Imagination

All day long, I’ve been engaged in dreaming. Not asleep, but I’ve been hard at work devising images and ideas for a story I plan to write. Yet, for all my many hours of faroff looking in the reveries that have consumed me, I’ve only just come to be aware of how much of my imagination I’ve surrendered to the physical world. When I was a teenager, and rather bereft of worldly possessions, it did me well to imagine what I might someday possess. Often, it was shapeless and without definite color. It existed out of time, and had to it, no measurable dimensions. My vision was more of a feeling. I felt that the world was a marvelous place in which reality was unfixed. There were possibilities out there, and I loved to dream of grand exploits in faroff places.

Because I lived in an apartment with my parents, I knew the brute functionality of things. I knew that a faucet dispensed water, and that a refrigerator chilled liquids. I knew the thermostat brought forth atmospheres of warmth and cold. And I no doubt knew, when I visited with friends more monied that we, that such things existed more excellently or more beautifully than what our little income could afford. I understood that money could furnish luxury beyond the mere functionality to which I was accustomed. And so it came to pass, I coveted the sinks in which the porcelain was real, and around which marble formed countertops, and mirrors reflected burnished brass. I longed for beautiful Persian carpets in spite of the low-pile rug with which our apartment had come prepared. I wished for larger windows, the better to admit sun and the eventide breezes that carried aloft lilacs. All of these wishes had their places in a real world. For I had seen them with my own eyes. But what of the things I did not see? What of the worlds that were wholly absent in my vicinity? I saw cats all around me, and so came I to know animals of infinte grace, whose eyes appeared wise. I saw their tails and their whiskers. I felt their silken fur beneath my caresses. I knew their claws when they climbed, or when my foolishness possessed them to inflict me with a scratch. All these things, I could now imagine any creature under the sun possessing. But what about feathers? What about scales? What about animals ten times the size of a cat, or 100 times smaller? How could I know such things existed without seeing them? When I saw dogs, I had some notion of relativity. They were larger than cats, and seemingly less solitary. Their noses were longer. Their eyes appeared plaintive, not wise.

So, out of that relativity I came, imagining many creatures whose features were neither feline nor canine, but both.

I suspect all our imaginitive powers inher from that first comparison. Difference suggests possibility: the possibility that between two extremes, there exist countless combinations. And when we see a cat alongside a dog, we naturally wonder if such an animal lives in which each of these others is present in some measure. How bizarre! Yet how worthwhile to envision life’s experiments! We love to question whether so many seemingly contradictory elements can work in concert. Can a cat run as quickly on legs more suited to a dog? Can a fish fly, or a bird seek its prey underwater? Nature is the grandest imagination of all.

But clearly, our own imagination requires some point of reference from which to begin. Without an object to ponder, one cannot imagine a reconfiguration. And isn’t a reconfiguration really what imagination is all about? We consider the way things are, and then we consider how they might be if we changed the particulars. We are left with a product in which only the arrangement has changed, though the substance has remained.

Thus, imagination sustains itself on reality. But I do believe there is such a thing as overfeeding one’s mind. When, after too long a season in the real world, we look about ourselves and can imagine nothing more than what we already see, then we have lost our capacity to believe in things unseen. For example, the man who spends his life observing big cats in central Africa, might struggle and fail to imagine a cat whose color is violet. Such a notion is simply unrealistic because his concept of cats is so fixed in what he has seen in the real world. And supposing he does see such a rare and untenable specimen, his time in the field must always compel him to call the creature a trick. Knowledge always counsels against a belief in the fantastical.

Likewise, he who reads a newspaper everyday, is too keenly aware of the state of world affairs. He has less of a mind to imagine Palestine and Israel ever declaring peace. He lacks vision to conceive of a time when government will meet the needs of its people unconditionally. He can think of the world only in terms of its page one headlines, or its book reviews, or its classifeids.

So, as I was working on my story, I realized that I am in danger of becoming that man. I have seen the world both splendid and lackluster. I have measured it against itself, and come to know what is possible only by what is probable. I fear I am becoming less apt to accept things which I have not already seen. And when I sit down to imagine incredible things, I imagine things not so incredible as well-documented in the pages of encyclopedias.

What is the key to retaining one’s imagination? Once upon a time, I believed that to stay imaginative required a willful sort of ignorance. But ignorance is a negative word. Rather, I thought it needed a kind of innocent naivete; a mind fed only on the sparest diet of facts and figures, and only so much as it needed to begin reconfiguring what it had seen. In that time, whileI lacked reference to the many glorious and tangible delights of the real world, I suffered gladly for the greater pleasure of imagining things that did not exist.

Knowledge, as ever, is a benediction even as it is a curse. One learns what one needs to live in the real world, but at what price? To imagine is humankinds greatest commonwealth. I, for one, would gladly forego knowledge if it meant I could recapture even an iota of the absurdities that once filled my head and my life!