the world offers itself to your imagination

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
          love what it loves.
-Wild Geese | Mary Oliver

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I'm going to scratch an old itch here today, one that I know I've talked about before, because it's come up again recently and I'm feeling a little peevish about it. We'll start here: the tweet pinned to the top of my Twitter profile says "this is your regular reminder to use whatever fuels you, whether it's anger or hope or fiction or music. Fuel yourself & run with it."

Since I've started writing seriously, a fair bit of my work has been about synthesizing fiction and "real life," bringing in lessons from stories to think about how the world works. I--and all of us--come from a long tradition of this kind of thought, maybe as long as stories themselves; our earliest stories, from folklore to religion, are created with the intent to inform and guide our behavior and understand one another and the world around us. That's not always a good thing, but it is almost always true. We tell one another stories as a means of imparting our knowledge and beliefs on others and recording them for ourselves. 

It's really only more recently that we see an attempt to draw strict lines between fiction and other art and "real life." The idea that a story, especially one that's important and part of a large-scale cultural awareness, might help us understand what's happening is troubling to some people. For example, if you're online much, you'll probably see both people drawing comparisons between current events and Harry Potter and other people chastising the first group, telling them to "read another book" or to stop comparing life to fiction altogether.

I think that's a little bit farcical, myself. To continue the Harry Potter example, it's often a useful tool for thinking about current events specifically because so many people have read it and drawn personal connections to it; you can refer to a major or minor villain or event in the story and most of the people around you will understand the analogy you're trying to make. Where a global event might be hard to internalize, stories are often created with the intention of self-identification and immersion, designed to evoke emotions. If we were a perfect species, we'd be able to empathize with strangers or understand the context for an event without that intervention, but since we're not, the intervention makes a difference a lot of the time. I've often thought about what it means that the generation of adults who are now in our late twenties and thirties (the official millennials, if you want to name the cohort) grew up on a diet of stories about revolution and revolt. Our Dumbledore's Armies and Mockingjays and movie-era Avengers tell us something about how we can respond to the world's dangers, and it's a somewhat different thing than the stories our parents grew up with. I think that matters.

The point is that art and people are not separate things. The things humans create are borne out of their understandings of the world around them, their perspectives on how things are or how they wish them to be, and their desire to share those understandings and perspectives with each other. Fiction doesn't exist independently of real life because it is created out of the threads of real life, and conversely, real life is informed by the stories we tell one another, whether they're true literally or "only" emotionally. Truth sometimes comes in costume.