Why not start with another great quote from Mark Twain. When asked which was harder to write to write, fiction or non-fiction, he replied, "Fiction, because it has to make sense." Life is not obliged to make sense. Experience doesn't need to know what's going on in order to keep on working. We just keep getting propelled forward, whether we like it or not. It's up to us to catch up.

And since we are all a part of the same sensual matrix, we cannot help but keep trying to make sense of it. I've been trying to make sense of life for a long time - not rational sense, mind you, but physical sense. Stories make physical sense. They are the common currency of our experience, our common sense if you will. They support and enrich our consensus view of reality. We share them, and in this way, we find acknowledgment from each other.

Stories help us to avoid bad experience. They also push us to embrace good experience. This is the body of our knowledge, and as such it has sense and it is this sense that drives our imagination. Is it possible to imagine something that we haven't first sensed? I doubt it.

It is also imagination that drives us to share our experience with others. The manner in which we share that experience is relatively unlimited. We may choose from any media form we like, and still support the overall pattern.

This overall pattern is a cyle of expression that moves from sensation through imagination to stories. This is the basis of our common language, a language that allows us to share intangible things - a definition nearly synonymous with magic.

Let us look at the triangular cycle more closely, by looking at the masks of comedy, tragedy and science.