Welcome to the conversation!

Ah, rosepetal, I'm sorry to hear it's tough times, but you do bring lovely things out of the darkness with you through your writing -- that's brave. M. Camus has much to say about that, including this:

My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Truly yours,
Albert Camus


And so does Mary Oliver:


"WILD GEESE"
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


Oh, and so does juniemoon! It's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. I'm thankful for a world of such wonderful companions as the ones we've quoted and the ones who respond here at ATop.

Ooh, mirages, I can't wait for you to start reading Ursula LeGuin and Earthsea - I know you will love it, for it goes right along with this darkness-light theme that got started. Here are a few lines of poetry from the very beginning of the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea:

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.


And here is something from The Left Hand of Darkness:

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

***

And I'd like to continue the conversation about writing, imagination and reality by sharing these quotes by Ben Okri*:

“The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed.”


“Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.”


“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”


“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”



* Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist (living in London, UK), whom I met at the 3rd International Literature Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, where he won the 2008 Novi Sad Award for Literature. He won the Booker Prize in 1991.
From Wikipedia: He has described his fiction as obeying a kind of "dream logic," and stated that his fiction is often preoccupied with the "philosophical conundrum ... what is reality?" insisting that:

"I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death... Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there's more to the fabric of life. I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality."


And to add to that thought, here is something I wrote about reality:

Which one is real: the event or our perception of the event? 
The events we experience influence and shape us. But we do not really remember the actual, "objective" event, but rather, our own subjective impression of what happened. After all, the latter is more important to our life, our future. The truth is we live subjective lives, and therefore there exist as many subjective worlds as there are humans on this planet. And each of those worlds is real, if only to that one person. And they are all different, for no two beings are the same. Is a world, then, just a dream? A collection of memories which disappears when the body dies? Millions of worlds born and dead... what were they like? Good, bad, scary, exciting, lonely, colourful? Colour... I take it for granted that there are colours in the world. But that's not true. There are colours in my world, but not in the world of a blind person, or a person who is colour-blind. Is my world, then, "more real" than theirs? Maybe reality cannot be qualified. There is no real-unreal, there is no more and less, there is no better or worse. Reality is infinite, as the universe, here and now, constantly moving and evolving, as today becomes yesterday and turns into tomorrow.

I'm back, having rebooted Zoomtext and realized the Audible conundrum was actually a grey matter problem not a technical glitch -- I was looking for it in my Kindle library, duh! I have SO many good ways to get books into my head without using my eyes, I have a lot to be grateful for!

So, "reality," eh? Yeah, what a concept. Today when my 14-year-old son got home, he said that his 20-minute walks to and from school have a "surreal" quality to them. I thought about that for a minute and then asked if maybe what they actually have is an unfamiliar REAL quality, because he is so prone to be reading a book or a manga or using his computer most of the time.

There is also the difference in the feel of "reality" that has to do with how much presence we offer it ... a mindful walk is so much different than a distracted one. I have to fight for mindfulness as I tend to wander off into my own interior, and while that is equally real, it is limited because I am limited. I love the intensity and the beauty of things fully attended to ... a book on Zen I read recently pointed out that anything you make yourself fully present to, you fall in love with. I think that's true, or at least I've experienced it from time to time, and it also astonishes me that despite the richness in that, I still drift off into distraction again at the first opportunity.

I wonder what Okri means by "manufactured" reality? I mean, any subjective reality is, as you point out in your own observations, manufactured -- from the vast field of what is, we pick and choose those particles that interest us, thrill or terrify us, which stick out because they surprise us or which we decide are most "real" because they chime with what we already believe. To some extent, we can only see what we are prepared to see -- Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is to some extent a brief history of how even scientists have trouble seeing things that don't fit into what they expect to see.

What you wrote about the billions of individual subjective realities made me think of the newish multiverse theory, and of my daughter saying after watching an episode of "Cosmos" that we are all the centre of the universe. It is just freaky that the universe appears so uniform in all directions, isn't it? And that, as the mystics used to say, the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

And finally there is the dreaming ... the Zen book I mentioned above is by Susan Murphy, who is from Australia and has built aboriginal "dreaming" ideas into her worldview. Hindu veda suggest that we are all a dream in the mind of Brahma, or perhaps an infinite number of dreams.

And there's Voltiare saying that if there were not a god, it would be necessary to invent one. Is this true of everything? Is this the function of creative work, to allow everything to come into being that must/should/wants to?

And yet bringing things into being ("lifted from the no of all nothing," says ee cummings) is in a way a process of imposing limitation -- that is, we say a thing is This, and therefore it is not all other potential Thats. I do not know whether it is just the nature of our brains and their cognitive limitation or the nature of the universe, but it doesn't seem possible to have this without that, light without darkness -- to bring it back to Earthsea, as one of the wizards says, "Even to light a candle is to create a shadow."

And the darkness, the shadow, is not necessarily the problem; our attempt to evade or deny our own shadow is what usually causes mayhem.

I'd love to hear more of your experience at the literary congress where you met Okri, and now I may have to go check out his books, too!