Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2005 |
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Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2005
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| Rating | |
| Title | Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, October 10, 2005 |
| Creator |
Yoshida, Kyoko, 1969 Neihoum, Laila, 1961- Chi, Zijian 1964- Haslinger, Josef, 1955- Hai, Van Cam, 1974- |
| Creator - Nationality |
Japanese Libyan Chinese Austrian Vietnamese |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2005-10-12 |
| Description | Kyoko Yoshida tackles the topic of fantasy and reality through identifying "disorientalism" in four parts, taking his audience on a journey that beings with a story by Edgar Allen Poe and ends with Coleridge pursuing the real, rebuilt, Xanadu. Laila Neihoum constructs her understanding of reality as "a creation of the mind"; her talk revolves around stories speaking to that point, specifically using Andrew Crumley's novel, Mobius Dick, as an example. Chi Zijian's talk, titled "My Heart Away in Thousands of Mountains" describes his experiences following the shamans of the Shilubu, who cure their people through communicating with spirits, leading his perspectives on fantasy and reality to take on a divine direction. Josef Haslinger's talk focuses on the changing boundaries between fantasy and reality, about literature influencing real-life events and vice versa. Van Cam Hai's talk also involves questions of divinity and spiritualism, while imagining a conversation among himself, Franz Kafka, and Chuang Tzu. |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Topical Subject (LCTGM) |
Authors Writing |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Kyoko Yoshida (Japan) Disorientalism The book is what is real. —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night I. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” the narrator claims that he has found a text called “Isitsöornot” which tells the true fate of our beloved, resourceful storyteller Scheherazade. According to Poe’s source, on the 1,002nd night Scheherazade begins to relate a neglected episode of Sinbad the Sailor. In his last voyage, Sinbad encounters a giant passenger steamboat, and takes off to circumnavigate the globe. Sinbad visits a coral reef, a petrified forest in Texas, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, and encounters a lava-gushing volcanic eruption whose ashes darken the sunlight. Finally he arrives in England, a nation of “most powerful magicians,” where steam locomotives rush across the land, incubators (“hen[s] without feathers”) produce hundreds of chicks everyday, the automaton chess-player and the computing machine beat the wisest of the nation, and the letterpress can print thousands of copies of the Koran in an hour. Scheherazade’s list seems endless—the catalogue of the latest physical and astrological discoveries and cutting-edge technologies of late nineteenth-century England disturbs the King so much that he interrupts Scheherazade. The stories are so preposterous and outrageous, he can’t stand any more of her lies and he decides Scheherazade is to be throttled the morning after. The moral of this ironic parable is two-fold: (1) the historical facts sound too fantastic and bizarre; the reality is far more difficult to swallow than the fantasy; (2) the truth is often told in the form of apocrypha; and a text may metamorphose into apocrypha when it travels across borders and time. Poe’s story is apocryphal in a double sense: Scheherazade’s anachronistic narrative of Western technology that the King finds bogus, and the transcultural adaptation of “Isitsöornot” by Poe’s narrator. II. The incredible comes true in the age of information technology and global terrors. In both cases, the realm of the real seems to be expanding every minute while our imagination, both collective and private, steadily dwindles, becoming compartmentalized. Poe’s tale suggests pushing the limit of our imagination is as big a challenge as crossing borders between nation states, or the Orient and the Occident. Today when dealing with the fantastic, the writer and the reader are playing catch on the cliff—the two have different backgrounds, different ideas of the fantastic, different authorities in relation to the particular text, namely authorship and 1 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp the right to [mis]interpret—and one might well throw a ball to the other’s pit, assuming it’d be a perfectly safe catch. Here, following Poe’s spirit of apocryphal tales, I would like to present my tenet as a pseudo-manifesto related to the kind of the fantastic I have in mind, namely Disorientalism. Recent literary scholarship continuously reveals that even the most sophisticated readers, including the admirable Edward Said, cannot totally liberate themselves from the mindset of Orientalism—so why not further complicate the game by actively and accidentally dis-orienting the reader? III. Disorientalist Manifesto My dear audience, be aware—if you carelessly celebrate this assembly of writers