Emotional truth
*You must be a little bit more honest than you are comfortable with*
“[…]Wolves can't talk...
We human beings understand that. That is the magic of stories. That is the magic of fiction. Cause it can give you something big, true, and important that you might not otherwise get. And you can carry it in your heart. And you can tell it to your children. And your children’s children.”
Fiction as a realm to understand truth has long been a fascination. In daily life, so many interactions ‘seem to’ be interwoven with, dare I say, ‘untruthful’ expressions. We tell each other stories, but we mix up the characters, their developmental lines, concrete needs, forgetting about their deeper calling, the sense in apparent senselessness or the bigger relational dance we are all smoothly part of.
Authoring a fictional story is a verbal handicraft of (re-)discovering truth. That may be an experiential, emotional or existential truth. In fiction, we may rediscover the true – let’s say ‘deeper’ or ‘layered’ - emotional motives for this or that character (or: ourselves) to feel out of place or to succumb to certain seductions. Ironically, this clarity can also mean we recognize more ambiguity. We see the subtle complexity of the protagonist, we question our learned believes about what is right and what is wrong, we dare to look at the inner world of someone who in real life might be quickly judged hollow or evil. Sometimes, through fiction, we see through everyday interactions and evolve our intuition to understand life from a feeling stand, even from a bodily knowing. Rich metaphors or smart plots in literary texts come to invite us to explore different, even unknown movements and motivations of an individual or collective. We tap into our imagination and what we find there is an extension of what we consciously dare to be or become.
Again ironically, fiction is also a form of lying, to put it a bit bold. Writing fiction demands that we tap into our affective memory to make the imaginary world believable:
“You are using the truth in order to make your lies convincing and true. You are deploying emotional truth in a way that is convincing.”
Now, of course, this clarifies why this ‘fiction seeking’ is in itself a form of truth seeking, not only for the reader but also for the writer.
Emotional truth seeking feels like a core motivator for me. And maybe fiction has often felt like the gentlest and artistically engaging way to facilitate such a search while staying connected with endless uncertainty, while dancing on the boundaries between fact and fiction, while entertaining a state of non-duality. Deeply involved in a character’s choices, movements, and facial expressions, I creatively meditate on what is means to be a human being. I try out an emotional repertoire that at first hand might seem all but mine, but gradually and skillfully finds its way under my own skin. There and then, I extend myself. This way, I wonder thanks to a podcast by Stijn Smeets (Existential Injection), reading may be considered an act of love. It teaches me ‘to be different together.’
Now, a challenge lies in the realization of this act of love ‘in real life,’ a life that is not lived in between pages. May fiction inspire me to reach out for another’s truth-seeking, the fragility and ungraspable nature of such seeking, even beyond words, in what is not written, in what is vulnerably shared, stuttered sometimes.
Luckily, writing and reading can sensitize us to sensitivity:
“You have to be willing to open your chest and show rather more than is comfortable for your heart and mind.”
And well…this little ode to writing and reading at least brings ease to my virtue seeking mind .
All quotations: Neil Gaiman.