My earliest memory of my grandmother visiting us from the village is that of the nighttime stories she shared with me before I retired to bed. She'd tell of these believable fables in her soothing voice, pausing at the right moments for dramatic effects. The silhouette she cast on the couch from the light of our oil lamp added to the tension of the stories. I was her favorite grandkid. I still am.
Her stories mostly contain the same characters. Gizo, a smartass spider and, in retrospect, the most aggressive capitalist I've ever encountered; Koki, Gizo's wife, a patient, cautious, and logical stick insect (yeah... don't ask); a variety of returning characters with different personalities depending on the storyline in place, from kings, queens, princes and princesses, slaves, ordinary folks, religious scholars, to the entirety of the animal kingdom — scared hyena, pliable squirrel, the brave lion, and on and on.
This thought of sitting around a fluctuating kerosene lamp after dinner, listening to tatsuniya, brought back memories of simpler times when I wasn't paying taxes. Sadly, today's and future generation would miss out on those genuine human interactions thanks to vices like TikTok and Twitter.
One of the troubles of growing up is having to endure variations of that horrible Thanos phase — getting cursed with knowledge. For me, one way this phase plays out is in slowly realizing that fiction isn't the opposite of reality. It is not even its supplement, really. Fictional stories are always either intertwined with our own reality, existing in an independent form, or similitude of the two.
I think of the racing emotions we experience when watching a well-made movie or reading a well-written book, for instance. We feel connected to the characters, their struggles, and the setting. We cheer them on their adventures and celebrate with them on their wins. We sympathize with their suffering and insecurities. We understand them. We miss them when they die, shedding tears that are anything but pixelated.
We often reduce fiction to a device with which to reflect on and recognize how our cultures and traditions shape the way we see the world, a coping mechanism that provides a bird's-eye view of human conditions as we know them. While that is a magical power to have, one to be celebrated every day, it can also be used to excuse ourselves from seeking answers to the basic questions that we all carry around but prefer to shove deep down inside.
Myriad emotions are a necessity of reality, but as demonstrated, they are not exclusive to it. There are other concrete fictional entities so significant that we have since abandoned recognition of them as such. Money, country borders — and even race and ethnicity, for the most part — are constructs of our own making that extend beyond their intended purpose. We see them ignite wars, spread too much hatred, sever family ties, and cost us an incredible chunk of our very humanity. Yet, we can't function without them.
"Without commonly accepted stories [a fancy way to say fiction, Mr. Harari] about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can't play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can't enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But stories are just tools. They shouldn't become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars `to make a lot of money for the corporation' or 'to protect the national interest'. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our life in their service?"
— Yuval Noah Harari, Historian (2015)
I want to take it a step further (welcome to Nightcap!): If everything is connected — and it sure seems to be — it isn't too much of a stretch to assume that our very thoughts, in the sequential order or lack thereof, manifested in movies and books, are true occurrences elsewhere in the cosmos. In essence, what if every story ever told is real?
What I am proposing is not the 'many worlds' theory — a quantum mechanics phenomenon that holds that many worlds exist in parallel with our own space-time continuum. Neither am I proposing that every choice we make is branching off into a separate reality, although that is possible. Instead, I am suggesting that every conjecture ever written or performed by anyone — every fiction, anywhere, anytime — is a rough account of another reality.
That would suggest Peter Griffin is a real entity — pardon me, but I am not ready to refer to cartoons as people yet and I am afraid you won't take me seriously if I do. It would imply that Prairie did, in fact, spend years as Hap's captive; that Homer and Rachel really existed, and everything wasn't just a screen performance — in case I wasn't blunt enough, this was my way of saying that Netflix's The OA is one of my favorite television shows of all time. The Marvel Cinematic Universe comes to mind. Wakanda and its futuristic technology. King T'Challa's charming smile, a breathing person outside our reach, but refreshing to think of as being alive nonetheless.
It would mean that Brit Marling, Stan Lee, Seth MacFarlane, and my grandmother, along with every storyteller to have ever shared their story, were unknowingly narrating the true tribulations and triumphs of the characters they thought they had created.
In other corners, someone might have written about Hitler and our world is the unfortunate one to have harbored the monster — this interconnectedness dictates that the reverse is also the case. COVID-19 probably began as an entry for a literary fiction competition somewhere in the cosmos. It's possible the entry didn't even make it — or wouldn't make it, since the progressive order of events may only exist here. Think about the giants of our time and how their stories are only regarded as mere myths and legends elsewhere.
This latter topic, which I explained using movies like a typical Gen Zer, isn't exactly new. Variations of it exist a long time ago.
Over two millennia ago, Plato argued in what would become his "theory of forms" that the world we inhabit, the physical world, isn't really the real world. He maintained that there exists another world where everything is in its most ideal form, and that what we call reality is simply a shadow — a silhouette if you like. Everyone is free to accept or reject this notion, of course, but there is no way to know for sure.
The implications that every story is real in one timeline or another are, however, even more complex than either of us can imagine — from what this realization can do to our already fragile ego, to the turns and curves each story within another story will ignite in and by itself, creating a ricocheting domino effect no human language would dare to attempt unfolding. It extends beyond what shaking the foundations we fear truly recognizing fictional stories like money and states entails.
In the stories we share, from the ordinary to the bizarre, the characters are as fearful as we are. They have monsters and heroes in their worlds too. They suffer. They still dream. In their search for meaning, we see them expressing art in all its dynamism.
My grandma's and other people's stories likely reflect more than just our insignificant lives. We might think we create these characters, but that is perhaps the furthest thing from the truth. I like to picture them writing creative pieces about us sitting around kerosene lamps and bonding with our younglings too. Each of us relies on the other but knows little about the extent of that bond. And depending on how we view it, this vantage point of looking at it all can be liberating.