Fantasy must not die I had already begun writing in my mind: “Fantasy must not die.” And I stopped. Being convinced of an idea does not mean that, merely because I am convinced, everyone else must be convinced as well. Before saying that fantasy must not die, there is an earlier question: Why must it not die? Or perhaps an even more uncomfortable one: Why will it not die? And we could keep moving backwards. Every question contains another question that came before it. A recursive regression that, if we let it continue, eventually reaches our own existence: why we think, why we write, why preserve an idea instead of condemning everything to oblivion. We could retreat so far that we would end up asking whether we should write even a single word. But I do not want to go that far. Not today. — I live between four walls. Sometimes I have the impression that I leave this room less often than I should. I want to move screens away from my eyes. I want to smell more and see less. I like feeling the wind. I do not last very long outside. But during that brief interval, before I grow tired, I feel something. It is not peace. It is relief. And the distinction matters. Because peace and relief are not equivalent. Peace presupposes, in some sense, that the conflict has ended. Relief means only that, for an instant, its pressure has diminished. Besides, going outside is not always possible. And the relationship I am trying to describe is not as simple as “inside” and “outside” either, although at a sufficient level of abstraction perhaps it can be reduced to that. I am speaking about our relationship with our environment. And an environment cannot always be changed as easily as opening a door and crossing a threshold. Reducing the problem to being inside or outside would be to mistake one variable for the system. — And in truth I could stop here. I have already said what I wanted to say. Everything that follows belongs to another obligation: making myself understood. That is my weariness with writing. I do not write for myself. If I wrote only for myself, I would have finished many lines ago. Perhaps I would have finished at the title. Everything that followed would have happened behind closed doors, without syntax, without explanations and, probably, without words. But I write for you. So that you can understand me. And knowing that I have already spent this entire text —everything except the title— writing for you, now I do ask for your attention. If you have already understood where I am going without needing another word, I wish I could have you in front of me. That looking at one another were enough to know the what, the how, the when, the where and the why. To spare ourselves this absurd need to turn thoughts into symbols, symbols into sentences, and sentences back into thoughts inside a different mind. But we cannot. So I continue. — Fantasy must not die because changing our material environment is not always comfortable and, far too often, it is not even possible. Fantasy is a way out. Although “escape” may be a word that has been unfairly discredited. For some people fantasy is images. For others, sounds. For others, sculptures, bodies, textures. Some fantasies are seen; others are touched; others are heard. And some are smelled. I am sorry to tell you that I cannot think of a way to perfume this text, which may reach you converted into bits. I am even sorrier that I do not know what scent could carry you into an environment where you could feel exactly what you need to feel now. Because it does not have to be the same thing I need. Nor match my sensibility. Nor my ethics. Nor my morality. Perhaps your thoughts would seem contemptible to me. Perhaps I might come to hate the mere possibility that someone like you exists. Perhaps I can judge you. Perhaps I cannot forgive you. Perhaps I consider it legitimate to condemn you. Perhaps others may want revenge on you. And yet understanding you remains possible. To understand is not to absolve. This distinction matters in law as much as it does outside it. Understanding the causal chain that leads to an act does not necessarily extinguish the responsibility of the person who carries it out. But neither should it authorize us to pretend that the chain does not exist. I can reproach you for what you do and, at the same time, ask myself what brought you there. I can recognize your responsibility without granting you a monopoly over all causes. And perhaps there I can offer you something: a less harmful option. A different exit. A fantasy in which certain impulses can find representation without having to become harm. Whether you accept it or reject it no longer depends on me. You could even interpret it in such a way that one day you make me hate myself for having written a single word. That too is the risk of creating. — Because fantasy, however much we may like to imagine it full of magic, castles and talking iridescence, does not mean the same thing to everyone. It does not even mean the same thing to the same person throughout an entire life. Fantasy adapts. It mutates with whatever we need to escape from. And then a much harder obligation appears: to understand. Understanding does not mean celebrating. Understanding does not mean justifying. Understanding does not even mean ceasing to feel pain in the face of what we understand. Sometimes understanding demands exactly the opposite: passing through our own rejection and establishing an intellectual connection that, emotionally, we resist accepting. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt not because everyone is innocent, but because no serious explanation should begin by treating its conclusions as already proven. And if we go looking for someone to blame, we may discover something even more uncomfortable: blame rarely behaves like an indivisible object. It is distributed. Here I must be precise. Legal responsibility can be individualized. Causality almost never can. A court needs to determine who performed an act, with what knowledge, under what circumstances, and with what degree of culpability. It needs limits because without them law would become impossible. Reality has no such obligation. Reality can accommodate enormous causal chains. Fathers. Mothers. Institutions. Absences. Decisions. Humiliations. Incentives. Fears. Errors. Silences. People who did something. People who failed to do something. I am drifting away from the subject. But the digression contains something too. And since the strict question of fantasy was resolved many lines ago, I want to propose one final exercise. — One being gives a weapon to another. He does not order him to use it. He does not tell him against whom. He does not impose a target. He does not even particularly encourage him to fire. But there is another set of people, events and circumstances that place pressure on the second being. They provoke him. They break him. They slowly destroy him. He finds no exits. Or, more precisely, he cannot see them. No one shows them to him. The only thing he learns with any regularity is how to suffer. He does, however, have the weapon. He learns how to use