Rashomon

Who and what do you see when you look at this photograph?

The photograph is of me in the 6th grade. I look happy in my headscarf and hand-me-down dress. In reality, my brother had just gone to Vietnam and I feared for his life every day. Another reality was that my father had stepped up his drinking to the point that our whole family was in turmoil. I would go to school every day frightened, not of school but of what I might return home to.

But looking at the photo now, I can almost believe that the child looking back at me is happy.
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I guess I'll know I'm over feeling sad about leaving my AOL Journal when my first thought here at Blogger is not how sad I am that I'm not posting in my AOL Journal.

Ah well. Over at my AOL Journal, I recently did an entry about "Reality," and Vince posted a one word response: RASHOMON. I'd never heard of Rashomon, but because it came from Vince, who introduced me to the excellent book, Denial of Death, I thought I should check it out.

I did a quick Internet search and found out it is the name of a movie directed by Akira Kurosawa. The term "Rashomon" has entered our vernacular to mean the unreliability of "truth." If I'd heard of the "Rashomon Effect" before, I didn't recall it, but apparently it is a common way of referring to the phenomenon of eye-witnesses having different accounts of what happened at the same event.

I rented Rashomon from our video store and watched it twice this evening, once with and once without the commentary. It is a powerful film. What struck me the most --and everyone will come away from the film with different thoughts because it's that kind of film--was the message that we come to believe the realities we create for ourselves.

The film definitely opens up a new way for me to think about my own writing. It deepened my insight into what motivates people to lie. As the film says, we all lie.

This is where someone who prizes authenticity begins to get into severe trouble, I think. If our self-concept is based on authenticity yet all human beings lie, then who are we? (Add to this the dilemma that the purpose of the artist, according to Picasso, is to lie in order to depict the truth.)

I know that I need to work at adopting a more playful orientation toward life, one taking into consideration the natural failings of human beings, my own failings. I've known this for a long time.

I believe this recognition on my part of what I need to do is why I am so drawn to the Trickster figure in mythology. That Trickster is an ornery trouble maker who turns reality upside down. The Trickster is always mixing volatile cocktails of fantasy and reality.

I highly recommend Rashomon. Thank you, Vince, for telling me about it.

Here is the original entry from AOL:

What is Reality?

What is the truth?

I'm thinking now of the writer whose self-concept depends on authenticity.

Does this describe you? It describes me.

Perhaps I'm more comfortable writing fiction than non-fiction because I worry that non-fiction has to be completely "true," detail by detail, and I drive myself mad trying to get all the details "right."

I'm finding more and more that I don't know how to tell "the truth." I only know how to tell "my truth." And in telling "my truth," I find myself constantly departing from facts and into the realm of mythology. I believe there is so much truth in myths.

A wonderful poem by Rabia al Basri explains the difficulties of writing from the heart, of writing, to, for, out of, or about the Divine source (by Divine source, I mean that mysterious place our creativity and imagination comes from):

REALITY
In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?