The Blackberry Walk

All characters are fictional; well, at least in part. Fiction is what's left up to the imagination, what can't be seen with the eye, but rather can only be seen with the mind. Associations, patterns, understandings, whether from nature or nurture, are stored in the mind, waiting to be projected onto Detective Conan or your mum. Which is fictional and which is real? Well, they're both fictional, insofar as there are these webs of associations projected on to them; your understanding of your mother is not the same as someone else's, not only because you have more experience talking and living with her, but also because the idea of mother colours you perception in a specific way. My understanding of Conan as a character is far greater than someone who hasn't watched the show, but my understanding of him is also coloured by how I relate to him as a character. That very act of relating is the fiction, giving it the personal touch. One of my favourite quotes is from Saint Exupery's The Little Prince, where the fox tells the little prince: "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." What's most precious to us are these fictions, these stories, the bonds with many things, places, and people we make across our lives. The value of your favourite mug is invisible to the eyes, because only with the heart can it be seen. What you see in the mug is the fiction - the memories of drinking out of it, washing it, taking care not to break it, the story you've shared with your mug. We relate through our hearts, writing fictions, anchoring ourselves to the world around us. For whatever reason fiction is a much maligned word. To say something is 'a fiction' or 'a myth' is to say it's false, baseless, and wrong. The attempt to gaze scientifically at a work of fiction by beating it with mechanical analysis to find what is 'real' and non-fictional is to misunderstand that everything is fictional and that however mentally hygienic you try to keep, washing your hands with peer-reviewed journals and repeated clinical trials, the fiction inherent in how man views the world can't be rooted out. What the scientific eye may see as weeds, the eye of the heart sees as flowers. Adopting a deeply skeptical scientific view of all things is akin to uprooting our mental flowerbeds and covering it with AstroTurf. Science has it's place, but it shouldn't be a driving force in how people should live their lives, nor how governments - essentially bigger people - run countries. Countries can only bloom when they are not run on nihilism, and are instead run on strong fictions. Fictions which bind people together bring the hearts of the citizens closer, because through a powerful fiction people can see their fellow man through the eyes of their hearts. Fictions are deeply empirical, even if science tries to assiduously de-weed them. Science is a subset of empiricism wherein man attempts his best to pluck each and every fiction, leaving behind a distilled, reproducible (yet sterile) reality. But science is not our empirical reality at all; our empirical reality is lush with deeply spiritual and meaningful fictions. Indeed, science is a kind of idealism - most of theoretical physics is derived rationalistically through maths, only needing to be checked against empirical data afterwards. What does materialism even mean anyway? That which can be touched through the senses? Most of theoretical physics reads like Timaeus: it's a cosmology. Anyways I completely lost track of what I was originally trying to say. Somehow I always end up writing about science, trying to tie back together my current views with being a science fanatic for most of my life. In summary, Metaphors are real lol.