You know that lightheaded feeling that happens when you stand up to fast? Well, I had that from the moment I stood up. I kept expecting it to fade but a strange tingle ran through my whole body accompanied by powerless numb feeling. I put my glass under the stream of water but it never got more than an inch full. My vision started to blotch and disappear. In a moment everything was gone, though it wasn't as if my eyes stopped seeing but more like my brain stopped making sense of the information it was receiving. I heard a gigantic crash when I hit the floor. I vaguely felt that my right elbow was hurting very bad but it was like it had happened to someone else and was being described to me very vividly. I had a blurry thought that I had probably woken someone up but I couldn't care, even if I wanted to.
After what seemed like fifteen minutes, though it was probably much less, Carrie stuck her head into the kitchen and asked if I was alright. I had moved a little bit and gotten another glass down but had ran out of energy and laid back down before I could even shut off the water. My memory is a little watery of before Carrie came in. Also I noticed that the first glass had shattered all over the floor. I felt the glass in my hand and I knew something was wrong. It was narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, and that is definitely not correct. I looked at it for a while and finally realized the problem. I was holding it upside down.
After I righted it I rose to my knees and filled it a bit and took a drink. O sweet heaven glory be to two hydrogen atoms bonding covalently with one oxygen atom in great quantities. Carrie told me she would sweep it up and I went back to bed and woke up quite late feeling surprisingly good besides a lump on my arm exactly where a massive hockey bruise had finally healed.
Now for some observations on blogging in relation to the story above. Do you believe that the story is true? Well, it is...sort of. However, every written word is fiction. No one is a good enough writer to write a "true story". The sensations related can never portray the actual feelings to the reader. In fact, every reader will glean different ideas from written text and all of them are false. If you have never been to the Setian's house it is even worse. You have formed a picture of the kitchen in your head for me to pass out in. The real kitchen is not like the one in your head I promise, so I have portrayed an entirely false setting. Even the very order of the words forms subconscious picture of things and the writer must take this into account in order to portray what they want. For example, "I heard a gigantic crash as I hit the floor," implies that I didn't know I was even falling and a sense of absentness about it, which is good. If I had written, "I fell over backwards and hit really hard and made a big loud crash and it hurt," those ideas would not be there even though that is what happened. Though neither is true, one is just more what I wanted to write.
People always want to believe what they read, that way the thrill is more intense. I always snicker when people tell me they only read non-fiction because they don't like reading fake stuff. However, I can admire real people because of their stories, and respect for the hardships they suffered or whatever. And if it's a good story sure it's good, but for entertainment, don't scoff at fiction, because that's what your reading. If you can't read fiction, just find a good one, keep this in mind, and suspend your dang disbelief for awhile. It's not that hard considering before all that suspended it for you were the words, "Based on the true events" "The true adventures of..." "The actual happenings of..." and so on. Come on people, it doesn't take any skill to write that on the front.
Blogging is some of the worst because people believe it to the letter. Even the most truthful can't be honest, so just think about the dishonest. With every post I make, false ideas are spread onto the Internet and untrue understandings are absorbed about what I meant to say. Therefor I hereby warn you that nothing I say is subject to accountability and I do not take any responsibility for the truth or untruth of my posts. So if I lie, it's your fault. Goodnight.
6 comments:
You are a character that you created!
If all written words are fiction, are all spoken words fiction? If we think in words are our thoughts fiction? Or is it only in trying to communicate with someone else that the narrative gets fictionalized? So is all communication fiction? I think as soon as we arrange words into a narrative, that is fiction, even if we are only thinking to ourselves.
What about the Word of God made flesh? Does incarnation protect the veracity of the word?
I'm going to say that question was directed at you, Carrie.
If I may, I'd like to comment on this. The Word has been called The Truth, and The Word was made flesh. Nobody can deny The Word's existence; The Word is not fiction. If everything else is fiction, then that means The Word is the ONLY Truth in this world!
Of course, as Christians we believe that the word of God is True with a capital T. Ken's point is interesting, that it could be the only truth in this world. It certainly has a unique status of truth, apart from questions of whether a biography is truer than a novel, or whether Cory is disseminating true or false information on his blog:)The Bible can be subjected to interesting narrative analysis though, such as examining the point of view of the narrator, and what information the narrator chooses to withhold or impart.
It is the fact that all narrative can be subjected to this type of analysis that causes critics to claim that all narrative has essentially the same truth value. However, calling something fiction does not necessarily mean that it has no truth value.
No matter what abstract conclusions we come to about the nature of narrative, we are still going to basically believe everything Cory writes on his blog, and we are not going to have any trouble figuring out when he is posting an example of his "fictional" writing versus when he is telling us a "true" story.
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