Imagination

I teach a course at BGSU called "Imaginative Writing."  But what is the imagination?  I don't think there's one agreed upon definition.  But clearly, long ago humans developed an ability to recognize special, magical moments in life.  They developed the ability to describe their exterior world, and to participate in self-knowledge.  They learned to describe their inner world.  

Somewhere along the line, some designated themselves as transmitters of this magic, of this wisdom.  They were the shamans and the artists.  Those of us who try to follow in their footsteps benefit from their wisdom. 

I've written in earlier entries about how--when my writing is going very well--I feel like I'm traveling into my center, into my true self.  And that this center seems connected to something divine, though I don't really understand the essence of that divinity. 

This I do know:  The return to that experience of mystery is one of the things that keeps me coming back to the writing act.

I'm not alone in the experience of the divine.  William Blake, my inexhaustible source of inspiration, wrote:

I rest not from my great task!

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination

Colridge also felt the imagination is the "organ of the divine." 

Colridge thought that the imagination is "the highest faculty that synthesizes experience into imagery.  It perceives shape or form and order, using different, even opposite, elements of feeling, vision, and thought to achieve a unified whole.  In other words, it fuses and assimilates the daily experiences into a larger unity."  (I. M. Oderberg)

I like that thought, that it is the artist's task to FUSE AND ASSIMILATE DAILY EXPERIENCES INTO A LARGER UNITY.  This is also why it is so important to read the work of other writers, and to read widely.  The work of other writers will become part of your own consciousness.  You will have a deep well to draw from when it's time to do your own work.

Shelley thought that the imagination helped us to access the "real" world. 

(Oh!  How I love this:  Shelley's notion of what the "real" world is!)...

He thought we only experience the "real" world during moments when we feel illuminated, when we become aware of "the heart of things."  In other words, when we sense the presence of the eternal.  (Think about this the next time you hear someone snidely suggest:  "Get real!"--thinking of Shelley will give you a wonderful, secret thrill!)

Blake thought humans were fallen souls from heaven that needed to get back to their original state as spiritual beings.  He thought it was the job of the artist to help humans get back to that state of existence. 

Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.  For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Blake thought the imagination to be the creative soul of the universe, life itself "a ceaseless crossing of thresholds, an endless being through becoming...endless...endless time...no beginning, no end..."

I think the imagination is also our way to recognize possibility.  This "ceaseless crossing of thresholds" causes a change, a growth.  It's like the idea of the Tibetan Buddhist who sees in the heart the "jewel in the lotus."  As we cross the thresholds, the jewel becomes more and more polished until our full inner potentiality is reached.

I think when I write, I'm polishing the jewel.  It is a never ending process. So it's the journey wherein we glimpse the eternal.  On the whole, we will often feel ragged and unfinished.  But, oh, we will also have those moments when we see through the narrow chinks of our cavern.  We live for those.  We live for those! 

I think the artist's task is to try to portray that journey, and when we portray it, we take the participants of our art along with us; or, better, set them out on their own journey.  To me, the poem by Dag Hammarskjold describes the creative act perfectly.  We leave the mediocre, "everyday" world and enter the unknown land of the imagination.  We don't know what we will discover; we often don't even know what our goal is.  But we vaguely know what we seek--that clear, pure note of "truth":

Thus It Was

by Dag Hammarskjold

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper,

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

 

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

To get there, I believe we have to work hard on making ourselves the kind of indivividuals who can perceive this "truth."  We can't perceive it unless it exists within ourselves.  That, for me, is where writing and the spiritual life merge:

You cannot see beauty outside unless you have beauty within you. You cannot understand beauty unless you yourself are beautiful inside. You cannot understand harmony unless you yourself in your inner parts are harmony. All things of value are within yourself, and the outside world merely offers you the stimulus, the stimulation, of and to the exercise of the understanding faculty within you. -- G. de Purucker

Change

 

Wesley Mcnair

I'm still formulating my entry about the imagination and the creative life.  In the meanwhile, I was quite taken by this poem that came to me from NPR's Writer's Almanac.  My first impression of the poem was that it must have felt very good to write.  Secondly, it felt very good to read, because more and more lately I have entertained thoughts (fantasies?!) of bringing about a great change in my life. I've been on a job search the last year; last year I interviewed for a teaching position in creative writing at Fairbanks, Alaska.  Someone else got the position, but if the committee had chosen me, I would have been there.  I would have left family (children--the husband goes where I go!), home, cats, and almost all of my possessions.   

