Seeking out the novel and the alien in a world that is designed around routine and obligation isn’t easy. There are fewer hours for getting lost, less proximate unexplored spaces, and more empirical evidence that I may not actually have any superpowers. This last bit of self reflection may seem irrelevant to a love of getting lost, but across a lifetime, my belief that I could always find my way home – even defy laws of physics and tamper with fate--made it easier to disappear. I also happen to know how to read a map.
As a kid, my dreams were always geocoded to the same location. The world of my nighttime adventures was debatable, ethereal, and fantastic. As I walked alone on the silver pavement, the concrete would turn into a sundrenched stream, the city would fade away and I would be left standing with wet feet in an unfamiliar landscape. This never scared me. I wished for it. I expected it. I still expect it and I know there are other adults out there that expect it too.
The reason that I believe in this possibility is because I was introduced to science fiction before I had a firm grasp on the limits of reality. Like a heart that has never been broken, imagination space free of imprint was first marked by the backdrops and characters of beautiful, but terrifying places. These were places riddled with conflict, and it was here that I first learned about the truly wicked ways creatures can treat each other, and their worlds. Children are well-equipped to become citizens of imaginary lands - shaped by the cultural identity of places like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars (a.k.a. Barsoom) and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia –where violence and warfare are an inescapable part of being on the side of right. In these places, I witnessed the customs and traditions of people concerned with harnessing the scarce resources of their world for survival and made peace with the art of war.
Each night as I read stories with a flashlight under my covers I wondered if tonight might be the night I would fall down the rabbit hole into the lands beyond expectation. I was ready to be pressed into service to save a dying planet or to restore the earth’s equilibrium. Empty wardrobes, bricked in alleys, and unclaimed spaces where a child might hide – or better where they might seek, and find a world that would reveal their true identity -- were passages. Marked by beacons that only the initiated might see, these roads alluded to the promise of heroic work. Side of right jobs are difficult to come by and it’s a gift not to have to look elsewhere to create meaning in one’s life. I wanted one.
While waiting for my offer, I was expected to get an education so I built my ability to recognize danger and create alliances. I studied aesthetics – literally the examination of different ways of seeing and perceiving the world, hoping that I wouldn’t miss the beauty disguised all around me. And then there was this thing about the maps. I studied planning, but it was my informal work in this discipline that has a direct correlation to the superhero waitlist. I meticulously catalogued and memorized tactical terrain. The visual geography of moss-covered dead-sea bottoms, extensive canals and the inhospitable frontier that separates the deserts and cities of Barsoom is as clear to me as any landscape on Earth. The in-between spaces – unnamed, unremarkable and on the way to somewhere else – are the ones that determine the way home and tell the story of whether one arrives at their destination.
With time though, the real estate of imagination gets cluttered with the rights and responsibilities of the perceptible world. I didn’t quite fall down the rabbit hole (unless you count the time my infant son was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes), but I have heroically found my way back from dark places. My side of right job at the moment (when I am not managing emergencies in NYC)is reading the Phantom Tollbooth to my children as frequently as they can stand and making sure they study the landscape between the marked foothills of confusion and the great city of Dictionopolis. My heart sings when my children try to conduct the sunset or demand that we call a wizard when a task exceeds our mere human abilities.
I dutifully got a day job too, but my predilection for mythical creatures, righteous warfare, cartography, and being unexpectedly thrust from reality into another time/space continuum is still there. Like an avatar waiting for my return, the girl standing with wet feet in an unfamiliar landscape waits.
I am not sure I want to know if she's real or worse, if she isn't. In this hyper-networked world where do any of us live really? From the rabbit hole to the wardrobe to the imagined geography of all of the places I’ve never been, the who and what and where of becoming a citizen of a place has changed. In our dissolving hearts, minds, and countries? In the boundaries? It’s the space between us that is most notable – the last great wilderness.
Required Reading:
The Phantom Tollbooth; A Princess of Mars; Alice in Wonderland; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; Le Petite Prince; A Wrinkle in Time; The Secret Garden
