truth and fiction

Writing is a technology. It's such an ancient one that it's easy to forget this, but of course there are not just individuals but whole societies on Earth today that are illiterate or preliterate ("oral cultures"), and of course there was a time before the first writing had been invented by anyone. The earliest writing seems to have been used, as far as is known, purely for record-keeping. The idea of writing as an art-form came much later, probably when poems came to be recorded for posterity.

In his book The Beginnings of Western Science, David Lindberg makes this fascinating observation:

We must ask how the preliterate patterns of belief that we have been examining yielded to, or were supplemented by, a new conception of knowledge and truth (represented most clearly in the principles of Aristotelian logic and the philosophical tradition it spawned). The decisive development seems to have been the invention of writing. The development of fully syllabic systems about 1500 BC (that is, systems in which all nonsyllabic signs were discarded) made it possible and, indeed, reasonably easy for people to write down everything they could say. And finally fully alphabetic writing, which has a sign for each sound, made its appearance in Greece about 800 BC and became widely disseminated in Greek culture in the sixth and fifth centuries.

Writing replaced memory as the principal repository of knowledge. This had the revolutionary effect of opening knowledge claims to the possibility of inspection, comparison, and criticism. Such comparison encourages skepticism and, in antiquity, helped to create the distinction between truth, on the one hand, and myth or legend, on the other; that distinction, in turn, called for the formulation of criteria by which truthfulness could be ascertained; and out of the effort to formulate suitable criteria emerged rules of reasoning, which offered a foundation for serious philosophical activity.

He's saying that the invention of writing was the key event that launched the system of knowledge that we now call science.

But what about writing as an art? Is it not also concerned, in some way, with "truth"? How does it relate?

Before writing as art there must have been speech as art: ritual, poetry, rhetoric. We write things down that we want to remember, or to communicate to someone else to whom we can't speak--such as to a posterity beyond our own time.

Over against Lindberg's assertion of the importance of writing as a step on the road to science--objective natural knowledge, consider this extract (compressed) from Campbell's Creative Mythology:

Bertrand Russell has summarized in one sentence his own idea of the aim of symbolization: "The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts." A more usual business of language, however, has been to motivate action. To assert or deny "fact" is about the last thing language has ever been used for. "Fiction," rather, would have been the honest term for this master of clarity to have used--for, as Nietzsche already knew, "whatever can be thought, cannot but be a fiction." And "Logic rests on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual world corresponds."

From that point of view, then, there is nothing but fiction: all of our "science" is really just a branch of fictional art.

Back in 1981, when I was struggling with the issues of my spiritual beliefs and also with my vocation as an artist, I wanted to write an essay on this topic. I sat down at the drawing-table that served as my main writing-desk and wrote the title: "Truth and Fiction". Under this I wrote a couple of sentences, but realized that I had no idea what I really knew or thought about this whole topic. I wanted to justify to myself the whole vocation of a fiction-maker, somebody who sits down and deliberately writes "false" things. I had no idea how to do so, and it caused me a lot of difficulty and pain.

I no longer feel such agitation about this topic, but I don't feel altogether comfortable with it either. I think Lindberg is right, and I also think Campbell is right.

The image that comes to mind now is one that comes to mind in many situations for me: of a documentary I saw once about the making of samurai swords. I've probably mentioned it before, but here goes again: the sword-makers would heat the steel, hammer it out, double it over, and temper it by plunging it in a water bath. Then they would heat it again, hammer it out, and anneal it by letting it air-cool slowly. Tempering makes steel hard; annealing makes it flexible. By repeating this alternating process, tempering and annealing the steel, the Japanese sword-makers created a steel composed of thousands of layers of alternately hard and flexible metal. In this way the samurai sword became that seemingly impossible combination: a weapon that was both hard and flexible.

Truth, in the sense of something that corresponds with fact, and fiction, in the sense of something that deviates from fact, somehow depend on each other. I remember watching an episode of Kung Fu starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, of which I was a passionate fan at age 14, in which some brutish American says something to Caine, and tells him, "That's the truth!" Caine, with his trained Chinese calm, responds, "Those are facts--they're not the truth."

