The world as it is

 

Subject: The world as it is.

Who has most value in our society the blacksmith or the wordsmith. The practical artisan or the poet who's musings are mostly self-serving anecdotes.
Education and educationalists have been divided on the matter, the eloquence of a wordy philosophiser or the blacksmith as he hammers the hot metal. Can words supplant practical action or are words merely the frustrated outpouring of a suppressed ego.

 The imagination of the writer provides succor for the unimaginative, and storytelling lays a path for the imagination to fasten onto, to be carried along, like a branch in a fast running river. The manufactured illusion of a story captures the dull mind and illuminates it for a while, it whips up memories of similar experiences on which the story is then made real and it's hard to tell when ones own reality starts and the other finishes.

We all have a story to tell but few people take the time or feel their lives are too mundane to capture another persons imagination. There is an art in weaving fact into fiction, to make it palatable (perhaps even saleable) and words are the ingredient like flour is to bread but words alone won't make it rise, it's the intimacy of which words you chose and why you chose them since words have a weight and substance all of their own. A story is the background, the words provide the flavour as they conjure up in the mind of the reader the nuanced subtly which our mind feeds on, hopefully finding comparison with their own lives. Without your own experience a story has no foundation,  no symbiotic understanding, be it love or hate, frustration or happiness, without your own experience the writers story simply lies in a vacuum and never comes to life.
Fact or fiction once upon a time were clearly recognisable since real life was protected by decency and a restraint in the telling, we jibed at bad language and the fantasy of the exhibitionist and even declined to read the tabloids for their dumb down style. The word by word, line by line trust we had in the old ‘Times’ newspaper (before Rupert Murdock got hold of it) with its reporters filing in their stories from the far flung corners of the globe, a world made intriguing by its cultures and to us it’s strange habits and whilst distance and time made their world far away, we felt safe.
Instantaneous data transmission and video footage makes the commentary somewhat superfluous these days, there’s no romance in what we see, only blood, sweat and tears and our creative reflex to interpret and soften what we see is overwhelmed by so much horror.
The subjective mind is blown away, you can’t be impartial any more, the immediacy of everything destroys any attempt to create the illusion that such and such belongs to a different world. And so the storyteller becomes the soothsayer, the fact checker and the mystique and glamour which made us all smile is forever gone.