Making a Controlled Break from Reality

Riding in a cab with longtime friend Robin Uchida may years ago, I made an observation about philosophy. I told Robin that I thought that it was about making a controlled break from reality. What I meant was that being philosophical is to exercise the freedom from what is given, what is known, what is understood, in order to explore what might lie beyond our current line of sight. The controlled element is critical, because it is what keeps us tethered, both to our traditions and to the practical world of the everyday where most folk, including ourselves, find what most concerns us.

I'm not sure when I first discovered the work of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison , but it changed me forever. I'd seen surrealist art before, and I'd admired the scenographic images of photographers like Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson . The ParkeHarrison's work, like Wall's and Crewdson's, bring us into adjacent realities; imaginable, but unreal. That kind of break makes available something that is akin to the best work in philosophy, a kind of drift that can both help us understand historical and present reality better, and to imagine alternate possibilities in our near and far off futures.

The transporting power of art, as my friend Ingrid LaFleur has often reminded me, is that it does not require the degree of study that book-based thinking does. Art can act on us in more direct ways, hence the incredible power of not only art, but also of design. One of the great accidents of my life is that when I made my escape from the world of academic philosophy, I found myself in the collaborative world of design. Ever since, my work has sat at the verge between these two traditions of imagination, the philosophical and the artistic.

As I read Paul Lynch 's astounding Prophet Song in the last weeks, I was brought into the power of the art form of the novel and its ability to move us in and out of realities we can barely imagine, but must, in order to wake ourselves to the dangers and cruelties in our present. Percival Everett 's brilliant and brutal novel The Trees had a similar effect, and, amidst the horror, also created something impossibly funny. And I return often to the well of visionary fiction in the work of Octavia Butler (particularly the Earthseed books ) and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Word for World is Forest , among many others).

As Dave Gray recently reminded me, there is a powerful magic in exploring and summoning the Adjacent . Again, the idea of deviating from the known is strong here. Being on a path, having clarity of purpose and direction, is a good thing, often a necessary thing. But we should be careful that we don't miss what lies out of view, past the boundaries of our comfort. It's were the wild things are...