Reality

Here's the thing. No-one wants to be me. Which is ok for this week, because I am me until Friday, but after that I become Lori and we need someone else to be me.

I read that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is 80. Hasn't everyone had a love affair with Marquez? Didn't you voraciously read everything he had written after the first page of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'? I know I did. The other day I heard or read some writer's work being described as 'North America's version of magic realism'. I'm sure this was an allusion to GGM, and yet, he didn't actually invent magic realism for pity's sake. The mediaeval Arthurian Cycle was full of it. And I love magic realism because it's how I think life really is, just below the apparent layer.

Last night, someone was talking about Carlos Castaneda. Another writer, another love affair. A man who wrote about a hidden reality, a 'separate reality' that he reached by taking mind altering drugs. And then last night someone said that Castaneda had confessed that he had made it all up. I joked that I didn't want to know, and it does make a difference to know that even he didn't believe in what he said he believed in, but it doesn't alter what I learned from his books, and the alternative reality that reading them gave me at the time.

I'm taking the liberty of quoting from my friend Raymond's blog.

"I was just reading about the value of "life lies." It was referring to an Ibsen play I think I studied but didn't remember. Anyway, it was about the value of believing something that pulls you through life, regardless of what reality might be."

Raymond gives the example of religion and I can see that. He also goes on to say how reality in any case, is emergent. We have changed our views on the nature of reality. And by 'we' here, I'm not using the royal 'we' I mean in the sphere of thought, the strata of human ideas, like a sea, a soup, in which everything we think is exchanged with and touched by other thoughts.

Philosophers have always questioned the nature of reality. Theologists have questioned it too. Is God in fact reality, the afterlife, or is it this life? And what is this life? Is it our perception of it? Does our perception change reality, in the way we can alter quantum events, by our own choice?

Even today, in my job that no-one wants to do, I was thinking about reality. Children often ask if the stuffed deer it real. 'Yes,' I always say, 'yes it is, but it is not alive.' Today, the teacher was assuring them that it used to be real, but now it wasn't. So she equated reality with living. And yet the deer and my television set are quite, quite real, as real as I am, just that maybe I can create reality with my mind.
And that brings with it another question. Is my mind real? Because I can't touch it or see it, just use it.

So to me, the life lies are important. It doesn't matter whether they are 'true' or not, and there's yet another can of worms. Is truth reality, does 'truth' apply to something 'real' or is it something we all just agree on? Pragmatism in fact.