Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs

“Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.” Thus spoke Tom Waits, the gravel-voiced poet of American song, whose words carry the weight of the earth and the whisper of dreams. In this statement lies the essence of the artist’s struggle — the eternal balancing act between the world as it is and the world as it could be. Waits speaks as one who walks the narrow bridge between reality and imagination, knowing that both are necessary, and that neither can live without the other. His words are a hymn to the sacred tension that gives birth to creation.

For reality without imagination is a dim and lifeless thing. It is the unlit bulb — full of potential, yet cold and inert, waiting for the spark that brings it to life. And imagination without reality is a wandering spirit, beautiful yet blind, stumbling through the dark without direction or ground. Waits, who has lived a life steeped in the strange alchemy of art and experience, knows this well. His songs, filled with the grit of city streets and the surreal glow of dream, are born from that marriage — where the dust of the earth meets the fire of the mind.

To “straddle reality and the imagination” is to live with one foot in the visible and one in the invisible, to breathe both air and vision. It is the way of the artist, the mystic, the philosopher — all those who refuse to be confined by what they can merely touch or measure. In this, Waits joins the lineage of the great creators who understood that the truth of the world is too vast to be found in fact alone. The imagination is not an escape from the real; it is its completion. It is the flame that reveals the shape of what lies unseen.

Consider Vincent van Gogh, who looked upon a field of stars and did not see them as cold fires in an indifferent sky, but as swirling currents of divine motion. His reality — poverty, loneliness, despair — was illuminated by imagination, which transformed suffering into radiance. Yet his imagination was always rooted in the world before him: the trees, the fields, the faces of peasants. Like the blind man’s cane, it guided him through darkness. Through that delicate balance of vision and truth, he painted eternity into the everyday.

So too did Waits forge his art from contradiction. His world is full of broken angels and drunken saints, of love and decay, of laughter born from pain. He does not flee reality; he bends it until it sings. And in that bending, he shows us that imagination is not a flight, but a lens — one that turns the ordinary into something holy. For when he sings of the forgotten and the lost, he gives them form in imagination, and through that, they become eternal.

This quote, then, is not merely about art — it is about the condition of being human. Every life, in its way, straddles reality and imagination. We all must dream, and we all must wake. To live only in reality is to wither under its weight; to live only in imagination is to drift without anchor. But to weave the two together — to let imagination electrify the real, and to let reality give shape to the dream — is to live with fullness and meaning. The wise know that truth and fantasy are not enemies, but lovers, forever chasing one another across the landscape of the soul.

So let this be your lesson, O listener: do not fear the dream, and do not flee the world. Marry your imagination to your reality, and both shall thrive. When life grows dull, let the light of imagination fill it. When dreams grow wild, let reality steady your hand. Create, speak, love, and build from that balance, for it is the harmony of heaven and earth within you.

For as Tom Waits reminds us, the bulb cannot shine without the socket, and the blind man cannot walk without his cane. The same is true for the soul — it must hold both dream and ground, both vision and truth. In that union lies all art, all wisdom, and all the fire that makes being alive worth the wonder.