Towards an Understanding of Human Fanciness

 

Of all the human drives which lie beyond the animal realm of preservation and propagation, perhaps the least understood or most overlooked is the infinite capacity for fanciness. The word fancy, originally a contraction of fantasy, has through time become so versatile as to be almost useless, which makes it all the more useful for our purpose. It is altogether fitting that fancy functions as a noun, verb or adjective and has meanings ranging from inclination and ornamental excellence to caprice and empty inflation of worth. In all its current uses there is a slight weakness, a mode of the emphatic that stops short of even being decisively sarcastic. In short, the word fancy is a fancy word. Let us turn to its creator. Any attempt to characterize with a single term such a long and multifarious experiment as the human race must necessarily fail unless that term is itself mired in endless diversity and elusive tone. Such a term is fancy.

From pre-history it can be seen that what raises man above the animals (if indeed this can be claimed at all) is a special capacity that has long and mistakenly been identified as reason, but which we now venture to call fanciness. It is now generally accepted that reason cannot bear the weight that Western tradition has assigned to it as the definitive characteristic of the irrational animal. Reason implies necessity: a faculty for responding to given situations; a tool for synthetic problem solving and continued learning. This is, of course, not wrong, only partial. What reason overlooks is the insatiable drive towards problem-creating, making simple situations insolubly difficult, elaborating every aspect of life beyond function, beyond beauty, beyond usefulness, and finally beyond sustainability. This unreasonable, mindless complexity is the true hallmark of our species. It is our glory and undoing. Neither glittering towers nor mass graves are the work of a rational animal Culture and its annihilation are unnecessary, only the rewards of constant and unmotivated growth-for-its-own-sake.

The illogic of fanciness would have man cut off his feet to wear them on his head, followed by the legs, torso, etc., until the head rests on the ground and the last fancy move would be to return the head to its original place atop the neck, where it could then devote itself to something more useful- an essay perhaps, or digging a hole in which to bury old hats. Here we arrive, naturally, at an abyss. If our fancy animal wanders far enough to the right or to the left, it will find in either direction the yawning chasm of the abyss (so the world is round after all). To the right is the path of self-extension, of leaving one's mark, of empire; to the left is the path of self-annihilation, of losing oneself in the world, of love. These are the twin ecstasies of fanciness, which are inseparable: to shine with an unbearable brightness, and in that brightness to disappear.


~(from Ashes: the surviving fragments of John Kane. Sleepytime Gorilla Press 1955)