Imagination, fantasy, illusions, chimera #
Mythomane - a person with a strong or irresistible propensity for fantasizing, lying, or exaggerating.
Literature is based on make believe. As Margaret Atwood wrote,
both the reader and writer know what is fiction, but agree to believe it.
Ashleigh Brilliant coined this saying:
Now that I have abandoned my search for truth, I’m looking around for a good fantasy.
For survival, we need some self-deception and useful delusions. When our dreams become unrealistic and supplant our aspirations, they can be damaging.
Einstein was not only a brilliant scientist, but also, a keen observer of life.
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Imagination is more important than logic.
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Logic allows you to count; Imagination is infinite.
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Logic takes you from A to B; imagination takes you everywhere.
Maturity is having a secure sense of self and a grounded perception of reality.
Coleridge explores the possibilities of imagination and our potential to create perfection –“in that dome in air” - fantasies.
Similar to Keats’ later assertion that
⮚ “heard melodies are sweet but unheard melodies sweeter still”.
C.S. Lewis
“The greatest joy lies not in the having, but in the desire.”
The light that never fades; that is eternal, is what you most desire - out of reach.
Sexual fantasies are quite commonly inconsistent with one’s social values and this should not in itself be a cause for alarm.
It is the quirkiness and unruliness of sexual impulse: fantasies — of submission, abandon, extremity,— that do not necessarily translate into reality; they are untrue to the workings of the sexual imagination.
Christ’s Sermon on the Mount fails to distinguish:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ (28) But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
But when confronted by righteous puritans demanding he punish a woman for adultery, Christ casually invited, He who is without sin, cast the first stone.
Mary Shelley claimed Percy Shelley loved to
idealize the real – to gift the mechanism of the material universe with a soul and a voice.
Fantasies can be better that reality.
For some life has always been a performance—even in the pre-digital past.
Imagination induced by drugs can be distorted and visions become hallucinatory and cause delusions.
Beguiling illusions
Dante and his beloved Beatrice: Did they ever actually meet in this world?
Petrarch and his idealized Laura: Did they actually ever communicate?
Flights of fancy do require a safe landing - a reality check, lest our illusions become delusions.
The Castle’s tagline could easily be: “Tell him he’s dreaming!”
Death of a Salesman powerfully portrays a man of crumbling illusions.
Emily Dickinson #
“Life is full of fanciful illusions conjured from thin air; dreams that are hostile to reality, that dwell in possibilities”
For more: https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/dickinson/I-gave-myself-to-Him-Dickinson.html
Ulysses – James Joyce #
Joyce broke the sexual taboos of holy Ireland, Victorian England, and puritanical America, Life, in Ulysses, is the experience of the body, from tip to toe, as it wanders through the world.
When his publishers were found guilty of publishing obscenity, fined fifty dollars each, and forbidden to print any more installments of Ulysses. Joyce countered by saying,
“Obscenity occurs in the pages of life, too.”
Merve Emre New Yorker writes that Leo Bersani claimed that Ulysses brought to modern literature its most refined technique: a narrative perspective that was “at once seduced” by its characters’ distinctive thoughts and “coolly observant of their person.”
David Damrosch, Harvard University claims that Joyce’s linguistic violations and his refusal to tell the inside of a character’s head apart from the outside world.
Inner and lower were the directions modernist writers took literature, toward what goes on inside the head and below the waist.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, writing about the bodily functions that caused all the trouble.
Was Bloom masturbating at, to, or for a young woman on Sandymount Strand at dusk? The prepositions seem important.
Joyce described the episode as “the projected mirage,” and this may explain Gerty’s rhapsodic participation in Bloom’s excitement. Of course!
The text shows Bloom’s projection, not Gerty’s reality. She isn’t thinking about her underwear; she is thinking, like any young person on a beach, about life, love, art, and her dinner.
When Joyce was asked what really happened between Bloom and Gerty, he said,
“Nothing…It all took place in Bloom’s imagination.”
The book unlooses itself entirely in the mind of Dedalus and starts to dream:
“He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.”
Hang on. Did Stephen actually visit his aunt’s house, or just imagine that he did?
T.S Eliot #
Eliot wrote: “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, echoing Kant’s “Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.”
“Unsatisfied desires can play a most important part in keeping the soul alive and urging one higher,”
Eliot appears to have frustrated female issues.
Burnt Norton, the first poem of his Four Quartets.
Here he propagates Courtly Love’s adoration of the unattainable.
“What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.”
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Emily Hale was not the only woman who expected more from Eliot’s friendship.
To limit the above to our romantic inclinations does not do justice to Eliot’s range of human needs and desires. In all aspects of life we have to resort to illusions, just to maintain hope and give meaning to our existence.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty #
Perhaps one of the best examples of Aristotle’s advice, don’t tell them, let the characters reveal themselves. The mystery of the short story relies on us to tell when James Thurber is depicting reality or the fantasies that keep Mitty alive by escaping reality.
Sylvia Plath #
The Bell Jar depicts disturbing emotions of formative sexual experiences. Selected as one of twelve young girls by a fashion magazine, given jobs for a month in New York, all expenses paid, plied with free gifts, beauty products, entertained by successful people in the field of their desires, as models for advertising, Plath depicts the emptiness and boredom of the sham glamorous lifestyle of pretentious celebrities.
Plath’s persona, Esther Greenwood, describes the girls,
on the sun-roof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. .. Bored with yachts and bored with flying around in aeroplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with men in Brazil.
She introduces Buddy Willard:
Buddy Willard went to Yale, .. but he was stupid. Oh he’d managed to get good marks all right..but he didn’t have a spark of intuition.
In a moment of self-realisation Esther Greenwood, the persona, experiences symptoms of The Imposter Syndrome:
A feeling of inadequacy where the subject feels fraudulent. The causes of imposter syndrome are complex, but perfectionism and family dynamics are believed to play a significant role.
Imposter Syndrome, can arise as a feeling of not having done enough to achieve perfection, often when you are surrounded by extremely competent people.
I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee, herself, and I felt all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.
Loss of innocence applies to our sexual awakening; coming to terms with our sexuality and its function in life. There are many links between sex and thinking. The mind can be both slave and master of the body’s appetites, but it is an absurd and terrifying task of stabilizing that dynamic, in theory and in practice.
Sexual needs and urges, biological, instinctive and imperative, emerge during puberty causing confusion and misunderstanding. “Sexual pleasure in a woman is a kind of magic spell” according to Simone de Beauvoir.
Plath’s Vianelle captures the fantasy:
Mad Girl’s Love Song
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)