The Simulacra

Have you ever fallen in love with a made-up world? Some fantasy in a book or a film that engrossed you so completely, resonated so deeply within you, that you ached to think it would never be real as it is within your own heart and mind?

I've fallen for many such worlds, lived whole lives within stacks of pages, series of images within a screen that felt more real even that my own so-called reality, chaotic and clumsy as it can be. I have shed some very real tears, spent innumerable hours trying and failing to summon into existence the figures and forms of these alternate realities: the inconjurable scent of cherry blossoms wafting over Kyoto; the burn of absinthe in a Parisian cafe; a place beyond the stars.

All the while knowing that such things have never truly existed as I imagine them, and that my only access to their reality is through the limited conduits of symbols: lines scratched out on a sheet of paper, captured light projected upon a screen, markings that bear no meaning but what I give to them.

Roland Barthes spoke of the difference between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. Some stories are uni-directional and simply offer themselves up to us with their meanings naked and fully-formed, while others require us to fill in the blanks and come to our own conclusions, to inject something of ourselves into them to create a synthesis of meaning.

I believe all texts are writerly texts. All texts demand something of us; no narrative exists independently of our interpretation of it. And though every reader drinks in the same set of symbols from a text, is it not filtered through a unique lens: a completely distinct set of experiences shaped by a singular set of experiences and personality?

If you and I watched the same movie, or read the same book, how often would our experience of it be the same? How often would we agree as to what it all means?

And is our world not another text, another set of symbols that we must navigate, the meaning we draw from it inseparable from the lens through which it is viewed? Is our experience not mediated by eyes that can be fooled, to be filtered through minds that can be flawed and perceptions that are tinted by our own neurosis and biases?

And in our interpretation of this world we must all share, are we not each fully alone within the bubbles of these bodies, the prison that is our discrete existence as separate Selves, able to interact with our reality only through symbols, building maps in our minds of a thing we can never truly quantify?

For the map is not the territory, the symbol is not the reality, and in our age of mass-media that gives us more streams of conflicting information than ever, diluted through yet another degree of separation from its source, we are left with a simulation of a simulation, a copy of a copy of a copy. Shadows dancing on the cave wall, from which we cannot look away.

It would seem that we are bound to this one reality at least: that there is no true means of knowledge available to us, nothing that is not tainted by the faulty lenses of our perceptions. That we are forever chained within this Platonic cave, watching the shadows upon the wall, never seeing the fire that casts their flickering forms, nevermind the true light that lay beyond the doorway to the cave.

Or is that assessment just another shadow on the wall?