Is Reality Really Real?

Artists are dreamers.  We often don't want intruders trampling through our insouciant dreams.  Why do we want to escape?  For various reasons, depending on the individual experience, but how real is "reality", really?  Reality is the proverbial drag, man! And I should know, I'm a hippie from way back. I didn't invent music, or protest, or lingo, or art, or drugs, or communal living, but I've been a poster child for all of those things at one time or another.  It can't be separated from me, it can't be excised like a tumor, and it isn't a "disorder".  Even when the lines between what I know is my baseline of real and what is fantasy are smearing like the walls in someone's acid trip, I'm aware of where the lines are generally drawn.  They are often very narrowly defined in order that many authorities' jobs are easier.  Law Enforcement, Psychiatry, Education all purport to know what it is and how to defend it. My training in the liberal arts can be summed up in this quote by Deepak Chopra:  "Realty is a construct, a response of the observer."  I can't be reformed to think of it differently; it can't be counseled into existence by any amount of psychology or logical theorizing.  We can agree on general principles, but the edges are not so clearly defined.  We will compare to the average when it is convenient, and celebrate the "outside the box" thinkers when THAT is convenient.  The rules change by context, not by logic.  Hipness can't be driven out like a fever, It's as part of me as my skin, and for every bit the same reason as anyone is anything in life. I know the difference between "hip" and "square" to use the old hippie lingo, and yet I sometimes choose to ignore one definition and step into a different one.  In that way I make comparisons that others are unable or unwilling to make.  

Classification is something that humans do to make life less scary.  By placing a label on something, we feel that it has been neutralized, when, of course, that is often far from the truth, and by so doing create all manner of frightful prejudices, as people focus on the label itself, and their relation to it, rather than the individual entity it's purported to represent.

Reality is getting up at the alarm clock's clarion insistence, like some nightmarish banshee piercing our rejuvenating dreams with a sharp stick to our eye, and yet we know WE set its chronometric cries.  We chose to.  We long for the warm sheets even as we desert them for our surrogates: hot shower water and coffee/tea and the warm "hearth" of the TV weather girl/man's chipper tootling.  Our toast's warm smell reminds us of our mother's kitchen, while our eggs remind us of what they are: embryonic chickens, albeit nourishing, at least if we are doing the cooking.  

Reality is dodging the insanity of everyone going everywhere at once so as NOT to miss everyone's being somewhere making money.  Your boss hopes it's where you/she/he works.  You secretly wish it was somewhere else.  You notice a fender bender accident and say a little prayer that it wasn't you losing a week's pay to an insurance company's deductible, which, without even lifting a finger, pulled off one of commerce's neatest tricks: making money off of tragedy.  Surely the damage will cost more than the deductible to repair, but nowhere near the premium that person has been fleeced by for years: reality.

Whatever you might have been doing today, you don't, because your time is spoken for.  Your rest prepared you, your meal replenished you, and your journey deposited you at the object of your existence: work.  Your time is spoken for and now that you are "clocked in" you are someone else's.  It is to be hoped that you arrived at this juncture by your bubbly personality, your wit and charm, your knack for problem solving, when it is really your willingness to accept the least possible pay imaginable for one with your plethora of skills, and there you happily while away your serviceable years:  In reality.

Fuck off!  That is NOT reality!  That is an age-old ruse to make slavery voluntary and antiseptic!

Reality is butterflies and bees, thunder and trees, earthquakes and disease, starlight and stone and pollen and freeze.

I didn't get this out of a water pipe, although altering reality can help one to see both what it is and what it isn't.  It is proximity to death which has shown me the preciousness of living.  My life has flashed before my eyes on many occasions, and never did I say, "Oh no! I didn't finish my sales goals for today!" even when I was in the sales profession.  On the other hand I HAVE said, "Wow, I'm really going to miss "so and so", but I've also said, "There was so much I didn't accomplish!" so I suppose if ladder climbing is your reality for accomplishment, that's fine, just don't tell me it has to be mine as well, and don't call it "the real world" either, because it isn't.