from around the world, the alternative realities of the Orient, the “rich oral traditions” of the third world, the emergence of new hyphenated voices in American Literature, and the cohabitation of different cultures in America and the rest of the world, you may trick yourselves and become dis-oriented without your knowing it. Hyphenated writers, postcolonial writers, be aware—your worthy efforts to recover your history in counter-narratives, to make use of your people’s narratives, may only be taken into the larger efforts of the dominant power to rationalize Others by consuming your narratives as amazing but safe exotica. Disorient your bona-fide readers with false promises of the authentic experience, anachronism, pan-ethnic settings, arbitrary foreign descriptions, and faux exoticism. Mimic, not the Occident, but the Orient, because we cannot naturally be Orientals any more, for we become one only through learning and imitating. Guide your good American readers westward because after all, that’s the right way to the East. People travel east and west. We sail over roaring billows to the rim of the western horizon where the burning sun sets and the seething saltwater thunders down into the void with dense clouds of steam. We trot over the gentle slopes, counting dozing sheep, to the edge of the eroded eastern wall pierced by the acute steel-blue moon. People travel to outer space. People play golf on the moon. People go north and south. None of them has any purpose. Everybody wants to see the Eiffel Tower, though we know how it looks. We are anxious to check the eight corners of the world. Yesterday Jerusalem, today Tunis, tomorrow Disneyland. Goethe said—he said everything—that the more we travel, the more stupid we become. These are not his exact words. I like to think Goethe meant that as we travel we lose our intellect and memory. The ability to think critically and the capacity to cherish one's past. The idea that one 2 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp gains deeper insight by traveling to other parts of the planet is dangerous. The more we see, the blinder we become. The more excitement we seek, the more bored and boring we grow. The longer we travel, the longer we stop thinking. In the end we must keep traveling constantly to fill up the increasing void in our minds. No matter how fluent we are in foreign languages, no matter how long we stay in a foreign land, and no matter where we were born and raised, we cannot avoid being clueless tourists. As we travel east and west, our dead brain cells scatter right and left from our ear canals. The dead brain cells look, smell and taste like rotten tofu—both are flabby, spongy, high-protein, organic. Birds and squirrels follow and eat the droppings. And that’s how we all get completely lost in the Black Forest of daydreaming. Which way is east? Which is west? Night falls; we get continue to get lost in our nightmares. And we ask each other, “Isitsöornot?” Welcome to the Land of Disorient. IV. In Kajii Motojiro's very short story, “Lemon” (1925), an impoverished narrator roaming about Kyoto leaves a lemon in a bookstore, fantasizing it would blow up the whole building. Imagination is the only weapon the worn-out narrator has against overbearing reality: Sometimes, as I walked along those streets, I tried to imagine that I had escaped from Kyoto to a faraway city where no one knew me.... If I wished hard enough, I felt, I could transform this place.... As the images took hold, I began to tint them one by one with the colors of my mind, until they could easily be superimposed on my dilapidated surroundings. Then and only then could I taste the joy of losing sight of my real self. This cityscape is real and imaginary at the same time, as expressed in Gérard de Nerval's paradoxical conviction about the power of imagination: “Whatever the case, I believe that the human imagination has invented nothing which is not true, in this world or in others, and I could not doubt what I had so distinctly.” Nerval's statement reflects Poe's thesis, “The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.” “Dream is the real,” writes Edogawa Rampo, another follower of Poe, whose penname, almost homophonous to Poe's, literally means “flânerie along the Edo River” in Japanese. The synthetic cityscape in the Land of Disorient is a hybrid zone where the travelogue and the dystopian topography intermingle. It is not a mimesis of an actual city, but a reflection upon one's cerebral cortex projected by a narration: the lines on the cerebrum are the lines of the text, and lines and paragraphs become the passages—of Kyoto, Xian, Baghdad, or Iowa City. 3 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as the zone of “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.” It is a temporary yet intense moment like a trance that lasts only as long as the hesitation is sustained. ��At the story’s end, the reader makes a decision … he opts for one solution or the other [choosing either the uncanny (the supernatural explained) or the marvelous (the supernatural accepted)], and thereby emerges from the