The three weeks that my mother visited me with my four-year old nephew, nothing else was being shown at home but Cartoon Network. One of the shows that interest me was Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. As the title implies it's a show about abandoned imaginary friends adopted by the Fosters. According to pop psychology children abandoned imaginary friends for real friendships, because I think based on the same pop psychology again that if a child has reached a certain age and he still have these imaginary friends, then there must be something wrong with him.
Or maybe I am just reading the wrong kinds of books or admiring the wrong kinds of authors and artists and being friends and mixing with the wrong people.
The Dominatrix, one of my favorite Philippine authors certainly has imaginary friends galore. She even has an imaginary husband--Conan O'Brien. But then she never really put too much weight on people who defined themselves normal.
In Saul Bellow's novella The Actual, the main character Harry Trellman imagines a lifetime of conversation with his high school girlfriend whom he reconnected with after several decades. I'm wondering what happened to the character's imagined world. Was he able to turn away from that world which he carefully constructed for so many years? Can the mind immediately turned itself off from that? Does the reality of his marriage and love to Amy able to stand up to this other reality?--"Half a century of feeling is invested in her, of fantasy, speculation, and absorption, of imaginary conversation.”
I do like to read a good love story every now and then. But I am rather of Kurt Vonnegut's school of thought about love story in that: "I try to keep deep love out of my stories, because once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga over love. If a lover in a story wins his love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucer."
Alejandro Sanz, a spanish composer and singer said to a girl, who may or may not be his real girlfriend: Me paso el día planeando (I spend the day planning) Nuestro encuentro imaginario (Our imaginary encounter). So why would he say our imaginary encounter if she is already his girlfriend who's just on a really very long vacation? Shouldn't he say instead I'm imagining our re-union? Or maybe she's a former girlfriend whom he has no hope of ever reuniting with so he imagines maybe he'll bump into her in the mall...
And some Hollywood artists do admit to having imaginary boyfriends and such. And imagined love after all is a Hollywood B movie stock for obsession themed films. Usually people get hurt in these kinds of imaginations but who cares really if it is his reality?
Vladimir Nabokov said about reality: "Your use of the word "reality" perplexes me. To be sure, there is an average reality, perceived by all of us, but that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional forms of humdrummery, current editorials. Now if you mean by "old reality" the so-called "realism" of old novels, the easy platitudes of Balzac or Somerset Maugham or D.H. Lawrence--to take some especially depressing examples--then you are right in suggesting that the reality faked by a mediocre performer is boring, and that imaginary worlds acquire by contrast a dreamy and unreal aspect. Paradoxically, the only real, authentic worlds are, of course, those that seemed unusual. When my fancies will have been imitated, they, too will enter the common domain of average reality, which will be false, too, but within a new context which we cannot yet guess. Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture."
This is why I read because my own imagination fails me sometimes, so I borrow or enter into the imagined worlds of others. Authors who I admit have more vivid and rich imagination than I have or if not because they are better able to put these rampant imaginations into words.
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