Day: April 8, 2025

Thoughts about fiction and reality

Dickens

Charles Dickens,the great novelist of Victorian England
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
Fiction is invented,of course, by novelists and writers.And we also have lies which are slightly different.The truth of fiction when well done comes from the use of the true imagination based on genuine interactions with what is other than ourselves and is a way of depicting the truths of the heart.

The true imagination can only be effective when it is not fantasy based on mere wish fulfillment.To me that is what Buddhism is about.We desire nothing in order to get everything and more.

Lies,on the other hand ,may be for purposes of manipulating other people or may be the product of fantasy which is common in children who “make believe” they are having a birthday party because they want one so much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors
I might say fictional writing in novels or poetry using the true imagination helps us to understand complex reality better..Lies can be very destructive.And we have the kind of language used in the novel 1984 by George Orwell where black can mean white and death merely.termination of life…. we have begun to hear a lot of this and it does have an utterly bad and even destructive effect on personal and political life.The most famous example is when some politician was lying but it was referred to as being “Economy with the truth”.It’s our intentions which count to in making us moral agents.We may lie so smoothly we feel it will have no illl effect.

Imagining what it is like to be another person as in Dicken’s great novels about the poor is very powerful and can change government policy via changing people’s hearts and minds.

I feel imagination does have this purpose of making us feel for others and bring us closer even to murderers and criminals when the writer makes their world something we can comprehend.

Reality is very complex which is one reason we have all the arts,science,mysticism,religion as they all look at or relate to different aspects of life.

Plain lying is a selfish activity for our personal benefit or to avoid trouble when we have misbehaved.And we weave a web of destruction

Poetic and religious truth

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/

Click to access Religion_as_Poetic_Truth.pdf

Religion as Poetic Truth
A lightly edited transcript of an impromptu talk by Mark F. Sharlow

How much truth is there in the religions of the world? How many of their beliefs are true? Before trying to answer that question, I’d like to mention an example that shows how intricate the question of truth can sometimes be. Think about poetry. The poet Carl Sandburg once wrote a poem titled “Fog,” in which he used these lines: The fog comes on little cat feet. Now, is Sandburg’s statement true or not? When you think about the fog coming in over a coastline, as in Sandburg’s poem, do you find those lines true? The answer to that question could be “no,” because there are no cat feet on the fog – no matter how hard you look under the fog, you won’t find cat feet. Or the answer could be “yes,” because those lines describe exquisitely a certain experience of what it feels like when you’re in a place where the fog is coming in. You know what I mean, if you’ve ever been there – that strange hushing, that strange softness that your surroundings develop. It’s a subjective experience, but it’s a real part of your awareness. So, are Sandburg’s lines true? The answer is yes or no, depending on whether what you mean is 1 literal truth – truth of the kind that a scientist would consider true – or poetic truth. If you mean literal truth, then the lines are not true (of course). But if you think of the lines as possibly describing an experience, as being poetically true in that sense, then they are true. Those lines do describe something real – a real subjective feature of your awareness and of your surroundings – even though there really aren’t any feet under the fog. I’d like to propose that we think of most of the beliefs of the major religions of the world in this way. These beliefs might not be literally true, but at least in some cases – at least for the central beliefs shared by most religions – they might be true in some other way. They might point to a significant truth, even though they aren’t literally true. The prime belief of this sort would be belief in God. Now, some people think of God as a being who created the universe and who created everything in the universe, including living species, by supernatural means, by just bringing them into being (boom! there they are), instead of natural causes creating the things in the universe. If this is exactly how you define God, then there is no God. Why? Because things have natural causes. Many things have been found to have natural causes, and biological species, as one prime example, have been found to have natural causes through evolution. So if that’s what you mean by “God,” then there is no God. But the answer is different if what you mean by “God” is a divine presence in the world, some entity or feature of reality that can be regarded as divine – which means, at a minimum, that it’s worthy of our highest admiration and love, and somehow represents and embodies all that is good. If that’s what you mean by God, then there could well be a God. I’ve argued in some of my writings that there is a being like that. It’s what philosophers would call an “abstract entity” – not a ghostly spiritual substance, but an entity that can be known to us as a feature of the world and of things in the world. This entity is a suitable focus for our highest love, because it is shown or manifested in all that is beautiful and good, including the people we love. It is not just some force or some object devoid of spiritual qualities. Instead, it has enough mindlike features that we can regard it as a “someone” instead of a mere “something.” However, it is not what we usually think of as a “person.” I know I’m being rather vague and sketchy here, but I’ve spelled it all out before, in my writings on the subject of God.

