Existential Fear and the One-track Imagination
For the last two years, I’ve been working on a climate fiction novel set along the Lowermost Mississippi River. It is difficult to stay in a fictional narrative space when I’m writing about the very real climate crisis. It’s hard to world-build a place in my imagination when the real world seems to be burning and drowning, and dying around me.
As long as my writing and research was theoretical, confined to books, libraries, coffee shops, and my kitchen table, I was able to move around that narrative space with ease. Within 10 months, I'd written a sprawling 180,000 word draft (with around 90,000 darlings to kill). But the more time I spend interacting with the communities rooted along the river, and the more I learn about the timeline of the climate crisis–which is fueled by the heavy industries that are poisoning these communities–the harder it becomes for me to stay in that fictional narrative space I’d been exploring for the last two years.
And I am someone who understands the value of make-believe narrative spaces. These are the spaces that help me make sense of things. For as long as I can remember, I’ve needed imaginary places to process the reality happening around me, and I’ve always accessed those thoughts and spaces through reading, writing, or exploring my interior world. (This narrative need is probably one of the reasons I love a good English classroom, both as a student and a teacher. For me, a good day in the classroom involved snooping around a narrative space, flipping the lights on and off, maybe taking a peek in the medicine cabinet, in hopes of finding some meaning or connection.)
Even while understanding the value of fictional spaces, it feels selfish and reckless and the epitome of privilege to spend my days in an imagined world while the one I’m living in is falling apart. Long-form fiction feels remarkably slow in the face of the climate crisis when the research is so urgent.
As I worked on turning my draft into a workable manuscript, my characters began monologuing for pages about capitalism, heavy industry, colonialism. It took me awhile to realize that I was losing patience for long-form fiction during our slow-moving cataclysm, and even longer to admit that–for my own sanity–I needed to be writing short-form nonfiction, too. (Hence this website.)
But slowest of all was the realization of what fear was doing to my imagination.
Fear can be a great motivator for the imagination, but it’s rarely a healthy relationship. Bosnian-American author Aleksander Hemon describes those moments in the face of a cataclysm when our senses heighten and our priorities rearrange as “disaster-euphoria.” But when your imagination entertains existential fear, there’s a fast approaching point of diminishing returns, and the drop-off is steep. Once you slip over that edge, the imagination might gain momentum, but it is usually moving fast in one direction.
William Faulkner wrote about fear’s effect on the imagination in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech. He was of course writing about a much faster moving disaster–the fear of nuclear annihilation–but his advice is relevant for anyone trying to access their imagination in the face of an existential threat. Faulkner told a banquet-hall of his contemporaries–and countless English classrooms since– that “there are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” According to Faulkner, the imagination steered by fear “labors under a curse…grieves on no universal bones, leaving no scars. [It] writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
In no way am I arguing that everyone on the front lines of a disaster should sit down and write a poem about their feelings. The question “When will I be blown up” is not a metaphorical one for millions of people in this exact moment. But I am asking that those of us who have the time and space and privilege to theorize on the relationship between our imagination and our existential fear do so. These theoretical spaces where we’re able to consider the heart instead of the glands are not exempt from the sixth mass extinction. As our climate crisis intensifies and our humanitarian crises multiply, Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs will make less space for the imagination.
If you think about the imagination as the muscle that only poets and playwrights and artists flex regularly, than the loss of it might not seem so dire to you. And you are not alone. In her essay “Operating Instructions,” Ursula K. Le Guin points out that “the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work…Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.” But she goes on to argue that “the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.”
Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a particularly imaginative person or your work especially creative, I assure you that your imagination is alive and well, working overtime, and essential to fight against the overwhelming fear we experience on a daily basis. Every day we are told that we live on just this side of annihilation, 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock. Even without realizing it, we’ve internalized these fears and subconsciously live on the edge of our seats. In such circumstances, imagining anything other than doom is revolutionary. Activist and writer Walidah Imarisha points out that “all organizing is science fiction…Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds.” By Imarisha’s definition, anyone who is able to push through their fear and imagine a world that is deeply different, healthier, and more just is dabbling in speculative fiction. Decolonizing your imagination and visualizing a future other than extinction by extractive capitalism means you’re writing what Imarisha calls “visionary fiction.”
In order to turn back the doomsday clock—and I absolutely refuse to believe that we can’t—we have to imagine that it’s possible to do so. And we can’t do that if our imagination is paralyzed by fear.
