Two weeks ago, we discovered in class Julian Beever and his incredible talent to create illusions and to make us see the world in a different way for a second. This reminded me a movie a watched last summer called “Life Is Beautiful”. This is the story of a Jewish Italian person who had been deported to a concentration camp with his five-year-old son. To protect and help this latter survive their internment, he use his imagination to “create” a better and imaginary world for his son.
These two elements brought me to think and question myself about illusion and the impact it can have on your life. I started my reasoning by trying to find other field where illusion comes to play. The most relevant I thought about was magic. We all know that there is nothing magic in this world. However, we all enjoy magic tricks? Why? Why do we like so much to be fooled? The explanation I came up with might create some disagreement so I apologize to my reader if my opinion differs from yours. I think that illusions allow us to think that everything is possible and that our lives might improve after all and it comforts us just to think that it is possible. To come back to my previous example, at the end of a magic trick, you look for the secret. But you won't find it... Because of course, you're not really looking...you don't really want to know. You want to stay with this perception that every thing can happen.
I did some research about illusion and found that scholars usually separate illusion into two categories: affective illusions and perceptive illusions. Perceptive illusions are well represented by Julian Beever’s drawing while affective illusion is a little bit more complex. Affective illusion is more an ultimate solution human being has to escape the reality when the latter becomes unbearable. This is perfectly well expressed “Life Is Beautiful”. At some point, it is comparable to psychosomatic diseases, where the illusion is the way used by the mind to express something that would be unbearable otherwise. Affective illusion can protect for a certain time if it remains under control. The risk is to become insane.
