42 Seconds of Happiness | Chapter Seven | Peter, Ike, Tommy, and Johnny Depp

“You won’t be happy, until you fucking work on yourself!” Ike and Tomas try to persuade Peter to give up on Daphne. A stranger barges in. Meet Marc.
Time/Space: A few months before the dinner. In a bar, somewhere in NYC.
4 couples. 6 friends. 5 affairs. 42 seconds of happiness.
Featuring the ensemble of the Writers Improv Studio, 42 Seconds of Happiness is a web series made from improvisations which examine with tender honesty the intimate and fragile components of love and friendship relationships.
For weekly episodes, behind-the-scenes and more follow us on our website https://www.42secondsofhappiness.com, facebook page https://www.facebook.com/42SecondsOfH… and twitter @writersimprov
Produced by the Writers Improv Studio: http://www.writersimprovstudio.com
Created by Christina Kallas

42 Seconds of Happiness | Chapter Six | Vineke and Peter

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story,” said Orson Welles. Meet Vineke and Peter, a few months before the dinner. Vineke is Peter’s second wife — he left his first one because of Vineke, and deep inside she fears he will do it again. Can one love from a position of fear?

4 couples. 6 friends. 5 affairs. 42 seconds of happiness.
Featuring the ensemble of the Writers Improv Studio, 42 Seconds of Happiness is a web series made from improvisations which examine with tender honesty the intimate and fragile components of love and friendship relationships.
For weekly episodes, behind-the-scenes and more follow us on our website https://www.42secondsofhappiness.com, facebook page https://www.facebook.com/42SecondsOfH… and twitter @writersimprov
Produced by the Writers Improv Studio: http://www.writersimprovstudio.com
For movie chkout http://alliecine.com/2012/09/42-secon…

42 Seconds of Happiness | Chapter 5 | Felice and Ike

“There is no you or me, and we are one”. Meet Felice and Ike, a few months before the dinner. Can they have it all? And if yes, which one of them can have it all? Or is it the wrong question?

4 couples. 6 friends. 5 affairs. 42 seconds of happiness.
Featuring the ensemble of the Writers Improv Studio, 42 Seconds of Happiness is a web series made from improvisations which examine with tender honesty the intimate and fragile components of love and friendship relationships.

For weekly episodes, behind-the-scenes and more follow us on our website https://www.42secondsofhappiness.com, facebook page https://www.facebook.com/42SecondsOfH… and twitter @writersimprov
Produced by the Writers Improv Studio: http://www.writersimprovstudio.com

“He’s a walkin’ contradiction partly truth & partly fiction, Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home:” Meet Ben. Physics student. Iraq veteran. American citizen. Born in India. Forever caught in a catch-22. Running from his devils.

4 couples. 6 friends. 5 affairs. 1 intruder. 42 seconds of happiness.
Featuring the ensemble of the Writers Improv Studio, 42 Seconds of Happiness is a web series made from improvisations which examine with tender honesty the intimate and fragile components of love and friendship relationships.

For weekly episodes, behind-the-scenes and more follow us on our website https://www.42secondsofhappiness.com, facebook page https://www.facebook.com/42SecondsOfH… and twitter @writersimprov
Produced by the Writers Improv Studio: http://www.writersimprovstudio.com

The Dinner continues… Will Tomas and Alis find back together? What does their breakup mean to their friends?
4 couples. 6 friends. 5 affairs. 42 seconds of happiness.
Featuring the ensemble of the Writers Improv Studio, 42 Seconds of Happiness is a web series made from improvisations which examine with tender honesty the intimate and fragile components of love and friendship relationships.
For weekly episodes, behind-the-scenes and more follow us on our website https://www.42secondsofhappiness.com, Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/42SecondsOfH… and Twitter @writersimprov
Produced by the Writers Improv Studio: http://www.writersimprovstudio.com

Tomas and Alis have their friends over for dinner, when Alis’ cell starts beeping. Someone is texting her insistently, and Tomas seems to know who it is. The couple starts fighting, right there in front of their friends. And when the friends interfere, all hell breaks loose. Alis drops the bomb: She wants a divorce.

