Ivy Getty, Tom Blyth, and the Search for Fantasy in a Mad, Mad World
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The Dream Sequence
Last fall I went to a splendid exhibition in San Francisco featuring sculpture, collage, and video by the artist Wangechi Mutu. Because we went on a weekday afternoon, it wasn’t crowded, and my friend Anisse and I could linger up close with Mutu’s chimerical, often towering sculptures. Mutu has spoken of inventing her own mythologies with her work; accordingly, the hybrid deities she’d shaped with bronze, clay, soil, and gems were newly strange, and fantastically haunting. It was one of the best afternoons I’ve had all pandemic long, and it was one I’d desperately needed, this brief time with an artist’s made-up world yielding a kind of magic that has helped sustain me through many less charmed days.
I have long believed that fantasy, art, and fiction—the lust, that is, for imagining other ways of being—are vital to any life I want to live. I have also had times when I’ve lost faith in this belief. During the first part of the pandemic, like a lot of people, I felt compelled to be so vigilant that almost all I could read was the news. Every day, barely sleeping, I careened from headline to terrifying headline. I’m a novelist, and I couldn’t read fiction. What use did it have, I thought, if it could fail me in a time of such need?
But the letdown was short-lived. The ability to read fiction returned, and what a relief it was, a gift beyond measure, to find I could stay up late with a novel again. To be able to spend a whole Sunday reading in bed, so drunk on words that I’d finish one book, drop it, open the next book on my nightstand, and keep going.
People often defend the social utility of fiction—in books as well as other media—by arguing that it can improve our ability to feel empathy, while some contend that multitudes of fiction -lovers have perpetrated a great deal of evil. Both lines of reasoning sound sensible to me—fiction expands imaginations, and it will not itself cure evil—but I’m not here to argue for how edifying it can be to read. I do believe this expanding of our imaginations to be powerful, and useful, urgently so (consider the many fascist efforts in the U.S. to ban books by marginalized people, think of how powerful these books could be), but that’s not what pushes me toward fiction.
What pushes me toward it is, instead, pleasure. It’s joy. To lose myself in a novel—or a movie, show, or painting—is one of the greatest joys I’ve known. And as has been true for so many people, I’ve been running short on joy. In this breaking, glorious world, said William Blake, “Let every particle of dust breathe forth its joy,” and I’m with him: I believe that we’re built for joy, and deeply sustained by it, needing it as we do love.
Meanwhile, I pull up the news, and I read about war, rising tyranny, violence, and the escalating depredations on our rights, and there is little cause for joy. In California, where I live, a terrible drought continues; I check the forecast, which predicts more devastation, and I am filled with alarm, grief, and fury, not joy. Not pleasure.
So, I’ve been reading novels. I buy collections of poetry. I’ve had giddy nights of watching up to an entire season at a time of shows like Sort Of or The Chair or Squid Game. It is such a pleasure to get out of my head, away from my troubles. I’m not, though, ignoring the news, or disregarding my communities: Part of how I was able to resume reading and writing after the pandemic hiatus was by promising myself I’d do more for others every day, after which could I please have the time with fiction, with the make--believe I craved? In short, I bribed my anxiety, quieting my inclination to think that if I stay afraid each minute of my life, I will thereby protect the world from further harm. Which isn’t, of course, how the world works. This vigilance helps nobody, so I continue to bribe myself, and to seek out as much joy as I can, knowing that it leaves me with more to give.
A question that often comes up is how anyone can care about fiction, about the made-up fantastical, in a time like this, to which one might say that the times have been hard for a lot of people for a very long while. With and in spite of tribulation, we’ve still always insisted on telling and listening to stories, and on the necessity of art. On losing ourselves in other worlds to better find ourselves again.
Photographs by Richard Phibbs
Styled by MaryKate Boylan
Hair by Brent Lawler for Act+Acre. Makeup by Vicky Steckel for Mehron Makeup. Grooming by Losi at Honey Artists. Nails by Kayo Haguchi for Chanel Les Vernis. Tailoring by Yasmine Oezelli. Set design by Todd Wiggins for MHS Artists. Shot on location at the Weylin in Brooklyn.
In the top image: On her: Max Mara trench coat ($6,590) and dress ($7,590); Salvatore Ferragamo pumps ($775); Munnu The Gem Palace necklace. On him: Officine Générale jacket ($695) and pants ($420); The Row turtleneck ($1,290); Crockett & Jones Shoes ($725). Globe-Trotter vanity case ($1,445).
This story appears in the May 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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