Having Fun All The Time

I realized something today while watching a video on the New York Times web site called “The Continental Picture Show Series”.

The video is mostly silent, with written narration inserted in frames ala old-time-stilent movies.

It’s about birds, and visiting the oldest woman in America, or something like that.

It reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s novels, where he splices his stories with random photographs that seem to have no explanation, or only connect tangentially to the story.

The video, however, should have some connection to reality. But it has a surreal mood. Things definitely don’t connect to each other logically but obviously relate visually, emotionally, symbolically.

This is very much the case with Sebald’s books. And Kafka’s. And what I think that does is it makes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction less important. Kafka’s and Sebald’s books were fiction but there was a great deal of the author visible in each work. Just not literally — only symbolically, emotionally, intellectually. Everything connected but nothing connected.

This is extremely hard to do, I think. It’s much easier to write a story that has nothing real in it (surral needs real in order to be surreal, I guess, because it turns real on its head) and is pure fiction, or to write a story that is essentially autobiographical. Sebald and Kafka, and the creator of this video, I think, did both. They seem to inquire into reality deeply enough as to make the question of what is reality their real inquiry. In a way that you almost can’t detect or touch or rationalize.

I think this is important because we must accept that life is not simply a mediated form…everything we do is both fact and fiction; life is both a construct of our wills, an active narrative that we construct in the moment and in retrospect and looking forward; and it is also a series of random events with no meaning, no future intent or history or significance; it is both of those things at the same time. It is useful, I think, to inquire into that divide sufficiently enough to understand the ways that reality stands on its head.

It isn’t strictly surreal…I think “surrealism” is a much broader category. It’s just so inquisitive that we can understand it without understanding it. Like Kafka narrating, in the Castle, how time speeds up and slows down like an elastic plane; or like Sebald in the Emigrants narrating as a young man describing his uncle standing on the seashore and explaining that it is the edge of the darkness, with an underexposed black-and-white picture of a man standing on the seashore on the opposite page.

Or it’s like theses weird birds in this video flying across the road in Iowa.