4 couples. 6 friends. 5 affairs. 42 seconds of happiness.
Featuring the ensemble of the Writers Improv Studio, 42 Seconds of Happiness is a web series made from improvisations which examine with tender honesty the intimate and fragile components of love and friendship relationships.

For behind-the-scenes and more, follow us on our website https://www.42secondsofhappiness.com, Facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/42SecondsOfH… and Twitter @writersimprov 
Produced by the Writers Improv Studio:http://www.writersimprovstudio.com

by Christina Kallas  

So what is “the real world we THINK we inhabit”? What is reality?

To determine that, we might want to look at how the human mind arrives at a sense of understanding the world. Once again, it all goes back to Aristotle. The system of thought expounded by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. is the system of thought we are still using today: it is the order of human mental processing we are familiar with. Says Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics: “In the evolution of the human race and language there was a natural order of evaluation established; namely, the life facts came first and labels (words) next in importance. Today, from childhood up, we inculcate words and language first, and the facts they represent come next in value.” (Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. 1933. Fifth edition. New York: Institute of General Semantics, 1994. p. xlvii.)

The nature of language (an abstract symbol system intended to pass information from one mind to another,) invites us to group and divide objects and phenomena that can’t necessarily be separated in reality. Pay attention and you’ll quickly notice how anxious people are to give everything in the human experience a name or a category. As Alan Watts writes in his popular 1957 book The Way of Zen. “We do not feel that we really know anything unless we can represent it to ourselves in words, or in some other system of conventional signs such as the notations of mathematics or music. Such knowledge is called conventional because it is a matter of social agreement as to the codes of communication.” (Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. 1957)

But what does that mean for our perception of reality? Aristotle’s system of thought (so our system of thought) is based on the effort to be “objective,” it is two-valued (either-or, dualistic, subject-predicate, etc.) and linear. “Perception is selection,” writes Daniel Goleman (Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception, 1985), referring to the model set forth by Freud in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which may still be our best understanding of the processes of the mind. The basic flow of the model is that a sensory stimulus occurs, then passes through memory sub-levels to the “unconscious” (followed by a censor), the “preconscious” (followed by more censoring), and finally conscious thought, which elicits a response. We say information has been “repressed” if it doesn’t make it to the conscious level.

So, is each of us, as Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson would say, trapped in the reality-tunnel (assumption-consumption) his or her brain has manufactured? Where we do not ‘see’ it or ‘sense’ it as a model our brain has created, but as the objective reality, something we automatically, unconsciously, mechanically ‘see’ and ‘sense’ out there, apart from us?

Inspired by George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, social psychologist Anthony G. Greenwald (The Totalitarian Ego: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History, 1980) writes: “The past is remembered as if it were a drama in which self was the leading player. In part, this observation refers to the autobiographical or episodic character of much of memory…” In Orwell’s story there is a concept called “doublethink” and it involves tricking oneself into thinking a conscious choice was actually an unconscious one. Might it all be a bit more complex than Freud’s model of repression, in which the censoring occurs prior to reaching the conscious level? If yes, there is still hope. Writes Goleman: “My aim is to ponder our collective predicament: if we so easily lull ourselves into subtle sleep, how can we awaken? The first step in that, it seems to me, is to notice how we’re all asleep.”

Says Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” (1984, 1949) In the novel this refers to the Ingsoc government, whose paradoxically named “Ministry of Truth” constantly re-writes history according to the current needs of the totalitarian leadership. In the book, as in real life, the details of the past have a determining effect on what can happen in the future. Does that mean that the self, or ego, controls the past from within the ever-changing present, and, therefore, the self controls what can be predicted or planned for in future? If yes, it is an intriguing thought. Now what does this tell us in relation to the objectivity of reality or to the content of truth in cinema?

The psychology of the group, said Freud, involves ‘the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction.’ That translates to the prepotency of shared schemas over personal ones, concludes Goleman, taking into consideration the group studies of  Trotter and LeBon. So what if cinema creates the most potent shared schemas, which we have come to consider our reality? If we take into consideration that cinema is based on conflict and has almost never been independent from commercial interests, it is a daunting thought.