It was the first time I'd been exposed to that distinction, and it has resonated within me ever since. Fiction seems to acknowledge and affirm the fantastic, projected, constructed aspect of experience, the dreamlikeness of it. "Truth" or fact seems to affirm the hard-edged, given quality of experience--the inescapable that-ness of it. They exist only in relation to each other, and the more you emphasize either one, the closer is the moment that it will transform into its opposite, just as in the ancient teaching of yin and yang.

writing for dollars, reading for love

Except for my inner emotional tusslings, yesterday went normally. It was sunny and cloudy, and I beavered away on my copywriting work, not really affected by my previous sleeplessness. Kimmie is suffering soreness on her right side, so we did a low-powered walk through the neighborhood rather than a full-on power-walk. Both fatigued, we were in bed before 8:30 p.m., while it was still light out and a neighbor was still using a power saw. I took half a Sleep Aid and slept through till 4:11, feeling much better.

But I'm feeling a bit bad that I'm not pushing my book forward these past few days, after my recovery of enthusiasm or direction last week; it feels as though I'm kind of flunking a quiz. "Ah--you feel motivated? Let's test that motivation..."

But my research reading seems to be telling me that I'm on the right track; I'm learning new things that I believe will make a difference to my story, to the way I see its world and my own world. There is simply no denying that my discovery of the world of my story, and my discovery of its characters, is a slow, slow process. They have not sprung up fully formed. They are more like figures emerging slowly from a fog, or images appearing on photographic paper while it's being developed. Developing a photograph is a chemical process that can't be rushed. If you use developer that's too strong, in a hurry to get the image, you ruin it--you lose the subtlety and full detail of the image. Such is my memory of it, anyway, when I developed film and prints in the darkroom at high school. The image is there on the paper, latent. You need to be patient and just minister to the process.

As I do my reading, I feel my viewpoint changing, evolving, developing. Gradually I'm acquiring expertise. As I read, I witness the diversity of views among the experts, and gain a sense of the range of possibilities, and my own freedom from reliance on any one borrowed point of view. This freedom gives me the power of creative choice. Robert McKee talks about this in connection with the writer's research: knowledge of your world, that is, the world of your story, gives you choices. These choices become the possibilities of your story; the more you know about the world, the more of these you have. Depth of familiarity equals creative freedom.

All stories demand a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader; we play the game of accepting the artifice of a story, the fact that it is not reality but an imaginary construct. But, having stepped through that magic doorway and suspended my disbelief, I want to believe. Within the imaginary world of the story I want to find credibility and consistency; I want to find truth. Whatever emotional and spiritual truths a story might offer will arise only among the hard granite and oak of its setting and the firm but yielding flesh of its characters. And the more fantastic the story, the more solid and real it needs to be.

On a labor of love, no amount of work is too much, of course. Is there such a thing as too much love?

the artist's wandering mind

I'm a distractable person. I'm not sure whether I'm more or less so than other people, but my attention seems to wander.

I venture to guess that most people would say I'm the opposite: I have good apparent powers of concentration. If I recall correctly, in graphoanalysis concentration shows in the smallness of one's handwriting; my handwriting--what little of that there is nowadays--is fairly small, and has definitely grown smaller over the decades of my adulthood.

So what do I mean. I do tend to have an active or hyperactive mind. In my meditation career I had to get used to the busyness of my mind. In general one does not seek to control mental busyness in meditation, since efforts to do so tend only to produce more thoughts, more mental churning. It's like telling someone to relax: it tends to make them more tense. In meditation, the main way to settle the busyness of one's mind is simply to meditate more. This is one of the major benefits of a longer, more intensive meditation program or retreat: one meditates much more than usual, and the mind gradually exhausts itself. You get bored with your thoughts and kind of give up. The present moment becomes much more interesting and stimulating, and you become more anchored in it. I think of a crystal paperweight: the mind becomes clear but also heavy, in the sense that it isn't easily pushed around or jostled away from where it is. It seems to sit down, just as your body sits down on a meditation cushion.

But if you don't have six or more hours a day to meditate, there are some tricks that can be used to tone down the hyperactivity of a restless mind in meditation. One such trick is to think about your own death and the deaths of your loved ones. These thoughts, if entertained seriously, tend to have a depressing effect on the mind, which is the same as saying that its busyness is dampened. When I was a monk at Gampo Abbey, even though there was a fair amount of meditation every day, I found there was not enough sustained meditation to really get my mind to sit down, so I found myself resorting to some of those tricks, with mixed results, I found.

