Truth Or Lies
From the anthology Truth or Lies (Putnum, 2001)
By Morton Marcus

Realistic art is the norm these days. We're instructed in creative writing classes to reproduce reality, copy nature. And that's what the general literate public wants--it seems, all it can accept. But each scientific breakthrough tells us that what we experience through our senses is not reality, is not what's really going on. We're not solid matter. We're empty spaces composed of clusters of atoms spinning around each other and held in place by gravitational force fields, and we're regularly pierced by bits of blue light called neutrinos that fly through us to the ends of the universe. In reality, our bodies are like swiss cheese, but composed more of swiss than cheese. So what is reality, what not? What is truth, what lies? I create worlds in my parables, funhouse mirrors whose warped reflections seek to show the essences of things, project solid images of such weightless abstractions as "the human condition." We've gone astray in our art. Art is not the literal copying of nature, it is the imaginative creation of possibilities, the creation of any number of realities that will quicken our sense of life, keep our inner being open to new ways of seeing, enrich our emotional and intellectual existence, and heighten our consciousness. Does it matter if the girl/woman in my poem, "The Girl Who Became My Grandmother," is really my grandmother? Does it matter that the kitchen in which she ran away became a coach any more than that in another piece of literature the dish ran away with the spoon? Or is my probing of the past what's important, the sense of magic still alive there that leads to me, that leads to us all?