Reality
is a fragile concept. Humans feel the need to demarcate it, to ensure that we
are talking about the same perceptions of time and space. Our reality is shaped
by culture and science, which dictates how we interact with our environment.
Growing up, we learn that reality is a location, but as we develop, it becomes
a mindset. As under-stimulated high-school students in a damp classroom, we’re
taught that reality might not even exist. Apparently Plato had locked his students
in a cave for a lifetime and once they got out, they only believed in the world
of the shadows. Berkeley said that if an abandoned building collapses and no
one witnesses it, it’s impossible to know whether it actually happened.
Apparently it’s necessary to state that cameras or bunnies hopping by also
counts as witnesses. But realistically speaking, my class appreciated Matrix
metaphysics the most, taught by our favourite substitute teacher, Keanu Reeves.
What if humans just made up rules to make sense of what we call reality, while
we are actually dreaming, floating in rows of industrial bathtubs. Our entire
reality could be completely coded, invented or calculated by something or
someone.
When reality was still a location to
me, I learned how to write and attempted to capture it in illustrated diaries.
My fantastical projects were always in separate notebooks, filled with fairy
tales, short stories and entire worlds I would design. The constant production
of writing was fuelled and inspired by the endless stories and books my parents
would read to me. The concepts and locations of all the narratives seemed so
realistic that they must have been
real. For example, my grandma’s best stories were about her childhood in the
Middle Ages, because she could talk for hours about all the knights and pages
in search of the Holy Grail. The stories enhanced the world around me, giving
the impression that mythical creatures existed in the corner of my eyes – when
I would turn my head they quickly disappear and re-emerge in my blind spot. On
the other hand, once I convinced myself of this mythical layer, I also brought
monsters into reality, like dinosaurs that lurked behind my bedroom door, or
the witch Bindoeventoken that would pinch my toes when I was sleeping. My
parents solved that problem by letting me sleep with a wooden sword under my
pillow, so I could fight off the monsters in my dreams. The wooden sword made
me the knight in my narrative.
When I was eight, me and my best
friend wrote a religion into existence. Like many before us, we were in search
for meaning and understanding of reality, but it seemed too simple for the
answer to existence to be found in existence itself. Then were did all this
mythical realness come from? We figured that there had to be a world parallel
to ours, ruled by the dragon goddess Asa, in which all fantasy creatures lived
peacefully and happily. At the edge of their world, the creatures of darkness
brewed plans to destroy the entire mythical world, after which they would come
to our reality to haunt and tantalize mankind. However, the enemies threatening
our worlds materialized in the people around us. The frog monsters were based
on some very strange people in our class, who called themselves the kregits. We
prayed for the protection of our world, of which we had mapped every centimetre
and composed an encyclopaedia of all its inhabiting creatures. We performed ancient
rituals and spells to protect our fantasy, its symbolism and tradition
actualized in writing. We believed that the future of mankind rested on our
shoulders, two silly, blond girls who loved reading, writing and drawing. The
narratives holding our religion together were so extensive and real to us that
we managed to completely indoctrinate ourselves for four years, until my friend
moved away. A functional cult is based on proximity of its members and the
spell of the narrative we had summoned into reality wore off.
I still wanted more from reality,
which was now lodged back into its fixed locations, so I decided to become a
writer. In middle school I wrote novels, abandoning story lines and first
chapters constantly, because the ideas were all competing to be penned. I
started writing with a friend again, as the rules of the fictional world you
create together are unpredictable and challenging. We filled 13 notebooks and
more than 900 pages with our fantasy universe, that was surrounded by an
additional mythology we would jokingly make up as we cycled home together every
day. Writing became a way of escaping monotony and exploring my new
oversensitive adolescent brain. My own stories ranged thematically from the
bizarre tales about geishas, assassins, female spies or anti-heroes that happen
to stumble into a wild adventure and accidentally save the day. Maybe even
about fish-people showing up at your door and taking you along their quest, or
a guy who breaks his leg and realizes he always had felt like a one-legged person,
his unconscious wish being fulfilled in a horrible accident, or a high-school
drop-out who becomes a rock legend in Italy, fans screaming her name wherever
she goes.
