true storylines

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It’s no fiction I have a luscious range of engagements worth pursuing (not to mention economy of expression—not); and a vertiginous spectrum of attitudes that can be reliably entertaining (can be). Certainly it’s no fiction that I love writing.

I have so many unintegrated notes because I often make them when I have spare minutes, filing snippets away among many categories of interest. Eventually finding the gestalt with all the pieces and making the thing into its fulfilled landscape is so more appealing than assembling someone else’s puzzle (which reading a great novel also is—though reading is also a kind of writing. (I want to eventually weave that result with my nascent conception of “intergenric intimacy,” not here though).

Complex persons in a complex world cause complex stories, of course. That’s why Literature evolved. That's why psychology evolved: to express lived understanding and to gain structured understanding, not to devalue (as if we’re at fault for being); nor to objectify (diagnose, as if seeking to repair). Literature and psychology—literary psychology, I would now have it—exists because we’re human: We inquire about the world, so we inquire about ourselves.

At best, one doesn’t love a work of art because it reflects oneself; one loves the other for herself (himself, myself)—though I don’t consider persons objects of art! But you know the principle: art of living, living as an art, flourishing person as artist of their life.

Few persons elicit this kind of attitude from me about them.

Anyway, we can’t expect truth to always be simple, obviously. It’s not simple in Literature. Reality is labyrinthine. That’s why there’s narrative, why stories call for being told—or made: bringing all the nebulae and details of pointillistic life into the gestalt that they can belong to, and we give ourselves to that as reading lives—not for mere fabulation; rather to be one’s best effort to understand what really matters.