In that context, again: To the good liberal humanists of the West, cinema is a symptom of history, an archive that tells us something about our times. But what if cinema is not the symptom but the cause? What if cinema co-creates our reality? Quoting from Kaufman’s Adaptation: “I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end”, one might be intrigued to think whether there is indeed a reality out there which has been created by our very own movie culture, especially the wide spread one, that of Hollywood movies. How many of us have learned what love is or should be through movies? How many of us have learned what success is or should be?

And then, there was non-linear.

Non-linear storytelling was not invented by movies. Its predecessors go way back in literature. In the beginning it looked like a trend: towards fiendishly complex plots that demand intense audience focus and analysis just to figure out what is happening on the screen; and mind-benders - films designed specifically to disorient you, to mess with your head, some that challenge the mind by creating a thick network of intersecting plot lines, some that withhold crucial information from the audience or that invent new temporal schemes to invert traditional relationships of cause and effect, some that deliberately blur the line between fact and fiction – indeed through use of all the classic techniques of the old cinematic avant-garde. (Steven Johnson, Everything bad is good for you)

Cinematic complexity also, or perhaps even more so, informed TV series – possibly, among other reasons, because there are only so many threads and subtleties you can introduce into a two hour film.

And then came Web 2.0, the second generation of web services - the ones that didn’t just deliver information or goods or entertainment but invited people to participate. The sharing of stories and characters in trans-media or interactive storytelling, the first-person involvement of online gaming, eventually blurred the line even more, not just between story and play, but also between storyteller and audience, illusion and reality, fact and fiction. (Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion) And characters belonging to apparently separate story lines were randomly or not so randomly linked.

It might be interesting to consider Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome – an a-centered structure without a hierarchical organization in which any point can be arbitrarily connected to any other (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) – as the structure that best reflects multi-protagonist, multi-perspective, non-linear storytelling. The two theorists regard the rhizome as the only alternative to traditional tree models and the structures of power and dominance systems that they inevitably bring about. So do the new cinematic storytelling forms also hold the potential to overcome the hierarchical organization reflected in our classic storytelling’s privileging of one character and his/her point of view (and subjective reality) over the rest?

Multi-perspectival, non-linear storytelling is a participatory experience. In telling the story in non-linear fragments and leaving it to the audience to piece them together – or even if the writer has pieced them together allowing for different interpretations as is mostly the case – what is created is essentially a kind of participatory fiction. Charlie Kaufman once described his writing philosophy in the following way:  “I guess my mindset about movies is that I feel like film is a dead medium. With theater, you have accidents that can happen, performances that can change. But film is a recording. So what I try to do is infuse my screenplays with enough information that upon repeated viewings you can have a different experience. Rather than the movie going linearly to one thing, and at the end telling you what the movie’s about – I try to create a conversation with the audience. I guess that’s what I try to do – have a conversation with each individual member of the audience”.

Might we be experiencing a shift in cinematic storytelling? And assuming that we accept that cinema co-creates our sense of reality, might we be also experiencing a shift in our perception of reality? 

by Christina Kallas

André Bazin is perhaps the one writer who seems to have written about cinema today, while talking about cinema so many years ago. Interestingly enough, his moment lasted only fifteen years and ended with the events of 1968: cinema’s relationship to ideology and power prevailed – so also Eisenstein’s rational theoretical approach. The “new” approach has come to be known as “semiotic” a term which summarizes the structuralist, ideological, psychoanalytic and gender theory it encompasses. Bazin explains how through the contents of the image and the resources of montage, cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator. Neorealism is as far as possible from that danger, he writes. Neorealism never makes reality the servant of some pre-existing point of view. It requires the actor or the non-actor ‘to be’ rather than ‘to act’ or ‘pretend to be’. But above all, it requires the narrative to respect the actual qualities and duration of the event in preference to the artificial, abstract or dramatic duration favored in classic montage. Simply put: Bazin puts his trust in the representation of uninterpreted reality and is open to the accidents of reality. But is that even possible? Is there an uninterpreted reality?

Perhaps it is time to remember what another leading exponent of the realist view of cinema, Siegfried Kracauer, wrote so long ago: Film, he said, is the only art form which can really hold up the mirror to reality/to nature. It reproduces the raw material of the physical world within the work of art. It is the clear obligation and the special privilege of film to record and reveal, AND THEREFORE REDEEM, physical reality. For Kracauer film art redeems this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence by endeavoring to experience it through the camera. (Kracauer famously argued that German cinema helped prepare the way for Hitler’s rise by diverting the audience from a serious appraisal of social realities.)

