FANTASY I have recently embraced the opinion that fantasy is much preferable to reality. Reality is important, to be sure, probably more important, even much more important, than fantasy. Reality must first exist to provide the background on which fantasy is placed. Without reality there could be no fantasy. In a sense though, fantasy is the purpose of reality. It is the reason, if you will, that reality exists in the first place. In other words, if there is no fantasy, it's like reality is being wasted. It was really very simple to arrive at this conclusion. Reality is of course the necessary background. Without it fantasy could never come to be. But reality, as fundamental and necessary as it surely is, is nevertheless quite boring. It’s like rocks. They are necessary. But what do you actually do with them? Just look at them? The very purpose of rocks consists in their ability to be used as raw material - to make stuff with, whether it's structures, (like houses) or works of art (like statues). You can also pile them up and make dams with them, or fences, or whatever. The same applies to basic “reality.” You’re not supposed to just sit and look at it. You’re supposed to mess with it, turn it into something, like you turn rocks into a dam or fence or statue or build a house with them. In reality, there are no unicorns. But so what? There aren’t supposed to be. You’re supposed to make them up, just like you make up fairies and elves and goblins. It is very likely that a personal fantasy life is a hell of a lot more exciting than a “real” life. It may be the purpose of a real life, to make one of pure fantasy, and spend as much time in the imagined one as possible. In a way, all the stuff in our man-made world is a product of fantasy, like fantasy made flesh. Something as simple as a granite countertop in your kitchen is a fantasy. If you doubt it, just try and remember the last time you saw one in the world of nature. No, granite countertops don't exist in nature. We have to make them. And we make them because we have imagined them. For that matter, even wooden countertops don't exist in nature, any more than chairs and couches do. All these things are fantasies. Just because we've clothed them with material form doesn't make them any less fantasies. Taking a pig out of a sty doesn't make it something other than a pig. Everything we make is a product of fantasy. But lately, it seems that our fantasies are getting into high gear. The computer graphics people are making animated characters that are very close to mimicking real people, not to mention heretofore purely mythical constructs, like unicorns. I have to say that this new position of mine is a total about-face from my previous opinion on the subject. I used to go around saying stuff like, "Ah, that's nothing but fantasy," like there was something wrong with it. Now, I think I would have a hard time saying that to someone. There's nothing wrong with fantasy. As a matter, the more deeply I think on it, there's nothing but right with it.
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