The Ore and Aura of the Real

[Gary Freedman]

I swim in a sea of reality, but that makes me no more a fish than Moby Dick was. Mine is an unreal universe in which the exceptional is commonplace, in which the transient states of frustration or depression or meaninglessness are the norm. I am not a character whose life conforms more or less to the life of the ordinary man. I am an anticharacter in my experiences and in my sense of the world of reality. I require the fabulous and the bizarre. That is my metier. My purpose and philosophy of life is nonrealistic, fabulous even. I breathe the air that normal men breathe, but that makes me no more normal than any tragic figure of literature. I am both the author and the creative transformation of a fantastic tragedy. You, my friends, both real and imagined readers, are the audience of an absurdist play worthy of Beckett.

One might state it as an axiom: the anticharacter requires not only a nonrealistic setting, but a nonrealistic (or fabulous) purpose and philosophy of life in the author. I myself admirably fulfill this axiom. Not even my most fervent admirers would maintain (at least I hope they wouldn't) that my assumptions about the human condition, and far less normal human reactions to it (even if we did accept my premises), are a realistic portrayal of what is the case. We have to say something like this: I convey how things sometimes feel for the normal person when he or she is depressed or frustrated. But in my world depression and frustration are the normal course of life. In all those common extrapolated usages, there is a sense of the ludicrous for the normal man. But not for me. My life is ludicrous. My experiences, my feelings, my thoughts reflect a nightmarish dream world or something out of a book, both literally and metaphorically. Yes, for me, since early childhood, real life suddenly became like "something out of a book" -- it would seem unreal to a normal person. But for me life is unreal. Life is not like something out of a book. Life is something out of a book. My literary models are fragments of my lived experience. I have erected in actuality a model of a hypothetical universe that is much worse than the actuality. But that unreal world of the unreal is my actuality. What is interesting is that my life approximates a world more characteristic of tragedy than of the novel. No one has ever blamed Oedipus Rex or Lear for lacking realism, since we have all been trained to make the necessary metaphorical leap, to suspend what constitutes our ordinary standards of reality. And that is what you, the audience, is required to do in appraising my life, my world. You must suspend what constitutes your ordinary standards of reality.

With me it is the articulation, not the articulated, that fundamentally matters. The process and not the content is all and everything. What I wish to convey in my writings is the experience of the bizarre and the meaningless. The failure to see this is why so many who read me have failed to grasp my essence. I don't think it is altogether mere bad memory that will make you unable to recall concrete descriptions of my experiences and feelings from my writings. It is of course part of my intention that what should stay in the reader's mind is the general process, not its details. What I wish to convey is a pathological process of existence, like the state of anemia. You cannot make discoveries about anemia with normal-blood-count patients; or about anxiety neurosis with the bovinely contented. I cannot convey my message by relying on ordinary means. My means are to extract from published material the essence of identifications and associations that make up my personality. That means or method -- what some call simple plagiarism -- is my message. I restate and paraphrase what I identify with. I am like a mirror. The mirror reflects images. The mirror does not contain an original image, like a painting. But that is the purpose and the process of the mirror. My writings are a mirror that does not describe my world, but which reflects my world. My blog posts are mirror images of myself. I suppose my purpose is an existentialist one. My intent is to reflect the meaninglessness and futility of human existence. I want to show that the imitative life is the only real life. I and my writings are an extraction of the world's sorrows, griefs and passions from the ore and aura of the real. I am a miner of reality, the reality that is mine.