On Fantasy

It’s a hell of a relief, sometimes. Fantasy asks for the judgment of a human being’s heart and spirit, not the logical part of the brain, not the necessity to weigh propaganda against pleas for help and to make a decision which is which - a decision that could mean the life or death of real people.

But the decision of the heart and spirit is not the mere escapism that the detractors accuse fantasy of being. Fantasy is also the training ground where the logical mind learns to trust those other components of the human gestalt, to the extent of maybe, someday, in a situation dealing with concrete realities and genuine blood and guts of actual human beings, influencing and tempering decisions that have to be made in that hour. Trust the heart. Machines may be taught logic, but not empathy or compassion - and a human being who does not possess or trust those attributes is, in essential form, no more than such a machine.

People are looking for meaning. Many turn to religion and the various faiths which flourish in the world today. The problem with religion as the sole answer to the question of meaning is that it is so often adulterated with dogma and weighed down with protocol, the protection of the privileges of the priestly caste, and the frequent insistence of any one given religion that all of the others are at best bunkum and and at worst dangerous enough to be annihilated with fire and sword. It is religious intolerance, in part or as a moving force, that smouldered at the inception of the Crusades in medieval times; in the expulsion of the Huguenots from France; in the myriads of Catholic-Protestant conflicts over the centuries; of the Cherokee Trail of Tears where a nation’s cultural and religious beliefs were thrown into indiscriminate upheaval because the people who held them were inconvenient and in the way of progress.

Fantasy may be a violent genre, but it also, to an extraordinary extent, values life over senseless death - and more than that, it values living. Fantasy lives are so rarely a mere existence on a day to day basis - people in these stories are all here because they need to be here, because they have a role, a destiny, a sense that because of their presence and their actions the Universe is unfolding the way it should.

And that is the gift that makes people reach for the fantasy in this world. It makes individuals examine their own destiny. It gives every life value, no matter how insignificant it may appear. To paraphrase a wonderful line that Tolkien put into the mouth of Gandalf, his wise wizard - it does not matter how much time we are given in this world, what matters is what we do with the time that we have got. Learning to understand that conundrum is at the heart of a meaningful existence. And it is neither more nor less than that understanding that lies at the root of the somewhat fraught relationship which has always existed between fantasy and the audience that receives it.

Fantasy does not require blind obedience to a priest, a king, or a president. Its only demand is that seekers be true unto themselves.

This is a powerful affirmation.

Powerful enough to keep people flocking to the bookstores and the movie theatres, perhaps. And maybe, just maybe, the things learned there will help us live in the reality that we have made for ourselves.