The Real, the Fake, the Virtual, the Remembered and the Imagined

When I was a kid I lived in imaginary places.

My parents built me a rocketship out of a cardboard box from a refrigerator they'd had shipped to their house. They even made me a spaceman helmet out of a paper bag, and a spacesuit vest out of another paper bag. I played in my imaginary spaceship until the next hard rain hit that turned my spaceship into a soggy mess.

My next imaginary place was the world of books: Narnia, Middle-earth, Camelot, the Four Lands (Terry Brooks, in case you don't know). My mom, concerned I'd get lost in this new world, had me read history books and NON-fiction books so I could also be grounded in reality. My dreams were often vivid, and seemed sometimes more real than my life during the day, and I often imagined when I was living in a small town of 800 that someday I'd leave that town and go someplace else and the adventures would begin.

Eventually, I did leave.

Now I teach literature, and give an occasional history lecture, and have been introduced to Umberto Eco and Jean Beaudrillard, the Matrix, eastern and Greek philosophy (and philosophy in general) in addition to being Christian, and most of these areas ask, "What is real, and how can we know what is real? How do we know the difference?"

I went to a lecture once on movies and culture and the lecturer talked about how people reacted to the early silent films. The technology was such a shock that often people who went to see the early films would get so mad at the people on screen that they would stand up and get ready to fight them, or would peer around the screen to see where the people went. Later films took this idea and used it to critique and make fun of itself (in postmodern lit. we'd probably call this self-reflexivity (a work of art being self aware and turning back on itself), or metanarrative, telling stories about stories).

Now we have more than just early film, but high definition film, larger than life IMAX film, "realistic" theme parks thanks to Disney (nods to Eco's Travels in Hyperreality), internet chatrooms and blog spaces where we communicate with people we have to accept on faith exist. We have emotional affairs with people we've never seen, never met, never touched, never smelled, never tasted. The world of writing and blogging, television and film seems more real and authentic than our REAL lives because they include all the best aspects of a relationship or a person's body or a situation. They are things as they "should be" and not as they are, and so the reality seems mundane. We enjoy the play acting of saving the world to the reality of trying to balance our checkbooks and not despair that our life may not be in constant crisis or in need of megamicromanaging or be as sexually ideal as we envisioned it. I'm often less in awe when I read about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea or Jesus coming to life after being dead because the stories in DC or Marvel are more sensational. Can Jesus leap tall buildings with a single bound? Can Moses stop bullets dead in their tracks, stop a train, and rescue a girl all at the same time?

I'm not being flippant or sacriligious here, I'm simply wrestling with the feeling that the world has been through a technological (and therefore social) time warp and I'm still hung over from severe jet lag, trying to hang on to the jet stream by my fingernails.

It's not the first time that change has come hard.

My great grandma was born the year the Wright Brothers had discovered flight and died after the first satelitte had left our solar system. In the Industrial Revolution people's lives changed dramatically. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution took place over 100 years; in the US, around 30, and it transformed our view of ourselves (cultural identity), how we communicated and traveled, it made us wrestle with factories and unions and new forms of social injustice, and made us deeply question our place in the world as a society and as individuals. Some felt irretrievably lost. Others felt it was the best time to be alive.

I had a hard time talking to my parents when I was in high school because they sat glued in front of a TV for 3-4 hours a night. Since college, I have had the same problem with roommates because they do the same thing with Xboxes. Personally, I've developed a jealous hatred of TVs because they seem to disconnect more often than they connect us to each other. We're forced to watch others live imagined lives than be creative with our own. We sit in silence next to friends and family rather than face to face. Yet, on the other side, advocates for TV say that it is the new shared culture and gives us connecting points to talk about (I agree. I like talking Smallville or Seinfeld or the Office or Survivor), and brings people together socially as much as it tears them apart. I don't know which is true, what's real.

I'm teaching next semester on the history of film and the history of TV, but only a couple lectures, so for now I'm thinking out loud. No answers yet, mostly questions, and I'm wondering how I'm going to tell stories to my students across a ten year generation gap that will connect, and I'm wondering how often in my lifetime we'll have to reinvent our stories and reinvent our lives so we don't get lost in change, and what things will stay the same and be timeless. How will we know how to talk about and distinguish from the world of the real and the virtual, pseudo, mirror worlds we create around us? Is it a question worth asking? Does the real world have priority over these other worlds, or are all of them--imaginary, dreamlike, virtual, fictional--permutations of the same thing?