Truth and Fiction

I am a whovian, and have been since about 1990 (after Old Who was no longer being filmed). I spent the next decade supporting KUED and collecting novelizations, on the odd occasion when I got down to Vegas, the nearest city with a big enough used bookstore to stock them. I waited. When they started New-Who in 2005, I shrugged. I simply didn't have access to BBCA and wouldn't ever in the foreseeable future. After fifteen years, I had developed iron patience about Doctor Who.

Every successive year has seen the show grow shinier and flashier and more popular until last weekend happened: the 50th Anniversary of the first airing of the original show. I watched it four times in three days.

I'm telling you this because I don't understand what I am in relation to the show. In the 2005 series, Nine meets Charles Dickens and introduces himself as his "Number One Fan," short for "fanatic." Hearing it defined like that, I became instantly uncomfortable with the label. When my learned friends talk about "geeking out" they mean monologuing about something they love, and about which they know more than anybody else in the room cares to. I do sometimes monologue (it's dangerous to ask me about the show), but I am not a trivia-geek.

So, if you give me a fake-geek test, I will probably fail. Despite the fact that I actually have BBCA in my home now, I didn't watch the Doctors Revisited documentaries. I mean, I might have caught one by accident.

But "fanatic" implies out-of-control, screaming, Beatle-mania-like hording of endless and ancient in-the-box mint kitsch. Doesn't it? What am I? "Geek" implies some kind of shameless encyclopedic aspirations.

Jennifer thinks that I won't date a man unless he prefers Old Who and signs every paper missive with the Seal of Rassilon. She was so sure that I'd be the first person to pay $14 to see Matt Smith in 3D, and that I'd show up in a fez. I didn't buy a ticket until I realized that it would be gorgeous in 3D, and some combination of the herds of fezzes and sonic screwdrivers and endless blue bowties made me physically ill. I'm not that kind of fan. I'm not that kind of geek. I would never survive SDCC.

Another friend, new-Who fan (and general television guru), was SO excited to talk about the 50th. She had seen some deep, Jesus/gospel insights in the plot and wanted to share them. My first reaction was discomfort, similar to what I felt when confronted with the "fanatic" label. The language of the 50th made religious connections impossible to miss, and Moffat must have had a childhood steeped in Christianity, but my head sorts those accidentally allusions and plot parallels quickly into the "not a source of truth" bin. Superman is not Jesus. *rolls eyes at film producers*

It's the Satan in Eden problem. (Badly paraphrased) Satan tells Eve "eat this" and she says "No - God told me that it would make me die" and Satan counters with what I strongly believe to be a half-lie, half-truth: "Naw, you won't die, you'll just know the difference between pleasant and not-pleasant, and you have to know this stuff to progress." So Eve is left with the problem of deciding whether to trust the slimy stranger with the really cool idea, or ignore him. For myself, I have decided that Eve ultimately made the right decision, but I have also decided that I would never have reached such an insightful conclusion. Ultimately, the dying/not dying part of his claim is irrelevant, but what if Satan had been lying the other way around? It feels like a gamble. She had a fifty/fifty shot that the dude wasn't pulling her leg about the important part of his claim. But I also suspect that information about the source was intentionally withheld.

All fictions feel like Satan's claim to me: they feel like half-truths, and half-truths come from unreliable sources. I have a layer of Truth that I keep near my skin, like kevlar, but built link-by-link, more like chain-mail. I test my truths. I hammer them mercilessly. I experiment. And if they stay true, I add them to my armor. If they warp, blister, or break, I discard them. But I'm not wasting my time testing every piece of information given to me from a copper mine. My truth must protect me, and copper is too maleable, like fiction. And probably most philosophy.

Even in my PhD studies, when acquiring new information, new episodes, new input, my brain does not absorb it as Truth. There's a level of necessary mediation (several of them, actually, if you include basic critical thinking). Have you ever accidentally tried to breathe water, and then started coughing and sputtering?

We live in an underwater world, and we don't have gills. So I carry an oxygen tank, and I breathe when I can. Everything that doesn't come from that tank has to be swallowed, digested, and either absorbed or excreted. Without that oxygen tank, my lungs shut. It's a survival mechanism, but it's also criminally reductive. I assess everything as if it were a possible source, when often (especially in my studies) they're not sources, but, like me, a mediative substance. I don't have to take them in: I can swim, or (in the case of Plato), mostly just tread water.

Each person has her own Truth (of whatever substance she pleases), but that's not what we share when we swap stories. Our children can inherit pieces of our armor - the comrades around the campfire get something else, something changed - something mediated. They get Fiction. They get jewelry. They get art. And now I'm getting much too near aesthetic philosophy. I'm so used to just learning it, and never taking it seriously as a life-pattern, because it's copper. We use it for other things, like computer parts. *wink*

So Doctor Who is not air. It's candy. Doctor Who is not steel, aluminum, or kevlar. It's gold. I use fiction wrong. Maybe it's the puritan in me, but I look at candy and reject it because it isn't a green vegetable, and forget that all half-truths move in two directions - a lie will distract from truth, will pull away, but "like draws to like;" truth gestures back to its source, and all Truth has the same source. Truth in Fiction is a distorted echo of a tune we heard before we grew ears, but sometimes that's enough. The echo is important.

I have left so many metaphors unfinished here. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to metaphorically describe the proper use of Fiction in relation to Truth. Because I'm still underwater, and afraid of drowning. And it's very, very late.

 

Maybe you judge a thing by how IT uses Truth?