Dawn of the Dead Living

"My interest in the science of storytelling began about a decade ago when I was working on my second book...I wanted to find out how intelligent people end up believing crazy things.

The answer I found was that, if we’re psychologically healthy, our brain makes us feel as if we’re the moral heroes at the centre of the unfolding plots of our lives.

Any ‘facts’ it comes across tend to be subordinate to that story. If these ‘facts’ flatter our heroic sense of ourselves, we’re likely to credulously accept them, no matter how smart we think we are. If they don’t, our minds will tend to find some crafty way of rejecting them."

—Will Storr, "The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better"

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Dear Kate,

My roof is no longer leaking, not perceivably by me anyway.

There hasn't been any really heavy rain since I put to test my final hypothesis last Thursday afternoon, but there was rain enough on Saturday to tell me if I wasn't completely right at least I wasn't totally wrong either.

It was a hypothesis because I wasn't able to identify the cause: a crack, a tiny hole, a fissure, and I knew there was one.  I prayed to God to open my eyes but He said What you see is what you get.  So I aimed for proximate goodness and worked on the most probable areas, imagined what my perception, rational thought process couldn't make me see.

One can say at the end I was still being taken there by rational reasoning.  But she left me at the opening gate, way before I started singing to the tar and playing magic flute to lure the elusive, trouble-making fairy.  What sustained my pursuit for hours up there last Thursday were what people in this age would call illusions, the kind of stuffs that give storytelling a bad name.  "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind"; I was given no answer, but a wind to ride on.

Did I see myself as the "moral hero at the centre of the unfolding plot of my life"?  And why a "moral" hero, and not just any hero achieving his end without engaging his "moral" capacity?

Zombies achieve their ends with no moral concern.  They don't see any destiny that is a spiritual drama still unfolding.  Zombies don't write stories about themselves, have no illusion about anything, give not a name to anyone, see what they get, get what they see.

Gosh, I didn't intend to write about the market economy this morning!

Yours, Alex