Abstraction

Do you have to deconstruct everything?

What? I don't know. Maybe. I think so. Perhaps it is the thought that cannot be un-thought, the mode of appraisal that seeks to situate everything with respect to its many causes as part of a continuing process, but also analyses how each thing relates to itself. Metamodernism doesn't immediately make sense as a word, but if we think about it in terms of modernism meaning directness, the attempted sweeping away of barriers between worldly phenomena and human understanding, then metamodernism consists in yet more things: the directness applies also to the work itself and not just its content: for instance the recognition of the presence of the author and the audience. No less, from this vantage point other ways of looking at the world start feeling somehow incomplete or dishonest. In other words, I'm not sure. It might be the case that I have to deconstruct everything. I didn't say this at the time, but it crosses my mind now that deconstruction can be another word for destruction. Well I don't think that's all that I am capable of. I really think that we can build things: humanity, communities, individuals. We can build towers of significance and thought. Though we may have divided their component blocks into a multitude of pieces.

But does this necessarily mean that there is a certain distance always present between the self and the world of experience? Yes I think it might. Paradoxically, intellectual directness appears to lead on some other level to an indirectness. I must confess I worry that I am losing my grip on what it really means to feel.

Briefly, I have just begun to peruse the possibility that the commonness of the theme of not knowing whether the events in a work of fiction are real (within the fictional world, for example as far as all of the characters are concerned) are a comment on the author's very own questions as to the realness of their own work. Sometimes it must seem so real, and sometimes it must seem like the most distant fantasy. When a protagonist wakes up and it is all a dream, is the author telling us how it feels to complete a story? Most writers are writers, and in any work of fiction where the themes of a journey or long and difficult task are present seem to me to be very good examples of instances where the subject matter of the created work lends itself very strongly to becoming a metaphor for how it feels to create the work. The reason I considered this last idea was the nagging question that I did not know whether all that I had written up until that point was the truth, or mere fiction, and we are wont to generalize the personal. I have no answers to any of these questions.