fantastic…. The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment.” If the Land of Disorient is a hybrid cityscape located on the frontier between reality and the imaginary, the cityscape becomes the subject of hesitation; therefore, the cityscape is the fantastic. Yet everything seems, sounds, and smells so real in the impossible borderland of the fantastic, for it is this realness that makes us hesitate, despite the laws of physics to which we subscribe. Our favorite vindication of antirealist modes of writing is, “Writers write the truth, not the facts.” To tell the truth, the Truth does not intrigue me as much as the Real. It is like when your body reacts to a nightmare and you know damn well it’s just a dream…. The figurative language, the timbers that construct a Disorientalist cityscape, operate in this borderland—it embraces both the real and the fantastic, making the familiar strange and vice versa. Coleridge was definitely pursuing the real, not the truth, when he was desperately trying to rebuild the city of Xanadu. 4 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Laila Neihoum (Libya) Reality: A Creation of the Mind Reality, the one we used to know, is no more—it has been twisted inside out. Even imagination and fantasy are hiding their faces in shame: they are outdated, no more á la mode. Maybe we are too, with our old understandings, our perspective out of fashion in a shifting world! And if imagination is what makes our sensory experience meaningful, that enables us to interpret and make sense of that experience, whether from a conventional perspective or from a fresh, original, individual one. It is what makes perception more than the mere physical stimulation of sensory organs. Imagination also produces mental imagery, visual and otherwise, which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and possibilities for the future, and to weigh alternatives against one another. Thus, as Nigel J.T. Thomas says, imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been and, perhaps most importantly, what might be. What might be! That is the core of what needs to be discussed. What is trendy today is a neo–mixture of the imagination, fantasy and reality in a bowl. Advanced sciences, technologies, and virtual realities that expand the limits of the mind—these new ideas play with mathematical spaces and worlds within worlds in a surrealist collage that erases and merges these boundaries into a new literary geography that was unimaginable before, I believe not a long time ago. Simply expressed, because of those computer-generated worlds that can be explored in real time, the world we explore virtually is continuously re-computed as it is explored— what you do affects what happens next. The computer will respond to whatever you do inside its world. How do we as readers deal with these blurry scientific ideas when they manifest themselves in fiction? I mean that, compared to this reality of a mesh of matrixes, writing in the old simple reality, imagination and fantasy is a baby��s lullaby. To better explain what I have in mind, I will describe a novel in which the writer, through his protagonist, took tentative steps into his up-to-date imagination to a strange place, full of multi-layered parallel worlds. He delved deeper and deeper, taking us with him into strange ideas of quantum computers that will create all manner of havoc in the universe. We wandered further into the place where lurked the danger of harnessing the energy of the vacuum between reflective plates, until finally Ringer, the main character, forgot where the door was, and we were bound there forever! More or less, Andrew Crumey's Mobius Dick is a novel written in a strange scientifichistoric- philosophical fiction frame that transcends the physical limits of the world, the past, the present and the future in a fictional style that sometimes sends the reader’s mind into turmoil and blurs his rational thinking, requiring him to update his knowledge of physics. So if he wants to understand, he will search to find that when waves are measured, they mysteriously ‘collapse��� in a quantum jump; thus, an electron is everywhere and nowhere until it interacts, leaving its footprint on the universe. Two conflicting stories can therefore be true, because when the universe splits after any event, 5 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp what is ‘real’ depends on your frame of reference—according to The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics formulated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Here exactly is the idea of meshed boundaries, which means that a mere split of a hair exists in between. At the end of the book, we find ourselves all-in-all in a state of not knowing if it was a dream dreamt a long time ago, or a memory recollected in the future. We are left to wonder which universe is real, if not all of them. On the other hand it is not exactly a science fiction novel, it is between genres— literature which has been updated to belong to a new writing era with advanced literary insights powered by neo–literary visions, if that is possible