Fact, Fiction, and the Beautiful Risk of A/theism

Fact, Fiction, and the Beautiful Risk of A/theism

By Creston Davis

Fiction, whether composed or digested, is always a foray into the unknown.  It seems blatantly obvious from the nature of the word itself, which, like many words in English, comes from Latin.  In this case the word fiction is distilled as fictionem (fictio) meaning “a fashioning or feigning.”  The verb to feign means to represent falsely.  More interesting this word is historically related to the idea of kneading as in shaping dough or to form something out of a chaotic indefinable blob.

Fiction is like making up a story or myth, a legend, a fairytale.  One of the curious virtues of our overly rationalized society is that we assume that truth functions like a mathematical or scientifically verifiable fact, like the Pythagorean theorem (i.e., a2+b2=c2).  Facts are what save us all from hopelessly sliding down into the immoral pit of despair.  Facts are like condoms that protect us from the dis-ease of fiction, fantasy, and moral decrepitude.  Thus there exists for us a very simple binary:  Facts/Fictions and neither the twain shall meet.

But it only takes a moment of reflection to reveal that we human beings don’t function within the matrix of this binary at all; indeed in many respects the binary is something of a feigned incantation conjured up from the mysterious bowels of hyper-rationalists, like accountants, bankers, and other bureaucrats that have suffocated our planet with red-tape and secret dealings.   For example, speaking logically, if this binary is a fact than we must ask not only whence it comes, but also, how do we verify the binary of Fact/Fiction itself?  But notice here too that suddenly the fact of this binary itself contains the necessity of fiction (otherwise the binary wouldn’t be a fact).

Don’t mistake what I’m saying here:  I’m not arguing that facts are bad things.  On the contrary facts are helpful and important, but they too have something of a deceptive nature for which we should be vigilant.  Rather what I am gesturing to here is that just because there is a “fact” does not relieve us from our own nature as human beings (and by extension our collective interaction called history).

A fact then corresponds to something that is true because it can be verified.  So what makes a statement true is that it corresponds to a fact.  But this can led us into a surprising conclusion that many of us might not like because if this is true than facts are read to be interchangeable with true statements.  Ineluctably, we are forced into the strange conclusion that there is only one fact, which is “the truth.”  Donald Davidson presents this argument (sometimes called the “Sling-shot argument”) in his Truth and Meaning book.   Perhaps the most convincing thinker of this argument is Kurt Gödel.  And just like that, on logical grounds, facts become far more complicated than they first appear.

Facts are contingent too.  At one time in history it’s a fact that the earth is flat, but this fact is overturned for a world that is round like a circle.  Facts can and often times change over time and are contingent on language and cultural influences.   Thus to assume that fact is always and simply opposed to fiction poses some logical and historical (not to mentioned linguistic) difficulties.  Indeed, we could even say that to hold to this fact/fiction binary is itself a foray into insanity insofar as insanity is a suspension of reality.

Apart from the historical, logical, and linguistic problems that “facts” pose there is another subject of inquiry that casts some doubts on facts namely, psychoanalysis.  The Austrian thinker, Sigmund Freud, developed psycho-analysis and most basically attempts to scientifically analyze the human psyche, which gives rise to how we behave, experience and think about our world.  The only problem here is that the psyche side of the human is not empirically visible, at least not directly.  So to analyze what you don’t directly perceive (i.e., the psyche) one must, as Freud did, work backwards, as it were.  That is to say, Freud tried to understand how the unseen aspects of our humanness (what he called the unconscious), relates to what can be empirically observable.  So, for example, if a husband mistakenly refers to his spouse as “Mom,” this action can reveal some deeper, unseen truth about the husband’s desires, drives, and so forth.

From this cursory definition of psychoanalysis we can see that human beings can sometimes do strange things.  It doesn’t take long to recall a few examples: all we have to do is think of your neighbor’s habits and interactions with you.  Knowing this can conclude that human beings don’t fit into the category of “fact”; indeed we can sometimes be considered contradictory as the great American poet, Walt Whitman nicely testifies in his “Song of Myself” poem:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

So facts, though significant and important, cannot account for our human behavior.  This leaves us with the need to understand ourselves, our history, and our desires (e.g., love, vengeance, hatred etc.) in ways that are different from an anemic reduction to facts and impersonal disembodied rationalized “truths.”  For human beings are not purely rational machines; we are rather unique, different and often times inspiring if not confusing and strange.  If we weren’t made strange we certainly act odd, uncanny, and strange.

