Tom Fallon's Imagine points to the ancient human questions "why creation" and "what is the meaning of life." It is a prose and free verse literary epic of human beings on a small planet in the mystifying great creation that is beautiful, frightening and astonishing. The epigraphs "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" of Paul Gaugin and Eugene O'Neill, "I am only interested in the relations between man and God," set its direction.
Imagine began when Tom Fallon realized at the age of 84 that he was facing the end of his life, death, silence. In response to this realization he began to create the word creation that would be his last. It is created in literary form of the modern direction.
With earlier creations Through A Strangers Eyes, The Man on the Moon, Now and Creation Now With Words Fallon experimented with literary form in the modern aesthetic direction rather than following traditional prose or poetry forms of the past.
After three years of uncertainty Fallon completed Imagine as the last words of his insignificant human life on the small planet earth in the great creation opposing his death drawing with his creative self from the great source in creation to present a new creation as the creation itself opposes death with a new creation, new creations. Often he asked himself as he wrote what is creation, why creation, why death for a creation.
Imagine is presented in five form sections. Part one, Prelude, begins with the creation and is followed by Naked, Presence, Imagine and Silence. Naked presents a news reporter who has lived through the danger and violence of human beings on earth while in part two, Presence, a young person communicates tentatively, spiritually, with his creator, his God. In three, Imagine, the incredibly vital Loreen appears with her beauty, wildness, joy and intelligence leading to the last words in Silence which seeks an answer to the future of the creation.
Fallon's embrace of literary art experiment has its roots in his exposure to art creators of the past. A first grade teacher quieted his wildness by introducing him to art. Bored in high school he discovered Thomas Craven's Men of Art which jump started his embrace of the great aesthetic explorations the 19th and 20th Century. The early Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance encouraged his exploration of literary form with complete freedom and the Marianne Moore interview with Donald Hall Paris Review in 1961 reinforced his embrace of art, literary, form exploration opposing traditional poetry forms of the past.
Visits to New York City during the Sixties and Seventies exposed Fallon to the happenings movement and Off Off Broadway theaters such as La Mama ETC with LeRoi Jones and Rosalyn Drexler, and his discovery of modern jazz of artists like Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton as well as experimental classical music of John Cage, Steve Reich and Anton Webern added to writers such as Shakespeare, Keats, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, e. e. cummings, Dick Higgins, and others.
So it is Tom Fallon's Imagine exists as he faces death, silence, his last words on a very small planet in the great creation: "Why do I exist? Why does the creation exist?"
