 |
| AA72, Zdzisław Beksiński |
In the seventeen years that I have roamed this planet, I have had difficulty dealing with escapism, as it lingers everywhere and nowhere. Especially these last five years. As a kid I wasn't aware of escapism, although I came into contact with it very often. I mostly read modern fantasy and most of it was escapist fantasy. Yet I wonder today whether it was an escapist activity for me at the time, since I really enjoyed reading these books and regularly got very excited. That brings us to the question: what makes an activity escapist? The most straightforward
definition is: an activity that leads us away (a way to escape) from reality.
This helps to relieve stress and distracts from the unpleasant and banal aspects of the individual's life. An important distinction to make, however, is how one experiences the activity and the activity itself; while an activity can be fundamentally escapist, it still can be experienced as confrontational (e.g., a critical reading of an escapist work), conversely, an activity that is fundamentally confrontational can be experienced as escapism (e.g., an escapist reading of Gormenghast). Thus we distinguish the activity itself from the individual experience of such activity.*
This means that an escapist experience cannot provide any insight into our world or ourselves, as it then had to point toward reality, and it neither improves nor confronts reality, right? The line does indeed seem a bit blurry: e.g., one goes out jogging, thus improving his health, but it is only to avoid confronting their reality, be it familial, financial, etc.; the real intention here being escapist, rather than confrontational, making this an escapist experience (experientally escapist*) of a confrontational activity. So the jogger actually does improve his reality, but only the parts of it that aren't connected to the major problems in his life that he wishes to avoid.