One day I wrote a story about myself 20 years in the future, my fantasy guiding my pen over the paper. Once I finished and read it, the fluffy hairs in my neck straightened themselves and I felt overcome with unease. The narrative starts by introducing my introverted blond daughter who depended heavily on me due to a serious eye condition. I was divorced, apparently in hiding with my daughter somewhere. My husband had loved me, but I needed to get away with her. He reminded me of all our good moments, but I couldn’t hear it any longer. He became manipulative and eventually violent, so I took the child and left. I bought a small white-plastered farm in Andalusia, surrounded with blossoming orange trees. We were inside, the sun shining on her blond hair. The white lace curtains were blown through the window, tickling our faces. All of a sudden, she got up and seemed to look out of the window. I followed her empty eyes and saw my husband at the bottom of the hill, tall, suited up, wearing a silver gingko leaf on his collar. He must have been walking for days, his suit covered in dust and drenched with sweat. He saw me.
The narrative stopped there, but every time I would fall asleep, I would dream about my daughter and I, lounging under the orange trees. She would run her fingers through the grass and ask me to describe its colour. Every night I desperately tried to explain the green, but would wake up before I succeeded. I started to worry about her even when I was awake, as if she was waiting in the corner of my eye, disappearing if I turned my head, making me unable to help or guide her. Dream, reality and narrative became increasingly intertwined. I didn’t want to sleep anymore, I didn’t want to dream anymore, but becoming an insomniac didn’t seem to solve anything, because now I had even more time to think about her. Now I had more time to write about it, which I now recognize to be the process of actualizing the narrative into my reality. Unconsciously I seemed to recognise that my reality and those of others were not compatible, so I kept it to myself. No one seemed to see that I was living two lives, and a month went by.
One day I wrote a story about myself 20 years in the future, my fantasy guiding my pen over the paper. Once I finished and read it, the fluffy hairs in my neck straightened themselves and I felt overcome with unease. The narrative starts by introducing my introverted blond daughter who depended heavily on me due to a serious eye condition. I was divorced, apparently in hiding with my daughter somewhere. My husband had loved me, but I needed to get away with her. He reminded me of all our good moments, but I couldn’t hear it any longer. He became manipulative and eventually violent, so I took the child and left. I bought a small white-plastered farm in Andalusia, surrounded with blossoming orange trees. We were inside, the sun shining on her blond hair. The white lace curtains were blown through the window, tickling our faces. All of a sudden, she got up and seemed to look out of the window. I followed her empty eyes and saw my husband at the bottom of the hill, tall, suited up, wearing a silver gingko leaf on his collar. He must have been walking for days, his suit covered in dust and drenched with sweat. He saw me.
The narrative stopped there, but every time I would fall asleep, I would dream about my daughter and I, lounging under the orange trees. She would run her fingers through the grass and ask me to describe its colour. Every night I desperately tried to explain the green, but would wake up before I succeeded. I started to worry about her even when I was awake, as if she was waiting in the corner of my eye, disappearing if I turned my head, making me unable to help or guide her. Dream, reality and narrative became increasingly intertwined. I didn’t want to sleep anymore, I didn’t want to dream anymore, but becoming an insomniac didn’t seem to solve anything, because now I had even more time to think about her. Now I had more time to write about it, which I now recognize to be the process of actualizing the narrative into my reality. Unconsciously I seemed to recognise that my reality and those of others were not compatible, so I kept it to myself. No one seemed to see that I was living two lives, and a month went by.
My Dutch teacher gave a lecture on
something insignificant, while I was thinking of ways to change my future (or
present?). I realized that the story fundamentally changed my life like the
religion did, as the characters in the narrative manifested themselves in my
reality. I didn’t see or sense them but constructed them and their ability to
influence my life. In the
middle of that insignificant Dutch class, I started crying. The realization
functioned as a mental reset, in which all characters were transported back to
their own realm. I was left embarrassed but relieved amongst my peers. I
stopped writing fiction for a while, just keeping diaries to ensure that the
narrative was based on reality, not vice versa. In the small philosophy
classroom with its discoloured digiboard, I could debate reality without having
to find answers, but drift away in my existential thoughts guided by great
minds.
