Reductionism

As Jack Chambers, the (fictional) 'Writer in Residence' at Portland State University explains, "Writing Fiction is simply a matter of discarding the useless bits of Reality. Think of Reality as a hunk of marble, Fiction as "The Pieta'... sixty percent less rock. The genius is in the editing."

Or, as he puts it another way: "Reality is Brownian Motion, random, incomprehensible, a jumble of cause and effect. There's no 'Why' to it, or even much 'How.' If you want it to mean something, you have to discard 99% of the causes, and focus on 1% of the effects."

His lawyer friend, Rachel, has more than once ignored his argument that "Justice is what you get after excluding the evidence."

Well... Jack is no genius. He should discard sixty percent of his arguments.

Who can say whether a hunk of marble at the quarry is more Real (i.e., less Fictional) than the same rock reduced to a statue. Are the bits cut away less meaningful than those that remain? Did Michaelangelo remove the right bits? Can it really be possible to add meaning by subtracting content? We need to distinguish 'meaning' from 'understanding', even if Jack doesn't. If we fully comprehended marble, would The Pieta be a fragment of its meaning, or the apotheosis?

In Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet', his narrator, Darley, kept a record of daily life in Alexandria, intending to write a 'true account' of their time. Happily, the little girl he salvaged from the wreckage, mixed up the pages and drew pictures on them. All that remained when Darley begins to write 'Justine' (the very book we are reading) were his memories--not the 'truth', at all, but a construct--edited by the irrelevant processes of Time. Better than a diary, the memories are the story.

What could better illustrate the more or less random way fragments of Reality are transformed into Story?

Well... how about this? My niece, a librarian, recently posted on Facebook an interview with a Cambridge University professor. It concerned a library catalogue created by the son of Christopher Columbus. This fellow (a man of grandiose ambition, like his Dad) meant to collect a copy of every book in the world--a task that might still have seemed possible in the early days of printing. He hired readers to summarize his vast collection of books, then collected their summaries in a handwritten book of 2000 pages. When he died the catalogue was lost, only to be rediscovered a few weeks ago in Denmark. Although written in Latin it seems to have been mis-shelved in a collection of Icelandic literature. There it remained, lost and ignored for 500 years.

I recalled another librarian, Jorge Luiz Borges, who imagined a universal library in which all memory is preserved and connected--a premonition of the internet. It seemed ironic, or nearly tragic, that Borges died just a few decades before this catalogue was discovered. Still, other librarians, elsewhere, in other times, will doubtless accumulate, preserve, rediscover and redistribute other lost memories. It's a sacred task, performed mostly for love. But no matter how diligent they are, they'll never capture the most important fragments of human experience--the truly sacred memories... OUR OWN.

An old man wanders the twilit playing field, poking his cane at the beer cans and candy wrappers of memory.

Mnemosyne jogs past. Recollection, revelation, distraction--all at once. She beckons. And disappears into the glowing mist.

Wait. What was I thinking?