A different kind of truth lies in poetry

Chiloschista-parishii_17-1

Photo by Mike Flemming 2017
Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
George Herbert. 1593–1632
. Love by George Herbert
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
      Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
      From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning          5
      If I lack’d anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
     Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
      I cannot look on Thee.’   10
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
      ‘Who made the eyes but I?’
‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
      Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’   15
      ‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
      So I did sit and eat.

Poetry ,invention and discovery

Orchid_2017-1.jpg

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=21541

 

Roger Caldwell

Invention and Discovery:

Poetry and Science Revisited

 

(1)

Poetry, for Wallace Stevens, was “the supreme fiction”. Poets invent things that aren’t there – or, at least, weren’t there before the poem brought them into being. Scientists, by contrast, are said to tell the truth. They discover things – things that are already there. The structure of DNA, Newton’s inverse square law, the speed of light are pre-existent features of the universe, waiting to be revealed. Some lucky scientist or other will get there first. On this model nothing could be simpler: poets are inventors, scientists are discoverers. The model is simple. It is also wrong.

We may not value poems for factual truth, but that is not to say that we value them either as merely spinning magnificent lies. A poem may well encompass or enact an important truth even if its facts are wrong or invented. Robert Graves was famously dismissive about Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” which, amongst other heinous errors, has Sophocles hearing the sound of pebbles flung up by the retreating tide – which, as Graves points out, is impossible, given that the Aegean, unlike the North Sea, is not tidal. But whatever truth-value is in the poem is there despite the poet’s careless way with facts. The facts in a poem are to be understood in advance as being in inverted commas. What is important is the truth that the poet brings to expression – or invents.

Is it possible, however, to invent the truth as opposed to discovering it? Some inventions work, after all, others do not. You can’t invent a perpetual motion machine, because such a machine would contravene the laws of physics: it wouldn’t work. All you can invent is the idea of such a machine. Similarly, if a poetic or other literary invention works, it is helpful to know why it works. Why have Hamlet, Werther, Jekyll and Hyde, Godot all become modern archetypes, part of the furniture of our minds – regardless of whether we have read the works in which they are instantiated?

It is true that, after Shakespeare, after Goethe, there were many more Hamlets and Werthers in daily life than there had been before. The poets, to that extent, had invented them, and changed things. But they couldn’t invent what had no basis in a possible reality. They named, they developed what existed already as potentialities in human psychology. Their invention, to that degree, is therefore, just as much discovery.

Indeed, there is a continuum rather than a disjunction between the two. Where poets like Hardy, Edward Thomas, Larkin are to a large extent discoverers, others, such as Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan, John Ashbery, J.H. Prynne, working at the limits of language, are primarily inventors. Where the poet of the first type fails, it is in telling us something we know already: where the poet of the second type fails, it is in an inability to tell us anything at all. To the extent that the poem of an inventer works, however, it makes a new use of language permanently available in which to explore truths – and perhaps lies – which it was not previously possible to express, rather in the same way that the invention of new concepts in a language makes it possible to think, and ultimately, to live differently than before.

Poets, of course, are not alone in this. Scientists too invent with greater or lesser success. They invented the ether, for example, which must count, in the end, as an unsuccessful invention, since it isn’t there, though it continues to haunt our language as an incoherent idea. But to discover what is there you must also have a theory as to what is likely to be there. Observation in itself counts for little. You must invent in advance. Who has ever seen a quark? What kind of a beast is natural selection?

(2)

We are told sometimes that poetry is its own world, that poets explore the potentialities of language – as if language could somehow be separated from the world out of which it has arisen. As if there could be a pure poetry (or, for that matter, a pure science). Fine poets can be slaves of a deficient aesthetic, just as scientists may make obeisance to a flawed philosophy of science and succeed

Do not copyright your hatred

Shall I give home to grievance and to woe

And cultivate my hatred with my tears?

Shall I remember carefully each blow,

And add this sorrow to my anxious fear?

I thought by hating you I would have peace

And surely I had reason without doubt.

Yet rumination gave me no release..

For wisdom and compassion it did flout

I remembered then past love and shared sweet words

I gave them freedom in my anguished heart.

I did it for your sake, yet then occurred

A sweetness, joy and gladness in all parts.

To forgive,repent and let go of such grief

Helps us more than hatred’s legal briefs