Escaping Escape
During most of 2020 for me, a good day would proceed like this: wake up, groan, smoke a bowl of weed. Anxiously pore through the news and absentmindedly swipe through social media. Play some podcasts while I make the bare minimum effort to arrive in my body for the day. Do the bare minimum amount of voiceover work to sustain my feeble bank account. Smoke more weed. It's probably 5 pm now, but only because I just woke up at 2. I spend the rest of my day lost in a thicker haze of marijuana smoke and a video game or Netflix.
That's a good day. The bad ones had no work, nor news, nor even the bare minimum of effort.
I don't begrudge myself that escaping. I do wish I had managed to use the time to improve myself, make more headway on the novel I was editing, try to set up a life I could emerge into at the end of the nightmare. But it turned out I wasn't ready for that. The sorry state of the world was more than I could face, and the sorry state of my own isolation was even worse.
But I am, at my core, an ambitious and optimistic and active person. And when it did come time to move back into a world where I could pursue my ambitions, I had locked myself into a pattern of reality-denial. In escaping the psychological trauma of the pandemic, I found myself in a prison of my own making.
Losing myself in a book, or a great movie, or an engaging story-driven video game, is an activity that genuinely fulfills me. It gives me a sense of joyous wonderment that the real world often fails to provide (or, as I've learned, that I fail to inject into my world). Escape implies freedom, doesn't it? Well, sometimes escape just means a different kind of confinement.
Paradoxes define us just as readily as identities and actions do. We hold strong convictions, though in our hearts we lack certainty. We move through our lives believing we have free choice, ignoring the railroad tracks below us. We accept that everyone is biased, except when we know the truth. Leaving these contradictions unobserved may be the normal mode for most people, but it is in acknowledging them that we can see past the towering structures that we and our society have built for our minds.
So when I say that I both support and oppose escapism, I can resolve that contradiction simply by holding it in my mind and accepting it. We’re all a mess of contradictions. Does that mean we’re flawed? No. I think it means the world is complicated and messy, and so are we. (But we are flawed, and perfect too.)
Something about escapism draws tidal forces of both support and condemnation from people. Usually those people pick one of those two options.
For my part, since I was a child, I have been on the support side. Even before I knew what “escapism” meant. When I did learn what it was, I saw it as a dirty word. A word that simply did not reflect what I experienced when I lost myself in The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. A word that meant “irresponsible” and “unrealistic” among a sturdy cache of other bad associations.
Many writers and thinkers that I greatly admire have said much more eloquent and beautiful things in defense of escapism than I could ever say, Neil Gaiman being one of them. Is there a bias there because most of these writers and thinkers have produced what might be called escapist media? Perhaps.
Gaiman writes, “If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? … books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.”
God I love that. It resonates so strongly with how I’ve always felt.
Those who condemn it usually sound like a musty and old-fashioned piece of American World War II propaganda. Get out and participate in society! Bleh. But are we ignoring them because they’re wrong, or are we ignoring them because they demand no less than the exact opposite of what we want?
Let me be honest here. This isn’t really about escapism, or even about accepting that paradoxes are part of how we operate. It’s about a general project of mine to encourage myself and others to look beyond the trench-like, habituated thoughts that we all have about ourselves and our world, and the behaviors that accompany those. To reach over to opposing trenches and see what it’s really like on the enemy’s side. To suggest: maybe there’s another way to see this.
And thinking about escapism and integrating paradoxes are important, even vital, to that project.
What was always apparent to me, even though escape from the real world was my safe refuge and my education for handling the real world, was that you do always return to the real world. So much of the painful beauty of The Chronicles of Narnia is in the fleeting nature of the adventures, and that at the end, the characters always come back to the real world. And then sometimes they never ever return to Narnia.
I thought the inevitable return to the real world was a truth acknowledged by everyone. Until I began to recognize that we don’t all agree on what the “real world” actually is. We all occupy our own fictions, our own brand of unconscious escape.
I want to scream into the void: How can you care about the cheap and manipulative power that social media influencers have? How can you keep eating so much meat when the world is nearly literally on fire and/or drowning? In *my* real world, materialism, psychological manipulation, and climate change are all very present and very dangerous. But they simply aren’t, for other people.
In *my* real world, too, though, I escape from opportunities, success, and newness for fear of failure or rejection. I am not immune to the pitfalls of escapism. It is not just about finding a safe harbor, a true and healthy escape from something bad. It’s also a way to blind ourselves to uncomfortable truths, and to perpetuate the habits and ways of thinking that keep us from upheaval.
But doesn’t the earth need to be broken and overturned for the soil to stay healthy?
The coronavirus pandemic was a time of great escape for many of us. The painful realities were just too painful, and relentless. We had the ability to step away from the horror for a time so that we could stay sane. I wouldn’t ever deny anybody that escape.
But can we say that escapism is a good thing, in and of itself? I don’t think we can. So here’s why I both support and oppose it, why I hold the paradox of escapism dear to myself. It is a drive within all of us, to varying degrees perhaps. It keeps us sane, but it also keeps us within our safety bubbles. Bubbles always pop, but it’s much more fun when we pop them ourselves.
Maybe Bertolt Brecht was right to try to force us to decouple from the soporific effect of fiction and entertainment—not in all situations, but when it really matters.
Maybe there’s a way to escape into a fantasy and simultaneously pupate into a new being, who doesn’t give one whit about how things were before.
Maybe there’s a way to close our eyes for a time and then open them and look, really look, at what we actually see.