The Tell-Tale Heart

Everyone has a story. There are observers who will either confirm or refute what they’re hearing. The notion of the narrative is even more pronounced in the age of therapy where patients consciously try to render their lives much the way writers of autobiography (a form of  fiction) have always done. In this respect there are now probably a larger number of people involved in the creation of self-portraits than  ever. A listener requires someone who's willing to express and the two cross-pollinate in the creation of what is essentially an art form. There have been writers like Somerset Maugham, Eugene O’Neill, Charles Dickens and John Updike who have always demonstrated a consciously autographical predilection. David Copperfield is Dickens’s story, at the least from the author’s point of view. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the story of O’Neill’s family leavened with the Aristotelian unities of space, time and action. This last gives a hint about all attempts to render the past which inevitably must take esthetic liberties in order to create their effect. Naturally a patient is not entertaining their therapist, but they have to be creative, if only to produce the kind of catharsis that takes place in a session. Is there any such thing as objectivity? Or is the “life-lie,” the lingua franca of another O'Neill play, The Iceman Cometh, what individual tales propagate? If nothing else the play that spreads out before the mind of the creator is true to the person imagining it.

Read "A Cubist Perspective on Life" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Juicy" by The Notorious B.I.G.