Seeing Is Believing

There is a part of you that wants tangible proof, requests sources, citations, and other assurances of stability. This aspect of you is rather proud of the number of times it checks facts considered unreliable, prefers to admit innocence or ignorance rather than to take as established fact something long since disemboweled on Snopes.com or some other equivalent of sensible peer review.

True enough, you spend a good deal of time under various conditions and circumstances, inhabiting your own world, trying to maintain an equable and collegial relationship with the outer world, the world of Reality. To accommodate this dual citizenship, you try to keep your inner world as aligned with and aware of the outer world of Reality as you possibly can, being aware of your quirks and predilections as well as those of Reality.

In other words, you are constrained by the subjectivity you try to nourish within yourself and the need to at least be indulgent with if not respectful of the world of outer Reality. 

Remains to be seen, Show me, and Seeing is believing are often not as cynical and entrenched in stubborn tradition as they may sound. Your years working for the entertainment side of the carnival has added to your understanding of how easy it is to manufacture an illusion. Only yesterday, you were revealing your pleasure in convincing people that your presumed knowledge was accurate, that  your information was sound.

You try most days to navigate that narrow cusp between the actual and the invented or the potential. Your attitude toward truth is neither cavalier nor overly compulsive, but with that said, you enjoy manufacturing alternate universes, based on the worlds and circumstances you see about you. With the best of intentions, you invite others to visit these alternate universes, which are often quite close to their Real Time counterparts. 

Thus the notion of parallelism reappears in your thoughts, bringing with it the notion that for you a narrative assumes its own reality when there is more than one dimension. Truth often raises issues of abstractions or relativity. Parallel lines help define the territory, one line being the present moment the other representing either the past, theme, or some kind of metaphor.

In a lovely kind of irony, you are blown apart by your own canon. Visions of potential story or essay come to you, not by any means as actual words, rather by visualizations of scenes or situations. The chores ahead of  you are multifarious: You must try to cast the concepts with believable characters, or with plausible interactions of logic. Then you must develop the concepts into story or to an essay rather than a mere ramble of sentences.

The Seeing is believing meme that in general causes you impatience now becomes a necessity. You must see the concept in order to make it a story or you must have some vision of the outcome if the material is to be an essay.

Even since some business or other had you involved in some meeting at a large, spacious tourist destination hotel along the beach front in Santa Barbara, you've devoted spare and focused moments to trying to turn a concept into a workable story. As you passed one of the many conference and meeting rooms, you noticed a group of about eight individuals, slightly more men than women, ranging in age from about late thirties to mid or late sixties. 

The apparent leader wore a suit, was presenting a power point display to his audience, all of whom seemed by appearance in clothing, posture, and degrees of concentration not to be the sorts of adults you'd associate with the expense of renting a conference room at such a hotel in such a city as Santa Barbara.

Even in passing, you could see one man had considerable tattoos on his arms; so did one of the women.

The man presenting the power point program appeared as close to your definition of business professional as any of the others, leading you first to curiosity, as in who were they? By now, your curiosity had hold of you, even though you had a meeting of your own to consider.

Who were these people?  By the time you'd arrived at your own destination, well beyond the vantage point where you could continue inspecting this group, you had the answer you required to cause you to want to capture your impression of these individuals in some narrative. You even knew the name of the man in the suit was Dennis because that's what your imagination told you his name was and you've come to have the kind of relationship with your imagination where, from time to time, you'll ask it if it's kidding. But mostly you believe what it tells you.

Of course you're used to transmitting the certainty that others will believe your imagination, because--well, because you've had experience propping up the foundations of that belief by studying the craft of storytelling but also by studying the craft of relating information counter to Real Time.

You want to convey the sense of these individuals as your imagination told you they were, which is to say they were bank robbers. You now have inherited their problems, which is how to rob the particular bank that was a part of Dennis' power point presentation.

They have in a sense inherited your problem, which is how to develop this vision of them, this concept, into your awareness of a complete story, without once telling the readers that they are bank robbers.