Kracauer argued in the same way as Walter Benjamin did (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935): Film is commercial, it is a mass product, and as such it has changed the nature (and the independence) of art. Creating a bridge to that argument today, it is intriguing to ask ourselves whether this effect can now become undone: In a time when films stop being necessarily of a high budget, when anyone can make a film - perhaps not a 3D perfect sound perfect image film, but a film which can be watched by a mass audience – cinema might again become an art form which allows for the creative independence it has more or less always missed, and that since its beginnings.

Another interesting consideration in relation to how we are used to tell stories, is that we are used to being told stories. That, again, has been challenged a few times in film history: For instance, by the shot-in-depth, introduced by Orson Welles and William Wyler, where dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on montage are created by the movement of the actors within a fixed framework. It is Bazin who first recognized that depth of focus gives an experience to the spectator, which brings him closer to his experience of reality. He also noticed something else which is most interesting in light of today’s evolution of the medium: that through the shot-in-depth, the spectator is more active and more participatory. Whereas with analytical montage he follows the director’s guide who chooses what he will see and what not, here he is called to exercise a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives. (Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, 1950-55)

Might the long shot and the shot-in-depth, but also multithreading in TV and nonlinear cinematic storytelling be precursors of a development towards participatory storytelling? It is interesting that Bazin (godfather of the Nouvelle Vague) would find this a positive characteristic, because in a way it goes against the very notion of auteurism: that there is only one (and sacred) story to be told, that of the auteur. Freedom for the spectator to create the meaning, essentially means also less respect for the single auteur’s “vision”. Bazin writes the same about montage: montage rules out ambiguity of expression, so it allows for only one reality: the one proposed by the auteur (intriguingly enough, he calls this a metaphysical proposition).

Another interesting observation that we might want to make before we embark further on this train of thought, is that continuity cinema and storytelling as we know it, are based on conflict. Both montage and screenwriting rules, the dramatic principle in itself are all based on conflict (and, subsequently, resolution of conflict). Eisenstein famously argues for conflict as the essential basic principle of the existence of every work of art. Through cinema, and not only, we are trained to think in the mode of duality and conflict - and to tell our stories in that way. Even the supposed reality of the photographic image: isn’t it itself a conventionalized compositional logic, imposed by rules of perspective and lenses grounded to stress conflict? Based on that observation, shouldn’t we be asking whether cinema re-produces reality or the world of the dominant ideology?

But what might we mean by the dominant ideology? Consider that: We believe in rationality and evidence, and we will not accept a counter-argument if it is not based on proof (Nietzsche describes rational science as Western civilization’s “last great religion”). Storytelling as we know it, also finds itself in that realm: the causality principle, continuity (the continuity system of matching, centering, shot-reverse shot, the 180-degree rule: where each shot and sequence is made to seem inevitable and plots that turn on oppositions are ultimately resolved etc.), linearity and psychological thinking all belong to the dominant way of thinking.

It is fair to say that there have always been other voices: Paul Feyerabend, the Austrian-born philosopher of science, with his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules, is just one of them (major works include Against Method of 1975, Science in a Free Society of 1978 and Farewell to Reason of 1987). He urges us to gamble more recklessly: by ignoring disciplinary boundaries, by listening to outsiders or even dilettantes, by suspecting experts, and by adapting for research the methods of the 20^th century’s avant-garde arts and nontraditional sciences. “We need a dream-world”, says Feyerabend, “in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.”

So what is “the real world we THINK we inhabit”? What is reality?

