Escape Pod Dreams - 31
Created | Updated Dec 23, 2003
Fiction this, fiction that... The fabric of lies is tattering.
How can you tell the truth when you are writing fiction?
Some ding dong or other brought up the idiotic canard that fiction could tell truths about the human condition again the other night.
The contention was that non-fiction, history or biography and autobiography were so much more likely to contain half or untruths than the honest purity of soul-searching artistry on the scribbled page.
Horsepucky.
The world is full of heart-felt lies that will never find their way to a publisher, with the possible exception of the newspapers and magazines.
To say that art can be more truthful than life is to tell a lie in the first place.
Art comes from two places: ceremonies and tools.
The ceremonies were religious or military in nature. That covers almost everything one has to say about fertility, death, hunting, and war.
The tools were the everyday things that people used, something that their hands touched and their eyes gazed upon often.
Rather than be happy with just a plain this or that, the artisans and craftsmen who chipped the flint, threw the pots, weaved the baskets and sewed the clothing added a bit of themselves and their culture.
Daubing flat spots in landscape with colors and chipping statues and dolls out of various rocks was the beginning of the first monuments to life, death, fear and joy.
Writing fiction actually comes very late in the human experience.
It began with the myths.
It moved into the writing of glorified biographies of kings and queens.
Concommitantly, it became plays about religion and memorable events.
After awhile the plays and biographies were joined by fakes
('allegories' to you college prats)
which were designed to make a point or to parody the subjects in a way that the dense might miss but the intelligent could applaud.
Fiction for itself is relatively recent. Don Quixote and a Japanese court romance that I can't remember the name of stand as landmarks, though they be hundreds of years apart.
The true truth of the human condition lies in rumours.
The daily stuff of half-remembered things, jealous murmurings and outright exaggeration.
Therein lies the truth, in the soon-forgotten gossip of the not-quite-thinking who daily recreate their certainty that while they know what is really going on, there are those laughable creatures who do not who will never cease to keep trying to prove otherwise.
Like those damned clever author charlies who get paid for 'writing'.
Writing lies, is more like it.
Professional liars.
Thieves, that's what they is.
Unlike us hard-working folk who really know how the cat ate the cabbage.
We don't care why.
Let art be for the farties.
Let's go to the cinema. You can always trust that. Pictures don't lie.
