Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? An oft asked question, but the apparent assumption is surely wrong - that one might be true does not mean the other must be false. Why did I even ask the question?
Yep - I'm once again lost in the pages of an interesting book, one that began simply enough but soon began to reveal layers of interwoven complexity that had me questioning my own perceptions - not only of the words I was reading, but of memory, understanding, and my experiences with life and other people.
My encounter with The Menagerie of False Truths developed from a simple beginning that soon took on twists and turns that echo its contents. Awake before dawn, and not wanting to disturb a sleeping household, I often put earplugs in and turn on my tiny pocket radio. At 5 am on most Saturdays of the year, the ABC Sydney station, as well as the one on the Central Coast, broadcast a show called The Big Fish.
The name, and even the promotional material, imply a show that might largely be a one hour fishing report from various correspondents around New South Wales, when in fact it is a radio stage, across which parade a remarkable array of characters, who tell fascinating, informative, and (mostly) amusing stories about people, fish, nature, weather, and, sometimes, politics.
This particular morning I tuned in a bit late, and found myself listening to the host, Scott Levi, questioning a chap about some exotic location in which he had been fishing for trout. The speaker, eventually identified as Greg French, was articulate and erudite, and it became apparent that he had written a number of books. A casual angler myself, I had not previously encountered his work - audio or published - and made a mental note to check the catalogue of my local library to see if we held anything by him.
We did, though we are not yet in possession of his latest book - Water Colour - but held other items by him, including "Menagerie" It was a title strange enough to pique my curiosity, and I ordered it sent up from the branch at which it had been reposing.
It swirls, as the pages turn, from disturbing, to amusing, to tragic, and back to disturbing, all the while informing as well as questioning. French touches on - digs into - aspects of perception and mis-perception, understanding and mis-understanding, ability and its lack, art, life, arrogance, humility, love, anger, grief, and suffering.
Each new understanding, though, came with an awareness that there must have been much more that I had missed - a re-reading will be in order, along with diversions to investigate concepts and information previously unmet.
At the heart of this novel are the perceptions, understandings, and behaviour that arise from the differences of mind and thought that society refers to as Autism, or The Spectrum, and the effects that those differences send to ripple out through families and communities that surround such people. It can be too easy to forget that each of us has a particular way of perceiving and understanding the world around us, and that of course affects our responses to the world and the life in it, including other people - what we see and hear may well be quite different to what they see and hear and feel.
Like fingerprints, each world view has its own unique whorls and curls and patterns - fingerprints, like world views, are meant to help us get a grip on the world around us; each pattern, though unique, still does its job, though some do not fit their surroundings as well as others.
The world we live in is complex, from micro to macro, beyond our ability to fully understand - but understanding it is a journey worth taking. Surprises are guaranteed, but so is delight.
Showing posts with label diversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diversity. Show all posts
Monday, 3 September 2018
Sunday, 26 March 2017
Conflicting Stories
Conflicting Stories:
In Communal Writing, I told a story of the OON - how it brought people together, and how it served the needs of a small community that was often under pressure from outside.
Of course, that's just one story about the OON, and others might remember other versions, or at least, other facets of the life of the newspaper and The Valley. Was it always rosey and harmonious?
Of course not. The Valley as a whole, and its various interest groups, had enough conflict and diversity - personal, age, gender, political, cultural, ethnic, and religious - to keep a posse of professional mediators in full time work. In fact, most of the mediators were amateurs, and were often deeply enmeshed in the conflicts they were supposedly settling. Everyone had their own story to tell and to weave into the larger story of life in the Valley, as well as a story of where that community sat in the world at large.
It seemed, from my vantage point behind the bars and counter-tops of the two wateringholes in The Valley, that there were more stories than there were people to tell them, and even such a small community would have furnished more than enough material to keep a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky happily employed for a lifetime or two. Thurber would have recognised many of the characters there, too.
Often I would be privileged to witness the birth of a new story. Some evenings, such a story would grow from an acorn to an oak tree within a dozen retellings, gaining weight and breadth with each new influx of willing listeners, and I could detect no crack in the sincerity of the author's voice, no matter how different the latest edition was from the first.
I have, too, heard stories about incidents that I was myself present at - versions so opposite in their tone and content that it would be hard to reconcile either with my own memories. Each contained some truth about the original, but it was a truth that was filtered by, and made to fit, the story that the particular narrator lived within. For we, and all the characters we write about, live within a story of our devising - one that charts and explains the journey so far, and dictates the course we choose into the future. One man's hero can all too easily be another man's fool.