To determine that, we might want to look at how the human mind arrives at a sense of understanding the world.

by Christina Kallas

I should start this text by explaining why I use the term ‘cinema’, when I actually mean the audiovisual medium as a whole - TV, WebTV, transmedia, any screen, really. It is true that medium distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred with emerging technologies, and thus we cannot regard any “medium” as an absolute fixed category (any more than we can do that with genre). If we consider cinema as something which is connected to the darkened theater of the classic period, if we indulge in nostalgia and think cinema is film: two uninterrupted hours in the dark, film festivals, theatrical distribution – then, yes, this is the wrong term to use. But if we see cinema as storytelling which is (primarily) using image and sound and which is as much about exploration as it is about spectacle; a medium which can penetrate deep into reality by destroying familiar ways of seeing - by challenging the very frameworks of reality - then we realize that there is no better term, none more inclusive, and definitely no term which raises the stakes as this one does. And we need to raise the stakes. Eisenstein’s vision of cinema as an “excellent instrument of perception” (Eistenstein 1977a: 69-70) reminds us how, early on, the function of cinema was debatable, and not taken for granted. Perhaps, once again, we need to stop taking it for granted and open the field as generously as we can: Cinema is everywhere. Long live cinema.

So indulge me while I will be using the term cinema in this context, as a poetic term, as something that is everywhere, as something that includes everything that is sound and image, as something that is growing together with technology. The next step should surely be to ask ourselves: ‘What IS cinema?’ Is it amusement? Is it a pastime? Is it a representation of reality, even a direct recording of nature (and if yes, to what effect?)? Is it artistic expression of a single mind? Is it a collaborative art form? Is it an educational tool, even one which is quintessential to the emotional education and through it to the cultivation of civilized society, as were the ancient Greek dramas for their times? Is it a tool of investigation?

For Lumiere, the documentarist, it was research. For Melies, the fiction maker, it was spectacle. (Godard famously said “I have always wanted to do research in the form of a spectacle”.) For Griffith it was art, and so it was for Eisenstein, leading to a century of discourse about the true nature of cinema.

It is perhaps impossible to comprehend how decisive Griffith’s influence was. By more or less discovering montage: the fluid integration of the camera’s total range of shots - from extreme close-up to distant panorama -, by showing the way to the most coherent narrative sequence, the most systematic meaning, and the most effective rhythmic pattern, he started on a cinematic language, which has stayed with us till today. It has lead to ‘continuity cinema’ and to our sense of filmic or other storytelling “as it should be”.

There is a word, which is being used a lot lately - the word ‘storytelling’: it is an interesting word because of its double nature, involving both a story to be told and the telling of a story. But are these two aspects the only ones? The work of the literary critic Gerard Genette (Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, 1980) is interesting in that aspect, as he distinguishes three different meanings for the term narrative. Taking this as starting point we can talk about three (not two) different levels in storytelling: the story, so the content, the storytelling, so the content as communicated by the discourse (the succession of events, real or fictitious) and the act of narrating in itself - the storytelling perspective (who narrates, why and how).

There, in that area, we are experiencing, especially in recent years, quite a few deviations from what David Bordwell (Narration in the Fiction Film, 1985) calls “the canonical story format”: the story pattern most easily recognized and comprehended within our culture. And – one would have to add – the one, which has perhaps contributed the most in creating our expectations, and through them our thoughts/our thinking process, and through them our reality.

Hang on! Art creates reality? Isn’t it reality that creates art? The main tradition of Western aesthetics, deriving from Aristotle’s Poetics, adopts the view that art “imitates” nature. In fact one of the biggest disputes between the teacher and the pupil (Plato and Aristotle) and perhaps the main reason why Aristotle conceived of his Poetics, had to do with that view. The main difference between the pupil and the teacher is that the first believes that art is a reproduction of the sense world; and that the second insists that it is a deceitful image. To Aristotle, the artist copies reality directly, not indirectly, as Plato maintains. The distance of art from truth - that is, the distance from the considerable goal of Platonic philosophy - is allegedly so vast for Plato that the work of art immediately becomes suspicious. Poetry is unnecessary, he says, since from an ontological point of view it is the copy of a copy. So: untrue. (Or we might say: unreal.)

Still, art always pursued the ideal of representing reality as close as possible. Painting pursued this ideal, literature did it, and even the theatre - if one thinks of Ibsen and Chekhov - held the mirror up to reality. All this was eclipsed by the invention of photography. Then what was more real than a direct recording of reality? With the moving pictures art created the perfect illusion of reality. Or did it?

