Sandcastles on a Lonely Shore

Water rocks through the substance of our dreams in rolling waves, rippling through grey matter in fluid streams of blood and plasma that scrape it flat, layer by layer, first a distortion, and then a memory.

I sit on the shore. It always begins with me clawing at the sand, shaping it into eddies. A single finger can plow a line through the sand. Several can turn a field. A wrist can morph dunes into canyons. A heavy palm can lend swift, unnatural erasure.

Once comfortable with the tool, and with the material, we begin to build. The imagination follows on naturally from a validity of structure, and then expresses it as a metaphor.

How are castles built?

Castles are built by huddled masses, for lonely gods who need a seat from which to rule.

The masses need roads. A source of water. Walls to keep others out, and to keep them in. Aesthetics, and adornment.

Why is the castle?

To focus them. To give them a purpose for existing, in a world of sand and water. Only in a world of sand and water.

There are only worlds of sand and water.

Endlessly working, until the inevitable comes, and the shapes you strove to make are rendered obscure by the restless tide, and you exist no more. This is the life of those on the shoreline.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about imagination, and hallucination. I’d be quick to say there was a time when the two were practically inseparable in my mind. But, as years get on, there is a clear pattern in that hallucination seems more common, and imagination seeps to its nadir. The two are similar in this way:

Both hallucination and imagination are perceptions independent of external stimuli.

 A hallucination appears to have the qualities of Physicality, while not undergoing a chain of physical causality that would lend it true existence. An image is conjured up from the mind and transplanted upon Physicality, existing as a picture drawn on clingwrap and held up over the physical world. Imagination implies an awareness of falsehood. Hallucination implies a misidentification as truth.

The hallucination and the image are said to diverge at a point we label control. The image is something controlled, because we can consciously direct it. We can banish it if it displeases us, and we are aware of its transitory nature. It is said than thinking of the past and thinking of the future inspire very similar thought patterns, as both are a means of perceiving something that exists outside of stimulus.

By rote, the hallucination is an uncontrolled manifestation of the subconscious, uncontrolled by the opposite qualities to those we provided to the image: it cannot be banished at whim, it cannot be adapted by thought, and the thinker is unaware of its nature as a hallucination.

Yet there are places where the imagination borders dangerously close to hallucination, especially in youth. Is a young child at all capable of banishing the notion that the slightest bump in the night or passing shadow is a monstrous visitor? Much like the builder of the sandcastle, doesn’t the builder need to prescribe to certain basic laws of logic in order for their image to hold integrity (can a sandcastle be a castle if it had no walls or form, but pure embellishments of stray seaweed and shells on a flat shore?), and because of this, is there not a core ideal of an image beyond their ability to shape?

We can rest on the most sturdy case, being that a hallucination is something we are unaware of; while an image is something we are at least uncertain of at any point in its existence. It’s a thin line – an important one, but a clear and determinate brink.

Is hallucination any more real than imagination? No: both are varieties of the unreal, and therefore just as unreal as one another.

 Yet, while both are unreal, we tend to declare that hallucinations feel more real than images – their reality has a higher probability.

Why should probability play such a big role?

This is due to the misdiagnosis of reality as a certainty. We automatically train ourselves to recognize the empirical as truth, and the formally presented as canon. We are indoctrinated to function in this way to such an extent that when exercising metaphysical uncertainty; we consider ourselves to imagine that our senses are wrong (thinking, “What if this isn’t real?”), rather than sense that our environment is imaginary (“What would indicate this is real?”).

Reality is never certain. Even the seemingly most solid component of it – our scientific understanding of physicality – shifts from decade to decade to incorporate the addition of information. There is no canon outside of the rational: only theory, so that we know that our established reality can be overturned should evidence which disproves it come to light.

*

Thus established, castle-building becomes a much clearer practice. If image and hallucination were placed on a spectrum, ‘uncertainty’ would sit between them as a measure of how easily they are misrepresented as real.

If the declarative intent of the castle-builder can be said to form a castle out of nothing, keeping their material something constant which is so because it is destined to be swept away by the ocean (sand, water, bits of flotsam and weed), then the rule of efficacy is in how much their creation transcends its material. How much something shifting, uncertain and transient can hold to the illusion of reality. Castle-building is, in its own manner, the way in which substance moves from Image to Hallucination.

*

I sit on the shore, watching my tireless work liquidate before my eyes as the sun sets deep purple. The archways fall, the grand chapel is swept until only a molten core remains. The joke is, it’s the physical things that disappear. All that’s left of the sandcastle on its lonely shore is my own memories of how it rose and fell, its arcane and elemental history that spread across the sand. All that’s left is the firm image of something that may have mattered, and my own stronger sense of how to make such images appear more real, every time I trace my hand though the sands.