truth lies
What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story?
When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed,
don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid.
What you need are the plump comforts of a story.
Yesterday I was watching, again, the Nobel lecture by Mario Vargas Llosa,
a celebration to reading and writing, an ode to literature.
But more than that it made me think about the importance of dreaming
What is literature if not lies, escapes, parallel universes?
Those stories, those lies are what helps us cope with that other world that we like to call
Reality.
Who thought of this word, reality?
And when did it start to become mandatory to live in that world only?
When you are daydreaming you are told to stop being silly and face the facts.
If we have "unreal" ambition people will tell you to be more pragmatic
Artists are constantly seen as a rare group of people not quite commonsensical.
Why are we so obsessed about truth, reality and homogeneity
as if they were universal absolutes, when they clearly are not?
If stories, make-belief and pseudo-truths are the things that make life endurable
why can't we let ourselves indulge?
Better than happy-pills, therapy and breathing exercises;
what the world needs is more fantazising, daydreaming, story-telling.
And story-making.
Poetry, Alfons Mucha
