March 17, 2003

• Escape to Reality

  
  

  "Dad, when you aren't in the car, Mom gets loud."  What do you think about a kid who tattles on his Mom that way?  Little blabbermouth -   Yesterday, the CD I chose to listen to most (often and loudly) was Illuminations.  The music of the Epcot Center fireworks display and Tapestry of Dreams parade.  Symphonic swells and rousing drums are best heard at full volume. 

  
  

  At one point tears welled in my eyes.  How embarrassing!  Even with no one there to see, I blinked the moisture away and straightened my shoulders.  Then I thought, "What!?  What am I doing here?!"  The music had awakened in me such a longing, such a sense of being exiled in the waste land, that I cried for the beauty I could only glimpse in my imagination.  How appropriate that this music should awaken in my the metaphysical dream.  Walt Disney, the inspiration for the performance, lived with his head concretely in the clouds.  More than one critic charged him with escapism.  Which leads me to wonder, escape from what?  And why is escapism a bad thing?

  
  

  Another dreamer I've been studying, J R R Tolkien, faced his share of critics who dismissed his work as escapist.  Tolkien rejected modern materialism and scientism as unimaginative fallacies of thought.  For Tolkien, true reality was to be found beyond the natural in the supernatural, beyond the physical in the metaphysical.  "Nature is no doubt a life-study," he wrote, "or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not "Nature", and which therefore is not obligated to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."

  
  

  Walt Disney, the dreamer gazed about in wonder at the miracle of life.   He exulted in the acheivements of the human species and proclaimed, "The time we live in is the most amazing the world has ever known."  Tolkien was a dreamer of a different sort.  He found much to deplore in modern industrialization that trapped men in wage slavery and polluted the earth.  Both men lived the ideal of hope.  Because they cast their eye into the future and saw things as they could be rather than reducing their vision to the so-called "reality" of skeptical materialism which says that things are as they are and cannot be otherwise.

  
  

  Tolkien and Disney were at opposite ends of the worldview spectrum, one a devout Catholic and the other a confirmed humanist.  But they were fellows in the philosophical gulags of their day which have devolved into the pits of despair that are postmodern angst.  Tolkien responded to the criticism that he wrote escapist literature with these words, "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?  Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?  The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.  In using [the word] Escape in this way, the critics have chosen the wrong word, and what is more they are confusing ... the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."  Walt Disney said, "The human spirit that is capable of taking us to the stars can also carry us into a future with no borders."

  
  

  Excuse me for a moment while I turn up the volume.  I've just realized that this music is the tunnel into reality I've been looking for. 

  • 11:33 am
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