to say. And to make things more complicated, this novel is constructed upon a text message on a cell phone, which might have been sent from either the past or the future. The text message says: call me: H. Full stop. A random text message can generate all manner of chaos. And chaos is the nature of these boundaries now. Reality becomes unbelievable, imagination becomes reality! Fantasy is what is happening everywhere. The events in the novel are part of a reality that has already happened, with one reality writing itself over the top of another like a multi-dimensional layered text. A complex text. This novel is an investigation into the philosophical question of reality, fantasy and imagination; madness; twisted logic; amnesia; music; phones; doppelgangers; dreams inside dreams. A novel in which fact is conjoined with fiction, and the line between reality and fantasy becomes very problematic indeed. In a way, it is a new inventive fiction which makes us analyze reality itself. Crumey, who is compared to Jorge Luis Borges and Calvino, is an unusual voice in contemporary fiction. Andrew Crumey has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, is literary editor of Scotland on Sunday and has written four novels, Mobius Dick being his fifth. His works have been widely translated and praised worldwide. He lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I have a strange story that has to do with this novel. I found out about it through the online literary magazine Barcelona Review, became interested, and began a search to learn more about the writer and his works. Then I started another search on quantum theory and the butterfly effect (which means in simple language: the notion of a butterfly flapping its wings in one area of the world, causing a tornado or another weather event to occur in another remote area of the world) and doppelgangers and multi-universes, and then another search after all the famous musicians and writers who appeared in the novel (such as Melville, Thomas Mann, Schrödinger, Schumann, and Harry Dick). As I was dreaming of actually acquiring the book, trying to figure how, not a day after, an unexpected call came. A long-forgotten friend in London asked if I need something from 6 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp there. And so the novel came via DHL. A week later I read it, became listless for days, wrote a review about it in my weekly column in the Jamahiriya Review—and then I had a strange dream, a dream in which I had written something about the novel and was reading it to people in a place I had never seen before, and that, in the last lines of my paper, I was telling those in the audience that I had dreamt about them and this place before, discussing the vanishing of the boundaries between reality, fantasy and imagination and multi-parallel realities with them, using Mobius Dick as an example! Thank you. 7 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Chi Zijian (China) My Heart Away in Thousands of Mountains Along the northern border of China, near my hometown in the Daxin’an Mountain, the people of the Ewenke tribe live on the reindeer that they raise. They dwell in houses built in the trees called cuoluozi, within which the starry sky can be seen directly through the roof. They eat animal meat, clothe themselves in animal skin. They follow the reindeer wherever they go. During the long winter, they sometimes have to move to a new place every three or four days, while in summer, they can stay in one camp site for as long as half a month. Every mountain there has been marked with their footprints as well as their reindeer trails. The deterioration of the wildlife makes the living of this Shilubu, this Reindeer Tribe, harder; the mosses, the food of the reindeer, are decreasing annually, and the wild animals they hunt are becoming rare. Three years ago, they had to go down the mountains to establish their camps. However, they could not adjust themselves to modern life. Therefore, they went back to their mountains and forests one after another. Last August, I followed their trail, arrived at their camp, and interviewed them. There was an old shaman whose fate had a tremendously emotional impact on me. Shamans in this Shilubu function as doctors. However, they do not cure their people with medicine, but through communication with spirits. One can become a shaman regardless of gender. Before people become shamans, they develop unusual behavior to show their divine power. Some can run bare-footed on snow without getting frostbite, some can go hunting without eating and drinking for dozens of days, others can touch boiling hot irons with their tongues without being scorched. All these feats show that they have possessed the power of the divinity. It is this divine power that they rely on to cure their people. And those people who are waiting for their treatment are usually already so ill as to be in an incurable stage. The shamans will put on their divine robes, hats and skirts before they perform their treatment. They will also slay reindeer as a sacrifice to the spirits so that they can be possessed