Between Delusion and the Divine - Vol. 1 Ed. 31
Feb 17, 2021 1:06 am
World Builders' Guild Newsletter
A fire breathing dragon used to live in Carl Sagan's garage.
So goes the thought experiment, at least, that Sagan uses to decimate the idea of belief without proof in his final work, 1996's The Demon-Haunted World.
The dragon is not the most interesting part of the chapter.
Sagan recounts the tale of a psychiatric patient from the 1950s enrolled in a treatment program with a psychoanalyst named Robert Lindner.
The pseudonymous patient who went by Kirk Allen was a government nuclear physicist with seemingly reasonable faculties otherwise. Allen claimed to be a time-traveling, intergalactic space pilot of sorts. He could "remember" the future. His exploits were documented in great detail in several volumes he authored and shared without hesitation. The more time he spent in "other worlds," the more his cohort in his secret nuclear research lab grew concerned.
As Lindner treated Allen, he found himself fully taken by his patent's delusion. The grand psychosis that shaped the fantastic worlds of Allen's adventures tormented the good doctor. It gripped him so much so that he lost himself in the false reality of the man he was charged to treat.
I read this account and couldn't help but ask:
Aren't the best world builders all a little psychotic?
Think about it.
How often does one fabricate a parallel magical universe connected by an unseen, oddly-numbered train platform that whisks future wizards off to a paranormal boarding school?
What kind of creator dreams up a kingdom brimming with anthropomorphized rodents living a cartoon life on Main Street, USA where people of all ages can come to lose themselves in the adventure?
The distant future is cobbled together from the remnants of a nation starved by war and greed where technology intercedes in every human circumstance. Giant conglomerates rule with cold contempt for life itself. We've all had that thought, right?
I'm suggesting that JK Rowling or Walt Disney or Philip K. Dick or Stephen King are or were psychos. If anything, they were deluded in the most incredible ways.
They had to smoke their own crack. If it's good, as they found, you can bet everybody else will want a hit, too. But for every high, there's a comedown.
Allen had it only half right.
He neglected to thread a way back to reality. Anyone who went on his journey with him couldn't find their way home. It was a one-way rocket ride into madness. In the end, though, his world had to die so that both Allen and Lindner could survive.
A world apart is a world un-lived.
Build yours with a two-way bridge.
To future worlds,
Matt Ventre
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