While I could never prove it, I believe that I am more inclined than most people to "dial out" of reality and entertain myself with my own thoughts and fantasies. Indeed, this may be one reason that I am a creator: I have a vivid imagination, and I use it. Or rather, mostly I do not use it, in the sense of harnessing it to productive purpose; but rather I kind of hang out in it. I get bored with what's going on around me, and vanish into my own thoughts. I do this with an ease that I myself find sometimes distressing (because I like to think of myself as a well socialized person). It can also be irritating for others, since they sometimes--not all that often, to be sure--might ask for my agreement or opinion on something, and I have to admit, "Sorry--I wasn't listening."

As I say, I suspect I am more "tuned out" than most people. Most of the time it doesn't seem to make too much difference. Indeed, I'm alone much of each day, so I don't really need to be socialized too much better than Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away. (I don't have a volleyball to talk to, but there are some cushions, glassware, and in fact any inanimate object that can do in a pinch.) But I worry that my distracted state puts me at a disadvantage with regard to my writing projects. The very imagination that makes creative writing possible also pulls me away from the task at hand, and has me chasing other rainbows all the time. Indeed, as evidence I can point to a host of abandoned projects lying rusting at the side of the road of my life. I start things, then, in the slowness of my execution, lose interest in them and start something else. This is entertaining and stimulating for me, but fatal careerwise.

When I was in my early 20s, working as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital, before I ever took up meditation, and knew I had a reputation as a "thinker" because I often seemed to be absorbed in my own thoughts, I became interested in what I was thinking about. I recall sitting in a chair in the ultrasound department one evening, making a mental inventory of the kinds of things that occupied my mind. In truth, I found that "thinking", in the sense of working through problems and so forth, played a very small part. Mostly I was in reveries: memories or fantasies of one kind or another. Mainly I was just trying to enjoy my mind.

The artist's task is to leave off enjoying his own mind--at least for a little--and to get its products out there for other people to enjoy. Can I stay on track enough to achieve that?

more imagination

Yesterday I was talking about imagination, sparked by my reading volume 2 of William James's The Principles of Psychology. Here is some of the text (compressed) from the top of chapter 18:

Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone. No mental copy can arise in the mind, of any kind of sensation which has never been directly excited from without.

Fantasy, or imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called "reproductive" when the copies are literal; "productive" when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes.

So imagination, in the sense of creative imagination, is simply the calling up and combining of sensations from memory.

One of my first thoughts on reading this was to wonder about dreams. Dreams contain a tremendous amount of novelty. Last night (well, about 3:15 this morning) I dreamed (again) that I was aboard a bus, actually more like our SeaBus here in Vancouver--a pedestrian ferry that crosses Burrard Inlet. This bus, jammed with commuters in the dream, had the same rows of white plastic seats facing each other, but with the new feature of having a kind of oblong ring-aisle off the main long aisle of the bus. The bus-loop we were approaching was more like an airport in the size and vacancy of the tarmac. So while the sensory elements of the dream were familiar, in the sense of being made of familiar substances and based on familiar objects, the actual objects and their configurations were new. So the "originals" being combined were of elements smaller than the whole objects themselves.

A few nights ago I had a dream of being in a cavern with a rushing river. In the river I saw a monster: a sharklike beast maybe 15 feet long, but with three heads on flexible necks protruding in a triangular array from the front of its body (the heads all had long sharp teeth--a very frightening creature). Again, the elements that went to make up this beast were small parts of itself--the fins, the skin, the necks, each tooth--all put together into a new whole. All the rest of the dream-elements too were new images assembled from much smaller pieces to create a strong sense of novelty in the whole.

I accept James's assertion that any imagined object must have a sensory original; a person blind from birth cannot visualize, period, and has dreams that feature only the other senses. But I suppose I'm wondering where this tremendous, productive, recombinant power of imagination comes from--spontaneously in dreaming, and with some conscious direction in creative art--and what guides it and shapes it.

The author of our dreams rips up our sensory memories and reassembles them into collages that have their own integrity, novelty, and emotional power. The pixels of our sensations are reformed into personal stories that have feeling and significance--that have purpose. It's as though the dream-stuff (known as "subtle matter" in ancient Indian philosophy) is a cloth draped over an otherwise invisible form, revealing its shape. And this shape has a purpose; it is not random or arbitrary. How much effort would it cost me to "write" a dream? To come up with its setting, cast, and plot? Quite a lot. Whoever is writing my dreams is putting out that much effort, while making it seem effortless. It can't be to no purpose, any more than my own creative efforts are to no purpose.

