Best of Week: Story Fragment

In the past I’ve tended to prefer short stories as opposed to poems or longer “book-length” stories I know some people write. I’ve always had problems with, at a certain point, not being able to create the will in order to write about a certain moment and thus often give up writing that story. Aside from just the fact they require less time to write, I prefer short stories because they are short enough to be read by anyone in a short amount of time, yet are flexible enough to establish a framework and exhibit a lot of meaning.

In terms of first writing fragments, I think it’s a great idea to just write about things that relate to the character. I’ve never tried it before, but I think it’s going to work. It’s interesting how these fragments allow the writer to discover for themselves things about their characters as well as the overtone of the story. Not only to we have a foundation upon which we can build and patch things together to form a plot, but we can access great insight about the character. We can explore things that are part of the character’s life, but maybe not the story, so that in the story, we can have a realistic and interesting character.

I plan on writing a story about a character that, through a very depressing set of events, loses all sense of morality. Especially with this kind of story, I believe it is important for me to be able to understand things about this character.

For me writing the fragments was fun and interesting, I hope things turn out all right.

What If?: I had to choose between the red pill and the blue pill?

I would choose the blue pill.

Although I like knowing things and although I despise ignorance, I would most definitely not go down the rabbit hole. People who would choose the red pill are probably foolish and need to rethink what they think they know.

One obvious reason for remaining in the system is that the “outside” might be desolate and really, really not worth going through all the trouble and giving up your decent life within the system.

The person who would choose the red pill here says that “the decent life” isn’t really a life, it’s a construction of the system to keep you content as a tool for exploitation. When we are separated from reality, when we cannot relate to our true environment, we can access no real meaning, because the things we think we are drawing meaning from or that give us meaning do not actually exist.

That’s a load of crap.

It’s a hard concept to grasp, but I’d argue “fake memories” have just as much value as “real” ones. First off, assuming that your senses can give you an accurate portrayal of reality, how much can you know actually happened? You could fall back on memory, but that might ALL be fake. I mean, really, memory is just an imprint somewhere in your head, it’s just a physical manifestation. So your entire past, your entire memory could have been constructed just a moment ago. I think you understand. “But I remember doing this, I remember what it feels like, what I was thinking” and so on… Obviously, however, what you remember really doesn’t matter, memory is not a perfect source, people forget things or remember things incorrectly all the time, it’s not inconceivable that with some advanced science, or just rare circumstances, your entire past has been simply imprinted on your mind.

But, an even more basic idea… Why are fake memories less valuable than “real” ones. Even when we assume that “real memories” are in fact real, I don’t see any reason for preferring them.

Emotions, memory, they are all chemicals, processes of our body, they are real, but not like we’d like to believe them to be.

For all we know, reality is completely different from how we perceive it. We might leave “the system” to find ourselves in another system, maybe a worse one. There’s always a middleman. Can we really trust our senses? They don’t say anything definitively about reality. You just know what your body tells you, reality could be entirely different, it’s all chemicals, and none of it is set in stone. There’s always a middleman. Whether it’s a plug in the back of our heads, or our senses, who cares? Maybe we are our own Matrix. Maybe we ourselves are the system we can’t escape.

Connection: Heart of Darkness and the Man Behind the Curtain

A very interesting point was brought up by Jenna this week. She compared HoD to the Wizard of Oz, at least in terms of its depiction of Kurtz. I found this comment very insightful, and it stimulated some thought. Kurtz is first depicted as an astounding person. His eloquence, his thoughts all resound with brilliance. Yet, Marlow discovers a very different Kurtz from what he had originally perceived. By the end of the book, Kurtz has been turned basically into an animal (as seen by his crawling). Likewise in the Wizard of Oz, throughout the entire plot, the main goal is to get to the all powerful, wonderful Wizard. Yet, in the end, he turns out to be a small man behind the curtain, pretending to be greater than what he is. Likewise, in Matrix Reloaded, we find out that “the One” is not a miracle prophesized by the Oracle, but yet another construction of the Matrix in order to balance some equation within the Matrix that is never really explained. We find there have been numerous “One”s in the past, and they all existed to fulfill the Machines’ purposes. In all of these popular plots, there is no escaping the system, just as something seems original, unique, humanity pulls back the curtain to find not a God, not a genius, but an small, twisted creature, less of a man, more of an animal. It is a lesson everyone must realize. There is no inherent value, goodness, God, there is only the grim truth of realism.