UNTITLED IMAGINATION
–a short work of semi-fiction–
By Jon Rappoport
In the year, 2094, a document was uncovered in a copper mine in Southern California. It was sent to the Non-Federal Bureau of Non-Control, headquartered in the old buildings of the former and forgotten National Security Agency.
The document, dated at 2011, written by an unidentified painter, was read by the Chief of Unsystematic Uncoordinated Records.
The document:
“If you hand a person a fig and tell him it’s a plum, there is a chance he’ll see a plum.
“If you give a person a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita and explain its ‘themes,’ there is a chance that, as he reads it, he will find those themes and consider them the most important result of his reading.
“Instead of relying on his own imagination and perception, a person imagines that what he is told is what he is looking at.
“So you point to a tree and say to a friend, ‘See that car?’
“Of course, if you are passionate about deceiving, you dress it up. You start with something complicated—rock formations in a canyon, on which wind and water have inscribed many lines—and you build the notion that these lines add up to faces and legs and feet and eyes and tools.
“And then the person with you may see what you’re describing.
“He may see a whole civilization no one has ever discovered before.
“Whereas, if you just pointed to the rocks and lines, he would see and/or imagine whatever he sees or imagines.
“Education tends to define what is there before a person can experience it on his own.
“I’m a painter. My education in art, before I ever laid a brush on canvas, was conducted by a few world-class liars who made up convincing theories about this and that. Somewhere along the line, I took over the process and ignored what they were saying.
“This eventually led me, on a long path, to the conclusion that imagination has no limits.
“A few minutes after that, I realized such an idea was not acceptable to most people. They preferred to be told what to see and what to know. They wanted confirmation of what they already assumed.
“Nevertheless, to the extent that I rely on anything beyond my work, I rely on other people’s imagination, in the sense that I’m painting what can only be accessed by imagination.
“Given what I believe, it would be foolish to tell people what to see in my paintings. I myself see many things, and what I see changes. I want it to be that way.
“I’m not trying to nail down a particular bounded reality. If that were my goal, I would manufacture shoes.
“From a rough societal perspective, I see imagination as an infinite series of platforms. The first burst of imagination somehow places people on platform number 1, which is beyond current consensus reality. They walk around on that platform for a while, and then it’s time for burst number 2, which creates a further platform, on which people stroll for a period of time. And then, burst 3. And so on and so forth. Forever.
“At no point does anyone lay down laws of perception. Nevertheless, there is a loose and congenial sharing of platforms.
“Of course, this is an ideal. Things don’t happen so smoothly.
“I have some peculiar ideas about language. In a way, I believe you can reach an endpoint with it. You obviously haven’t exhausted all the possibilities for, say, writing a poem. You can invent lines no one has ever come close to before. But you begin to experience the sensation of rearranging deck chairs, and then you know you need something more.
“You need a new kind of language, in which the letters or words or characters or pictographs are open. They carry no fixed meanings.
“Confronted with such a language, the reader employs imagination and imagination only.
“In terms of what we ordinarily expect from language, this seems quite absurd. It seems absurd until we try it out.
“At which point, imagination begins talking to imagination. Leaving systems behind, we are in new territory. The place is new, and how we will deal with being there is new.
“Suppose you walked into your garage and found a car you had never seen before. You get in, you turn the key in the ignition and nothing happens. You get out and raise the hood and inspect the guts. You find no battery. In fact, all the pieces and parts are foreign to you. You spend the next month taking the works apart, looking at them, putting them back together, and still, of course, the car doesn’t turn on.
“After six months, you come to the decision that this isn’t a car in the usual sense. It may not be a car at all. It may be something else.
“Two years later, you’re sure it’s something else, but you can’t fathom what.
Finally, driven to desperation, you make a leap. You say, ‘It’s up to me what this is. It can be anything. But for that I need more than perception. I need imagination. And if I need that, then this thing can be anything I want it to be.’
“And if this is the case, you can either fall into despair, because you don’t want the challenge, or you can go with imagination.
“If you opt for the second choice, you’re launched.
“Then one day, a friend drops by, and he looks at the car, he crawls under it, he fusses with a tire, he sticks his hand up the exhaust pipe, he taps on a bolt, and the car roars to life.
“You now have two cars. The first one is what you’ve already begun to build in your imagination. The second one you can take out on the road.
“If you can accommodate yourself to both cars, you are all right. You are doing fine. You are in good shape. You are dealing with the systems we call reality AND the unbounded X you create with imagination.
“Of course, you can simply go back to the car on the road and forget about X. You can drive it, you can study it with your mechanical friend, you can master its workings down to a T, you can understand every single piece of it and settle for that.
“Until, some time later, you’re bored out of your mind.”
The Chief of Unsystematic Uncoordinated Records finished reading the document and laid it down on his desk.
He thought, “If only that painter knew millions of people now speak and write in those open languages. His assessment seems so obvious in hindsight. Of course we would follow this approach. What else could we do? Deteriorate? Give up? Imitate a consensus? Only a lunatic would opt for that.”
Jon Rappoport
The first workshop of the Magic Theater takes place in San Diego on December 10 and 11. To inquire or sign up: qjrconsulting@gmail.com