Constructing Reality

James Frey is back on the scene with a well-received new novel. Frey got in widely publicized trouble for dramatizing his memoir, merging people (characters) and situations (plot). Or perhaps it was for marketing a novel as autobiography, although you’ll find some literati who would say that’s why one calls it a memoir instead of autobiography. And then I think you would find some people in consciousness studies, monasteries, and asylums that would challenge any attempt at distinction between fact and fiction.

As a book person, I noticed the favorable mentions of Frey. As a reader, I checked out my local library’s copy of Best American essays 2007 and therein read “ Shakers,” by Daniel Orozco. It’s far better written, but it reads like a Discovery Channel special, filled with scientific information, following an earthquake in a moment-by-moment way—with emotion-charged scenes of imagined people caught in the midst of it. At first I was offended, because I like reading science and nature articles and don’t much care for those Discovery Channel specials. But I must admit, it is that human element that gives the story its power and resonance, mimics the force of an earthquake in the mind.

Humans have always used the power of story: to teach, to learn, to attempt understanding of the world around them. Only when science entered the picture did this separation between fact and fiction—equating one with truth and the other with falsity. Ancient stories were relegated to myth. Science was looking to explain the world, not understand it. Science was a new culture, a new religion, stamping out the competition, limiting the world to what could be perceived with the five senses and the tools human beings created. And yet, every great leap forward in science came from intuition, dreams, thought—perception applied to observation.

Here in the 21st century, with our cell phones and computers, electron microscopes and deep space telescopes, internet and satellite HDTV, the lines between fact and fiction blur again. Not only the Discovery Channel, but also the History and National Geographic Channel (or Nat Geo, as its calling itself in the sound-byte age) are dramatizing, fictionalizing. One could say that introducing the human element is the beginning of fiction. The story is what people want, not the bare facts. This desire for story is the hunger for connection and identity, the desire to see ourselves in relation to the universe. Science and religion and story spring from the same hunger in the human spirit.

Are we truly any different than our savannah-dwelling, cave-lodging forebears? We light our cities against the dark night and its predators. In the midst of flood and earthquake, tornados and volcanic eruptions, science has the same power as religion to prevent them.
They really are the same, science and religion. In our quantum world where physicists, the priests and mystics of science, say that reality is influenced by perception, what is the difference between fact and fiction?

Is it such a large leap to change the term ‘influenced by’ to the term “created by?” In a world ravaged by greed (think war, gimme what you got), industrialization (think shrinking rainforests), and the unintended consequences of technology (think nuclear waste, which also encapsulates the former two)—in such a world, shouldn’t the quest of 21st century science be to harness the technology of the human spirit, the power of perception?

Isn’t that what it takes, a shift in consciousness, to create a new world? A shift in consciousness, the power of story. In the modern age, the ideal and story of freedom created the shift toward democracy—and a shift away from democracy to rampant capitalism, Nazism, fascism, communism, repression. Story and will shrank the British Empire. Stories of conquest, entitlement and fear planted the seeds for an explosion of terrorism.

The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we listen to—these are what create the forces of societal, political, religious, and scientific change that in turn change the world. At least, our perception of it. At least, our reality.