WHAT IS REAL?
I have begun attending concerts in Paris and Hamburg and Berlin through my new slightly larger iPad with a very clear screen and through the Homepods sitting across the room. The sound is good with the bass sounds coming through and I can see the musicians clearly. All of this would have been fuzzy and not available ten years ago and impossible fifty years ago.
I also have maybe 1000 ebooks to choose from, many bought for $1.99 on Bookbub or Early Bird Books on line. I don’t know who operates either outlet but books are available through a number of e publishers. I check through them every day. Hundreds of titles are offered and I buy only one every several days.
I haven’t watched TV in a long time, but now almost everything is available now through streaming. A few years ago we were signed up for Netflix DVD’s in the mail and before that we sometimes rented Blockbuster DVD’s or before that videotapes.
So this new digital access is very new and lets me experience all kinds of things directly and on demand from all over the world.
But this has only intensified ways of experiencing all kinds of things that I have no way of experiencing in everyday life. A couple of hundred years ago the only way we could experience life beyond our community was through print and through travel. Travel was slow and hard and expensive. And even print was expensive for many people. And before the printing press 600 years ago, most people could not read because there wasn’t much to read or reason to read and often couldn’t write either. Everything was experienced directly or through oral stories. And that was the state of human experience all the way back to when we were first human.
Direct experience and oral stories are the way humanity has developed. But no longer. Now we can experience every possible human experience anywhere in the world and even the imagined past, and every possible human activity. And just about everyone can do it through the Internet. Even the gap even between 80 year olds and 20 year olds is significant. We live in different worlds.
All of this seems remarkable to me. But what seems most remarkable to me is the difference between actual lived experience and imagined experience often written by one person and then acted out by others. The question that puzzles me and nags at me is how imagined experience in books or stories related in the news can seem as real to us as our daily lived experience. This is just as true of acted out experience on the flat screen.
We know that novels are dreamed up by someone, and often are written with a hackneyed standard plot. Romances are written this way and so are murder mysteries. We know that the events didn’t actually happen but they touch us intensely. Murder never happens around us and if it did we would be devastated. And yet we can watch three murders an episode happen on Murder, She Wrote while eating popcorn and getting comfortable on the couch without any feelings of horror. Romances describe love affairs that we know are made up and are much more intense than we could handle in our own families but they touch us in a way that romance in our everyday lives never touches us. And of course we hear stories in church about mythological Biblical events that don’t happen in everyday life, crucifixions, rising from the dead, virgin births, people living 800 years, the parting of the Red Sea and on and on and yet we are stirred by these events which make us feel centered and more alive.
The question I have is how we can have this double vision, knowing something can’t happen this way and never actually happened, and yet believe in it fully as we are experiencing it. How can we read a book and fall in love with or feel deeply the presence of a character we know an author dreamed up and rewrote several times before letting the book be published? We look forward eagerly to books by authors who touch us about events that we know are entirely made up.
Why is our inner visceral modes of responding emotionally so touched by things we know are unreal? It seems so natural and normal that most of the time we just accept it. So that is question number one. And it certainly applies to me with all the stuff that touches me which appears on the flat screen of my iPad. I have no idea how any of this can come to me through the ether as xxs’s and ooo’s, as digital packets, but my problem is why I believe it when it appears on my screen or sounds realistically from my Homepods.
But then a further question comes to me that is even more difficult for me to get my head around. And that is how feelings deep within me are turned into words, either spoken or which appear on the screen in front of me which is happening right now. I don’t have a thought in my head, it is blank, but the words come from my head and appear on my page through the clicking on the keyboard. I can hear each word as it appears. Not only do the words appear but they are formed in complete sentences which are strung together in somewhat coherent paragraphs with a progression from beginning to end which somehow makes a somewhat coherent point, yet when I sit down to write I have no idea of what I am going to say. It just pops out and appears in black and white. Where does this writing come from and how can it express the deep unconscious feelings within me?
Putting words together seems to be the most normal human activity there is. But these words lead to my living within a social construct of cultural conventions in which almost everything has been dreamed up by humans over time, all the things that I have been wondering about here in these posts: food, language, religions, economic systems, mating customs, technological inventions, means of production and sharing and on and on. The whole cultural bubble I live within has been imagined, from hot dogs to Jesus Christ, capitalism to socialism, and I live within this dreamed up actual and mythological world and believe in it. How can what is imagined be more real than what is actual? But it is. It is certainly more intense. What could be is more intense than what is. Insisting on scientific truth is actually insisting on living a less alive, a less intense, life. Understanding flattens life out, which is good at times because it flattens out intense feelings so that we can live with them, but it also makes our lives less alive. No wonder we so often resist science even when we also accept it much of the time.
But aside from this deeper perplexity about what is real, why is it that in my digital life what I know is made up and conveyed in an odd electronic way through pixels on a screen seems so real to me and has such an impact on me? What kind of double visioned creature am I that I can know that a thing is unreal and real at the same time?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 