The album that touched me the most was their 2005 album Black Sheep Boy. Loosely, it was a concept album based on the "black sheep boy" character, inspired by a 1967 song of the same name by Tim Hardin. Lyrically, it may be the record I most relate to in my entire library. Sheff sang with furious emotion about hearing of a female friend's abuses with her father on "Black," pained a simple, yet nuanced look into unrequited love on "Song of Our So-Called Friend," and created interesting fairy-tale allegories on "A King and A Queen" and "A Stone."
The song that usually sticks out on Black Sheep Boy, though, is the second track. Placed just after a stripped-down cover of Hardin's original "Black Sheep Boy," "For Real" takes rustic acoustic sensibilities present on earlier Okkervil River tracks and gives it a full Pixies makeover, with the chorus blasting in abrasively with bursts of distorted guitar and unnerving lines like "I really miss what really did exist when I held your throat so tight."
The song's lyrics contain the word "real" or "really" in almost ever line. In an inteview Sheff said this about "For Real:" "I was playing with the notion of reality on that song, and really on most of this record. We've become so insulated now from real life that I think we're convinced that what we see on TV is real life. We're alienated from our basic selves. I mean violence has to be this ultra-realistic thing to be real to us. It's like it's truer in movies or video games than it is in real life. What's real experience? We're real obsessed. Are her breasts real? What's the best reality TV Show? So I just wanted to see how many times I could squeeze the word real into the song."
I listened to that album all the way through for the first time in a long time the other day, and I remembered reading that quote and, if you'll forgive me the absolute pretension and pot-smoker philosophy bullshit that's going to follow, it's got me thinking a lot about the nature of reality.
It's weird to think about reality in a obtuse sense, because it's something that doesn't require thinking about. There is a world. We live in it. We go to work, we go to class, we eat, we drink, we fuck. That's reality, in a sense. There's no use thinking about reality because, well, it's not as though there's any alternative. Unless you are a comic book character.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine in college and I will full-on say that when he said what I'm going to tell you, I thought he was crazy. You can think that, too. That's fine. It's not about whether he or even I believed what he said was real. It's more the concept and the implications of that, in terms of thinking about reality, that interest me.
My friend, he told me that he had recently sat down for a cup of coffee with the physical incarnations of most of the Gods of the world's major religions. Vishnu? There. Yahweh? Also present. Buddha? Hell, they shared a scone. God was there, too. And so was God. The former was the Protestant God, and the latter the Catholic God.
The distinction between the two struck me as odd, so I asked him about it. Aren't they the same? Because it's not like Catholics and Protestants worship from a different Bible. His answer involved how Protestants classically viewed the nature of God, and how it was different than the Catholic view on the nature of God. These differing viewpoints created the different Christian Gods.
It was a convoluted explanation, but as I thought about it more, I found a simpler way to put it:
Belief creates reality.
That was essentially the crux of his story, on multiple levels. He said that people's belief in a god created that god, and made that god real for them. It made their doctrines of faith real for them. Believing in the Qur'an made it real for a Muslim, believing in the Bible made it real for a Christian. Believing in a completely benevolent God made it real for a Protestant, believing in a more unforgiving God made it real for a Catholic.
You can call my friend crazy, but he believed that he had really spoke with these gods and, in a way, it was a self-fulfilling argument. He believed it was real and, in his mind, belief created reality.
In a sense, that's true for all people. How we perceive the world working is how we experience it. A person who is hallucinating believes they see things, so they do. A person who has multiple personality disorder believes they are different people, so they are.
If we accept the idea that reality is personal, not universal, then other questions crop up. If reality is restricted and defined by me, is it possible that what I'm experiencing is an entire world of my own creation? That sounds like psuedo-philosophy bullshit, admittedly. Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi framed the question better in his very famous anecdote:
"Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."
Another question, if belief creates reality, then what does uncertainty create? If we accept my friend's postulation, that your belief in a God can create that God, then what do you believe in after accepting that?
I don't know. I don't have any answers, and the more I've thought about it the more I realize how trite and ultimately unnecessary the conversation is. Discussing the nature of reality won't change that nature, regardless of what it is. Wondering about the butterfly and the man won't give you an answer to either. Inevitably, to make progress, you have to say fuck it to existentialism and simply get on with taking action in whatever reality you're creating.
So ignore this post.
Or better yet, believe it doesn't exist.
And it won't.
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