The problematic begun by Plato and Aristotle constitutes the ideological argument right up until today: Can cinema represent reality, or does it serve to seduce and consequently become an end in itself? Or, going further: Does cinema create reality, rather than the other way around? “In my classroom, I tried to impress upon the students that reality is a consensus” (from Palahniuk’s Rant, 2007:53)

Mimesis, either as representation or as a creative reproduction of reality, has employed the most diverse schools of cinema narration many times over. It almost looks as though various historical cinema movements, such as Neorealismo, Nouvelle Vague, the Free Cinema, Cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema, the Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Cinema) and the relative contemporary Danish Dogma movement harken back to Platonic and later Brechtian argumentation, in that they accuse classical cinema of being seductive and declare their programmatic desire to represent objective reality directly.

At the same time we have an anti-realist tradition. That is not and cannot be the goal of art, say the proponents of that tradition, because what would then be the point? The value of art is in the interpretation or idealization of the world, or the creation of a world, which is there in addition to the real world. Eisenstein thought that a medium’s aesthetic value is a direct function of its ability to transform the reality serving as its raw material (and, obviously, the means of such transformation was montage). Assuming the role T.S. Eliot was also assuming in his own field - that of the artist-critic whose writings create the taste by which his own aesthetic practice is judged - he soon found the French Impressionists and Surrealists against him. They, again, represented the position that (as Bazin, the French critic and founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, who in fact made the most persuasive argument in the late 1940s, put it: film’s true destiny is the objective representation of reality): “an image of the world is formed automatically (for the first time in human history) without the creative invention of man”.

So – here we are: In a new medium or a medium, which includes the old media and still having the same unresolved conversation. Only we have changed. Today, we are all aware of the mechanics of storytelling. Cinema has made it its duty to reveal this, and we are perfectly aware of the fallacy of the reality represented in classic linear films. That, and in our immense contemporary desire for truth, is perhaps why that conversation receives a new twist today – and why we are having it, again.

How We Use Storytelling to Brand Ourselves

We love our stories.  We tell stories to define who we are as individuals. We define ourselves, first to ourselves and then to others.  We put a label on this constructed self.  We become a brand.

We create personas in Facebook, and we sell ourselves.  We may present ourselves in what we consider to be the best light.  Look at how many cool people I know.  Look at how much I travel and all the places I have been.  Look at how much fun I am having.  Others of us may present ourselves through the victim persona.  Look at how bad the Other is behaving.  Look at all of the injustices in the world.  Look at me speaking for those who have no voice.  Look at how noble I am. A few of us create sarcastic personas, readily available to make a snide or witty remark at the like of a submit button. All three are covers.  They serve as protective shields.  And through them, we tell a story of who we think we are.  We believe these stories.  We become what we say we are.

Or do we?

I was having a conversation with a fourteen-year-old boy the other day.  He is part of a global gamers community, and he told me that he and his fellow gamers do not tell each other where they live, who their parents are, which school they are attending, not even their ages.  This caused a strange resistance in me.  I asked him how he and the other gamers got to know each other.  The moment I asked the question, I realized how stupid my question was.

Do I know someone else by her age, where she lives, what she is doing for a living, how she was raised, where she went to high school or college, if she is married or divorced, has children, or what she had for dinner?  (So many labels, so many brands.)  Of course I know the answer to these questions, but only through my preconceptions, my memories, my experiences that I apply to every one of her answers.  Therefore, I limit her.  I brand her. 

Perhaps it is time we stop sharing our labels with each other and to stop telling others who we think we are - because we are doing it the wrong way.  Perhaps it is time we focus on the essence of who we are.

Do we know how to do that?  Would we know how to do that?  Maybe not.  But that should not stop us from doing it.  We will find it soon enough, and this discovery might change our stories…it even might change the world.     

p.s. By the way, the gamer did answer my question. Of course they get to know each other, he said. But it happens gradually. It happens over time. Lajos Egri would have been happy to hear that. For him exposition was part of the whole piece and not a detachable component placed at the beginning that plays no further role afterwards. The introduction of a character, he said, must unfold continuously right up to the conclusion of the drama. Here comes a generation which has better narrative instincts than the generations before. Does anyone still doubt that life is storytelling?

……

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