Two-way Street

The other night I awoke from a dream and found myself compelled to write down some thoughts that floated in my head as sort of the after-burn of dreaming. And that was about what “fantasy” – of the literary type – teaches us. 

Last night, the thoughts preceded the dream, and had to do with science fiction. 

I was reading a manuscript a former student asked me to read for her and comment on. I was no more than a few pages into it when I found myself stymied. It was written about a future world someone might have written about in the 1940s, where, along with humans, there were two kinds of humanoid robots. And it seemed so “retro” that I had to write to the author before I could go any further. I wanted to explain that the conversation about artificial intelligence had progressed a great deal in the seventy-plus years since Isaac Asimov started kicking around ideas about robots.  

There were many presumptions made about “intelligence” and “human behavior” and “self-awareness” and “autonomy” in those days. In a way, we know a lot more about such things, but in another way, we know much less – and in this I’m using the word “know” in a somewhat sloppy way. It’s not so much what we know as what we presume to know.  

In other words, perhaps, we define the problem in such a way as to arrive at a simple solution. It’s not about the “solution,” so to speak, but the definition. If the definition is off, the solution doesn’t really “solve” anything. 

It brought me back to my reading of Louis H. Sullivan’s The Autobiography of an Idea, published the year of his death in 1924. 

 

He [Sullivan himself, writing about himself in the third person a la Henry Adams] had worked out a theory that every problem contains and suggests its own solution. That a postulate which does not contain and suggest its own solution is not in any sense a problem, but a misstatement of fact or an incomplete one. He had reached a conviction that this formula is universal in its nature and in application. ... if one wished to solve the problem of man's nature, he must seek the solution within man himself. ... 

 

When the notion of humanity sitting at the top of the Great Chain of Being was considered indisputable, it was easier for our ancestors to figure out their priorities. Today, we’re not only uncertain of our position on the chain, but whether or not the chain exists at all. 

The more we know, the more we sense how much more there is to know. The more knowledge we gain, the more we understand how much of our universe is perhaps unknowable – at least in the immediate future. 

And I found myself thinking: the important thing in science fiction is not what we know, but what we don’t know. That’s what makes it fun and thrilling and fascinating – discovering the limits of what we know and speculating upon all that we don’t. 

And then I went to sleep. 

And then I dreamed about the house where I grew up. 

Except that it wasn’t the house where I grew up, not physically. It looked older, bigger. But it did have one thing my real house had: a crawlspace. 

And in the crawlspace I discovered that about a dozen college students had snuck in and were living there. They had fashioned their own little cubicles, and their own cubby spaces where they stored their books and laptops and clothing. They had their own sleeping bags and lights. It was all a very neat arrangement. But once I discovered it I had to figure out if I should allow them to live there or throw them out. After all, they were living there without permission of anyone. 

But they were living there because, of course, they had no money. And I could understand that. So I decided that I would let them live there and, if they ever found themselves with a little money to spare, to make a “donation.” 

Unfortunately, the house wasn’t mine. And eventually my brother arrived. And it was understood that he had power of attorney over the “estate,” such as it was, and would throw the students out or call the police on them.  

I awoke before any such eviction occurred. I felt bad about the students and what might happen to them. I hoped they would find another crawlspace somewhere.  

But I felt good about my decision not to evict them. Were it my decision to make, they could have stayed as long as they wanted. 

There was all sorts of other stuff happening in the dream. My parents were there, though dead – their presence was in every room. Pam ordered groceries, and two African immigrants who delivered them were waiting for Pam to fold up the boxes so they could be used for the next delivery. And I had an amusing exchange with a gentleman from Goodwill when I discovered that the uniform shirt he was wearing was exactly the same make as the one I was wearing. I have no idea how this all may have fit with the alleged “big thought” I went to sleep with: Science Fiction is not about what we know, but what we don’t know. 

Maybe there isn’t a connection, but I suspect there is. 

Suspect, but don’t know. 

And somehow, for some reason, I’m perfectly okay with that.

 

It Took All Year to Write this Post... and One Night

 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.