Phantom Seeing
現れを見る(Araware o Miru)
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The word fantasy finds its origin in the Greek phantasía:
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φαντασία (phantasía): “appearance,” “imagination,” “making visible,” “mental image.”
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Not illusion, but appearance. Not fiction, but the mind’s gift of making visible what has been seen, remembered, and reimagined. Before fantasybecame synonymous with the unreal, it was understood as the bridge between perception and understanding.
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I have always been fascinated by the aggression and disdain “we” sometimes direct at “fantasy,” as if there were a way to avoid interpretation and reinterpretation. Colors are an example of this in Nature. They are a reinterpretation of what is, part of the perception and experience “we” have of this Universe. Not fake, not unreal, just reinterpretation.
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I often wonder if the Universe is enthralled with its “fantastic” reinterpretation of itself as it dances and swirls, and “we” sometimes want to reduce this truly beautiful Universe to facts and parts so that the “anxiety” of the Unknown does not engulf our truly “illusory” sense of separation and control. Life imitates art, and art imitates life. Just flow and swirl and dance as This that is.
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“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII (1817).-
“If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.”
“Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.”
-Georgia O’Keeffe, artist’s statement for her 1939 exhibition at An American Place Gallery, New York.-
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Obsessed by compulsion
To see
Beyond this unreal fantasy
I claim to be
Rationality
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I study all separately
To find the secrets
That hide from me
Incessantly
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All the while
Fancy free
A light makes rainbows
Between the rain and me
A rainbow seen
As a fantasy
Light reimagined in me!
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Can it be
That what I find separately
Is the truly meant fantasy,
Phantoms invented by “me,”
So that I explain
The phantoms I see?
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Without the rain
No colors could be
Suspended in my eyes
As I could see.
This rainbow is then
Light, water, and me,
Never separate
As they come through
My fantasy.
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What is real is fantasy?
What is unreal is this “reality”
Where all is seen separately.
Separation is beyond
Imagining.
There can be no “you”
Without “me.”
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All that is here
Is This as seen,
Reinterpreted
As beautiful Fantasy.
Phantoms are here
And will appear
In between
The “you” and “me.”
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But the truly unreal
Is the separation you feel
As “you” swim in me,
A Universal Fantasy,
And see yourself
Submerged in me
As me…
