Harbinger.4 Intro

Until our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will always be at war with reality.

It hijacks history classes and funerals, waylays secretaries on the way to the coffee machine, turns rails into slides and shopping malls to playgrounds—it sends lives spinning out of control. Movie directors endeavor to harness it, travel agents to peddle it, political parties to enlist it; but fantasy, like the one who pursues it in earnest, can serve no employer.

Now that every continent has been conquered and every countryside explored, nothing is more precious than passages to new worlds. Mass-manufactured faiths are haunted by a thousand dreams of escape—and fancy weaves better wings for flighty youth than pragmatism ever fashioned our forebears.

As revolutionaries, of course we are fighting for our daydreams! When we cannot stomach another hour of this, we side with those moments we surprise ourselves, flashes in which anything feels possible, peak experiences that may last only instants—and therefore with every inhibited impulse, forbidden pleasure, unexploded dream, all the stifled songs which, unleashed, could create an upheaval like no one has ever seen. And when the dust settles afterwards, we will side with them again.

Call this escapist—perhaps it is; but what class of people is most disturbed by the idea of escape? Jailers. Right or wrong, selfless or selfish, possible or impossible, we’re getting out of here. They were shooting off fireworks through the tear gas down on the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of color. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, it is enough.

“You can see the whole wide world from up here.”

“Yes—and others, as well.”

The invitation to a new world may take a lifetime or more to extend; self-imposed outcast status may be established in order to receive the transmissions, to give the seeds soil in which to grow. The one who does this is not jettisoning herself from “life” after all, but providing its first port of entry—metabolizing, invisibly, the garbage of the old world into the new one, just as other “parasites” do.