So what brought this on?  I've been living in fantasy again.  I know, it's shocking, isn't it?  I was recently bemoaning the fact that I can no longer watch movies, because I live in the real world and can't afford cable TV.  Then I remembered the local free library has movies, so I can explore other people's fantasies and compare them to my own.  In fact, every good artist does this.  Among others, I watched "Wild Strawberries", 1959, directed by Ingmar Bergman, in which an old man, faced with the knowledge of his imminent demise, reviews his life.  He is an eminent doctor and must travel to receive an honorary award, but beforehand, in sleep and during daydreams on his travels, he remembers the highlights of his life as having more to do with people he loved, and his having shared sad and wonderful experiences with them, than his work, which has made him wealthy, but cold.  In "Sullivan's Travels", 1941, directed by Preston Sturges, a successful director decides he is going to make a great pathos film called "O Brother Where Art Thou", about the plight of the poor and unwashed of the Great Depression.  His fellow director/producer friends tell him that he's crazy, that nobody wants to see that kind of film, and that he doesn't have the background to tell the story anyway, because he's never wanted for anything.  He then decides to go out among the "hobo" class to get an education.  However, the studio only signs off on it if they can come along as the support crew, which he only just barely manages to get disentangled from. Eventually, after many misadventures, he comes to realize that his friends were right, that the people don't want films about reality, they want to be entertained.  It's a fantasy about reality imitating reality in order to generate a more "real" fantasy, and of course, more recently, the Coen brothers went ahead and made the film in real life anyway, which adds another layer.  In an example of fate guiding reality delving into fantasy in order to better understand reality AND fantasy, all of these films that I chose were only coincidentally similar since I was choosing them more for their actors and directors and settings and genres than plot, because they are free to "rent", I next chose a film from 2006 called "Stranger Than Fiction", directed by Marc Forster, starring Will Ferrell as a repressed obsessive compulsive IRS agent, who, in the middle of going about his life, suddenly realizes he's being narrated, which sets off an interconnected set of events, during which, with the help of a couple of expert, and a few less than expert advisors, he finds his true self.  But in so doing, it ultimately leads towards his inevitable death at the hands of a brilliant, but somewhat sadistic author, played by Emma Thompson, writing her latest and greatest novel.  The tagline is "He's not crazy.  He's just written that way."  It was hilarious!

With this tangle of fate vs. reality vs. fantasy weaving itself through my conscious and subconscious this [yesterday] morning, I found myself dusting the bathroom plunger in preparation for cleaning the bathroom floor.  Once again faced with my nemesis, a drab reality, I started to curse the fate which had led to this most menial of tasks, and having to ask myself, "Do other people dust their plungers?" But then…I had an epiphany.  If I was dusting the plunger, it meant that it hadn't been used in some time, thus pointing up the fact that for some fairly extended period time—at least as long as the interval since I last cleaned the floor which mostly gets spot cleaned, while the fixtures get regular cleaning, and at least suctionwise—the toilet had been performing its general function most admirably.  Well, that, and I've managed to find a toilet-paper that begins to disintegrate before it even makes it off the roll.  In any case, I decided that it was going to be a glass half full day after all.  Then, having completed a few tasks on the day's list, I began to watch "Synecdoche, New York", from 2008 (rhymes with Schenectady, the first setting in the film), written and directed by Charlie Kaufman.  After the first few scenes I knew it was going to be deep, although intriguing and entertaining.  So inspired, and before I got too involved, I began to write this essay.

And now that it's over all I can do is shake my head.  I can only hint at the layering of reality vs. fantasy in this film. It's nearly bewildering and super creative.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is a theatrical director, and by midway he's won a grant to create a personal masterpiece, directing a play he's continually writing as he goes along about the brutal reality of our everyday lives.  He has actually hired actors to act out scenes from his own life.  In so doing he becomes involved in the actors' lives themselves and has to hire and fire new actors as actors he's hired begin to interact with each other in ways that he himself had or had intended to act, but either more or less successfully.  Meanwhile, the theater becomes too small to hold the ever expanding sets and has to be moved to a warehouse to incorporate more of the city settings (in a bit of unintended irony, real graffiti artists kept painting over the graffiti painted for the film, which then had to be repainted), then more warehouses to incorporate the sets of the warehouses while time expands and contracts through the collapse of two marriages and relationships with his parents and two daughters.  I know this type of feeling.  Throughout the film one is constantly challenged with what is real and what imaginary—for example, one of his girlfriends lives in a burning house.  

