Rays of Fantasy
The root of the word phantasy in both German and English is the Greek word Phantasia—imagination or appearance, and that finds its ultimate origin in the Greek word for light, Phaos (φάος) but that is clearly no daylight or screenlight but rather a psychic light; as in Sylvia Plath: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.” The visible element in fantasy is probably its best feature, from an aesthetic standpoint, and our culture’s obsession with image only compounds the witchy phantasmagoria that is the phenomenal world. We will not blame the philosopher too much if they get caught up in the tangled thicket of transcendental idealism, for once they begin to wander down the bramble path of the appearances, both psychical and physical, it is no wonder that they (the philosopher) might throw up their hands and say it is all phantasy in the mind of Shiva (or where ever); just spooky quantum mindstuff all the way down…
We will instead refuse to make any such decision while keeping in mind the rather extreme ambiguity around these matters. The psychoanalyst is keen to point out, in fact, that life is not just a dream, and that fantasy, as the principle object of our investigation, finds its origins in the Real, which is not reality perse, but rather an unbearable truth. A truth so unbearable that we cannot even think about it and so we must produce a wishful fantasy with which to think. The structure of this fantasy shares with light a beam or ray flying at high speed through space and time so that we can imagine that our fantasy is projected from our mind, moving at the speed of perception and snapping to radiant sense impressions, just as a movie is cast through overhead space to snap upon the screen at the local cineplex. Some of these rays of fantasy no doubt travel much faster than perception, finding no better expression than the immediate to long term future, which is made, as it were, out of pure fantasy.
On these (rather uncanny) grounds our great desire for reality might be usefully reversed into a study of the reality of desire. It should likewise be noted that this projected fantasy shining on the phenomenal world (or that is the phenomenal world) bears no feature with which to distinguish it from reality and that is why it is called unconscious. And likewise, to complicate matters even further, we can make no great disambiguation between a collective phantasia and the consensual reality otherwise known as the world (all those individual fantasy rays refracted by mutual fear and loathing into mutually exclusive reality tunnels); so you can see why the philosopher may get confused; or anyone for that matter.
Sunrise, 1965, Roy Lichtenstein,