Reality became even more abstract in university, now it’s only a simulation with no connection between symbols and meaning. We are being trained to deconstruct and reconstruct assumptions about reality, writing paper after paper about truth versus bias. We frame it as the entirety of history happening at once, a self-contained mathematical formula encompassing all matter or through the supposed reliability of empiricism. While we are researching our reality extensively, the campus environment seems to contradict all notions that define it. Time becomes relative and academics suck up all my energy and motivation, meaning that if I would leave the campus, I would not go far. My experienced reality was limited to campus and the route to the Albert Heijn, my favourite cafĂ© and the station. I felt like the rest of the world was made of collapsing buildings, without me witnessing, recording or filming it.
It did not take me too long to start studying literature, in which truth and fable are intertwined and the scholar has to carefully abstract his or her conclusions. Literature does not inform one of absolute truths, but the narrative describes an individual experience established through social relations. As human experiences make up the fabric of our culture and scientific discourse, the narrative is what collects and connects different disciplines. I became a self-proclaimed armchair traveller, like my high school mentor, travelling through different lives, dreams, traumas and tapping into a spectrum of human experience through the novels stacked on my desk. It made me realize that whereas we can never pinpoint a collective truth by trying to integrate our individual subjective experiences, literature represents many lived social realities, whose narratives underlie societal change. The mythical world right outside my perception has always been a metaphor for my experience, which I valued again once I realised its political potential. Whether Plato, Berkeley, Baudrillard or Keanu Reeves was right, does not impact my experience of reality itself, in the same sense that humans would act the same whether or not free will exists. Rather the narrative that I read and interpret has always had a profound effect on how I interacted with, thought or spoke about my world. The narrative became essential to understanding reality, but more importantly, I started using my own narrative as a tool to producing reality. I finally realised that whatever I write is shaping my social reality and on an unrealistically large scale, contributing to an essential body of text that could potentially change our society.
Reality became even more abstract in university, now it’s only a simulation with no connection between symbols and meaning. We are being trained to deconstruct and reconstruct assumptions about reality, writing paper after paper about truth versus bias. We frame it as the entirety of history happening at once, a self-contained mathematical formula encompassing all matter or through the supposed reliability of empiricism. While we are researching our reality extensively, the campus environment seems to contradict all notions that define it. Time becomes relative and academics suck up all my energy and motivation, meaning that if I would leave the campus, I would not go far. My experienced reality was limited to campus and the route to the Albert Heijn, my favourite cafĂ© and the station. I felt like the rest of the world was made of collapsing buildings, without me witnessing, recording or filming it.
It did not take me too long to start studying literature, in which truth and fable are intertwined and the scholar has to carefully abstract his or her conclusions. Literature does not inform one of absolute truths, but the narrative describes an individual experience established through social relations. As human experiences make up the fabric of our culture and scientific discourse, the narrative is what collects and connects different disciplines. I became a self-proclaimed armchair traveller, like my high school mentor, travelling through different lives, dreams, traumas and tapping into a spectrum of human experience through the novels stacked on my desk. It made me realize that whereas we can never pinpoint a collective truth by trying to integrate our individual subjective experiences, literature represents many lived social realities, whose narratives underlie societal change. The mythical world right outside my perception has always been a metaphor for my experience, which I valued again once I realised its political potential. Whether Plato, Berkeley, Baudrillard or Keanu Reeves was right, does not impact my experience of reality itself, in the same sense that humans would act the same whether or not free will exists. Rather the narrative that I read and interpret has always had a profound effect on how I interacted with, thought or spoke about my world. The narrative became essential to understanding reality, but more importantly, I started using my own narrative as a tool to producing reality. I finally realised that whatever I write is shaping my social reality and on an unrealistically large scale, contributing to an essential body of text that could potentially change our society.
