Topical Guide 182
Mark Dorset
Other Worlds
Imagination
Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
Are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world? . . . Often we have before us, in those first minutes in which we allow ourself to slip into the waking state, a truth composed of different realities among which we imagine that we can choose, as among a pack of cards.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
He began by creating landscapes; then he created cities; then he created streets and cross streets, one by one, sculpting them out of the substance of his soul— street by street, neighborhood after neighborhood, out to the sea walls of the wharfs, where he then created the ports . . . Street by street, and the people who walked them or gazed down at them from their windows . . . He began to know some of the people, at first just barely recognizing them, but then becoming familiar with their past lives and their conversations, and he dreamed all this as if it were mere scenery to delight the eyes . . . Then he traveled, with his memory, through the country he’d created . . . And thus he created his past . . . Soon he had another previous life . . . In this new homeland he already had a birthplace, places where he’d grown up, and ports from where he’d set sail . . . He began to acquire childhood playmates, and then friends and enemies from his youth . . . It was all different from what he’d actually lived. Neither the country, nor its people, nor even his own past were like the ones that had really existed . . .
I turned to tracing to improve the inadequate drawings I made. Tracing paper had always been my friend. I laid a sheet of the paper over a drawing and traced it, trying to improve it as I went along. The result was a drawing that was different from the first, but not what I considered better than the first. I traced the tracing, again trying to improve it as I traced it. This continued. With each retracing of a tracing the result was a drawing further removed from the original. That phenomenon surprised me at the time, but it shouldn’t have; both of my grandfathers had explained to me the dangers of cumulative error in carpentry. I should have recognized it.
The distorted tracings stimulated my twelve-year-old imagination, and the degree of stimulation increased as the degree of distortion increased. These drawings offered more room for my mind to wander than my life and my world offered. They gave me an impression of another place—a place that I might discover by making it. Using my experience with paint-by-numbers sets, I began painting the distorted tracings.
As I worked, I came to think of the images I was making as real pictures of an imaginary place—specifically, Murky Bay, the town on the mainland separated by treacherous tidal waters from Kittiwake Island, where Larry Peters and his family lived in the adventure books that I read and reread at that time.
I understood full well that I was making that imaginary place by transforming images of my home town, but I had only a hazy understanding that I was also transforming the way I perceived my home town, my world, my self, and everything else.Peter Leroy, “Making Murky Bay,” The Babbington Review, Issue 6
See also: Imagination TG 62; Arcadia, Eden TG 40; Arcadia; Shangri-La; Fantasy Land; Raratonga TG 46; Idyllic Landscapes, Arcadia, Shangri-La, Beauty Spots TG 58
[more to come on Thursday, January 27, 2022]
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