Interior Monologue — Trains
The interior monologue is the thought process of a character written from their perspective. A method of writing an interior monologue is through “stream-of-consciousness,” allowing any conscious thought that comes to mind to be written down. In stream-of-consciousness mode, sentence structure and style need not be considered during the process of writing.
Exercise:
Write an interior monologue using a “stream-of-consciousness” from your own perspective (i.e, write down the flow of your own conscious thoughts). You might like to use James Joyce’s method of writing without punctuation, with each thought a continuation of the last, until you reach the end of the opposite page. Is this a method of writing you would like to develop so as to allow you and your readers to get into the mind of the characters?
Trains:
Trains. Moving quickly. What else moves quickly? Fear. Disease. Hmm. Actually… It’s funny. Some emotions move quickly and some creep up on you. Which is worse? Imagine a monster creeping up on you, you can slowly sense it more and more like a feeling that something is going wrong or the sensation that something is behind you or following you. The alternative is a monster chasing you down the empty street in the middle of the night while you’re still in your pajamas. Smashing everything in its path. Its hunger is insatiable and his drool is acidic as he grumbles terrifying sounds yearning for his dream, to make your nightmares come true.
Both fears are bad in their own way but I’m not sure which is worse. Both gnaw away at your humanity. One makes you a paranoid husk. The other a selfish animal forgetting all sense of etiquette and previous civilizational agreements. Both make you remnant of what you were only a few moments before. Stoicism suggests that our fears are made up and it’s all in our heads; that reality is more subjective than it is objective or at least that a subjective reality is more important to an individual than the one, true objective reality. (The one to rule them all). Now I’m not necessarily an avid believer in what the stoics had said but I do appreciate a lot of their ideas. Our monsters and terrors are real for some but myth for others and everyone can be wrong and right at the same time about the same things. Belief is powerful that way — it can make myths into reality and reality into myth. Maybe that’s what the Stoics meant. Not necessarily that a subjective reality is more important but that our thoughts, beliefs and perspectives can alter our objective realities and ultimately without a way to tell the difference between the “truth” of a reality, both a subjective and objective reality are ultimately the same thing.
But, just to play devil’s advocate, what if belief wasn’t the driving factor? What if everything were true or not true all at the same time in actuality? What if truth were fluid, like the water in the ground and in the sky, where reality bends to observation or a lack thereof. Didn’t a scientist just get a reward for this? Yeah… a scientist recently proved that reality is not “real”
…Because it would require the universe to have defined properties whether we are currently observing them or not. Like an Orange always being orange when in fact an Orange is ONLY orange when it’s measured as so. Maybe we should learn from what Monks practice and preach. Maybe everything is constantly in a state of fluidity. Only ever existing in the state you see it in or the state that you believe it to be in. But the scientist in me cannot 100% agree with that. The only way to only ever KNOW if the cat is dead or alive is to open the box. We can’t know anything for absolute certainty with prediction or belief. I mean, can we really ever know anything? Our entire lives are operated on our beliefs, perceptions and agreements with our realities. That doesn’t make them objective.
Regardless of the past decades of scientists knowing something funky was happening with reality, — that reality wasn’t exactly real… Either way, the results of if our beliefs being all true and/ or untrue are both are terrifying. One is terrible from its horror contained because we cannot be trusted to control our thoughts and the other is inconceivable from its painstaking emptiness and inevitable nihilism. Would that mean that all “realities” are painful because no matter which way we perceive our reality, it will either be entirely true based on our beliefs or entirely untrue? I mean, I think perception is the important thing here. Perceiving the world as full of monsters, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It becomes true to you. Perceiving that the world is always beautiful results in a completely different belief system and consequences thereafter. But choosing to be oblivious or “overly-optimistic” has its problems as well. Choosing to overlook monsters in plain sight. I mean it happens everyday but it definitely doesn’t help make the world a better place. Would believing that monsters exist, seeing them and confronting them? Maybe that’s a way to make a better world? A way to face our fears and venture into the unknown. One thought process saves yourself but damns everyone else. The other, the inverse. But everyone has their own definition of Monster and everyone is living in their own World. Which World is more important? More valid? More t r u e… I’m not sure. I’m not even sure if that’s the right question to ask. Either way, I don’t personally think that we have the capacity to control our thoughts enough to bring about a beautiful reality if all of our beliefs turned out to be true. It’s not that I don’t believe in humanity. I really do. I love humanity but I think we are easily distractible. Easily lazy. Easily convinced to give up on our dreams or to start another war. We have so much potential and we have the potential to make all of our beautiful dreams come true. But history is a great predictor of the future and often our greatest deeds are overshadowed by our darkest. History erases all truth even though the consequences that came from it, whether the soil is touched or scarred, seem to remain forever, but really only while it’s still important.
Is life just a cycle of those of us who believe life is good and perceive life as worth fighting for convincing those of us who are unsure, or perceive the world as too ugly to understand why it continues in perpetuity, and vice versa. Is everything a cycle? Seasons. Years. Time. Is everything a cycle of constant change? A pattern? Can everything be predicted? Is understanding reality really just a matter of understanding the patterns that make up reality? The cyclical changes within. Life breeds life but also death. Death makes room for life to occur. Air to Co2 back to air. Born to giving birth. Leaves bud, grow, die, and fall to nourish the soil to make more trees. Planets revolve around and around the same celestial objects. Is there even any benefit to understanding reality, if our thoughts make reality either completely true or untrue, we can wield these swords to bend reality to our whims. These research expeditions would only be worth it if understanding reality offered great benefit. But that’s ultimately the problem right? We can never know unless we trek down another frontier. Which costs time, money, courage. Prediction could just be about having the right information to make a proper fortune but then again, I think prediction can only take us so far. We need to feel it and hear it. Taste it. Experience it. Whether it’s a final frontier or it’s finality is a misunderstanding and we revel in the discoveries of more frontiers that unlock advanced vistas of knowledge. I know that some people think that each science straining in it’s own direction for the sake of betterment of men is an unworthy cause because it was meant to be that we would never venture far. But I’m unsure.
It’s comical. I started this tangent talking about the potential fear that haunts our perspective realities but it’s only brought me to the place I always go. Even the risk of my deepest fears cannot distract my yearning for expedition towards the unknown. I just have faith.
I believe that there is more out there. Things that we’ve never even imagined. It’s simply waiting to be found. I can’t tell you why I believe that. I don’t know why people believe the things they do. Why in the past did we believe in the myths, legends and divinations that were prevalent? I think anything that will bring us closer to knowing the answers to these questions, to knowing what “the truth” is, is worth venturing towards. As a person who is alive. I feel a responsibility to unlock every secret that I can. I wish I could tell you why but ultimately, it’s just what I believe.
