Writing: Fragmenting Reality

We all tell stories to make sense of our reality, of ourselves. Fiction can be more truthful than non-fiction. Nietzsche wrote we cannot live without illusions and in The Big Chill Jeff Goldblum said something about people being incapable of living without illusions. I say we are lost when we begin believing our lies about ourselves.

 

But if we tell ourselves stories in order to live, we use them also to frame our disappointment in the world. Why is life so hard? Because of the petty caprices of the gods. Because Zeus was angry that humans discovered fire, so he had the gods create Pandora, a lovely but treacherous female who unleashed unceasing trouble on the world. Or perhaps because of the five successive ages of humans Zeus created, we—from Hesiod to Didion and back again—are the worst of all: the world is cruel and violent and is going end in an utter collapse of moral values.

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At the writing of “The White Album,” Didion was facing the dissolution of mythic settler narratives of the old, rural California in the face of emerging and fragmented trajectories and identities, which themselves were not any more grounded in justice or fairness. As Michiko Kakutani writes, the narratives Didion is interested in provide order, but they also reveal how illusory and fragmented that order really is. It is, in the end, just a story, and we must all make sense of our works and days, with the help of—or in spite of—the stories stuffed in our heads, even as we doubt the premises of all the stories we had ever told ourselves.

From Didion to Hesiod: The Center Will Not Hold

So, need we question our own stories? I see possibilities there.

sch 4/28/22