Buried Giants and Other Lost Things

I just finished reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. At the end I cried. I was immediately filled with an intense desire to hug my wife and tell her how much I loved her. Unfortunately, she happened to be 1,300 miles away at the time, so I settled for a text.

I was surprised to find myself so affected by the book. It’s about an old, frail couple traveling across early medieval England on the way to meet their son. Not exactly my normal cup of tea. I suppose I cried because Kazuo Ishiguro is a literary genius and wrote in such a way that I was deeply invested in the two main characters, and I cared about what happened to them. But there was something more.

I think the real reason The Buried Giant resonated with me is because I have a worthless long term memory. Yep. I can’t remember squat. Everything just fades to black after as little as a few days. Well, okay, not everything, but, when it comes to memory, I’m somewhere just shy of senile. And it just so happens that one of the major themes in The Buried Giant is loss of memory, so this hit close to home for me. It’s not just the old couple in the book that has lost important memories, either. There is this mysterious collective amnesia that’s afflicting the entire land through which the main characters travel.

"The Awakening" by Seward Johnson

The Buried Giant reminded me of one of my favorite children’s books. A picture book by Shuan Tan called The Lost Thing. In this book, the main character finds a strange creature that he befriends. He spends the whole book helping this creature to find the place where it belongs. At one point, after exhausting all his other options, he takes the creature to the sinister feeling “Federal Department of Odds and Ends” where they promise to “find a pigeon hole to stick it in.” While there, another mysterious creature warns him, “If you really care about that thing, you shouldn’t leave it here. This is a place for forgetting. Leaving behind.”

An illustration from The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan

These two books illustrate that we are living in a world afflicted with a kind of amnesia. This is, unfortunately, a place so often used for intentional forgetting. It made me wonder about the important things I’ve left behind, forgotten, lost. Things that would not only help me to be a better writer and artist, but that would also help me to live a fuller, happier, more interesting life.

Together, these books form a kind of yin and yang for things forgotten. The things hidden, and the things missing. The things we are running from, and the things we dropped or lost as we ran. The things we buried deep within us, and the things we misplaced or left behind. I don’t want to turn this into a psychology article, but we all have some of this going on in our minds, and I think we can learn a thing or two from these books that will help us in our creative endeavors.

In The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro warns us of the difficult experiences, painful memories, and unresolved issues we’ve tried to run from. The title itself references the buried memories we’ve hidden deep within ourselves. It almost sounds like an act of excavation is required to unearth these old skeletons. But that’s exactly what we need to do. If we don’t, they begin to fester within us inhibiting our creativity. This is the “cellar” I talked about in my blog post “Navigating the Labyrinth with Brian Kershisnik”. You know, the one where the monsters live.

The point is, these buried giants often prevent us from doing our best creative work. They make us feel that we aren’t talented enough, people will make fun of us, or our ideas are just silly. All the things that prevent us from reaching our full potential or make us fail before we even start.

So how do we excavate these giants? Well, a good place to start is by reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and follow her advice. She specializes in “unblocking” artists after “creative injury”. There’s not a person I know that hasn’t suffered a creative injury at some time or another in their life. These injuries often get buried within us and begin to poison our creativity. Julia Cameron’s book provides the tools to help us to heal. It’s a beautiful and powerful book that says it all far better than I can. Go check it out.

So what about the other missing things? The things that make uncomfortable holes deep in our chests once they are gone and leave us wondering what might fill them? How do we recover these lost things? Well, Shaun Tan’s book can help us with this. It was also made into an Oscar winning animated short film that you can watch below. (If it doesn't work, you can watch it on YouTube here.)

I have an eleven year old that is constantly losing things: shin guards, socks, jackets, you name it, he’s probably lost it at some point. Every time he loses something, he looks for it for about five seconds and then gives up, throws his hands in the air, and says, “I can’t find it!” My response is always the same. “Well, you’ll only find it if you look for it.”

Shaun Tan gives us this same simple, yet profound advice in The Lost Thing. The story begins with the protagonist out looking for “bottle tops” for his collection. If he hadn’t been out wandering around with his senses open and alert, he never would have found the “lost thing”. You have to be looking, noticing, trying to see the things you’ve missed. I’ve talked about the fine art of noticing before in a post called "Wondering at Weasels". It’s a talent we all once had as children before we lost our sense of wonder with the world. Somewhere along the way to adulthood, most of us misplace it and have to go looking for it again.

This is probably because, as Shaun Tan points out in his book, there’s something about growing older that makes us want to make everything fit into a category, stereotype, or classification. We want everything numbered and filed in its proper place in our head. In The Lost Thing, you notice that everything has a number (even the people), there are signs directing people where to go and how to get there, and there’s even the huge, ominous “Department of Odds and Ends” designed to sweep under the rug anything that doesn’t quite fit.

Image from the animated short film "The Lost Thing".
The TV and camera-headed sculpture says it all!

Admittedly, this desire to organize everything is a side effect of trying to make sense of a very complex world, but what is lost when we do this? The magic of the world, whimsy, the beautiful complexity of human beings, and so much more. Tan’s story teaches us that we need to embrace the “objects without names”, the “troublesome artifacts of unknown origin”, and the “things that just don’t belong”. By giving up our desire to pigeon hole and simplify, our creative work will become more enlightened, rich with texture and depth, and sparkling with originality.

For example, think of the flat, stereotyped characters so often found in Hollywood movies. The action hero with the bulging muscles and chiseled jaw who is always rescuing the beautiful damsel in distress (who by some miracle never seems to have a hair out of place despite the fact that she just survived a high speed chase on the back of a motorcycle). These characters are nothing more than walking clichés and they are the result of the lazy thinking of people who want everything to fit into a specific category, numbered and filed.

In contrast, think of the achingly real characters in books like To Kill a Mocking Bird, Of Mice and Men, or even Harry Potter. These are the characters that feel so real I wouldn’t be at all shocked to see them walking down the street or sitting on the couch in my living room. They were written by authors who were unwilling to number and file the world away. We have to find the lost thing if we want be able to write this way.

"Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange

Photo: Vogue Magazine

Consider the two iconic photos above. The one on the top is by famed Depression era photographer Dorothea Lange and the one on the bottom is from Vogue Magazine. Both are undoubtedly masterful photos in their own right, but while the Vogue photo merely seduces the eye with its surface beauty, the Lange photo invites us to feel the profound struggle of a migrant mother during the Great Depression. It, too, is beautiful, but its beauty comes from its depth, texture, and reality, not the illusion created by the perfect makeup, hair, and pose.

So what exactly is “the lost thing” we need to help us write like Steinbeck and take photos like Lange? I would argue it’s our childlike fascination with the world that keeps us alert, interested, present, and noticing. It’s the ability to see through the innocent and fresh eyes of a child and perceive the magic, uniqueness, and complexity of the world without trying to categorize, classify, and pigeonhole. It is, quite frankly, the ability to better grasp and understand reality. It’s funny to think that we intentionally lose this ability as we “mature”.

These two seemingly very different books, both teach us about the impact of things forgotten and how important it is to rediscover them. Taken together, these books show us that as we strive find what was lost, we will necessarily uncover what was buried. Likewise, as we struggle to excavate the buried giants within us, we will find many of the things we’ve lost along the way to adulthood. If we can recover these memories, if we can remember how we once were as children, we will not only become better writers and artists, but better human beings.