In this fashion, we can see why purely scientific ways of accounting for being human fall short giving way to more creative modes that attempt to figure us out.  And this is why a strictly fact based reality must make room for a different mode for engaging the mystery or our existence.  And we have a name for this, it’s called: Story—the art of fiction.  It may be, that our uncanny existence on this tiny plant, Earth located in an inconceivably large cosmos, requires us to appeal to the authority of feigned fiction-making in order to grasp the indefinable even nebulous borders that mysteriously comprise what we vaguely call “our reality.”  For it is in re-presenting our reality falsely that we paradoxically gain access to an insight, a hope, and a truth that ebbs and flows in a hidden, tucked away pattern of being that is somehow asymmetrically related to the very limits of our reflexive abilities in word and deed to account for this pattern.   In other words, the very tools that we use to access our truth are put forward as conscious half-truths and even lies.  But the beauty of these lies are magically redeemed in the very act of risking the words (lies) we use to describe our own incompleteness.  In this light, telling tales and conjuring up stories and myths often reveal deeper truths about us than vulgar prosaic facts could ever tell; indeed the problem of facts, in the last instance, never risk anything at all and that is why they are stripped of beauty and lack mystery.  That is why facts are so impoverish and fiction so rich that the latter cannot help but to touch us, draw us into the “rabbit-hole”, and even trick us into feeling the true depths of our void.

In my novel, The Devil’s Demure there is a scene in which a college student comes to terms with this paradox of fiction when she experiences the wave of power that strikes her off balance—a wave that can only be described in terms of what Jacques Lacan called the “order of the Real” the gap in the symbolic order (language).

“What am I?” Patricia asks.  Her voice breaks silence.  The sound of her voice strikes her oddly, strangely.  Thrown off, she clears her throat, “eHEMM.”

“What am… I?” Repeating her question, this time stressing the verb as she leaps out of her chair and moves over her room like a disembodied ghost.  Dashing across her dorm room, stumbling over the Bio-Chem book wrapped in her dirty clothes.  Reaching for her mirror, she begins frantically searching it as if it was a window into a black hole.  Finding her eyes she peers into them—the windows of her soul.

“Ahhhh”, Patricia screams as she realizes her soul has fled, and the cracks begin to show.

….

Later in the chapter, Patricia converses with her Christian boyfriend on the steps of St James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue, Midtown-Manhatten.

….

“But, Patricia, you must believe in a higher-power.”  Arthur’s tone is forced and slightly annoying.  Patricia looks up at him; he is silhouetted, the sun gleaming off the edge of the church roof.  Her eyes meet his as her shoulders shrug her palms turning skyward.  The noise of the city suspended.

Arthur’s words quicken: “What will your parents think if you were to go home for Christmas and tell them that Christianity, … hell, religion, is all just one big act, a farce?”

“I don’t know?  I just don’t have it in me.”  She says.

“It’s like I’m blanking on a simple math problem.  ‘What is two plus two?’”  Again her shoulders meet her chin.  Arthur is blushing.

“I don’t have the memory bank for belief anymore.  It’s just gone, poof… like a thief stole it in the night.”  Patricia reaches for his hand as he sits down next to her on the cold, concrete steps.  His ass is instantly numbed.

“But, Arthur, I think you’re looking at this all the wrong way.  I don’t see this as a lose, maybe.  But, maybe, it’s a good thing.  THE God, THE powerful one ensuring my meaning, my meaning is now gone.  And this makes me desire my own meaning, to find myself, to know what I love and how to love.  I, guess, I don’t know, I guess I just have to risk life.”

“But that’s crazy! Crazy.”  Arthur interrupts.

“You’re just letting the liberal professors get into your head.”

“No, I’m just facing reality for what it is without sugar-coating it in religious beliefs that helps us all keep functioning without going mad.  But this is not madness; atheism is not insanity.  Arthur, it’s less mad and insane than it is risky and truthful.”  She pauses, Arthur is speechless.

“You see without God and the promise of everything working out just perfectly, like a cosmic Disney fantasy story, I am able to live.  I can be free.  But the risk comes when you realize that all this is just one big mistake.  Yet the beauty of this chaos is that we can make sense of it, not by science—science invents its own God called ‘reason’ that makes sure it all comes out right like the scientific method or something.  Science is for those who cannot or don’t want to confront reality too.”

“How do you makes sense of chaos? That’s just stupid and, honestly, impossible.” Arthur indignantly says as his body shifts, his shoe tapping the step.  He is impatient.

“I don’t know, but perhaps we make sense of this by trying to make sense of this.  There’s no final answer, no pre-coordinated framework of ‘truth’ that measures one’s success or failures.  We just have to take what we have and try it out.  We know we’re gonna fail, hell just look at the 20^th century!  But maybe in a freak-twist of fate, in our failure we are already successful.”

….