Writing and belief: a stray realisation

[la_marquise]

I've just realised that a key theme in my writing -- apart from water, which literally gets everywhere -- is rationalists and non-believers discovering that the irrational and the weird are real and can affect them.
I have no idea why. I'm not particularly religious/spiritual in the formal sense (though I may be superstitious and I do talk to saints and trees on occasion. Also to the late and loved Caspian cat). I wasn't brought up with any kind of faith. But it's there in Living with Ghosts, particularly through the characters of Thiercelin and Joyain. It's in quite a few of my short stories ('The Whale's Daughter, certainly; 'Coldrush'; 'Clocks'; to some extent in 'Seabourne') and in the various sections of the ongoing, unfinished Gaheris saga.
What's this about? Should I be worried? Is this a sign of Dangerous Fluffiness or WooWoo, a weake girly non-science-yness? Or is it an artefact of a background in, amongst the history, social anthropology, which leads me always to look at the stories cultures tell about themselves, their origins and their environment. I tend to find fantasy novels which either lack reference to beliefs of any kind, or import default cardboard ones, very unsatisfactory. (And somewhere someone must have written a story about J******h's W******s in their mission starship, banging on the doors of new colony worlds.) I tend to be much more convinced by books where the author has clearly thought through how and what peoples believe -- Violette Malan's The Sleeping God, glass_mountain's Children of the Shaman, freda_writes's Dark Cathedral, to list a few. It's about world-building and depth and texture.
And yet, none of that explains this writing tic I seem to have, this 'more things in heaven and earth' -ishness that I seem to be returning to, over and over.

Comments

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

In fiction, if there is magic or other woo-woo, then I take it as part of the fictional universe, which is not my own. That's...all there is to it, really. I think this theme is just your preferred way (since you write fantasy) of illustrating the classic theme in fiction of people finding out that their world is bigger than they thought it was. I cannot quite see Thiercelin as Huck Finn, but it's much the same sort of thing.

In real life, if a phenomenon is sharing the universe with me, perceptible to my (non-malfunctioning) senses, then I'd take it as being as much part of the natural world as I am. Or to put it in non-rational terms: an entity perceptible to me is an entity on the same wheel as I am. The appearance of an unexplainable phenomenon would not "prove" that whatever religion is an accurate representation of the universe or that there is such a thing as the "supernatural". It would just show that something exists. And if something exists, then why is it not as natural as anything else?

As a side issue, I've noticed that the English-language debate about faith (a term of art in itself) and rationality is perhaps inevitably usually conducted entirely within the rigid mental paradigms imposed by monocultural monotheism. I won't bang on about this, but will merely point it out and remark that as usual, it's not that binary.

Also, I am that I am and require no justification for my existence.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yes: we are horribly mired in our history when it comes to faith and I find that unbalancing sometimes. That may be another thing that's getting into my writing. Thank you.