I think a lot about reality and fiction and how it seems to make fiction all about mimicking reality that somehow we are depriving aspects of reality and aspects of ourselves from our own works, that unreality can somehow deepen an emotional piece of work, how layering the symbolic architecture in unrealistic ways can somehow build a deeper foundation of a work. I mean, we don’t really talk like we do in novels do we? All the um pause and er um and dead end speaking, conversations that loop…
misunderstandings, unhearing, not hearing, half listening, all the wrong words placed in the wrong sentences
And in someways I think that if we wrote like that, wrote like we really talked, then readers would question the reality of it. I think that we can’t actually show reality in a way, we can’t even show a mirror of it, or a dirty mirror of it, or even a sideways glance of it, or an almost seeing but not seeing of it. We can show somehow it’s symbolic reality, but that’s not reality, what we’re looking for is showing how our mind’s experience reality.
That’s what is important. Our brains create narratives out of everything anyway, it creates layers and tries to make sense of it all. It filters and distorts and changes, and sometimes only half sees the truth. We know this more and more, with video evidence, with photographic evidence, with audio evidence- that we’re not really seeing reality. So why is it important in fiction?
Reality is a confusing mess filled with shadows and things unseen and unspoken. Reality is far more fictional, and our experience of it far more fantastical. The qualia of our experiences is one that creates a world of constant wonder, a world far apart from reality itself. The ah ness of things, this mono no aware of our world, is like a spiritual film that coats everything. For those with eyes and ears and shadow steps, you can see how the world is haunted, how experiences layer ghosts of our lives over everything.
Nights and days and memory times all change, can’t be real, can’t be right. All times seem like the wrong times. And in the end, light or dark or day or night autumn or summer is all depending on the emotional state of that reality. How does our memory haunt this moment? How do our emotions paint this moment? Internal, external, it’s all about seeing spirits everywhere.