Escapism – Real or Imagination?
It has been said so many times that prison guards [now
called correctional officers] are the only people who hate the word ‘escapism. However,
when you really think about it, more people engage in the act of escapism than
you may realize. In fact, if you truly understand this word, you would say that
correctional officer love escapism for the act itself is defined as a way to
avoid life’s realities, withdraw from the social factors or pressures and delve
into a fantasy world or make believe scenario you can cope in as your
imagination guides your desires.
As a writer, expressionist and critic, I freelance most of
my stories based on acts of people who escape responsibilities and duties
designed by law and moral structures to keep us safe and protect us from harm
or worse. Therefore, I often crossed lines already blurred and allow escapism
to be created to step out of these traditional boxes of visions and corruption.
Within those stories I used metaphors of fantasies such as dragons, haunted
houses, Scorpios, spiders, zombie uprisings and other Armageddon or apocalyptic
visions to stream the cultural visions.
Not trying to compete with an Xbox or other visual aid, I wrote
stories, articles or books based on shifting knowledge from one mind to another
and finding guilty pleasures in telling tales or stories with make believe at
the core but always tying it to the reality we face daily. With the use of word
processors, computers and visually creative software, we can change reality
into a fantasy in a nanosecond and make it all seem to be truth and real in
perspective or belief changing attitudes and judgment on how things ought to be
done and how they are really to be seen.
Creating a digital fantasy is not only fun and exciting but
it is a tool for expressions that create or provoke thinking of the mind other
than mainstream ideas or thinking patterns. It is designed to keep us sharp and
challenged with a little bit of entertainment and escape from the reality we
are facing or living with around us. In other words, it creates a fantastical
and escapable flight for a higher purposes and that purpose is learning.
Metaphors create their own reality complete with human perceptions
and visions of what the words mean or represent. It encompasses individual
knowledge of maps, languages, cultures, history and politics as it facilitates
escaping the primary reality for as long as you are engaged in reading the
materials presented and written. We all hunger for an escape so writers created
those opportunities for others to enjoy and benefit from. In turn, this enables
a smooth transition to a superimposed fantasy you can rely on to take you away
from primary and secondary world realities that either stresses you, enrages
you or burden you with more pressure.
Language is a powerful technology for escape, but it is only
as powerful as the literacy of the reader. In other words, you the reader makes
this transitional power a useful or effective tool if you engage into the fantasy
with all the force and knowledge you possess. Your mind can do more than the
words do as it creates an immersive force that makes on screen fantasy even deeper
by morphing higher visions or expectations into the subversion or image
provided. The possibilities are endless if you dive into a fantasy and read
more and watch less on the tube or the computer created games.
In some stories, fantasy worlds are limited only by
imaginations. The transformation is
individually designed for every individual mind. The more voracious the appetite
to escape, the more creative the vision or fantasy becomes. There is an old
saying that “the world is made of atoms” but in reality, the world is not made
of atoms, it is made of stories about atoms and you can change those atoms
inside your mind with creativity and escapism that allows you to see a
collection of thoughts the way you want to see them.
Some stories are targeted for specific generations. Social immersion
of various generations is tricky and takes talent to digitally generate the
appropriate escapism with depth and complexity to match the generation’s
expectations. As a writer, we give this talent away for the price of a good
read or novel. Herein lies the fact nobody really talks about much these days
for as the technology of escape continues to accelerate, we’ve begun to see an
eruption of fantasy into reality. A risky disconnection is comparing the reality
with the virtual reality in our own physically and artificially blended world.
Perhaps we need to tolerate our fantasy experiences and
limit our creativity to maintain a solid pulse or connection to the real world’s
reality. As technology advances so does intelligence and singularity as it
grows exponentially and culturally around the world. And yet the digital
technologies of today are just the latest in a long progression of tools for
the expression of the imagination. We are escaping, not into other worlds, but
into imagination.
Don’t confuse materialism and idealism. Materialist
philosophies contend that reality is composed of matter and energy, and that
all observable phenomena, including mind and consciousness, Idealism argues
that reality is constructed by the mind. Consciousness does not arise from
material interactions, it is universal; and from consciousness arise all of the
material phenomena in the universe, including atoms. The world is not made of
atoms. It is made of the stories we tell about atoms.
Therefore, in a material philosophy the act of escaping into
our imagination is at best temporary based on the materials at hand; on the
other side, the same act of imagination can reshape our reality.
