Keeping It Real 2020 July blog
Truth comes one kernel at a time—not so much like eating corn on the cob but like planting the seed that produces the ear.
On the platform of Greek amphitheaters or the screen for early Hollywood captioned talkies, most stories were “once upon a time” stories: stories where it was easy to tell real life from fiction—unless you were, like, 5-years-old.
People argued whether art imitated nature or nature imitated art. Narrator’s addressed “dear reader, you will recall . . .” and forced things to their ending, happy or unhappy depending on the author’s temperament or the popular fashion of the times. On the Attic stage, a machine lowered a savior to rescue the otherwise doomed. Cathartic maybe, but the ‘deus ex machina’ was no one’s idea of reality, except maybe for 20th century American religious literalists.
Centuries go by! Then seemingly the whole culture called for more realistic stories: “local color”—identifiable scenes, seemingly ‘true to life.’ Soon came psychological realism, and then the problematics of cultural and political and economic systems on top of that. Advancements, yes, but soon it was harder to tell whether we were taking in something fictional—made up—or something real or at least real-seeming.
And then came . . . “reality TV”—misnomer and nail in the coffin of facts, reality, informed consciousness, truth. “Reality TV” is a form of fiction made possible only by fictions that earlier had beset curricula, worship, and news media—fictions we are only now starting to suspect. Passing off the fake as real helped us come to the present moment when some are having a terrible time telling truth from fiction, and some no longer care if there is a difference.
Case in point: A friend recently sent me something to reinforce his belief that all this to-do about Covid-19 is silly: a blog by a fellow whose stock-in-trade has been a blog on Husker sports—but, of course, during the pandemic there isn’t much there to blog about, so he has turned his blog to commentary on the world. Gosh, if you know football, how hard can the world be? The fellow lives not far away from where I live, and my current work demands I know about Covid-19!
In the blog, the Husker-turned-world authority claimed that there weren’t many cases of Covid-19 where he lives. In fact (those pesky things), he lives right where one of the major outbreaks has taken place. Fact? Fiction? I don’t think he cared. I don’t even think my friend who sent me the blog cared. Too bad, because at least my friend is a bright and accomplished guy.
Ideological captivity didn’t just spring on us—it’s been the lurking menace since the late 19th century. Or perhaps it has always been the lurking menace, the blinder on seeing clearly. At least Bacon thought so—and as a cookbook once heralded, “everything goes better with bacon.”
Perhaps powerful interests have always bent rulers toward keeping the blinders on while pandering to our baser instincts.
One salutary result of confusing the fake and the real: we are seeing the reemergence of the writer as witness, the writer as a goad to conscience, the writer as inheritor and companion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Fort, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin.
Here’s what Salmon Rushdie said: “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
That should be enough to shore up the story teller’s vocation for quite some time.
next blog: August (with any luck)
Kearney, Nebraska
July 2020
capeek 