THE IMAGINATION MACHINE
APRIL 13, 2011. The title of this piece is a joke because, of course, imagination isn’t an apparatus.
Not only that, you have to realize people are taken up with assessing the PRODUCTS of imagination. This one is good, that one isn’t. This one is acceptable, that one is not.
As always, people keep themselves from understanding the root of the tree. All they can see is the leaves. Now they’re green, now they’re gold and red, now they’re gone, now they’re green again. It’s almost a trance.
Well, it’s understandable, because physical reality is the screen on which is played the entrancing movie created by imagination, by many imaginations.
Teachers and schools are afraid to go near this situation. It’s incendiary. Tell children they have imagination? Encourage them to use it? Allow them to give it full rein? Who knows what might happen?
A spell might be broken. Students might suddenly look around and realize there is an infinite realm called creation—and this realm is not being imposed on them. No, they are the ones who flesh it out and invent it. Where would we be then? What might truly liberated children eventually do?
We adults, who have been raised in a prison, would be forced to look at what they do, far beyond our walls. Are we prepared for it?
Suppose we end up looking at things we can’t comprehend? Suppose reality begins to take on shapes that make no sense to us? Suppose our careful categories of perception are destroyed?
Life in any society you would care to examine resembles a funnel, with the large end in childhood and the narrow opening in adulthood. This is considered good and proper. “Common sense” eventually rules the day.
Have you ever had a dream in which people were speaking a language you didn’t understand? It’s an interesting experience, in part because you do feel you’re grasping the words and phrases at some level—even though you’re not supposed to.
Or consider this situation. You’re looking at a copy of an ancient manuscript from a dead culture. Pages of characters. It’s intriguing. Then, you read the translation offered by modern scholars. It’s a let-down. Imagination deflated. “That’s all it was?”
Every culture has multiple myths that describe how the world or universe was created. These are essentially Postponement Myths, because eventually we discover that we have the power to create without limit.
When this day arrives is, of course, up to us.
We are taught, or train ourselves to learn, that every idea has content. That is what an idea is: content. It’s all very simple. To qualify as an actual idea, the meaning must be specific. It’s hardly worth mentioning this, because everyone instinctively understands it. But suppose we encounter an idea that is ambiguous? Even worse, suppose the ambiguity is an essential part of the heart of the idea? Is that possible? For example, we read a poem, and then we break it down, line by line, phrase by phrase, and squeeze all the literal meanings from those words, and assemble them, like a puzzle, in order to arrive at a sum—the total message of the poem. And then suppose, after we have extracted the last drop, we find that what is left over, what resists our aggressive pressure, is what enchants us about the poem, even thought we can’t explain it.
Consider that this is a metaphor for imagination itself. You can erect frameworks and bring in machines and drill down into imagination to analyze its components, and every tool you employ will go dull, and still you won’t have begun to unearth the essence.
People generally find this kind of result distasteful. It rankles. It produces an aversion. “Let’s abandon the search. It was fruitless to begin with, because there was nothing there. We were fooled.”
Even as we say this, we know, in another part of our minds, that every single thing in this world came into being through and by imagination.
Search for a resolution to this paradox in all the works of philosophy and science authored in the history of the planet—and you won’t find it.
How strange! The very force by which all the things of society came to exist is the very force we want to deny, postpone, ignore, avoid.
Can we introduce a course-correction into civilization?
The individual can, at the very least, begin to think about his own disguised ability to imagine and invent. He can ponder the possibility of stepping out into the open and discarding his pretense of ignorance.
Because that’s what it is, a pretense, artfully constructed to evade detection.
Coming: Part 2.
JON RAPPOPORT
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