Interjection II
Okay, I'm starting to have a past now. That's kinda nice. Yeah, of course I had one before, but it didn't really have any flesh, any substance. It guided my actions, it bore on personality, all the ususal stuff, but that "thing" affecting me was just this empty... aspect. The land of "Here There be Dragons" on an ancient map.
No, it didn't feel like I had amnesia. It was nothing that obvious. I guess it's a bit like recovering blocked memories, if a bit less dramatic - you can't even notice that anything's missing until the moment you find it.... Maybe.
I have to wonder what it was like for the other, uh - God, I hate to say this, but - characters. I mean, I'm really just forced to assume that they don't know what I do about all this, so what did they experience while their past was being explored? IF you move along with the narrative, I guess it was almost as if that part of their... fuck, our lives was being lied out at that point. To them, though?
There was also that conversation back in the diner, with Marduk recounting some of his past. So to you, and I'm just leaving it at "you" for now, it was his first time remembering all of that. I kind of doubt that he saw it that way, but, at the same time, I don't think it's very often that people bother to think about whether or not they've remembered something before while they're actually remebering it. I also doubt that as you were reading that part, or writing it, it really occured to you that he had never remembered all of thatbefore, at least in so many words, but to you he really hadn't. So, again, did that part of his past even exist before that part of the narrative?
This brings us back to my last little interruption, since we still don't have clear pictures of what "exist" and "before" actually mean in this situation. What does it mean for a fictional character to exist? Before, of course, means, "at an earlier point in time," but which time are we going by?
Okay, maybe I can handle this if I do it one piece at a time....
On our existence in your reality: From a completely literal and materialistic standpoint, we have none. Zero. You could say that we have a sort of physical reality and weight as the actual pages our story is recorded on, but I'd have to dismiss that as a perfect example of confusing the map for the territory. It's an easy assumption to make that our characters are reflective of the Author and other people that he knows, but saying that this gives us any solidity is like saying that the reflections in the mirror, seen as the objects they reflect, are the same as the physical object that is the mirror. This doesn't hold up very well. Just ask Alice; I think she knows. Obviously, though, we do have some connection with your world, or else I couldn't be communicating all of this to you (regardless of how ineffectively I might be doing so). You could say that ours is just a subset of your reality, but that strikes me as one fuck of a simplification. Other than our being essentially non-physical, what would the boundaries, the paramaters, of that subset be? I'm sure it's pretty easy to say that we just exist within your mind or your imagination. This brings up a few different questions, though, depending in part on who, exactly, you are.
If you are just a reader, or a listener or a viewer, then it's got to be a bit tough to say that our existence is limited solely to your imagination. To one degree or another, our world is being communicated to you through ink squiggles on paper or some other linguistic medium. Think about how often you hear people talk about "a character in a book they're reading." Again, I'm not trying to tell you that we exist "in" a book in any literal sense, but I think that might help to clear up that, even if we do exist in your imagination, that's only one part of it. For one thing, if our existence is in your mind, there's at least one other mind we exist in - the Author's. Chances are good that there are a few more than that, but I'm not taking my assumptions that far, and that doesn't really matter much. That's one funky little co-location trick, and I think I'd have to wonder how we're pulling it off. But we're just concepts, you say? To that I say: Fuck you. I'm only speaking for myself here, but I'm not just a fucking concept. With just as much authority as you could say the same to someone else, I can tell you right now that I am, in fact, a living, breathing human being. I've got flesh, skin, hair, eyes, a mouth, hands, feet lungs, bile, DNA, you name it - and if you ask me, these are all a lot more than just concepts. Solid. Real. Try spreading your liver out across a few imaginations, even if they are "higher-level" imaginations than your own, and maybe you'll have some sense of how absurd that whole idea seems to me. I imagine you'd feel about the same if you just happened to realise that you were just a character in someone else's piece of fiction.
Oh, of course you aren't! How could you possibly..? I just want you to know that Marduk would be more than likely to say the same. If I were to go write a story and my characters were presented with that idea, they'd say that too. Sorry, I'm just not ready to admit to being any less real than you. For one thing, I can't even begin to imagine what it could be like to be "more real" than I am - could you?
Yeah, and I'm just as solid as you are, I'm sure. If I get stabbed, you bet I'm gonna bleed, and I'll probably scream in pain if I don't just pass out first. If I tried to walk through a wall, I'd just end up banging my nose. I eat, I sleep, I piss, I masturbate, if I get really shitfaced I usually wake up the next day with a hangover. Any of this sounding familiar?
Christ, you have no idea how overwhelming this all is. Wasn't I going to go though this in some kind of orderly fashion, or something? Sorry, I guess I just completely lost track and I think I'm about ready to scream anyway. Fuck it all.
With His Authorship's most glorious and humble permission, I think I'll just try to get back to this shit later.
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