Charles Bernstein on History & the imaginal

 from Charles Bernstein, A Poetics  (p. 75)

But escape can be an image of release from captivity
in a culture that produces satisfaction as a means
of exploitation or pacification. The problem
with "escapist" literature is that it offers no escape,
narratively reinforcing our captivity.
To escape, however, if only
trope-ically, is not a utopian refusal
to encounter the realpolitik of history: it is a
crucial dialectical turn that allows imaginal place
outside history as we "know" it,
in order to critique it,
an Archimedean point of imaginative
construction, in which we can be energized,
our resources shored. The utopian, ecstatic
is not a refusal of history
but an envisionment of the indwelling
potentialities of history
that must be envisioned - audibly embodied -
in order to occur...