[Video: Skylar Tang — 15 years old at the time she posted this video — was recently named the winner of a big-band composing/arranging contest sponsored by the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s “Essentially Ellington” Festival. (Read more about that here.) In the video here, she is not performing her own composition: it’s a brief instrumental cover of a song by “soul-pop” band Lawrence… with her performing all the parts, beautifully split-screened together. (You can see Lawrence’s own video of the song here — imaginative in its own right, sure, but c’mon: every one of their instruments is played by a different musician.)]

As someone who has written fiction — and continues, wistfully, to aspire to write more — I hope you’ll forgive me for elevating the imagined to a plane possibly loftier than the real. Oh, trust me, I don’t mean there’s no difference between them. Get enough people together in some real setting, ask them to notice what’s around them, and forbid them to express their observations aloud, and — well, whatever they’d notice in common if they could communicate: that’s reality. Anything else would just be analyses, judgments, speculations, and opinions tame or wild about reality.

[Aside: this isn’t speaking about fiction vs. non-fiction, by the way. I regard my favorite writers in both those broad categories with equal esteem. And then there are those wizards who manage to pull off both types of magic at once: novelists of the “realist” sort, who educate the reader about the objective world on every page… via wholly imaginary characters, settings, and stories.]

All I’m really pointing at with this comparison, really, is the truism: what people call “reality” exists in their heads just as much as what they call “imagination.” Only when they take it OUT of their heads and share it with other people — and at least informally poll those others to establish a common vision of What Is Outside — only then can they classify an experience as real (shared) or imagined (idiosyncratic or minority opinion).

Over the past week, our anonymous friend at whiskey river has offered a couple of meditations about this. First, and most directly (including the last sentence, omitted at the river):

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think […]. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

On the other hand, what about metaphor? Is what’s being expressed or described (the so-called tenor) more “real” than its characterization in the figure of speech (i.e., the vehicle)? Consider, for example:

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

(Ada Limón [source])

That second reading hit me especially hard this week because I’m on the brink of finishing Richard Powers’s big (612 pages! (well, except of course, those are — ha!) real pages, not the metaphorical ones of my e-book reader)) novel The Overstory. To say that this is a fictional work about trees — and about both humanity’s understanding and its ignorance of them — really is not to say much at all about it. But try this passage on for size; it’s the complete opening chapter, called “Roots”:

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.

Something in the air’s scent commands the woman: Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now—now?

Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

(Richard Powers [source])

See? What’s the “reality” of the trees enumerated in just this one page — alder, chinquapin, poplar, persimmon, walnut, rowan, oak, hawthorn, laurel, willow, acacia, mangrove, nutmeg, baja elephant, sal? Do they have just a single reality? Will what follows in the book capture it — and if so, what makes it “fiction” more than anything else?