it. He understands its function. And eventually he fires. He commits a crime. Now comes the uncomfortable question: who is to blame? I am not asking who pulled the trigger. That is a descriptive question and probably a simple one. I am asking about the complete causal architecture. How much belongs to the person who handed over the weapon? How much to the person who applied the pressure? How much to those who created the conditions under which that weapon came to exist and circulate from hand to hand? How much to the person who manufactured one piece? How much to the person who supplied the metal? How much to the person who watched that individual deteriorate and decided it was none of his concern? How much to an institution that could have intervened? How much to the individual who ultimately decided to fire? I am not saying that all of them should bear legal responsibility. That would be absurd. I am saying that causing, contributing, allowing, facilitating, omitting, deciding and executing are different categories, even though in our need for a simple answer we prefer to compress them all into one word: blame. We could even imagine it mathematically. Let there be a final event E. There is not necessarily a single cause C, but rather a set: E = f(C₁, C₂, C₃, …, Cₙ) Some variables will carry almost no weight. Others will be decisive. Some will be necessary but insufficient. Others will be sufficient only when they coincide with particular conditions. Some will be so remote from the outcome that assigning any legal responsibility to them would be absurd. But a small weight is not the same thing as exactly zero. And here appears the question that truly interests me: Why, at the end of an immense chain of causal weights, where gram by gram a mass greater than the one borne by the final individual may accumulate, does our gaze fall almost exclusively on the last link? On the person who finally fell. On the person who finally acted. On the person who was there when everything that came before acquired material form. Perhaps because it is easier. The final link has a name. It has a face. It can sit before us. A society does not fit in the dock. A causal chain cannot be handcuffed. An era cannot serve a sentence. I understand the objections. I understand the extreme examples that are probably beginning to appear in your mind. I also understand that some acts can produce such intense anger that any attempt at explanation feels offensive. I am not trying to take that anger away from you. Nor your pain. Nor your right to demand consequences. My point is not to erase the individual with the comfortable phrase that “we are all a little guilty of everything.” That would be another simplification. My point is almost the opposite: if there is a part that belongs to me, I want to know it. And I would find it much more bearable to live in a society where each person paid —in the broadest sense of the word— exactly for the part that belongs to them. No more. No less. — That is my environment. The environment I want to escape from at every instant of my life. A hostile and cowardly environment. A system made of uncoordinated masses who, despite constantly participating in collective outcomes, declare themselves individually innocent. Everyone proclaims their moral superiority. Everyone finds, with extraordinary ease, the guilty person who exists somewhere outside themselves. And that is why I need fantasy. I cannot find the world I am looking for simply by going outside to feel the air. Nor by smelling Mediterranean rosemary. Not even by having a sailboat moored in the harbor, waiting for a beautiful windy day so I can go out for a few hours, return home, jump into the pool and eat a wood-fired fideuà. All of that could make me happy. But I would still belong to the same world. The environment I am speaking about exists only in my fantasy. — Board games are fantasy. Literature is fantasy. Cinema is fantasy. Series are fantasy. At least, they are part of mine. They allow me to leave that uncoordinated, contradictory and unjust environment for a few hours and enter another one governed by rules. And the rules must be coordinated. They must be intelligible. They must relate to one another. They must produce predictable consequences within the system. Because otherwise the fantasy breaks. Perhaps that is one of the things that attracts me most to games: a small universe can be more coherent than the universe that contains it. A board has boundaries. The world does not. In a game we can define a set of states S, a set of rules R, a set of possible actions A, and a transition function: T(S, A) → S′ If you do this, that happens. If you make a decision, the system responds according to known rules. You can argue about whether those rules are good. You can change them. You can create others. But while you are playing, you cannot pretend they do not exist merely because you dislike their consequence. The board does not proclaim innocence. The board responds. — That is how I began creating BALL. But the reflection behind it probably deserves more attention than a game that, today, perhaps not even I will play. Because BALL was born from something that came before BALL. It was born from the human being who wants to flee. From the need for escape. From the importance of leisure. From our ability to build small universes when the large universe is not enough. And that escape is not necessarily harmless. Thought can produce change. Fantasy can show us what hurts precisely because, for an instant, it allows us to look at pain from the outside. It can reveal what is missing. It can allow us to rehearse another order. It can help us identify a solution. Otherwise we accumulate symptoms. We treat one. Another appears. We treat the second. A third emerges. And we continue needing the same medicine: fantasy. Not because fantasy solves the cause, but because we never reach deeply enough to solve it ourselves. — And so we return to the beginning. We can keep asking questions. One after another. Why do I need fantasy? Why do I want to escape? Why does this environment feel hostile to me? Why do human beings build environments like this? Why are we the way we are? Why do we exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? We can keep ascending —or descending— until we formulate questions for which we may not even possess the proper language. But there is no obligation to reach the final one today. First we learn numbers. Then we learn to add. Then to subtract. To multiply. To divide. And only much later do we try to solve equations whose notation would have been incomprehensible when we were still learning how to write the number one. Stay with me here. Do not start telling me that before that we learn to speak, and before that to use our vocal cords. You know what I mean. Do not hurry. Do not turn the search for the original question —the question whose answer would solve the entire mystery of life— into an excuse not to answer the questions already within our reach. First count. Then add. After that, we will see how far we can go. That is BALL. BALL is a fantasy.