A college lecturer, I certainly identify with the lines about the "sadness of rooms" where family slept while I graded mounds of papers.  And about not fitting in, not wanting to fit in, at some of the colleges where I taught (I won't name those colleges).  I identify with the speaker's feelings about missed opportunities, a lost life.  Perhaps that, the feeling of loss, is what my need for change is all about.

Poem: "Goodbye to the Old Life" by Wesley McNair, from Fire. 

Goodbye to the Old Life

Goodbye to the old life,
to the sadness of rooms
where my family slept as I sat

late at night on my island
of light among papers.
Goodbye to the papers

and to the school for the rich
where I drove them, dressed up
in a tie to declare who I was.

Goodbye to all the ties
and to the life I lost
by declaring, and a fond goodbye

to the two junk cars that lurched
and banged through the campus
making sure I would never fit in.

Goodbye to the finest campus
money could buy, and one
final goodbye to the paycheck

that was always gone
before  it got home.
Farewell to the home,

and a heartfelt goodbye
to all the tenants who rented
the upstairs apartment,

particularly Mrs. Doucette,
whose washer overflowed
down the walls of our bathroom

every other week, and Mr. Green,
determined in spite of the evidence
to learn the electric guitar.

And to you there, the young man
on the roof turning the antenna
and trying not to look down

on how far love has taken you,
and to the faithful wife
in the downstairs window

shouting, "That's as good
as we're going to get it,"
and to the four hopeful children

staying with the whole program
despite the rolling picture
and the snow - goodbye,

wealth and joy to us all
in the new life, goodbye!

Still the Question

"The Path" painting by Reginal Machell *******************************************************

Thus It Was

by Dag Hammarskjold

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper,

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

 

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

******************************************************

You cannot see beauty outside unless you have beauty within you. You cannot understand beauty unless you yourself are beautiful inside. You cannot understand harmony unless you yourself in your inner parts are harmony. All things of value are within yourself, and the outside world merely offers you the stimulus, the stimulation, of and to the exercise of the understanding faculty within you. -- G. de Purucker

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I want to write in my next entry about the imagination and the creative life.  These two quotes are but a prelude to that discussion...

The Sage

 Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

Cynthia, this entry is for you!  It's based on your entry, "Father Christmas" by ELP.  This is the trek of the Idealist.

The Sage

by Greg Lake

(sung by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer)

I carry the dust of a journey
that cannot be shaken away
It lives deep within me
for I breathed it every day

You and I are yesterday's answers
the earth of the past come to flesh
Eroded by time's rivers
to the shapes we now possess

Come share of my breath and my substance
and mingle our streams and our times
In bright infinite moments
our reasons are lost in our eyes

Alone

Galway Kinnell

This poem was sent by the Writer's Almanac on Christmas Day. 

I first discovered Galway Kinnell's work in 1987 when I came to Ohio for the MFA program in fiction writing.  I found a copy of his Book of Nightmares in the campus bookstore.  His work was unlike any other poetry I had read, and I find that book still haunts my mind.  The poems have strong, archetypal images throughout.

I like the following poem and think it an exceptional choice for Christmas Day, as holidays are about communion with the sacred aspect of ourselves and we have a deeply engrained need to share this experience with others. 

This poem causes me to think deeply about what aloneness feels like, and the longing that accompanies it.

There is a boundary line between solitude and loneliness--sometimes it's hard to understand which side of the line we are on.  This boundary is a theme I return to again and again in my own work.

