Imagination

[tealin]

Appropriately for someone struggling with issues of creativity, and my place in my immediate socio-vocational creative context – and in time for the resumption of The Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I seem to have developed a one-person feud – the CBC ran an interesting two-parter on imagination. It's approached through the lens of William Blake, but it veers off into matters scientific and psychological of which he would have been unaware.

Ideas: Imagination, Part 1 and Part 2

We have stories that help us understand who we are and what our place in the world actually is. But of course these are all imagined stories. There's nothing in the material world itself than can give us a sense of identity, that can tell us who we are, and who we should be. If you were to take away imagination, and had a purely objective scientific worldview, and said "this is the chemical structure of your body, this is the biological system that determines who you are, this is the material substrate of the universe around you," that is completely devoid of meaning. That's where imagination comes in, whether it's religious imagination, or some other form of cultural imagination. Because it really gives us a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense of direction, and a sense of identity.

I didn't actually catch who said this

[The imagination] is absolutely essential to our being. In a sense, it is what provides us with a possible future, or hope for a future. And when you're in a situation where you completely lose all hope, it becomes very hard to survive. And you think about what happens to people who have the imagination taken away, people who have no hope to continue ... Of course, it's the objective of torture, is to strip anyone of any hope, or any sense that there can be anything else other than what they're enduring, at this moment, and so in a sense they give up. And the same thing happens with people who have nothing in society, who are left without any means to imagine a possible future for themselves, and it becomes extremely difficult to survive under those circumstances. The imagination is actually life itself, in a way.

– Ron East

To the extent that man has an imagination, he is alive, and therefore, the development of the imagination is an increase in life. It follows that restricting the imagination must then tend in the direction of death, so that all imaginative restraint is ultimately – not that it always proceeds to ultimates – a death impulse.

– Northrop Frye