859 - Fundamentals

To add to the right to tell stories,
The right to disbelieve them;
The right to doubt one's disbelief;
The right to be wrong in one's doubt;
The right to believe a story,
Knowing it to be untrue.

The right to disbelieve,
To take joy in a fantasy for the sake of its fantasy:
If listener and teller do not share a common disbelief,
If all ghosts rise somewhere,
Who'd listen to, who'd really tell
Of a new thing?

The right to doubt one's disbelief,
To find the frisson of a story in its possibility,
Not because it has been pinned true in the past
But because other tales like it have been told,
And once told, tasted - the taste,
If not the telling, true.

The right to be wrong in one's doubt,
For either the story is true, or it is false:
The doubter is always wrong. But
To make that doubt bright and new,
Though it is wrong, the truest of gifts,
And brightest hope, and forever, and so -

The right to believe a story, knowing it
To be untrue: to disbelieve a story,
To doubt one's disbelief, to be wrong in one's
Doubt, and believe, and not - to
Stand with science, hold court with
the Gods - a right and a blessing, bounden
duty, horizon, forever, forged, found