What is fantasy ?
Il Domenicano Bianco di Gustav Meyrink
Maybe the meaning of life is asking questions, rather than finding answers !
Today I discover this rather interesting writer, thanks to a series of volumes on fantasy which I have subscribed to on newsstands, and I bring you the words of the introduction, which when I read them impressed me very much as they perfectly reflect my thoughts on fantasy, precisely.
"Everyone thinks they know what fantasy is, but only a few suspect that there are very strange categories of imagination.
What should one say when, for example, the hand, this seemingly docile brain tool, suddenly refuses to write the name of the hero of the story one has invented and stubbornly chooses another? One should not automatically wonder and wonder << Am I really creating or, in the end, is my imagination just a kind of magical receiving apparatus? Something similar to what in the field of wireless telegraphy is called an antenna? >>
There have been cases of people getting up at night, in their sleep, and completing writings that the night before, exhausted from the day's works, they had left unfinished, and doing tasks better than they probably would have been able to do being awake.
People like to explain similar things with the words << The subconscious, usually dormant, came to the rescue >>, if something like this happens in Lourdes, they say << The Mother of God has given help >>, who knows, maybe the subconscious and the Mother of God are the same. (...)
In the present novel, a certain Cristoforo Colombaia plays the role of a living person. I have never been able to find out if he ever lived, he certainly did not arise from my fantasy, I firmly believe this. (...) I had the novel in mind, finished in all its details, and I had started writing it, then I realized - only later, when I read the transcript! - that the name "Colombaia" had crept in without my realizing it
But that's not all: the sentences I had planned to put on paper changed under the pen and expressed something completely different from what I wanted to say, a fight ensued between me and the invisible "Cristoforo Colombaia" in which quest the latter, in the end, had the upper hand.
I had planned to describe a small town, which lives in my memory: it has transformed into a completely different image, an image that stands before me today more clearly than the one I actually experienced.
In the end I had no other choice to leave to this influence, who has given himself the name of Cristoforo Colombaia, than to lend him, so to speak, my hand to write and erase from the book everything that had arisen from mine. inspiration. (...)
And the figure of Cristoforo Colombaia is only his messenger, is it a symbol, is it the mask that appears as the personality of a shapeless force? To pundits, so proud of their "being masters at home", the thought that man is just a puppet will certainly appear repugnant.
When I was taken by similar feelings, one day in the middle of writing, the thought suddenly came to my mind: is this Cristoforo Colombaia just something like an I separated from myself? (...) As if that invisible had read in my brain, he immediately interrupted the course of history and, using my writing hand, he prompted to write this strange answer: "She is, like all people who, like her , do they think they are individuals, perhaps something other than a "split me"? The split from that great ego that calls itself God? " (...)
From then on I gave up hope of unveiling the secret and at the same time rejected any speculation that I eventually I thought - assuming the ancient theory that man is incarnated several times on earth - to have beenthat I had been that Christopher Dovecote in a previous life. !
The thing I would like most would be to believe that that something that guided my hand is an eternal force, free, withdrawn in itself, freed from every shape and form. (...) I have often had the strange thought: he lives beyond time and space ... "
Here, in these words are expressed all the questions and feelings that often whirl through my head, and the concept that the human being can be compared to a receiving antenna reminds me of those same confused thoughts that I have seen written with a nail on the wall of the former psychiatric hospital of Volterra by a patient who became famous, Fernando Nannetti:
"The ghosts are furmidabili after its second appearance it takes material semblances, the shadows ... they are alive under the cosmos so the drawing imagines them. The invisible man armed with a cathodic buckle as well as the animals / Telequadrant with cosmic discharges and shadowy intercontinental clouds / Stars of the Milky Way / Glass sheets metals wood bones of human and animal beings and the eye and spirit are controlled through the reflective magnetic cathode beam are living materials images that have a temperature and even two die times / Telestations in direct telepathic connection ... "
(from the volume "N.O.F.4 The book of life" edited by Mino Trafeli, Pacini Editore Pisa)
Perhaps a little confused intuitions, but probably very deep and "true", perhaps more true than so much mechanistic science, cold and empty.