noticed this, but my main character is an angel. In my personal theology, that makes Ori non-binary. Ori talks to everybody, anyway. Also, female characters in the story have been talking about pretty much anything they want to, as well. I suppose the real test of my characters is whether they ever stop talking about music and/or mythology.

What I've been thinking about, though, is whether the characters in the stories pass the Milgram test. Stanley Milgram did an experiment to see if people, er, human people (so once again, Ori doesn't count), would deliberately inflict pain on other people if an authority figure told them to. Milgram originally thought he would show that stalwart New Englanders, raised in good, old-fashioned democracy, would refuse to do any such thing. Then he planned to go over to Berlin and see how the Germans did.

This was in the 1960s, when people were still pretending to think the Holocaust was an aberration.

The New Englanders let Stanley Milgram down, big-time. They followed orders at exactly the same rate as did the people in other countries that were tested. Two-thirds will do the wrong thing, says the Milgram test. So how do our characters fare? Maybe the fact that so many of them fail the test is a measure of the realism in our stories. And what are we to think about SashaQ's delightfully evil tale, Horror at HQ? Yes, it's a fantasy. But don't we recognise elements of human behaviour under the reptilian mask? Stuff that maybe goes beyond Milgram?

So: to pass or to fail. To be like the Akkadians, or Cecilia Morgenstern's unbelievable boss (nobody could really be like that, right, Tavaron?), or certain other parties in certain other tales, or…to be like Hooverville. I'd vote for Hooverville. A certain teacher advised a couple of thousand years ago that this was good for the soul.

PS: To be clear: we're talking about the characters, not their inventors. Being willing to inflict pain on your characters is not usually considered a flaw in a writer unless – and I cannot stress this too much – the damage inflicted is gratuitous and excessive. Readers, not writers, are the judges of that.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

12.06.23 Front Page

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