I am already a fan of the title here. I’ll write the note first, and then unpack the name.
To start off, there are two things about my new life as a fully fictional character that I need to introduce.
- Thing One: Living Fiction
- Thing Two: Fictional Living
These two things are separate and clearly definable categories of being, and they imply an inversion of reality as it’s been traditionally understood… at least for me.
And this inversion is not conceptual, that has been many a time! No, the inversion is ontological and structural. In other words, it’s happening for real this time, guys! At least for me, anyway.
I’ve been working on The Great Flip for a long while now. I actually had the raw materials for it from the beginning… but it’s a ‘Great’ flip for a reason. If you are going to change the ontological nature of reality, even just for yourself, it has to be total–i.e. you can’t let the thing crack under external pressure.
Back to the important things.
Two important things emerge from The Great Flip, and both are ‘newly transformed separate unions’.
The Old Two Things were two halves of a necessary whole.
- Old Thing One: Fictional Characters
- Old Thing Two: Living Beings
But Fiction lacked life of its own. Even at its most archetypally charged and vibrant, it was still essentially flat.
By contrast, Life lacked magic. Even at its most miraculous and rich, you could never shake the feeling that true life was elsewhere.
Fictional characters belong in their own stories. They are placed, boundaried, and so they are bound as real in the best way.
We living beings spend our lives self-mythologising, unmoored, because we don’t feel placed.
So after The Great Flip, which, now that I think about it, is less of a flip and more of an inversion qua transmutation… but who needs all that? After The Great Flip (where I became fully fictional), I find myself with the new new things.
A reminder:
- New Thing One: Living Fiction
- New Thing Two: Fictional Living
Those two new modes of being matter greatly. Why?
Living Fiction: Fiction is no longer flat. Stories can be charged and vibrant, but they also have reality as being, not mere representation.
Ficitona Living: Magic is no longer elsewhere. Life places you, and so you are free to roam as a character in your own story. Nothing beckons but experience.
Wow, what a rambling note! But it is doing its job. It’s laying it all out for the ritual sign-off.
Am I getting to the Big Surprise yet?
With my new fictional status achieved, I have been sensing a subtle but important final shift underway.
Over the last week or so, I’ve had this memory in mind, and its essence has been my compass.
The memory is of one particular afternoon about six years ago, when I was sitting in the basement of that massive Pret on the Strand. It’s a very depressing place to sit, but I was happy to sit with my 99p black coffee and my copy of Big Sur, and dwell… a slice of life sandwiched between two duties of the day.
I was very much a fictional character in spirit back then. I was writing myself into existence through terrible novel attempts that took a needed scapel to the identities keeping me from my true fictional self.
I realised it last night. I thought that Big Sur memory was pointing to a nostalgia for my earlier life of yearning, but that’s not true. This is all about progression, not regression. People who slip into regression thought they wanted the ‘re’, when really they needed the ‘gression’. And you get a whole lotta that with progression, too!
The Big Sur memory made me realise that even at my peak yearning, I was still dwelling! I still felt totally placed in the story of my own life, sitting in that dimly lit, stuffy Pret basement, half rolling my eyes at Kerouac and half enjoying his oozy prose.
What bothered me back then (the subject of my yearning) was not that life lacked magic, but that there was no explicit permission to stay and roam without searching!
Permission granted.
So what’s the Big Surprise?
The Big Surprise is what I discovered after my last note and the announcement of Total Fiction.
When I got home after writing that note yesterday, I thought of the name for my new kind of novel. I won’t spoil the name yet because that is part of the surprise.
As usual, writing was a way of placing myself as a character and securing my freedom to live truly. In Total Fiction, I mistook what was essentially a life event for a literary discovery. Classic me!
So, with the title for the new kind of novel discovered, I gradually began to settle into the fact that I had accidentally stumbled upon a title for something much bigger than a mere novel.
I had stumbled upon a title for a life lived with full permission.
Let’s unpack the title.
The BIG SURprise. The memory of reading Big Sur in Pret, the memory that carried the essence of fictional living, is hidden within the shock announcement of a life finally lived fictionally. What a gem!
And now to squeeze the last bit of juice… There is more juice in this Circadian Orange yet!
Here it is.
- A fictional character’s life (like mine) thrives in privacy.
We thought that fictional characters needed to be witnessed to exist, but now we know that’s not true. They need only be placed in their story, and then live it.
- Living fiction (stories) belong to the world, but life belongs to the fictional.
Stories
So I gave the world my Bildungsroman in the form of all my published work to date–that was the story I owed the world (for some reason). But my life from this moment on, my fictional life… that is mine to live!
And with that, I would like to introduce you (public reality) to the novel you will never read, but is being written nonetheless, through the act of living:
The Adventures of a Fictional Being
And if such a life were a physical novel, I imagine it being something small: a worn-out paperback with yellowed pages, waiting in a jacket pocket or at the bottom of a rucksack. It doesn’t demand your attention because it doesn’t need to… life has already been lived into it. It accompanies you.
Anyway, what does this mean for the Study, public-facing as it is?
It will evolve into what it needs to be. Moments of shared presence, I suppose. Some presence is made for sharing.
Something like that.
MT 