Poem: "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" by Galway Kinnell, from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Praise the Day

A good poem to read on this snowy day--

Poem by Denise Levertov

...

Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
          the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney’s shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, which stays
our hand,
our murderous hand,
                    and gives us
still,
in the shadow of death,
          our daily life,
          and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.

Capturing the Eternal

From The Writer's Almanac: 

It's the birthday of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, (books by this author) born in Head Tide, Maine (1869). One of the most popular poets of his lifetime, he is remembered for a few short poems, which he said were "pickled in anthological brine," including "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Mr. Flood's Party."

His father was an extremely practical business man who managed to retire when he was fifty-one years old. He encouraged each of his sons to follow a different career path: medicine, business, and science, but Edwin Arlington Robinson, who was the youngest boy in the family, said, "[As a young man] I realized...that I was doomed, or elected, or sentenced for life, to the writing of poetry."

Unlike many poets, who have to work all manner odd jobs in order to support themselves, Robinson rarely did anything in his life other than write poetry. Before he made a name for himself as a poet, he was known in his hometown as an idler and a failure. The only job he ever kept for more than a few months was a job at a customs house given to him by Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his poetry, and he wasn't required to do any work. Even after he began to support himself with his poetry, he didn't get married, he didn't travel, he didn't teach or give public readings.

Robinson said, "The man who fixes on something definite in life that he must do, at the expense of everything else...has got something that should be recognized as the Inner Fire. For him, that is the Gleam, the Vision and the Word! He'd better follow it. The greatest adventure he'll ever have on this side is following where it leads."

--------------------------------------------------------------

I still have my copy of Robinson's Selected Poems from my days as an undergraduate at East Carolina University.  My favorite poem of Robinson's is "Isaac and Archibald," and I think of the poem often, saying to myself:  You really MUST read that poem again; it's such a great poem!    Seeing the write-up in the Almanac has finally made me do so.

The poem's speaker is a man looking back on his childhood experience of visiting with two old men named Isaac and Archibald.  The poem begins:

 

Isaac and Archibald were two old men.

I knew them, and I may have laughed at them

A little; but I must have honored them

For they were old, and they were good to me.

 

I do not think of either of them now,

Without remembering, infallibly,

A journey that I made one afternoon

With Isaac to find out what Archibald

Was doing with his oats.  It was high time

Those oats were cut, said Isaac; and he feared

That Archibald--well, he could never feel

Quite sure of Archibald.  Accordingly

The good old man invited me--that is,

Permitted me--to go along with him;

And I, with a small boy's adhesiveness

To competent old age, got up and went.

 

 Later in the poem, Isaac tries to teach the boy something about death and memory: 

 

                     "...Look at me, my boy

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after [Archibald], try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day.  Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me--

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald."

 

The most memorable section of the poem, the one I think about the most when my mind stretches out toward Robinson again, is the following one.  I now see I marked the section.  And I remember doing it.  I remember marking this section in class as the teacher lectured.  I marked it with an arrow and put the word "ominous" beside the arrow.  

The section includes a metaphorical allusion to death thatRobinson deftly weaves into the narrative poem.  The two old men andthe boy had gone down into Archibald's cellar to fetch a cup of cider:

 

Down we went,

Out of the fiery sunshine to the gloom,

Grateful and half sepulchral, where we found

the barrels, like eight potent sentinels,

Close ranged along the wall.  From one of them

A bright pine spile stuck out alluringly,

 ...

There was a fluted antique water-glass

Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest,

There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort

That feeds on darkness.  Isaac turned him out,

And touched him with his thumb to make him jump...

 

Since reading this poem, I have never looked at cellars or darkness or crickets  the same way. 

More than twenty years ago, as a younger student of life, I thought of this reference to death as "ominous."  However, looking at the poem now, I have a different impression.

 Now I see something strangely comforting in the way the old man touches the brown cricket to make it jump.  It is almost as though his touch is the touch of God, stimulating the insect back to life.   This section of the poem doesn't seem ominous to me now, but eternal.