Maybe you’ve seen this?

There’s some interesting stuff there, stuff about my emotional stability and pain and inability accurately to recount a conversation with someone.  I received an email from that someone, actually a few, demanding I label my work fiction.

Unfortunately, I don’t write fiction.

Pays better, I hear.  I’ve only managed to write one short series of fiction in the last two years, What We Built From Ruins. Otherwise–no.

There’s a bit of fictive metaphor in Perceval.  It’s in the first section.  My interlocutor wasn’t wielding a scepter. Also, there’s a mythic element in it.  I can’t prove a fragment of my soul suddenly found itself in Gwynedd again, at the shores of Llyn Dinas.  The earlier was a literal device, the latter a spiritual experience.  That’s the sum of it, though. The rest?  All true, and particularly my accounting of my interlocutor’s words.

Here’s the thing, though.  He claims I am not telling the truth. But he says some awfully nice things, too, mixed in with some questioning of my emotional state and a description of my ‘pain.’

So, you know how this works, yeah?  I claim my account to be true; he claims otherwise.  Thus, I am either lying, delusional, or telling the truth.

If I’m lying, you have no reason to trust anything else I say.  My accounts of meeting gods, my description of ritual visions, pretty much everything else should be suspect.  You should not trust me.

If I’m delusional, you have similar reasons to doubt everything else I’ve said.  I say I encounter a land spirit or sense the dead: you should wonder how sane I actually am.  As I’ve said previously, the mystic or the spiritualist reports a reality outside normal observation, and the easiest way to shut them out is to diagnose their condition.  I could have been crazy (either temporarily or possibly chronically), and if this is so, that would qualify me as (what we call in social work) a ‘poor historian.’

In your judgment is that I fall into one of the first two cases, I’m gonna politely suggest, for your own integrity and mental health, that you stop reading me.  I claim to write the truth, and if what I say is untrue or delusional, I’m guilty either of a very grave crime (misleading people) or need some medications.  It’s the same advice I’d give anyone else.  It’s not safe to believe people who mislead or outright lie; it’s also very unsafe to be caught in other people’s delusions.  You should stop reading me.  No hard feelings, seriously.

If the third, though–awesome.  Glad you’re around.  You’re who I’m writing for, and you have my love.

Be very well and in peace. I will be, too.