Fiction cannot be everything
Lunar notes: We can wear many things, but we can’t wear just anything.
New Moon in Leo
Stone of Three Lights: Sun, Moon and Star (19th century), Keisai Eisen.
Pay equal attention to what someone says and what they do. The gap between the two is where their greatest fictions reside, such as their aspirations, their psychic struggles, and their delusions. All of us have fictions. Learning how to live is also about learning how to tell liveable stories of ourselves. An inhabitable narrative does wonders for a life.
& a life does not need to have meaning or legibility, only a sense of direction or purpose. Pay attention to what you say, and pay attention to what you do. It’s up to you what the gap can do for you.
A good piece of fiction is either real, or honest, or truthful. Only one of these things. The gap it leaves is room for the reader, viewer, etc. If it tries to be all these things, fiction turns into a report, or lecture, or document. Fiction cannot be everything.
That’s why a person dependent on fiction to live is often ultimately dissatisfied. We mistake fiction for possibility, when it is desire. It has a path along which it travels towards what it’s hungry for. To be dependent on fiction is to rely on its indefatigable hunger as your engine — to subsume your desire within its desire. Unless the fiction is a close enough match, your desire will often become muddied and hard to distinguish.
We can practice reading our fictions with the mind of an observer and the generosity of a benevolent god. On one hand, to identify their drives and patterns. On the other, to accept these fictions as sincere marks and features of a life like any other life. And then: to try out other narratives, and to choose the ones which suit us best.
A narrative is like a uniform. We can wear many things, but we can’t wear just anything.
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past lunar notes:
