Just Imagine

 Contemplating the actions of this man, I'll admit I had a strange reaction. After the silence over the horror, after the frustration that a man who was being ground down by a shitty economy decides to go and shoot up Emmanuel Goldstein, summing up both the terrible fear people have and the pollution of discourse that creates a real toxic bubble--in short, after I reacted like the progressive I am--I had another thought.

It was, "Don't ever talk about people having no imagination. Anybody who believes what other people tell them has an imagination."

Both among the general humanism of the era, and in the SF/Fantasy/Comics subculture of whom I am an old member, Imagination is a wonderful thing, the best thing our brains can do. It is, as everybody from the romantics to the Dadaists have proclaimed, far superior to Reason and morals and all that political philosophy merdre that makes a pompous bourgeoisie and stifling stability and ossified thinking. Against that is the glory of Imagination! Whether Lord Byron or André Breton or Neil Gaiman, it is everything that's good, yes, even the parts with circular saws running through peoples' arms. And thousands of dreadful earnest ironic novels are written with a protagonist whose only important characteristic is More Imagination. Such novel end either moderately badly or very badly, but the point of interest is and is only the sparking of imagination.

But of course the Tennessee shooter's act is an act of imagination. And other books, meaning to show the decadence of the (bourgeois) intelligentsia has some professor of something in a black turtleneck, a goatee and a drink and a cigarette talking about 'authenticity' and 'exposing the hypocrisy' of this and that, lauding to the cocktail-party audience the shooter's crime.

Imagination is secular faith and secular miracles all rolled into one. It doesn't depend on what the universe actually may be like, so is, depending on what you mean by the word, existential. We may be crushed by the Jug O'Naught (tip of the hat to w. kelly) but we dreamed dreams, oh yes we did.

Is Imagination our glory, or is saying so foolish and dangerous? What do we do about the thing that takes us to the stars and shoots up a church full of kids?

I think the answer to that has to do with a befuddlement of terms. Because I think imagination is both less and more than what people think it is. Bear with me.

Imagination, if we consider the word closely, is the ability to generate images. To extend it to where we tend to use it, it's the ability to turn information into a sensorially perceived matrix or frame. It enables us to create vast worlds out of the mass of composted information sitting in our brains--but it also makes us able to 'follow' an argument or 'see' a point. It is how something 'makes sense'--that is to say, makes a place via our senses where we feel comfortable. Reason, as we're taught it, can take us places, but most people don't acknowledge reason--not without imagination. 

Once we've learned how to do it as infinks, we discover that lawless  imagination makes life unimaginably richer. If we're lucky enough in this segment of human history, and we're exposed to books, the skill of making pictures that are not bound by our actual experience becomes all the more developed. We don't tend to think that we need imagination to read a newspaper, but if you pay attention, you're doing it full-bore, full tilt. 

We live by imagination, and that's true even if we work in a laboratory, or a courtroom, or an accounting firm. Imagination under law is the vehicle by which reason works on us, how logic convinces us. (My one-sentence explanation of Plato's Meno.) If we can makes the sensorium and stand it and see the link and the pleasing shape, it makes sense. I think we do not live by memories, ideas,or facts, but by images, or better, imaginings.

So what about the top end, the glory of imagination and its worship? Well, my guess is this, while imagination really is part of that wonderful thing, we tend to confuse imagination with creativity.

Ah, you say. Of course. You might even be irritated by so obvious a statement. Using imagination the  way I've set up here, it generates one's daydreams, but also the drive home. A really good daydream is not one we just imagine, but create.

And once we're talking about creation, making, poeisis, why, then the big macjhinery starts to show up, from Aristotle to Plato, through Heidegger to Cleanth Brooks and a whole bunch of people I haven't read, to  Elvis Mitchell shooting the breeze with Quentin Tarantino. And creativity and creation is quite legitimately concerned with everything human, from morals to ethics to social convention to the mysteries of life, the Universe, and Everything.

I think we talk about human imagination rather than human creativity precisely because off all that heavy machinery. Because it has not only been so well discussed, criticized and circumscribed, as well as staked out by various classes and guilds throughout our history, praising human creativity sounds presumptuous, and problematic. There are whole branches of education devoted to telling you you're not creative. But imagination--why, that's fine. We all do that. 

There's another reason for the confusion though, and that creativity, unless you're actually welding or gouging or smearing, has as its ultimate product an imagining. Something that makes sense. It's also the product of every legal pleading, scientific argument and corporate presentation--the only difference is it looks a little more lawless. Good creating is intended to look like imagining, and it's part of the pleasure to make it seem so.

The Tennessee shooter was using his imagination--and as imagining it had a terrible symmetry. He managed to imagine away the forces denying him jobs and imagine gays and liberals in their place. He did it by submitting to the imaginings of Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly who with great consistency tell him precisely that. As a work of imagination it was terrible and complete. As a work of creativity it was slavish, immoral, and monstrously cruel. 

If we realize that we live our lives by images--all of us, not just the stoners and the new-age floaters and the keyboard commandos--then maybe we can understand that life is but a dream, and, after much creative effort, begin to be responsible for it.