On Usefully Misunderstanding Words

We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and are not so much accurate self-reflections as they are just ever so slightly impermeable and inaccurately reflective. There is a reason for this: the essence of a psychological experience of narrative is not that of the perfect fidelity or unerring confirmation of the information signal we believe ourselves to mirror and amplify. Each and every identity and experience of Self is only what it is in regards to the subjective distance and difference between itself and the variously mediated phenomenological facts it encounters. Realising at some inchoate or unconscious frame of reference that we are who and what we are precisely as a function of this difference and distance, we might prefer inhabiting an enigmatic fiction over documentary text because the unresolvable essence of paradox is a property that renews the space of uncertainty that both we and these texts so usefully and generatively articulate.