Friday Philosophy: A grand fiction

A lifetime ago…

I had dreams from time to time about writing fiction.  If I could only capture my dreams, which I was sure were filled with interesting substance of grand consequence, I was sure there would be stories people would want to read.  As I grew older, though, the only part of the dreams I could remember was the part where my dreamself was searching for a functioning toilet…meaning it was imperative that I wake up soon.

I never mastered the fiction thing.  When I start with a premise based in untruth, even the smallest change in the Herenow, my mind tends to follow too many paths arrived at because that untruth sparked too many consequences.  So mostly I read my books and thought about how those stories would have gone if I had been the author…a state which was surely never going to exist.

When I did start writing something besides mathematics, I stuck with my experiences, thoughts and feelings.  The only things approaching fiction were descriptions of the way I thought events should have…or could have…transpired.

Recently I am finding myself in a similar space.  As much as I would like to write prose about some of the concepts I mention in my poetry, trying to write about peace or fairness, justice or equality, on the one hand, or hunger, disease, bigotry, ignorance, neglect, or greed, on the other, seems to become just another effort in writing fiction.  That’s probably because there has been no peace in my lifetime.  There has been little in the way of fairness and what passes for justice seems to have minimal impact on people’s lives.  And equality has become so ephemeral as to be as much a fiction as I can imagine.

On the other hand hunger and disease, bigotry, ignorance and neglect have become accepted by too many people as just the way life is…and so writing about how we might bring an end to those conditions becomes little more than the exercising of a hyperactive imagination.

And greed?  What can I say?  People have reveled in its “glory” for the past 30 years.  Almost nobody listens to a voice that speaks against it.  Being against greed is considered quaint.

I remember what someone once said:

Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’  I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’

–Robert F. Kennedy

Perhaps Bobby is also now considered to be quaint…old-fashioned.

Trying to solve the problems of the world has taken a back seat to electing personalities.  People think they have to find someone they can trust to elect…to do what?  Meanwhile it seems that actual doing becomes a fiction…something that we may do sometime, sometime well into the future, when the time is right, when the chances of success will be better.

Is that time also a fiction?  What do I have to go by that indicates that it is not?

And meanwhile the main focus of our politicians always seems to be to pursue being elected.  Big surprise?  Not to me.

Another quote:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

–Margaret Mead

But it has always proved to be so difficult to assemble such a group, to have that group remain focused and committed to the task.

And now I find my energy dwindling.  And what I wish could be done in this world seems to become ever more fictional, perhaps even the product of delusion.

Campfire The Only Thing Sitting around a campfire we could select a problem and jointly figure out how to solve it if we wanted to But we are too many for such a gathering and to form such an intention and we have changed –Robyn Elaine Serven –March 21, 2008