by the spirits. This ritual is called Tiao Shen (dance for the spirits). The shamans hold a divine drum when they dance. They can bring life back to a dead person while they dance and sing. The shaman I am going to talk about has died. She was the last shaman in this Shilubu tribe. She gave birth to many children in her life, but they often died suddenly while she performed the Tiao Shen the dancing ritual. The first time she lost a child, she got a message from the divinity that her child was taken away by the spirit as a substitute for a person who should not have been saved, but who was cured by her. However, she did not give up curing her patients. In this way, she saved a lot of people, while most of her children left the world when they were still young. But she never experienced regret. I believe her tragic but beautiful life profoundly reveals the clash between human dream and reality. For the shaman, to cure and save people is her natural duty, and her religion. When this duty damaged her personal love in reality, she chose the former without regret. The former is da’ai—larger love. The real dream/imagination that transcends the contaminated and cruel 8 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp reality is the divine stage that human beings yearn for. The shaman entered this divine world because she had a kind, generous and merciful heart. I believe she was a great writer. Her life experience was a masterpiece. I adopted the fate of this shaman as the main thread in my upcoming novel. For me, the great work is an epic that reaches real imaginary heaven after numerous inferno torments in reality. A writer needs a great heart and broad view to be possessed with unusual imagination and perception. It is impossible for us to cover every corner of the world, yet our hearts are always on the way. Even if you live in a shabby house, your mind can reach as far away as thousands of mountains. What is most pitiful is when one’s body is on the way while the mind is confined! Postscript: About Dreams Probably because I grew up in an environment that has a close relationship with the Nature, the dreams that I have are often in various bright colors. In my dreams, I am usually not with human beings, but with animals and plants. The flower that refuses to bloom frustrates me during the day, but it opens and spreads its petals full and wild at night. The little bay where I have been is light blue in reality, but in my dream it radiates with the alluring colors of the rainbow. I have also seen luminous trees, flying fish, wildly running dogs and darkly clouded skies. Sometimes, human figures also come into my dreams, but they are often those who have already died whom we usually call gui, which means ghost. They tell me stories about life unhurriedly, just as they did when they were alive. I often think that since half of one’s life is spent in sleep, then if you live to the age of eighty and spend forty years dreaming, which part is more real? The sunset and flowing stream in the dreams inevitably has the color of nostalgia; some of the animals in the dreams are ferocious while others are gentle and friendly; all these feelings that we have in our dreams are not so different from what we get from social communication. Sometimes I believe our dreams are also a kind of reality, which is the same as the waking reality, based on landscapes and people. This is a personified reality, from which originates all our philosophical contemplations. Therefore, we do not have any reason to look down upon it, or to think it is just nothing. We should recognize that the things, the happenings and the feelings that we dream are all real in our dreams, while we who have these dreams are just empty bodies and real nothingness. In addition, the language of the dream possesses the nature of eternity, for it will recur perpetually and give you endless cues for your imagination, if only you can breathe and think. It is like the clear and familiar sound made by wine glasses when the toast is proposed—it is left for you to reflect upon afterwards. Translated from the Chinese by Hua Jiang IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 9 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Josef Haslinger (Austria) Imagination/Fantasy/Reality: Are the Boundaries Changing? The title is obviously a leading question. If we answer “no,” we end up exactly where an American philosopher dumped us off several years ago, at the end of history. At that time I’d already begun to prepare for life from the X-Box, with fantasy served up at the touch of a button. But then our concerned leaders took precautions to ensure that the history of the 21st century doesn’t differ too much from that of the 20th. One might say that reality went to great lengths to contradict the notion of a Zeitgeist philosopher. We have enemies once again, keeping each other on their toes, and so Johann Georg, Friedrich Hegel’s old wheel, after getting stuck for a spell, keeps on turning. We’ve developed a keen sense of hearing, in the meantime. And at least we have learned this much: whenever people have claimed