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Are Narrative Worlds Real? Reflections on Metaphysics

May 22, 2023

creativity, fiction, literature, metaphysics, philosophy, reality

As a child, whenever I got emotionally affected watching a film or reading a story, my folks would try to console me saying “It’s not real, don’t worry”. That didn’t help at all. To me, narrative worlds were real, more real than reality itself. After all, fiction and reality are not antonyms.

When we talk about the reality of imaginary worlds – narrative worlds, in our case – the discussion seems moot. “Of course narrative worlds are not real”, any random observer would likely utter with – not misplaced – confidence.

After all, when you follow the characters of a video game, you can always save your progress and restore if something goes wrong. Similarly, when you read about a lonely female programmer plagued by indecision, her life never leaves the confines of the novel. You can’t meet that woman, her actions don’t dictate yours and can’t change the world.

Or… can they?

narrative worlds real — Are photos real? Even if they are made “traditionally”, using light passing through a lens (rather than being e.g. a computer render), where do we draw the line between “too much post-production” blurring (no pun intended) the lines between being real and being imaginary? Establishing the reality of narrative worlds faces similar puzzles

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“Everything Is Evil”: Why Life Is Necessarily Flawed

August 22, 2022

Philosophy

life, philosophy, reality, time, truth

Unlike what you might think, the expression “everything is evil” is not an ethical assessment. Rather, it’s an existential one. This becomes apparent if we incorporate a bit more of the context: “Everything is evil. That is to say everything that is, is evil”.

These words belong to Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the 19th century – a literary giant with whom English-speaking audiences are not too familiar. One reason is that translating his poetry is considered notoriously difficult. Indeed, nobody dared to even attempt it until almost a century after his death.

At this point, I should make it clear: I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, an authority on Leopardi’s poetry. Not even remotely. What I’m doing in this post is literally taking one of Leopardi’s most (in)famous passages out of context, to discuss why “everything is evil”. That is, why life is necessarily flawed.

“There is no other good except nonbeing”, wrote Giacomo Leopardi. If everything is evil, life is **necessarily** flawed.

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Experience and Memory: a Problematic Relationship

May 2, 2022

Experiencing

creativity, experiencing, imagination, memory, reality, writing

It’s impossible to experience without memory. Think about it: If you had no memory beyond the immediate, ever-ghostly “now”, how could you remember how a sunset looked like? How could you remember your first kiss, or some important achievement?

Moreover, it’s not only experiencing that, without memory, would suffer. Learning would be difficult if not impossible. Much of what constitutes our humanity would be absent.

And yet, there’s something problematic about the coexistence of experience and memory. I’m of course referring to the fact that memory taints the experience it’s supposed to help us remember.

We often think we remember things very well, very accurately, maintaining an objective view to their real essence. As the perceptive, thinking reader that you are, I’m sure you’ve discovered many problems in the sentence above.

The truth is, we don’t remember things all that well, not very accurately, and it’s quite by definition that we can’t hold an objective view, let alone to the “real essence” of things – good luck defining that, especially for emotions, thoughts, and states of mind.

As I’ve said before, memory is crucial for writing – either fiction or nonfiction. So, how do we go about resolving the paradoxical coexistence between experience and memory?

experience memory — This image from the 80s helps me remember some scenes of my early childhood. But the memories are a **poor** guide for creating a factual foundation. Still, it helps me (re)create a non-fact based reality which is still useful

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