What is the power that fiction holds?
It was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bardelys recalled, who had claimed that meditation constituted a third state of consciousness beside waking and sleep. No doubt the Maharishi had only repeated ancient Vedic lore, but Bardelys had come all by himself to the notion that there was a fourth state — the state of following a tale.
He came to this conclusion in writing posts to his blog. He had begun the blog awkwardly enough (as anyone could tell by glancing through his blog’s archives) in a sort of editorial mode, now formal now more conversational, feeling for the right tone, but always writing with exposition in mind, trying to dig at the truth in whatever topic had come to him. Then he had read the brilliant columns in which Joyce Anstruther Maxtone-Graham had created ‘Mrs Miniver’ (written in the last years of the 1930s under the byline of ‘Jan Struther’) — and suddenly it struck him what a perfect way it was to write a blog. Create a blog character to follow and show the fellow wrestling with an issue. And so Bardelys did.
It took only two or three such posts to induce the trance he now felt at the simple suggestion of his blog-persona’s name. The dullest topic treated in his most awkward manner now sparkled with life for him. He felt a fresh sense of urgency in the blog — it became important again — seductive — true.
True enough that Bardelys even came to feel for the blog as though it were a tale he told. That was when he began to wonder at the power of tales. The tales that Bardelys had loved had held suspense, dramatic situations, danger, sex, strong characters, in a word — Romance. The blog had none of this.
And yet it held his heart now, though it had never done so before, at least not in the same way.
Was it in the telling or the following, he wondered. It felt more like the following — as if he were the audience of his own blog posts. Yet clearly he was the talesman and not the audience (unless in truth every talesman followed his own tales, or else the tales took on a life of their own), and there was no true ‘story’ in the thread of random blog posts.
The ‘tale,’ then, was so slight as a baby spider’s strand. The character was mere shadow (his own, which must add to its appeal to himself at least). There was no building from post to post striving toward climacteric.
And yet they held him.
Why?
He could only conclude that there was something in the act of following a character through his outer life and inner thoughts that induced this oddly powerful sense of double existence — of being himself, Bardelys, and the blog-persona, at the same time.
This sense of being two at once (or was it only the losing of himself, Bardelys, into the blog-persona’s shadow? He could not grasp the distinction with a fine enough touch) was the heart of this fourth state of mind, after waking, sleep, and meditation.
(Composed on pen-top Thursday 31 July 2008)
