Reality is for Meals (and other such misconceptions)

 "I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal." - Groucho Marx

When I was a young, foolish lad of only twenty-five, at the very beginning of my writing and creative endeavours (which still have yet to really take-off), I first saw this quote. I saw it and I said, "Yes! Now here is a man, a veritable creative genius, who sees things as I do. Who knows reality for its falsities and comes to it only to feed his body and nothing else."

I thought that it meant that all that reality was good for was the nourishment of the body and the resting of it and the mind (and even that I longingly gave over to the fantasy of dreams). I thought that Groucho was speaking to me, telling me that the way that I was approaching things was not only a successful avenue but one of the greatest that a creative mind could hope to wander down. For being lost in your own imaginings, in worlds unknown and private, was surely the way to create great art. 

It had to be the way forward, largely because it was the only one really available to me. I have always been a loner. More comfortable with a book or some music or my own thoughts than I have ever been in a crowd of two. The older I have gotten, the more I have meditated on these words, the more I have come to realize that Groucho was undeniably right. And I was woefully wrong.

Reality is not the place where we fortify the body, but rather the heart. Or the soul. Or whatever it is that makes us human. That lets us feel and think and be. That lets us love.

Reality is the only place that lets us-- as artists, as humans, as the way the universe experiences itself-- truly feel. It is the grounding by which all flights of fancy and fantasy are allowable. Because without the real to inform the absurd and the far-fetched, the wildest of imaginings are not worth the breath it takes to speak them or the paper they are written on.

Groucho was right and I was wrong, but I'm finding my way back onto that better, more human, path. It looks quite clear up ahead.

JK