Lately I’ve been walking around as if dragon blood were coursing through my veins. I’ve been lying in bed at night awake with wild excitement as if my daydreams were hallways into the future, as if they could hasten fate, propel me into everything I desire just a little bit sooner. And why not? It’s been an experiment of mine for about two weeks now: I get into bed a little bit earlier to make time for these fantasies, I awake and they come alive again; and in those first few minutes of waking when my consciousness is living in it’s theta state, I bring everything back from the night before. It’s intoxicating. It changes the way I walk around during the day. I am imbued with something other-worldly yet very focused on what is physically around me. Certainly, I’m sure, nobody is assuming I play this strange little game with myself, but that’s not the purpose of metaphor. It’s as if people view me with regality: with fear, love, admiration; verbs befitting a dragon queen.
This understanding of mine cost me a few months of my life, but it was also born of this cost, and time is never wasted. For all of August, September and most of October I worked five or six days per week. I would wake up around noon, drink coffee, read, and then go to work. When I got home, anywhere between 1:00 and 4:00 in the morning I would turn on Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, cuddle up on my couch and stare intently at the screen for hours. If it wasn’t this I would be reading Fire and Blood, or fan fiction online. I didn’t notice the time. Only occasionally would I leave that den to drink cocktails or champagne in a dimly lit lounge and allow myself to actually laugh with another person. I remember saying to a friend: I have been consumed with fantasy, with the lives and motivations of fictional characters, and for the first time in my life I am recognizing it as an escape. I had always recognized it as inspiration. I felt happiness but that happiness came with the knowledge that I had to take a break and go to work. I wasn’t inspired, I was latching onto a static thing. My real life had become the couch and these stories. I did not feel invested in my own life at all.
It is difficult for me to admit this period of escapism. I keep typing half-truths and then frantically hitting delete. But this is indeed what it was, and in that case, the only thing that had the ability to rip me out was something more pressing to focus on. At first I thought that something was a man. Now I understand that it was my own idyllic storyline that I was following: I had no need to escape into another universe if I had the inclination to escape into another, made of my own demons and princesses and fabrications. The problem is that both were forms of escape, both were forms of hyper-fixation. And the purpose of this story is to detail how I have arrived at a symbiotic sense of duality, objective and subjective at the same time, as if I am literally writing myself, stitching myself into a story.
I have always found these girlish fantasies of mine to have equal relevance to paying my cell phone bill or buying potatoes and dill at the market. I’m working on refining them now, using them as a tool. When I was younger people would say to me, “you’re not even a girl” if I wanted to submerge myself in Lord of the Rings, X-Men… Star Wars. I always found that so odd; firstly, I thought this was the girliest thing about me! I would daydream for hours about Aragorn, about discovering that it was me, ME, who could wield the force. And secondly, isn’t it obvious? Our world is a fantasy world. There are literal beasts living in the ocean, pests that carry viruses that could wipe out populations, a royal family with disgusting secrets that span hundreds of years, that same royal family has committed atrocities in plain sight, there are evil geniuses, corrupt leaders: there is war. This is a fantasy world. We are living in fantasy fiction. We are living in science fiction. Our magic is spoken with words. Dinosaurs have been dead for thousands of years, just like the Dragons of Valyria. And while it is unlikely that a woman will walk through fire and give birth to flying lizards, those are the rules of another fantasy world. Ours is simply a different book. Our rules are different. We are commoners, performers, leaders, citizens, we rape, enslave, and conquer. We have fought holy wars. We sit in prayer to God. We symbolically eat the body and blood of His son’s walking incarnation on earth. In the evening, we sit at the beach and watch a blazing ball of light disappear. In other places we hide women. We murder women. I have read stories of women having their vaginas sewn up in villages during war. Someone recently told me there are places in China where people are living in caves. There are little birds everywhere. I live in a very technologically advanced civilization here in North America. I can buy passage across the sea and experience something else if I wish. I can stay here and repeat if I wish.
A few months ago I was talking with my friend Kristen over Instagram and she shared a piece of text that involved a woman complaining about her boyfriend’s reading choices: the woman found it odd that her boyfriend could have both bell hooks on his shelf while at the same time preferring sci-fi over Jane Austen,
“It’s not that he’s a protein-powder-where-a-brain-should-be-bro. Indeed, he bears all the hallmarks of a fully reconstructed man: NTS on the radio, bell hooks on the shelf, a yoga membership used at least thrice weekly. But literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, history, or sci-fi, just doesn’t interest him. Why prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart, when you can terraform planets, or dig into the CIA’s murky psy-ops in Indonesia?”
