I awoke from a very strange dream early this morning and, instead of my usual m.o. of saying, when a thought comes to me, “I should write that down,” and then turning over and going back to sleep, this time I actually wrote it down:
What fantasy teaches us –
We are taught that what is true and what is real are synonymous.
And we are taught that believing and knowing are the same thing.
What fantasy teaches us is that what is real is often not true, and what is true is often not real.
And what we believe is often not what we know, and what we know is often not what we believe.
And that is why so many hate fantasy.
Not because it’s an “escape,” but an acknowledgment of our contradictions.
And with that knowledge, whether we’re free or imprisoned, we can become truly dangerous.
Fantasy can, or at least may, give someone not only the power to recognize the words “true,” “real,” “believe,’ “know,” but to change them.
... And then I went back to sleep.
It’s been a strange year for everyone, but not “strange” for everyone in the same way. Every journey has been a little (or a lot) different.
For me, the challenges have been somewhat personal. I’ve found myself in a position that I wouldn’t have imagined a few years ago, but one I would have hoped for a decade or so back.
I’m writing, though not as much writing fiction as I’d like.
I’m teaching, though not necessarily the subjects I’d imagined I’d be teaching. Still, the subjects are in the neighborhood of my “area of expertise,” as some colleague might call it. “Foundations in Creative Writing” – I’m supposed to know about them. “English Authors from Beowulf to Blake” – would not have been surprising in grad school, but fifty years ago if you had told me I would be teaching Chaucer, Marlowe, and Pope, I would have laughed. When it came to literature, I cared little about what was written yesterday. I wanted to read what was being written today. I wanted to read what was being written tomorrow. My journey through literature has been a backward progression.
The one that really had me – and still does – perplexed is the Fantasy Writing Workshop. I’ve known and read fantasy fiction for years.
But I can’t say I know what it is.
The literary categorical definitions have been little help. The one quote that has really helped was from Gene Wolfe, who said something along the lines (too lazy to look it up now) that it is the one thing in the universe that is bigger than the universe. There is more going on than “primary” and “secondary” worlds, with respectful apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien.
What is primary to some is secondary to others, and vice versa. There are times when it seems that the primary world is merely an extension, or an appendix, of the secondary.
I know many of my students want merely to write medieval idylls with dragons, elves, and fairies, but I can’t help feeling there’s more to this.
Some of that feeling may be personally driven. For the past couple of years I’ve been watching my mother, now 92, descending into dementia. And I believe part of the reason why it’s been so difficult for me to watch her descent is because, for her, all her life, the lines between primary and secondary worlds never really existed. What she believed to be true and real was always incredibly flexible.
It wasn’t that she was “merely” a liar, although she lied. It wasn’t that she rearranged facts for the convenience of the immediate circumstance – that's just part of it. It wasn’t that she chose a “make believe” world at times over the “real” one. I think, honestly, that she couldn’t tell the difference between the make believe world and the real one.
Mentally ill? Not entirely. Not necessarily. I think millions of people do much the same thing. The only difference may be in degree. Some people are just good at it.
I may be one of them. After all, I am my mother’s son, along with being my father’s son.
Funny. Both of them excoriated literary fantasy to some degree. And yet both them lived intensely interior fantasies. Perhaps that is their legacy to me. And it may be why the traditional definitions of fantasy have left me cold. Something’s incomplete about them. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
And perhaps that’s where the dream came from – the dream that left me awake at 4:45 in the morning with those words in my head. It’s taken me a year, maybe two years, to figure them out somewhere in some part of my conscious or unconscious.
For a large part of my life, I have felt that my life was a long, sloppy, unfortunate accident. I was the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I was a “rough draft” of a human being that it would have been better to erase and start all over again, were the laws of the land not written to prevent such corrections.
I’m beginning to think that maybe the accident was not so unfortunate after all. Even more – that it may not be an accident after all.
That’s something new for me. And it may be that the twists and turns of our current pandemic have played a role in getting me in that frame of mind.
I’m not saying pandemics are good, but it’s perhaps possible that not all of their outcomes are bad.
Let’s see what the next dream tells me.
By the way, Happy New Year.
