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Produced & Maintained by Idaho Mountain Express, Box 1013, Ketchum, ID 83340-1013 
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Copyright © 2001 Express Publishing Inc.
All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited. 

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For the week of June 13 - June 19, 2001

  Opinion Column

Imaginary headline here

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.

 


The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.