What Is Plausible Story, Anyway? part 2

Part 1 is here. But it isn't very helpful, is it? By god, this is a cryptic place, you thought to yourself. Those pitcher plants sure are cool. Weird, but cool.

Sometimes even the most ethereal of us likes to have things spelled out in black and white. Concretized. Brought down to earth. Is this a date or are we just hanging out? No, really, it would be fine either way, but if you just let me know, then I'll know how to act. I think. Right?

So. Plausible Story.

It's really very simple.

1. It's a place to tell stories.

True stories? Maybe. Mostly. What is truth, anyway? Oh, no, now we're being cryptic again.

2. It's a place to talk about the truth of stories.

Yes, what is truth, anyway? My truth, your truth, her truth, their truth? (ahem) OUR truth? My cat makes sense to himself, but I don't see my house the way he does. I usually make sense to myself but sometimes people look at me funny. George Bush makes sense to himself but the rest of the world thinks the U.S. has gone loco. What of it? you ask. Sounds like a bunch of morally relativist claptrap.

May it be interesting claptrap. (What an odd word, claptrap.)

Full disclosure: it's likely to be mostly MY truth. I'm the Author here. That is to say, there's only one of me and even my imagination has limits.

3. It's a place to talk about how contradictory, paradoxical, and ambiguous stories (truths?) intersect, overlap, collide, divide, mutate, and mate with each other.

Remember the big flap in the 2000 election about the merits of the reality-based community? Remember when the Church persecuted Galileo? Remember the Americas in 1491? Remember when Zeus's mother gave Cronus a stone to swallow instead of Zeus?

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me.

Comments

[Julie l'Amazone]

Et voila- I have seen the online Hill Person Realm, and it is good. Will also have to read shalimar- that is one champion of a sentence, and I have had lots of dreams about waves & floods & attendant ambiguous relationships to the waves: let 'em at it? run like hell? build a watertight house?
J.

[hilllady]

Why thank you, Mademoiselle l'Amazone. I am honored by your kind attention. The volcano will be erupting shortly.

h

p.s. Now that I'm more than thirty pages into the Rushdie book I'm having second thoughts. But he could still pull it off. And for a sentence like that I'm not too picky. Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer for a relatively silly book of stories (The Interpreter of Maladies) that also contained one of my favorite stories ever (The Third and Final Continent)--and therefore I begrudge her nothing.