Nairobi – Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates - born June 16, 1938

I haven’t yet narrowed down my inability to finish this volume of the BASS. Sure I’ve been distracted by the pregnancy but I’ve had plenty of time to read and write.

It’s not like I don’t have more years of the anthology to plow through…

Perhaps it’s my lack of disciple showing again.

I don’t understand what is so difficult about spending ½ an hour with a story and then writing something about it the next day.

So…Nairobi.

Oates.

A pleasant enough story. Nothing spectacular – standard fare from Oates (which means that the writing is superior to other authors).

What did it give me?

Well, this was a tough one.

One that caused me to stare hopelessly at the computer screen for awhile.

The first word that popped into my head was illusions.

I feel that the story had to do with the perception of those illusions. Is it even possible to perceive illusions or are illusions something that are stable and cannot be subjected to a certain perception? They either are something or they are not.

Hummmm…

This story caused me to think about the world around me and my existence in it.

How much of the time that I spend in this world is an honest existence?

Reality vs. fantasy.

I’ve written in the past quite a bit about perception and how I am working at how I deal with my own.

It seems, and this may be just because I am hyper aware of it, that there is an awful lot of discussion out there in the world now about the “reality” that we are living in. Was the life we lead before this economic crisis a “real” world or was it a world based on a fantasy?

Was it this illusion that got us into the trouble that we are in now?

Was what happened after 9/11, America’s reaction, based on a realistic plan to fight our enemies? Afghanistan? Iraq?

The internet, TV, the movies, the entertainment and information industries…infotainment…are they reality?

Do we see Nairobi on the other side of the screen and believe that we are there because we have been conditioned to believe that we are there because we are told that we are there?

Illusions and reality – something to be explored and considered.