In Praise of Sc-Fi and Fantasy

I have three blogspots on the go at the moment:

joan-blethers.blogspot.com

joan-dreams.

joan-well.

That made sense at the time, because the things I wanted to talk about seemed to fall into 3 distinct categories. But now there are other things I want to talk about, so I am faced with a choice: do I start more blogs, or do I just muddle the blogs I've got? Well, in view of all I have been saying, that latter makes sense.

Life is much too complex to be contained within a filing cabinet. Understanding life is less about tables, and classifications, and neat, linear logic, and more about jig-saw puzzles --- ie building pictures, and, ultimately, people. In the words of the bard (Robert Burns, if your not a Scot): 'The man's the gowd, for aw that!' (gowd=gold; aw=all) Or, as Terry Gilliam so beautifully portrayed, the person is the Fifth Essence ---

and that brings me to the subject of this blog: Science Fiction and Fantasy (and not forgetting, definitely not forgetting Magic Realism.) And, now that I think of it, I should add: Surrealism. In fact, all those 'not-quite-to-be-taken-seriously', 'not-to-be-classed-with-Shakespeare' branches of our culture, or, at least, the ones that are more akin to THE TEMPEST than HAMLET, or HENRY V.

The thing is that you find a deeper, subtler realism in fantasy. In the words of Wilfred Owen: Truths that lie too deep for taint. Take that poem itself: STRANGE MEETING. In it, the writer eescapes the noise of battle by going down a tunnel --- how are we to understand that? Wilfred Owen escapes the noise of battle by going underground --- (understand, that the process of interpreting writing is like that of interpreting dreams: it is alway about the writer). So, Owen in the trenches, like everyone else, had need to escape, and, in Owen's case, he 'does something secretive.' That is usually what 'going underground' means. So, in the manly world of the trenches, did Owen write poetry openly, for all to see, it did he do it in secret. And, even if he did do it openly, did the people he mixed with know that it was anti-war poetry?

But the metaphorical war that the poem really deals with is likely to be the kind of war that every writer experiences: that between what you really want to write/write about and what society will approve of. And, when Owen goes underground, he meets a man he killed some time ago --- yes, well most people make the choice early in life, to aspire to be Shakespeare rather than themselves, so they 'kill' 'themselves'. The friend Owen finds underground, is some part of himself that he killed off in the past --- that rediscovery probably explains the marked difference between the poetry Owen wrote before the war and what he wrote during the war, and I would suggest that the war did him that favour, that it induced him to rediscover something that was truer to himself, and which therefore, gave new life to his writing.

And then there is old Colridge, who suffered from depression --- need I say more about the origins the THE ANCIENT MARINER? More interesting, is the mysterious KUBLA KHAN:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree

Where Alph, the sacred river ran --" etc etc

Supposedly it was written under the influence of opium --- but that just means it was written without the conscious imposition of what the conscious mind sees as a satisfactory representation of reality. In other words, it was unadulterated dream --- ie fantasy, Sci-Fi, Magic Realism, Surrealism --.

As I said above, it is about the poet, and the problems of the poet. So, go through that poem again, but this time think about the problems faced by someone who has a self that want to write, and has truths to tell, but who also lacks the self-confidence to defy society, and so generates within themselves another