I understand how genre works, so the classification of literary fiction opposed to science fiction is clear to me. However, I have a case to make for science fiction (and speculative and fantasy) prodding the nooks and crannies of the human heart. Put the human heart in the middle of downtown London, New York, Shanghai… anywhere on this planet, and there will be something we can relate to, even if it’s an experience we’ve never had. But how can you claim to say that the human heart is not expanded in some way by placing it within the scope of another universe with unknowable physical laws? Would new feelings spring from the circuits of our minds? Would it be too much for us? Are all those creatures in fact not human at all? Love is tested by many things; I am not saying more in one scenario than another, but what would you do if you were immortal and your lover was a mortal man? Does this not cause you to dream? Does this not cause you to take account of the words “duty” or “commitment;” isolate and then bring it all back again to your own circumstances, and maybe have different expectations? Does this not cause you to think of the reverse, if you were occupying the mind of a foreign lifeform, dreaming of drinking Italian wine or investigating the “ancient apocalypse?” Fantasy has taught me that we all have a role to play. It has broadened my understanding of the language I speak, and therefore broadened my understanding of the expansiveness and limitations of my own consciousness. I think about words like courage, terror, loneliness, temptation; I think of sacrifice, which may touch them all. Most importantly, I think very much about romance in fantasy, for truly, where else could it thrive so lavishly than in leagues with imagination? These particular types of fiction take a good deal of empathy and fascination to discover more about yourself. So, why prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart when you can terraform planets? Because I want both. Because I have a large and ravenous appetite for desire itself. I want to terraform a planet just so I can make love on its weird surface.
Back in our world, I’ve always bound myself to the truth; I’ve clung to it as if it were a life-raft and I was in the middle of the ocean and the endless blue surrounding me was a lie. I never wanted to be false but I could not always hold myself up to breathe because in my clamoring I would often go under. Which, on the surface, contradicts everything I have said so far. It’s just that I do not believe magic to be a lie. I feel as though I have fought against this for my whole life: that because I am a feeling person, a lyrical, vibrational person, that it must mean I have no regard for reason or logic or science. But I do. I do! I believe that it is precisely what makes this world so fascinating to me, so wonderful. I am completely matter and completely what people would attribute to the soul; however, I believe that matter, our biology, the micronutrients, blood, and bones that make us up created that soul. And so, like this, it is the contrast that is generative; yes, we live in a fantasy world, but we are restricted by the physical laws and rules of this place that dreaming of anything else is classified as false, other-worldly. At times, by comparison, I consider myself to be a stupid and hedonistic girl. I have felt pain, certainly, but I have stopped thinking of my life as challenging; it is not, and it is not wholly because I have decided it is not.
It might seem odd that I claim this world to be akin to any other fantasy world we may have read about and yet I am still traveling to other places, hoping for some other form of magic. The motivation is that I travel to those places to ground myself in the wonder of where I am. As I experienced last year, it is a very fine line: I have gone mad and back again. But today, as I was walking along the beach, I imagined myself to be on a planet, this planet, looking out at the still container ships. My shoes crunched seashells and slid unevenly in the sand, my hair whipped about as I looked up to see a crow flap its black wings in front of an array of contrails. I wondered what small part of history I might be a part of; what perhaps, was lurking over the Pacific, how little my jacket mattered, and what instead did I want to infiltrate? Within a matter of seconds I decided to go home, to stop and buy broccoli, a green cruciferous plant, tidy my apartment and fix myself herbs to cure my sore throat. These details allow me to experience my own life as it is written by my own hand. “The artistic field is a universe of belief” writes Pierre Bourdieu, who theorized a “field” being a universe with its own laws of functioning, wherein “the existence of the writer, as fact and as value, is inseparable from the existence of the literary field as an autonomous universe.” In this way, my life is the field and I am completely affixed to it; nothing could possibly wrench me out, nothing would dare, for there would be no field if it weren’t for me calling myself the writer. In a way I am living in something that is neither here nor there.
At night I lie in bed and close my eyes and smile and dream of my perfect day. It’s a Tuesday on Naboo, maybe I’m holding a crystal cup filled halfway with Nebbiolo or Viogner, maybe not, but the sky is the richest orange and pink you’ve ever seen and it’s perfect. And when I’m driving down Cambie, or looking north along 8th Avenue in Fairview, or walking down Maple St with a mug in my hand and I can see the peaks of mountains I imagine myself truly on a strange and wonderful planet. Because I am - and I am not. This is what I call fictive living.
"But how can you claim to say that the human heart is not expanded in some way by placing it within the scope of another universe with unknowable physical laws? Would new feelings spring from the circuits of our minds?" - I love this! The whole drowning oneself in fiction vs feeling through it (in media and in real life) was so relatable and beautiful, thanks so much for writing this!