We demiurges!
Kat Donohue’s blog entry from yesterday (http://blogs.salon.com/0001068/2002/09/17.html) got me to thinking. First I thought that the Chaney household must be quite dull if fiction is banned from there. Then I was struck by the self-immolation nature of removing oneself from the consumption of fiction. Let me explain.
Whatever one’s religious belief might be (or not be for that matter), I think that there is a very valid truth in the statement in Genesis that Man was created in God’s image. Once again, if anyone has a problem with the “God” concept, substitute it with nature, scientific law, or anything that in your opinion is responsible for the world around us. Done? Good, I shall proceed then. One way to view human history is to behold a continuous attempt to imitate the creative process that put us here to begin with. In the physical world we take the matter and energy we find and fashion it into artifacts whose nature emanates from our minds. We constantly strive for the creation of the self-moving, the reacting, even the thinking. The will to recreate the world around us into objects of our own desire is all around us.
Still, so far at least, our achievements, however formidable they may be (and they are), are dwarfed by the enormity, majesty and mystery of the physical world. The playing field is not quite leveled – we haven’t even quite figured out how the universe operates, so our creations are always based on a certain degree of ignorance.
All that changes radically when we turn our creative forces towards the creation of imaginary worlds. The How it got that way does not matter at all. All that matters is What it is. The creation of a world that works on its own terms (be it something quite absurd out of Kafka or totally realistic our of Tolstoy) gives the creator an unbelievable high. A successful work of fiction is an autonomous system with a will of its own in the sense that it interacts differently with different people who come in contact with it – the readers. To view all of fiction as escapist is to miss the mark completely. The experience of creating and consuming fiction brings us face to face with the very elemental forces that science is trying to unravel and technology is trying to utilize. That is the reason that good literature gives us “insights” about the world that surrounds us. By interacting intimately with a stylized, infinitely less complex world that was created by one of us, we acquire a model, a mental device that allows us to better apprehend the insurmountable complexity of the world in which we are living.
7:15:21 AM 
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