to understand the logic behind history, there have been others made to suffer for it. I remember well my first video game. It formed the evening’s entertainment in an East Austrian mountain lodge at 3,000 meters. The men and women split into separate groups. We had to aim a rifle at a screen and shoot ducks, and I was damned good at it. I was champion of the men’s group. All of the hunting enthusiasts and marksmen around me were green with envy. (Perhaps that was why I became a conscientious objector—because I would’ve been simply too dangerous as a soldier.) I got to dance a waltz with the winner from the women’s group. After the Gulf War of 1991, the Chicago Tribune ran interviews with pilots and WSOs (Weapons System Officers) from fighter bombers. As they flew over Iraq in their F-15s, out of range of the anti-aircraft defenses, the WSOs chose on a monitor the targets they’d destroy. They were preparing an attack, but they spoke as if they were supplying the region with food. Bombs were called “pickles,” and cluster bombs, which split into smaller individual bombs before impact, they referred to as “mixed pickles.” Captain Keith Johnson, a 32-year-old WSO from Nebraska, said, “It’s nothing but a video game.” His boss, Colonel Hal Hornburg of Dallas, described the bombardment of Baghdad even more colorfully: “The man in front rows the boat, and the man in back shoots the ducks.” I declare that man champion of the men’s group. He has earned his waltz with Lynndie England, who later won the women’s competition. When video games were making their way into real life, I was writing a novel. I tried to imagine things from inside a terrorist’s head. I didn’t want to be one of those traditional terrorists, however, printing flyers with drawings of Kalashnikovs in seedy back rooms, propagandizing revolution in the name of some oppressed class. Instead I would be the leader of a cult, devoid of moral scruples and planning some big coup to bring about my means of salvation. I, the terrorist, would not work for publicity, but media publicity would work for me. And so I set out to turn Vienna’s Opera Ball into a European High Society Event, a cultural Superbowl, and through the lens of live TV cameras, destroy it with poison gas. What I didn’t know at the time was that other people elsewhere on the planet were working on the same strategic concept, not for a novel, but to make it reality. My novel was published in 10 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp February 1995. One month later, on March 20, 1995, members of the Aum cult attacked various subway lines in Tokyo with poison Sarin gas, leaving twelve dead and 5,500 wounded. My novel was first translated into Japanese. When that book came out mere months later, it bore a red ribbon with the words “The novel that anticipated the Ashara attack.” Is that something to be proud of? Or did I do something wrong? If we describe history as the realization of ideas, then it appears to be in utterly good shape. But a strange phenomenon might be observed. Whenever history flexes some muscle, somebody somewhere jumps up and shouts in horror, “The end of literature is upon us!” It has always been like that, so it’s nothing to worry about anymore. So far, the funeral dirges for the death of literature have always turned out to have been misunderstood background music for new literary developments. Of course we’re losing something this time, too. Throughout the entire course of historic development, something has always been lost. Some say the situation is graver this time, that reality has become an unstoppable frenzy of images that has arrested the cardiac muscle of literature—of the culture of language. To prevent literary writing from thoroughly becoming an appendix of the movie industry, Ben Marcus recommends, in Harper’s Magazine, language muscle training by means of experimental literature. It has become normal for written characters to be in the process of both coming and going. A bookshelf appears as a relic from times past. There is also an ethical dimension to this. The values of a society are traditionally tied to the canonization of written culture. When the canon of a written culture dissolves, the free market of taste takes over, leading in turn to multiple canonizations—though the weight is by no means evenly distributed. The canon focused on literary tradition quickly slips into defensive mode. Like public television outrun by commercial stations, it must find a convincing argument for itself. The dissolution of traditional written culture is directly related to an increase in youth violence, according to Barry Sanders in his book A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age. That’s an old intellectual trick played over and over again since the Enlightenment, one with which we German-speakers have been quite familiar since Friedrich Schiller’s day. Literature declaring itself the last refuge of Humanity. I don’t know how much excessive violence dear Lady Literature has prevented, but I do know that it hasn’t been all that bad at supporting excessive violence, either. Every country has its own dark chapter of literary history. When we stop feeling at home in contemporary literature, we can always read Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf and reassure ourselves that even the classic authors of the modern age never really felt at home anywhere. The boundaries, it seems to me, have always been changing. 