From this point of view, then, imagination is a tool, a means to an end, a way of getting something done. It's a way of seeing the invisible, speaking the unspeakable. The purposes or structuring forces underlying the organization of imaginative elements would be, I think, what Joseph Campbell would call myth. Or the whole process of draping these purposive forces with imagined elements, and showing and sharing the results, is myth.

If this isn't exactly clear, you're in no worse a position than I am. This is me working through an idea, a blog-post that reads a bit like an entry in one of my Thinking documents. There's something fascinating here--and very important for us creative artists, as well as us dreamers.

imagination

Recently I started reading volume 2 of William James's The Principles of Psychology. The second chapter in this volume, chapter 18, is entitled "Imagination". I was struck, even astonished, by what I read in there.

Psychologists of the 19th century made wide-ranging, if relatively informal, surveys of people's ability to imagine visually--to visualize objects and scenes not present--and were astonished to discover a huge variety in people who outwardly showed no great difference in their ability to function normally in life. In particular, I was amazed to read the following, quoted from an 1880 work by the psychologist Galton:

Scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation. The highest minds are probably those in which it is not lost, but subordinated, and ready for use on suitable occasions. However, men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give lifelike descriptions of what they have seen, and can express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination.

Many of the scientists that Galton surveyed reported that they could not come up with any mental image at all even for very familiar objects, like their own dining-tables at breakfast-time! By contrast, Galton found:

The power of visualizing is higher in the female sex than in the male, and is somewhat, but not much, higher in public-school boys than in men. After maturity is reached, the further advance of age does not seem to dim the faculty, but rather the reverse; but advancing years are sometimes accompanied by a growing habit of hard abstract thinking, and in these cases the faculty becomes impaired. Language and book-learning certainly tend to dull it.

Galton also found that women in general were much more interested in introspection than men, and much better able to do it. Some men seemed barely to have considered the idea that it was possible to examine the inner content and tone of their own minds!

Of course, artists, novelists, and such were (usually) the exception, and had better powers of imagination than most other people.

All this got me wondering: where do I fit in in the world of imagination? I did some of the exercises, such as imagining things not present, and was relieved to find that I could indeed bring mental pictures to mind, although not nearly as vividly as some of Galton's subjects could. I fretted further, since I am a scientific type by nature (Miss Warden, my grade 1 teacher, wrote on one of my report cards that she was concerned that "Paul seems to lack imagination; he prefers facts to stories about imaginary things"), plus I have done a very large amount of book-learning in my life--notorious killer of the imaginative faculty. Could I visualize my own breakfast-table?

Whew, yes, I could. (I eat my morning granola at the coffee-table in the living-room, incidentally, a habit I somehow got into while wearing a cast for my ruptured Achilles tendon in 2002.) As I sit here now, and close my eyes, I can see the coffee-table before me, with its stack of books and the copy of The Economist that I tossed on it this morning on my way downstairs, and the soft burgundy leather furniture surrounding it, and the spruce-green walls...

The images are not very vivid, but they are there. When I was a child I had quite strong imaginative powers, and liked to spend time in my imagination. I used to deliberately "trip" into my imagination often, visualizing myself in stories. When I was a teenager I sometimes used to read novels in a deliberately imaginative way. When I came to any descriptive passage--and some writers were much better for this than others; one of my favorites was Mary Stewart--I would pause, close my eyes, and mentally build the sensuous environment evoked by the writer. I tried mentally to put myself into the scene, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling it. I found that this greatly heightened the enjoyment of reading. I didn't like reading just "to find out what happens"--I felt that was a waste, and I still do. For that reason I didn't like stories that were too suspenseful, and I still don't.

No doubt some would be astonished that someone like me, co-creator and -writer of a successful fantasy TV series, might have any doubts about his imaginative abilities--but there it is.

I should get back to some of that imaginative reading. I don't want to lose this faculty altogether, like the grumpy scientists who responded to Galton that they didn't know what he was talking about. And indeed it has always been my aim as a fiction-writer to create material that others can read in this imaginative way. In fact, that is one of my chief aims altogether.