THIS: Idle Thoughts
By:
January 18, 2016
What’s not there has exerted such an influence on me. A dear cousin of mine survived cancer more than 30 years ago, carried through by the crappy chemo they had back then, a tenaciously loving family and an unwavering, sincere Catholic faith. I’ve told him that I’m not sure I believe God exists, but I never question his results, a balance my boy accepts with a smile. In 1990 Devo sang, “God isn’t dead, he’s in your head, right where he ought to be”; a perceptive reconciliation of the dogmatic and the imaginary.
Imagination is what God, or random biological fortune, gave us, and I (ahem) believe that something doesn’t have to be “real” to be true. I once said this in a passing interview exchange to comic artist Michael Allred, who later answered in glorious, courageous fullness in another installment of this column. Mike happens to be Mormon, and another of the greatest defenses of religion came hand-in-hand with a type of denial of it, in the South Park brain-trust’s original treatment of that faith — on one episode, a Mormon kid who moves to the area tells Stan, “The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, I have a great life and a great family, and I have The Book of Mormon to thank for that.”
Two other wise beings of ink and paper once put it similarly, in a Grant Morrison-written issue of Batman, where Batman asks the absurd elf Batmite, “Are you really an alien imp from the 5th Dimension… or just a figment of my imagination?” to which the maybe-figment replies, “Imagination IS the 5th Dimension!”
To “imagine” is not to make up, it’s to conceive of. Dreams have been a companion and a haven for me more than ever since both my wife and mother left this planet last year; my wife, in her last days, drifting between delirium and awareness deftly as she always had when she created her life’s-worth of art, experienced a commerce with dreams that put her in other worlds where she could move freely, and sent her back with stories and insights both she and I can take into infinity.
My dad has relied on his panoramic imagination to both fill in the details of, at age 91, a very sensorily-deprived world (that is, in the conventional sense), and to see him through the lonelier world he’s lived in since not only my mother left last year but their daughter, my sister, did almost two decades ago.
I was obsessed with the 1960s Batman TV-show as a toddler; he was my first fictional idol, but I also had a personal imaginary friend. I ran around our apartment’s pool calling to, no surprise, “Robin,” a figure I can no longer quite picture, since, as per the pointedly androgynous name, I had no concept of Robin as anything but “friend,” a spirit side-by-side with me at all times when I needed companionship or protection. A soul free of its bodily, misleading shell. Someday, I’ll go to a place where I will recognize this friend again, and many others will know more than my name.