The camera’s eye and third-person narration present to audiences the same pacifying pablum: An illusion of omniscience. While the control is not total (ergo, /not/ omnipotence), nor honest omniscience, for even while Ulysses tries to answer some strikingly miniscule questions of fictional ‘reality’, such as: how much specie Stephen carries in his coat pocket, it nonetheless prepares us with shifting vantage points, and information to which we should not, as individuals be privy. Rarely does this semi-omniscience calculate out to incorporate the audience’s /act/ of observing into a plot arc itself. Everything is always constructed /on/ the chessboard, and only Calvino’s Wintery Night or Tristram Shandy place us /in/ the action we so clearly perceive as some form of demi-god. The weak tea solution of fiction is to not just take us away from the “mundane” (which is quite majestic and mysterious, in /my/ humble opinion), but also to ascribe to each of us a capacity of reckoning and perceiving that we are denied in the “mundane.” This latter being the correct context of the word.

Now, it would only be tragically unfair if I did not assign you, dear reader (and why are readers forever so cherished? Because it is such a rare moment to be able to create this mimickery of pseudo-connection, that you would deign to read these paltry and unfiltered words, that I should humble myself, prostrate, before you, for if /you/ do not feel good in the act of reading this, you shall surely turn away, and in that turning away, you disdain, condemn, and ultimately void these ideas [void a far worse outcome than death]; and in so doing, eradicate every possibility for vivid-ification of these notions, they are strangled in the airless vacuum of the unobserved) some course of action and value to your most desirable act of reading. In fact, let me give you the shadow of something you crave. The omniscient narrator gives you a shadow of omniscience, but here, let me give you a small taste of what no other author has ever bestowed: a taste of shadow omnipotence. To have some limited power and control /over/ a thing, as if you were able to transport back to the Garden of Eden and eat of the fruit of everlasting life. Now, remember, and we’ll get to the nature of your power, but trust me in advance, it will only be a tiny morsel. There are more tremendous fictions which will offer you so very much more. And you’ll have to wait, though you cannot skip down, or you’ll miss it. Now, remember, God planted only two spectacularly special species of tree, Life and Knowledge of Good and Evil. There was never a tree of omniscience, nor a tree of omnipotence. The human may well strive, but cannot attain, the seat of deity. At least not until they are ready to construct it for themselves. For real. They have already constructed this fictitious throne, the type of vaporous metal that rests on clouds. It was my understanding that were Adam and Eve to maintain obeisance, they would live forever in the garden, obviating the need for the Tree of Everlasting Life. Odd, indeed. Had the serpent truly wished to torment God, and /truly/ threaten the throne upon which he sat, the serpent would have had Eve eat first (or more likely in /this/ case, Adam) of the Tree of Life. Then, like the rung of Angels, they would live forever, and would quickly (or longly, what does it matter to an eternal?) ascend to at least the same station as God, or even exceed Him (whom I shall refer henceforth to as ‘Jimothy’). How would Jimothy know if the two had even supped from the Tree of Life? There would be no discernible difference, so ultimately the tipping of any hand would still come from the eating of Good and Evil; for that matter, without the knowledge of Good and Evil how would they have known that eating from the Tree /was/ evil? Merely because they disobeyed? But disobedience is considered evil, a concept they apparently did not even have prior to indigestion. But Jimothy is a fucking asshole anyhow, upon which, all scholars agree. And in his irredeemable assholery and pettiness, he punished his ‘creation’ based on rules, the articulation of which were strictly forbidden. Top-notch douchery, but I digress. And it is not beyond religious scholars to continually digress into phase of Myseterious Jimothy and the Ways He Works. Only humans can engage in hypocrisy, so any illusion of such in the manners of Jimothy are only a simpleton’s vantage, an ape shattering a bone against an eternal, obsidion coffin. My God, it’s full of scars. But I digress, now let me introduce you to Jimothy. He’s a character in a paragraph of writing that you are reading. Although he lives in the same world as you, he is dramatically tall, fifteen feet if he is an inch. If, for some reason (I do /highly/ doubt this) you are a future member of a species that can process the written English word whose average specimen is /greater/ than eight feet, then please adjust the previous image to read: twice the height of even your /tall/ exemplars. So, towering. He lives his carbon life on a sea-washed rock, doused in kelp, slits and cuts in various stages of mending about his ‘person’ from strafing barnacles as he shifts his weight about his isle domicile. Jimothy is a thinker, he brings curious images and concepts in and out of being with merely his thoughts. As he articulates these images in his mind, they do not find themselves conjured in his reality, but they have a sense of loving tangibility nonetheless for him. Right now, he is unabashedly naked, reminding you of Rodin—one knee raised upon which he rests his elbow which supports his hand, his chin resting on the back thereof. And he stares out over the pacific, serene ocean spread endless before him.

Or not? What if you didn’t bother to read that? Well, then he didn’t. Those characteristics were denied him. A piece of his potential identity were stripped, even as perhaps others were endowed him, unasked. And therin, you are the potent. In your mind, just as Jimothy’s thoughts, he has sprung to life in authorial time. As many minds should read those words, so do they let him relive this moment, again and again, staring out at the sea, thinking. Just what he enjoys. Each time with a slightly different manifestation. Sometimes he has an afro, other times he is blond. But he is rarely a she, or a she wishing to burst free from their masculine confines. He is probably most often muscular, as we like to envision even our passing heros as more-than-passable illustrations of our ideal. Even if we aren’t clear wherefrom our ideal arises. So the depth of Jimothy’s identity and possibility resides within /you/, dear reader. And that’s a small tidbit of how you /could/ be important in writing, and how you could play a role in the evolution of ‘characters’ of a novel, and free yourselves from this endless one-dimensional and distant rendering of the page. And by giving Jimothy this artificial life, fabricated only in neurological electrical connections, you /also/ endow him with the possibility of one day being. Of creating /him/ into existence, which is more or less what *cough* Jimothy did for us. Thanks so fucking much, Jimothy! Of course it wasn’t Jimothy at all, it was our fear and loneliness that drove us to conjecture a pantheon of Jimothy’s in the first place. Beyond that, it was a rollicking process of atoms and molecules following a law of selfishness and isolation that brought us to our conscienced intellectual selfishness and isolation, all of it under the rubric of survival. And survive we have. And today, thanks to you, so has Jimothy. Clap yourself on the back, dear Reader!