The Unimaginable

The unimaginable creates the need for art. 

Reality as defined by physics and cosmology is unimaginable, and art answers this mystery with the mania of beauty. And by ‘beauty’ I mean a visceral awareness of harmony and proportion in our intimacy with the world. Beauty makes creative sense of reality, the irrational and arbitrary indeterminacy of nature.

For writers, that mania carries beauty into voice, which is linguistic style and storytelling. This beauty speaks from the spirit world through the basic symbols of text: alphabet, words and metaphor. The beauty of poetry, story, confession, remembrance and even straight-forward reportage can inspire mania and make of otherwise sane people readers|writers.

It’s difficult to write about one’s own mania without sounding maniacal.

Beauty in fiction is storytelling: human incident. In science fiction and fantasy literature, the genres of my particular mania, beauty is wonder. Or wonder-telling. Wonder-mania!

Wonder-mania participates with reality at a deeper range than biology. It draws enthusiasm from the same energy source that keeps electrons moving and not immediately hurtling into oppositely charged protons in the nucleus of atoms. Art dreams us whole by intimately interpenetrating our very real lives with fantasy. By which I mean that art connects us at irrational depths.

For our mortal moment at the center of the edgeless heart in the fantasy of fiction, writer and reader find sanctuary in each other, in the asylum of the soul.