Following up on my previous post about John Gray's "The Silence of Animals," here's some passages from another part of the book that I liked a lot, a section called The Supreme Fiction.
This is pretty much how I've come to look upon spirituality: believing in a fiction that we know to be such. Not true, but attractive.
When I read a well-written fictional book, I can get so absorbed in the tale that I forget this is just a story. Likewise with an engrossing movie. What makes such books and movies so enjoyable is their capacity to transport me into another world, a made-up world.
If someone interrupts my book reading or movie watching, I'm brought back into my usual world. I don't ever really believe that the fiction I've embraced is objectively true; it's just something I enjoy for a while.
Here's some of what Gray has to say about Stevens' famous poem, "Notes toward a supreme fiction."
The end of thought seems to be unending doubt. Facing this situation, the poet Wallace Stevens suggested that we put our trust in fictions: 'The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and to believe in it willingly.'
Stevens devoted one of his greatest poems to exploring what this might mean. 'Notes toward a supreme Fiction' is not a chain of argumentation. The poet has no interest in persuasion. In the poem Stevens poses what he regarded as the final issue of thought:
It must
Be possible...
To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,
The fiction of an absolute...
To be stripped of every fiction except the fiction of an absolute is to find your mind at 'a point/Beyond which thought could not progress as thought'. At that point, Stevens seems to suggest, one must simply choose. But how can anyone choose among fictions? How can anyone believe in something they know is not true?
...Yet a life based on fictions cannot be impossible, since we live such a life every day. We may not choose the fictions by which we live, or not consciously. Our lives turn on fictions all the same.
The confusion is in the idea of belief. We are accustomed to think our lives stand on beliefs about ourselves and the world: science is a search for true beliefs and religion the sum of our beliefs about ultimate things. In this way of thinking, a relic of western philosophy, belief is all important.
Wallace falls into this ancient confusion when he writes of believing in a fiction willingly. He wanted 'to stick to the nicer knowledge of belief, that what it believes in is not true'.
But fictions are not conscious falsehoods. Creations of the imagination, they are neither true nor false. We cannot do without an idea of truth. Things go their own way however we think of them. But we can live without believing our fictions to be facts. We need not always be patching our view of things to shut out a dissonant world.
An anxious attachment to belief is the chief weakness of the western mind.
...A supreme fiction, Stevens tells us, must have a number of attributes: it must be abstract; it must change; and it must give pleasure. These are interesting requirements.
Though they develop over time, myths are thought to be timeless. Why not admit the obvious, Stevens seems to be asking, and accept that the fictions that shape our lives are as changeable as our lives are themselves.
It may seem odd to ask of a fiction that it give pleasure. But why else should anyone make it a part of their life? A fiction is not something you need to justify. When it comes to you, you accept it freely. As for other people, they can do as they please.
The supreme fiction is not any final belief but the activity of making fictions, which Stevens calls poetry. Fictions cannot be created at will. If they could be called into being as we wish, they could also be dismissed whenever we like. That is the project of humanism. But while the fictions by which we live are human creations, they are beyond human control.
...The supreme fiction is not the one idea worth having, for there can be no such idea.
Admitting that our lives are shaped by fictions may give a kind of freedom -- possibly the only kind that human beings can attain. Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made.
Knowing that there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves.
...The idea of self-realization is one of the most destructive of modern fictions. It suggests that you can flourish in only one sort of life, or a small number of similar lives, when in fact everybody can thrive in a large variety of ways.
We think of a happy life as one that culminates in eventual fulfilment. Ever since Aristotle philosophers have encouraged us to think in this backward-looking way. But it means thinking of your life as if it had already ended, and none of us knows how we will end.
Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live.
That last sentence is freaking awesome! It was worth the price of John Gray's book to come across those nineteen words.
Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live.
I'm not sure what those words mean, but I believe I do. Which is the whole goddamn point of living. Gray writes:
Looking for happiness is like having lived your life before it is over. You know everything important in advance: what you want, who you are. Why saddle yourself with the burden of being a character in such a dull tale?
Better make up your life as you go along, and not be too attached to the stories you tell yourself on the way.
"Better make up your life as you go along, and not be too attached to the stories you tell yourself on the way."
We are making it up as we go along, but when one holds more to notions about what is true than to the evidence, one's fiction is farcical.
Posted by: cc | July 17, 2013 at 10:12 AM