Print the Legend: The Distance from Reality to Fiction.
How long does it take for a real historical person and/or even to turn into something we basically consider fiction, a comic book, a figment of our imagination? Does it depend on the positive/negative power of that event, or is it something else? A simple example is Jack the Ripper. I’m fully aware its history, but I’ve since long stopped seeing like that. For me it’s a thriller, a mystery. Almost a fictional riddle. I don’t see the victims as victims, I see them as memes. Symbols of an exciting storyline. Titanic is another example. It’s a story, nothing more. Is WW2 beginning to transcend into a scary story rather than a reality?
An even better example is modern serial killers, let’s say Ted Bundy — who have been completely taken over by the entertainment industry through movies and documentaries, where they’ve used his legacy to transform him into a cartoon — not necessary a bad thing, as art is art and art can do what it wants. The same thing have happened to Jeffrey Dahmer, and soon we’ll see more examples of this — and all of this have been going on for years, but the distance from the latest news to the unreal back drawers of our consciousness has without a doubt become shorter.
As Terence McKenna stated, time goes faster and faster. The weirdness is developing in a higher degree and soon we’ve forgotten our past mistakes… and successes. Time is what makes it unreal, and when times gets twisted we can’t identify with it even more. The longer we get from something the further from the truth we travel. Considering the Nazi ideology/fascism is more accepted now I guess that’s how it is, when people shrugs their shoulders and trying to find something constructive in destructive thinking. How long did it take for Adolf Hitler to go from a ruthless dictator to a funny man with a silly mustache? A meme of “evil”, but something we still see as a cartoon?
I’m a supporter of Graham Hancock’s investigations of an advanced civilization before our own, which not necessary might have been a decent/“good” one, but no matter what it proves how willingly and unwillingly we tend to distance ourselves from what’s been around before us.
The idea of something in the past, so huge it’s impossible to comprehend, but still can be rooted in reality, creates by itself a wide fictional inner world which lives on by its own and through us, the imaginers, with broader strokes and details added and retracted. Maybe a human character goes faster to be fiction, when a historical event takes hundreds or thousands of years to descend from storybooks to Hollywood movies?
It’s part of history to transform to his story or her story, and something we can’t avoid. Time changes everything, and soon we must put it back where it belongs and learn everything from new again. It’s a process like everything else, a learning process, deeply rooted in what it is to be a human.
Soon the reset button will be activated again, and soon a new phase of memories will be released and create fresh legends and new archetypes.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”- quote from John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Wallace.
Thanks to Paul A J Lewis and Marc Fusion for valuable input.
