Topical Guide 615
Mark Dorset
Projects: Practical and Impractical, Purposeful and Purposeless
Fantasy and Reality, Dreams and Reality
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 21:
He […] described his automatic waterer, and then he described it as it might be, with the trash-can lids suspended from giant versions of Mrs. Jones’s little windflowers. She was delighted. It turned out that what she’d said to Guppa about building giant windflowers was almost a confession. She considered the ones she’d made mere models for her future work. Almost from the first, she had wanted to make a leap in scale, but like so many people whose dreams seem to have no practical value she had kept them to herself.
Ruth, to Martin, in Jack London’s Martin Eden:
“This writing of yours is not practical. Something is the matter—maybe it is with the market—that prevents you from earning a living by it.”
Ironically, or perhaps by some intuitive acknowledgment, stillness was feared by the pragmatic idealism of the nineteenth century, where everything had to have a reason, an explanation, or a function. Victorian interiors, apparently merely ornamental, had a practical purpose: to cover the emptiness left behind by the absence of tradition. […]
The vast production of the late 1800s was geared to protecting, showing, holding—an obsession that accounts for this period’s fastidious arrangements, where nothing is out of place and all the different elements participate in an obligatory meaningfulness.
Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis:
The creation of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of “reservations‚” and “nature-parks‚” in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threaten to change . . . the earth rapidly into something unrecognizable. The “reservation‚” is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what is useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality-principle. […]
There is, in fact, a path from phantasy back again to reality, and that is—art.
See also:
Projects, Practical and Impractical TG 367, TG 569; Ideal or Real TG 443
Fantasy Land; Rarotonga; Arcadia; Shangri-La TG 46
Reality, Real and Fictional TG 27, TG 62, TG 64, TG 76, TG 78, TG 85, TG 127, TG 147, TG 155, TG 488, TG 603; Real Objects in Fiction TG 132; Reality: Perception of TG 426
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, and Reservations Recommended.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.