Imaginary
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Commentary by
ADAM TANOUS
What is
striking about our culture’s attitude towards fantasy is its inherent
ambivalence.
Think of
imagination as a fifth force of nature, one missing from all unified
theories in physics, but one no less important in making the world go
`round. And just as a physical force like electromagnetism is always
with us, imagination is continuously at work in the minds of everyone on
the planet. Still, we can’t see it, run it through our fingers, get an
intuitive sense of it. While individually we might have experience with
our own fantasies, we have little access to the imagination of others.
When it comes down
to it, imagination is our lifeblood. It is what can save us from the
here and now when the here and now is not what it could or should be.
Curiously, it
seems the great flights of imagination happen at the beginning and end
of life. It is almost as if the way we compensate for a failing body in
the end or a still uncoordinated and unformed body in our youth is with
our capacity to fantasize.
I’ve seen my son
and his little buddies—they’re all about 3—take a cardboard box, a
few sticks or perhaps just a patch of grass and turn them into little
universes of good and evil. Watching them, I sometimes think I’ve lost
my vision or hearing or some other critical sense, because they are
experiencing a much richer world than I am at any particular moment.
Children live in a
world where just about anything is possible, at least, as they imagine
it. My son’s ever-hopeful voice is like a refrain, "I’ve an
idea. How about this?" Then he’ll tell me what we are about to
do, pause for my reaction and continue with all the confidence in the
world, "We could, maybe, Dad. It might work. Come. Let’s do
it." Often I will catch myself starting to explain why we can’t
do something, and it dawns on me—well, why exactly can’t we do it?
Somewhere in the great space between being very young and very old,
imagination tends to get bound up in the sticky web of the day to day.
When my father was
dying of cancer, I remember helping him walk outside one day. He was in
a great deal of pain, as he was most days then. Just getting outside to
feel the warm, still air was a triumph. Out of the corner of his eye he
spied an eagle—just a dot in the blue sky—circling above us. He
looked at it just for a second, then muttered—perhaps for my benefit
but likely not—"that’s where I’d like to be." And in an
instant, he was there. I could see it in his eyes and in a weak smile.
As a body withers, the imagination blooms.
Perhaps a simple
way to think of imagination is life without the rules. Rules and
conventions have their roles. They are like little badges of what we
have learned in life, landmarks in a murky world. When we figure out a
system that describes the world predictably, we make a rule, or
establish a scientific law. Take, for instance, the acceleration of
gravity being independent of mass. Until you see a feather and a penny
fall through a vacuum at the same rate, you may not believe it.
Nonetheless, the law of gravity does help us get by in life.
What rules and
conventions don’t do is help us move forward in any substantive way.
For that we rely on imagination. Imagination drives both society and
technology into new territory.
People who
actually invent and create things do their best to forget all the rules
and conventions. They attempt to loosen the ties of established
knowledge so that their thoughts can roam. To dissolve the framework of
what we know is the only way to see what we don’t.
What is striking
about our culture’s attitude towards fantasy is its inherent
ambivalence. Certainly we encourage fantasy when children are young. It
seems, however, that as children age we slowly and surely fence in that
free-flowing imagination. The fantastical games children play receive an
increasingly skeptical eye from adults. On a certain level, we are made
nervous and perhaps frightened by people who continue to be dreamy,
little children. At what point is fantasy considered delusion? At what
age do we start to think Billy over there in the corner is just a little
weird?
This ambivalence
often plays out for adults in the realm of science. We encourage and
reward unfettered thought, provided the thought works out. If it doesn’t,
you’re considered a bit of a kook. Linus Pauling and William Shockley
come to mind. Pauling earned Nobel Prizes for chemistry and peace. Yet,
much of the scientific community regards his later theories about
vitamin C—that it cures cancer—to be a little on the bizarre side.
Shockley, also a
Nobel Prize winner, was one of the inventors of the transistor and a
pivotal figure in the development of solid state physics. When in later
life he turned his focus to the issues of race and intelligence,
Shockley and his controversial ideas were widely discredited.
It has been stated
before, but there does seem to be an ever-so-thin line between the
brilliant and the mad. It may be that what allows the former to flourish
is the fuel of the latter. Which raises one of the conundrums of
imagination—it can not be ordered up in degrees. To imagine is to
suspend disbelief entirely. It is an all or nothing proposition.
And so, given our
culture’s general skepticism towards the dreamy and fantastical among
us, being able to navigate comfortably in the world of imagination and
then to seamlessly return to the gritty concerns of the here and now is
a social skill as important as any. Reality and fantasy do inform one
another. Just don’t tell anyone that.