11 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Van Cam Hai (Vietnam) FROM THE MEETING OF CHUANG TZU, FRANZ KAFKA AND VAN CAM HAI Strolling along the bank of the still and silent Iowa River in the dead of night, all of a sudden, I discovered the familiar silhouettes of two figures, two friends of mankind sitting on the threshold of the Iowa House Hotel. On approaching these two people, I was startled to realize who they were: Chuang Tzu, the Far Eastern philosopher, and Franz Kafka, the author of “The Metamorphosis.” - I am so depressed when people, especially Easterners, keep accusing me of plagiarism. They say the idea of Samsa turning into a bug is not my idea; they accuse me of copying yours: butterflies transforming into humans and human’s souls into butterflies’, your thousand-year-old brainchild. It had been born long before I was!—sighed Kafka. - Oh, well, forget it! My butterfly is nothing like your cockroach. You must know the laterborn writers Edgar Allen Poe, and especially so-called “magic realists” like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They have their own inventions in their writings. - Actually, when writing “The Metamorphosis,” I didn’t know if it was real life or just imagination. Then, all my care was simply focused on writing—what I wrote was what I had in mind, in my writer’s mind. That’s all. 12 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp - Excuse me! I must say you have brought new realities to this life, the realities created by writers like you, making this life more and more diverse and colorful!—I interrupted. Chuang Tzu and Kafka both sent me a surprised but welcoming look. They said: - We both had to say goodbye to this life long long ago, guy. You are young, tell us what is going on in this world. Anything new? And the following is what I told them by the bank of the Iowa River that night. AN EVIL ACT Hijacked airliners plunged into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, claiming thousands of innocent lives and leaving a horrifying haunting image for the US and the world. Was the consciousness of the hijackers irrationally blurred so that fantasy and reality merged and, in the moment of that act, they in their imaginations believed they were accomplishing God's mission? Or did their actions simply come out of a hatred for the US? A MYSTERIOUS HOLY BOOK When I was in Tibet, a senior Lama told me that when a person died, one Lama would sit beside the departed to show him or her the way to say goodbye to life by reading out loud the Thodol Badol, a holy book completed in the eighth century by Padmasambhava, a high ranking monk. All the spiritual images in the Tibetan book come from a fantastic world which vividly depicts the stages in one’s life from one's last moments to the moments one's soul is greeted by the spirits above and soothed in the supernatural world. Such a fantastic world may be peculiar to almost everyone, however, for the Tibetan people, it is nothing strange. In fact, it is this “lively spiritual reality” that has nurtured the people, generation after generation. The lively spiritual images found in the above-mentioned book are associated with holy transformations, while the spirits of Vice and Virtue embody the unification between life and death, between the rational and irrational, which are all the properties of this existential life. 13 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp A MUSIC OF SALVATION While participating in a Sufi Muslim music performance in Pakistan, I myself saw people act peculiarly when the tune was played. They were dancing as if they were flying over all the limitations of time and space. They were filled with ecstatic joy for, via music, they saw their God. Similarly, Vietnamese people have “medium dancing” or “spirit possession rituals,” called “len dong,” in which they dance and sing to be metamorphosized. Here, in a trance, people say it is even possible that an illiterate woman can compose a few excellent lines of verse if 14 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp she is the reincarnation of a talented poet. If Freud had a chance to turn up in this life again, would he ever believe this? Obviously, some invisible souls were borrowing her body in order to speak. All in all, does fantasy spring from some mysterious feelings, or from some supernatural realities that exist in this world in the form of a supernatural appearance? Supernatural phenomenon reflects the fantasy, which may appear irrational but still exists in real life. If so, should we still call it a fantasy? Should it be considered a meta-reality or an indepth psychological phenomenon? And finally, does human imagination play the role of a link between reality and the so-called meta-reality? A WANDERING TONGUE OF LANGUAGE - Do you mean that all those things have been going around in the sunlight?