Jason Bunton: We Approach the Hollows at dawn

FANTASTIC TIMES REQUIRE FANTASTIC ACTIONS
I cannot recall when my first introduction to fantasy was. I am nearly certain it was in a children’s book, or from some fairy tale told one cold night early in my youth. Although fairy tales, fables, myths, and legends, typically do not have the orcs and elves of the modern fairy genre these stories do betray a bit of human nature. We are always trying to make sense of our imperfect world unreal tales and imagination allow us to form meaning and perfection out of the chaos. Fantastic tales allow us, as we learn, to make arguments about the world we know by imagining a world very unlike our own - a world with defined struggles beyond the everyday. For myself and many other in the Americas (which I will call “us”), living far away from visual remnants of an ancient and often hazy past, we would allow our given surroundings to form a fantastic world from explorations of alleyways, pathfinding in a nearby wood, trekking across a field, or surviving the desert of a parking lot. In these places we adventurers could imagine our known world of grays in black in white through the prism of fantasy and thereby define meaning from the spectrums. Simply by picking up a gnarled branch off of the ground we create a world as real as that in the mind for those few hours. The literature and art which we consumed gave further motivation (although very little was needed) to the journeys, it allowed for us to make new stories. We, through trickery of our own making, got out and saw the woods and the hidden ways of our world, and today these little rather non-fantastic discoveries continue to amaze and delight. In the act of escaping from the banality of our days through the fantastic we could find meaning in the days beyond.

John Henry Muhrer, Saint Louis, Missouri, January 26, 2009