A soliloquy from the play in the film:

"Everything is more complicated than you think.  You only see a tenth of what is true.  There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make.  You destroy your life every time you choose, but maybe you won't know for twenty years, and you may never ever trace it to its source.  And you only get one chance to play it out.  Just try and figure out your own divorce!  And they say there is no fate, but there is!  It's what you create.  And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, and you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second—most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born—but while alive you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call, or a letter, or a look from someone or something to make it all right, and it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn't really.  So you spend your time in vague regret, or vaguer hope that something good will come along, something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved.  And the truth is, I feel so angry.  And the truth is, I feel so fucking sad.  And the truth is, I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long, and for just as long have been pretending I'm ok just to get along, just to…I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own.  Well, fuck everybody!  Amen."


I got a kick out of that little speech, which ironically is spoken by a preacher at a funeral in a scene that seems so completely forced and at odds with Caden Gotard's original vision of brutal reality (and also because it somewhat mirrors an earlier statement in this essay!).  However, the sentiment rings true even if the delivery and the scene is caricaturish.  The director is aged and ill by now, has hired a new person to play himself, so now she(!) is directing in a way that's more entertaining (a la "Sullivan's Travels") and he is still searching for meaning in his work.  But anyway thank god or nature or fate for showing that I'm not alone when I want to be precise and in the moment one day, and want to be 20 million miles away the next, how I'm not the only one who can be fearless one day, and paralyzed with anxieties another.  One minute the "real world" suffices, the next, it's a poor cousin to what I feel is really "real".  "Real" is one of those words that if you say it enough times loses its meaning.  Why? Because the word itself is a construct.  It has an assigned meaning, but its interpretation is entirely determined by context, just like the idea that it represents.

The feral boy in the woods, raised by wolves, may have a few social awkwardnesses in his own group, but in reality is a wolf.  Only if discovered by humans with their own inherent "realities" would he be made to feel as though he were something different.  Being a wolf is unusual for a human, but that doesn't make it not real when it happens.  Only a human would tell a wolf-boy, "You mustn't be a wolf.  You must be a real boy."

We are all part of reality, but everyone's is different.  Let people try to tell you what it is and they are indoctrinating you into their hallucination.  The Nazi party did this.  It happens all the time. You may choose to follow along, because there is safety in numbers, but everyone has an agenda.

I'm still working on my greatest masterpiece, something greater than the sum of my parts, but so far it's just me, and some stuff I've made along the way, which is scary.  Ironically, what I've also learned, is that, while it is poetic to dramatise the discovery that people are more important than professions, not one of the main characters in the above stories started at the bottom.  All of them had already achieved success in their fields.  It lends each with an aura of credibility and respect that is a basic human need as social creatures.  We need to see credentials.  Each character has had initial success in at least some of their relationships as well.  Sometimes I'd rather be scary than scared, and I can't be any more or less than real.  My job, what most people call "reality", is professional fantasist.  While society bases its whole structure around the illusions of "reality", I'm here to show that dreams are inseparable from what is considered real.  Nothing great was ever accomplished without first having a dream, or by continuing to have one, and sometimes by breaking rules.  I have daily flights of fancy, and sometimes my dreams are shattered, but my reality, whether it is plunger dusting, or fixing the car, or my social relationships, or purposely divorcing myself from normalized perceptions, is geared towards an overall dream of creation.  I very often feel it is guided by fate, while not being dictated by it completely, any more than I unquestioningly allow society to completely dictate my reality.  I do question my own decisions when they lead to failure, but they also lead to new paths, and to successes.  I am not a human creation, but a universal one.  We all are.  That's reality.  

J. Shidler, 2011-09-27