Was Prometheus, as Hesiod portrayed him, a liar and a thief who brought suffering down upon the heads of mankind? Or, were Shelley and Aeschylus correct in painting him as a hero and saviour who was unjustly punished by a jealous Zeus? Did Oliver Mellors save Constance, or she him? Or did they both drag each other into darkness? Was the felling of the Tower of Babel an act of righteousness, or fear? Is there ever a simple answer?
Is not every story, no matter how complex, still merely a version of a larger truth, trimmed and simplified to fit within our limited understanding of the infinite? How do we write stories to convey the truth that we think important? How much fact is lurking within every act of fiction? From my own experience, quite a bit.
Do I have to "stick to the facts"? Or change them so as to "protect the innocent"? I am struck by that meme that occasionaly surfaces on the internet - the one along the lines of "never upset a writer, lest he puts you in his next book, and kills you"
Why should I be nice to the people who have wronged me in the past? What awful demise can I devise for them - and could it become a best seller? That meme led to those thoughts, and onwards, page by page, along a road I had never thought to travel - crime writing. And what an interesting journey it is turning into - a few strokes of the pen have despatched an old foe to an ending I cannot yet reveal (you'll have to buy the book, when it comes out). A few pen-strokes more have revealed some of the motivated, and their motives, and the road promises to have some interesting curves, bends and crests, before the body is found and the truth surfaces.
And yet, truth is stranger than fiction, and the journey through a fictional crime will be more believable, and safer, than revealing all the truths I learned in that Valley.
In Communal Writing, I told a story of the OON - how it brought people together, and how it served the needs of a small community that was often under pressure from outside.
Of course, that's just one story about the OON, and others might remember other versions, or at least, other facets of the life of the newspaper and The Valley. Was it always rosey and harmonious?
Of course not. The Valley as a whole, and its various interest groups, had enough conflict and diversity - personal, age, gender, political, cultural, ethnic, and religious - to keep a posse of professional mediators in full time work. In fact, most of the mediators were amateurs, and were often deeply enmeshed in the conflicts they were supposedly settling. Everyone had their own story to tell and to weave into the larger story of life in the Valley, as well as a story of where that community sat in the world at large.
It seemed, from my vantage point behind the bars and counter-tops of the two wateringholes in The Valley, that there were more stories than there were people to tell them, and even such a small community would have furnished more than enough material to keep a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky happily employed for a lifetime or two. Thurber would have recognised many of the characters there, too.
Often I would be privileged to witness the birth of a new story. Some evenings, such a story would grow from an acorn to an oak tree within a dozen retellings, gaining weight and breadth with each new influx of willing listeners, and I could detect no crack in the sincerity of the author's voice, no matter how different the latest edition was from the first.
I have, too, heard stories about incidents that I was myself present at - versions so opposite in their tone and content that it would be hard to reconcile either with my own memories. Each contained some truth about the original, but it was a truth that was filtered by, and made to fit, the story that the particular narrator lived within. For we, and all the characters we write about, live within a story of our devising - one that charts and explains the journey so far, and dictates the course we choose into the future. One man's hero can all too easily be another man's fool.
Was Prometheus, as Hesiod portrayed him, a liar and a thief who brought suffering down upon the heads of mankind? Or, were Shelley and Aeschylus correct in painting him as a hero and saviour who was unjustly punished by a jealous Zeus? Did Oliver Mellors save Constance, or she him? Or did they both drag each other into darkness? Was the felling of the Tower of Babel an act of righteousness, or fear? Is there ever a simple answer?
Is not every story, no matter how complex, still merely a version of a larger truth, trimmed and simplified to fit within our limited understanding of the infinite? How do we write stories to convey the truth that we think important? How much fact is lurking within every act of fiction? From my own experience, quite a bit.
Do I have to "stick to the facts"? Or change them so as to "protect the innocent"? I am struck by that meme that occasionaly surfaces on the internet - the one along the lines of "never upset a writer, lest he puts you in his next book, and kills you"
Why should I be nice to the people who have wronged me in the past? What awful demise can I devise for them - and could it become a best seller? That meme led to those thoughts, and onwards, page by page, along a road I had never thought to travel - crime writing. And what an interesting journey it is turning into - a few strokes of the pen have despatched an old foe to an ending I cannot yet reveal (you'll have to buy the book, when it comes out). A few pen-strokes more have revealed some of the motivated, and their motives, and the road promises to have some interesting curves, bends and crests, before the body is found and the truth surfaces.
And yet, truth is stranger than fiction, and the journey through a fictional crime will be more believable, and safer, than revealing all the truths I learned in that Valley.
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