—asked Chuang Tzu and Kafka. - Which sun?—I asked Chuang Tzu and Kafka—Do you two mean the wandering tongue in the universe? Observing the two surprised faces, I read aloud, instead of providing an explanation, some lines of verse from the poem “The Rivers Have Not Only Me,” which I composed: 15 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Vietnamese rives are often contemplative Cloud levels of memories Slurp the sad grass a mouthful of blue river On the body convulsed with laughter bomb craters reflect back at the sun From high above a tongue wanders Her language is a tireless light spread evenly, in spite of the sleepwalking rain, the roof of a church, a pier, a dry log like death leaning against your porch! - Oh, Dear!—said the astonished Chuang Tzu and Kafka—we thought that the industrial cilvilization was already submerged in the imagination. It has turned out that, in this respect, young people now are much better than us. The image of the sun has been so familar to us, but it has become the wandering tongue in their imagination. Is this the way of thinking in your postmodern or new postmodern poem? - Like Kafka, I simply put what I was thinking in my mind down onto paper. And you two gentlemen, you and I, with our imagination and fantasy, could create everything in literature, even leading the rich to Heaven through a needle’s eye! A NEW REALITY OF CREATIVITY The relation between reality, imagination and fantasy has always been dialectical. They at the same time are separate from one another and are so closely interrelated that the boundaries are often very vague. It is this vagueness that fosters the so-called Dionysian “bacterium,” revitalized from Greek tragedy by Nietzsche. Dionysian refers to the intuition in creation, the vagueness and the unreasonableness, which contradict the concepts of rational ability, lucidity and the reasonable represented by the Apollonian. More than 2,500 years ago, counting by the Buddhist calendar, Buddha said he could imagine in a bowl of clear water eighty-four thousand items of bacteria. I wonder if he could then see HIV, which has been relentlessly causing the AIDS epidemic. However, what he found is enough to make me feel grateful, and I feel even more grateful that he left the other bacteria for mankind to continue to discover. That is why Nietzsche still had a job to do. “Eighty-four thousand items of bacteria in a single bowl of clear water,” I think, is a thoughtful message that teaches me that reality is not only the things I can see with my naked eyes, but also the things I can feel with the eyes of my soul. Those things have turned into my imagination and fantasy, which bring me a novel dimension of time in which to approach reality. This is, I think, the fourth dimension apart from the so-called “natural” ones: past, present, and future. As discussed above, imagination and fantasy are not only the experience of real life, but also of the spiritual world becoming reality and adding some new truths beyond the usual reality we have been witnessing. Based on the thorough combination of inner truth, objective reality, imagination and fantasy, and on the special command of language he possesses, one artist can create a very colorful and delicate symphony of words, which can welcome and satisfy sometimes very different tastes. With an almost untellable joy, Chuang Tzu, Kafka and I noticed that human 16 IWP Panel: “Imagination/Fantasy/Reality” Iowa City Public Library October 12, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp imagination and fantasy could walk beyond the boundary of abstract thoughts to become a part of reality, once they had been embodied by words. The words, as effectively as they can, materialize the two above-mentioned misty concepts. It is what we often call the life of an art work, or at least the life of Chuang Tzu’s Butterfly, Kafka’s Bug or my Sun’s Tongue. Because in the world of creation, they all deserve a real life without the burden of reason. Before we three parted, Chuang Tzu and Kafka wondered if American people would believe my stories about imagination and fantasy. I told them that to find the answer, they should walk along the Mississippi where they would find a marvelous truth, an immortality of the imagination and fantasy created by the Native Americans at the Effigy Mounds Monument. - Thanks Hai, they said, we will start right now in order to get there and feast our eyes on that miracle you describe, which is bathing itself in the light of a new dawn when the Sun, or by your words, the “Wandering Tongue,” utters its shining language to communicate with this sweet world! 17 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection | International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
| Date Digital | 2005-10-12 |
Description
| Title | Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2005 |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-12-05.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-12-05.mpg |
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