Thursday, May 22, 2003
Nothing and no one seems sincere. Nothing even seems artfully deceptive, anymore. The surface of things, once perfectly opaque, perfectly obsfucatory, threatens to become transparent, and I can do without that sort of truth, thank you very much. Reality has no use for me and I have even less use for it. I mean - that reality which so many people assume they share in common, devoid, as they are, of any genuinely objective means of determining that they are indeed experiencing a common reality. "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one," said Einstein. He also said:
The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
And Henri Ponicare, in Science and Reality, wrote:
All that is not thought is pure nothingness; since we can think only thoughts, and all the words we use to speak of things can express only thoughts, to say there is something other than thought is therefore an affirmation which can have no meaning. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam that is everything.
And Joseph Conrad wrote, "The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future." I'm especially encouraged by this last quote. I don't know why. It seems damnably hopeful. Almost optimistic. And I think I'm talking in circles again. I was talking about the transparency of reality, wasn't I? And I drifted slightly south and east of there. Which is probably for the best. Keep picking at that scab and it will never heal. But. Art, including fiction, including my fiction, is dependant upon illusion which, in theory, reflects truth. It's a marvelous paradox. By gazing at the lie, which is not really a lie, but only something that hasn't "happened," we are led to understand, or at least perceive, truth. The fiction is a vessel for truth and may, indeed, be said to be "true," even if it isn't factual. One should never confuse "truth" and "fact." All facts are fictions, standing in for truth until something better comes along. I'm drifting again.
I suspect I've contradicted myself any number of times by now.
The stories I write should be truth, as I understand it. But I must accept that a) that understanding is probably false and b) it posesses little, if any, validity beyond the assumption that we can possess truths in common, that there is some value to a consensual reality. By value I mean "reality," and the statement becomes circular. Like the stories that I write, which seem increasingly circular. An endless parade of closed universes, twin wormholes leading one into the other, hollow Oroboros, wheels within wheels within wheels. These are thoughts that I think late at night, and sitting here in broad daylight. A circular hallway that must have doors leading out, if there's to be any point in traveling the circuit, but all the walls seem black as midnight and smooth as obsidian.
"Where do you get your ideas?" Strike that. Reverse it.
"Where do they get me?"
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