The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Entertaining Ideas: Barbara Knott
What Happens When Imagination Fails?
Perhaps life is inherently meaningless, the raw flux of molecules forming, interacting, dissolving, and forming anew elsewhere. We have to be intellectually honest and admit this possibility and restrain the ego's nervous protest. Yet we find it difficult if not impossible to believe that such a purposeless concatenation of subatomic particles could have written the Ninth Symphony or the Declaration of Independence ... .
...........James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination (5)
Imagination imbues life with meaning. When imagination succeeds, we have pianos, violins, cellos, horns, tympani, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. We have Chief Seattle and America's Declaration of Independence. We have Shakespeare's poems and plays, Homer's and Virgil's epics. Michelangelo and Leonardo. James Joyce's novels. Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Rilke's poems of praise. We have Holy Books from many traditions, telling the most important stories from tribe to nation to culture. We have the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Pyramids in Egypt, Japan's Zen gardens, the Statue of Liberty, the habitats for humanity inspired by Jimmy Carter. We have creativity and compassion giving rise to Thoreau, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malala.
When imagination succeeds, we can envision and live in a relatively peaceful world with the leisure to enjoy what is made and to make what can be enjoyed. I believe that we are sojourners in this world in order to witness and praise, and through paying attention and praising, to add our modicum of consciousness to that force that, in Wordsworth's words, "impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things."
On a smaller scale but even more important to us individually, when imagination succeeds, we have a child's drawing proudly displayed, the playfulness of children, creativity in motion. We take care to preserve the earth we live on, with all its flora and fauna. We have interactions that show respect and appreciation of otherness, along with curiosity and wonder. We live in harmony with the Other.
The title question might better be phrased, what happens when we fail imagination? Human perspectives on life can be narrow or generous, and any failure of imagination has to be seen as a failure of individuals.
Without imagination, without empathy, where is warmth, mystery, wonder, reverence, playfulness, pondering, praise? In its absence, do passion and erotic love turn to lust for impersonal sex? Does the urge to live a life of service to others turn into an urge for power? Does this turning lead to failed leadership and military vengeance and adventurism? How about political polarization based on unmoving parts of a stalled system? How about absence of soul not only in politics but in the workplace, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, and more often than we like to admit, in the church? Here is Hollis again:Our failure is the failure of the imagination. Racism or bigotry is the failure of imagination, the power to image the world which the Other inhabits. By Other, he means, of course, all that is other-than-human as well as, among humans, other-than-me, myself and I.
Violence in thought, word, and deed, directed against individuals, groups, or whole cultures, through murder, rape, or destruction of property, including cultural artifacts, comes from failure of imagination. Think of the sad murders that took place in Charleston this summer at a church during a prayer service where one person, failing to imagine his kinship with all life, turned against selected representatives of a group whose color was different from his own and destroyed them, thus flaunting his failure to imagine the higher values of the culture that spawned him. It is easy for thoughtful people to see the crime in its stunning wrongness. It is less easy to feel sympathy for the criminal, much less empathy or forgiveness. Yet the survivors in the church shooting did forgive.
The survivors in Charleston could only have forgiven the shooter by imagining a world in which forgiveness is possible, a world they learned about from one of the great spiritual teachers of all time. It was not by accident that William Blake spoke of "Jesus the Imagination" as if Jesus and imagination are one and the same. He meant, I think, that the image of Jesus carries energy and value that open up a generosity of imagination. This is the same teacher who, when a crowd rushed forward to stone a woman accused of adultery, is reported to have said, Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. This rebuke brought the crowd up short in their self-righteous mission to "punish the guilty other," and they turned away, perhaps feeling for the first time some intimation of empathy.
Although the Charleston perpetrator is in custody on the one hand, and forgiven by the survivors of his outrage on the other, the shooting incident has stimulated around the country a massive outpouring of invective against the South, the region of the U. S. that created the Confederate flag adopted by the murderer as a personal emblem. Suddenly, punishing the sins of the South for remnants of its history is everybody's business. This self-righteous mission is generating movements to take down the flag flown in government settings around the South; it can't even be sold as a trinket in a curio shop, and it's also being erased electronically from video games. Now the impulse toward flag dragging has expanded to monument erasing. The State of Georgia, we hear, is actually considering whether to deface the massive carving on Stone Mountain near Atlanta of the South's heroes from the Civil War. Ironically, the Charleston survivors can forgive, but others, far less injured, cannot.
Here is a local question with global implications: What if the Civil War memorial carved on Stone Mountain needs to be left as it is because it memorializes the colossal failure of a way of life that included slavery? Losing the war also spawned in the South creative movements that included long, hard looks at the rights and responsibilities of all humans as well as ethical adjustments made in response to soul-measured truths. History is embodied in story and architecture, art, and cultural ways. Erasing history risks losing memory of both the bad and the good; it makes more difficult the human capacity to find meaning in history.
Images embody experiences, including failure. Failure is important for the greater growth of imagination. Failure tempers the soul, forces pride off the throne and onto the common ground of being in the world. That sense of humility that mingles with failure may be what opens the door to empathy. Vengeance and invective come from a failure of imagination.
Perhaps the most important general truth about identifying "the enemy" was summarized by a wise little cartoon possum named Pogo, who declared, "We have met the enemy, and he is us!" Of course, this was literally the case in the brother-against-brother American Civil War. We fought ourselves. We would have done better to have had more interior struggles, to have developed more camaraderie with imagination. The same may be said of all wars.
The most shocking act of cultural violence I have ever seen on film took place in Afghanistan when the Taliban blew up the mountainside Buddhas. Will we do the same to Stone Mountain? Now look at the Middle East, to Palmyra in Syria where we are witnessing devastation of monuments created by ancient cultures, rare and wonderful extensions of those cultures into our time, enabling us to look, imagine, learn from the past. These feasts of destruction, deliberately filmed for our chagrin, show how soul shaking are the deeds of extremists who treat monuments and people alike in their desire to destroy all signs of those "who don't look and act like us." A failure of imagination on a grand scale.
We are still caught in the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth sense of justice that we cringe from when we see it being acted out in the Middle East: the cutting off of hands for the crime of theft, stoning for sexual indiscretions, or beheading for sundry crimes against cultural norms. Our drone strikes also take off heads and arms at weddings and family picnics. Take into account that we are bombing in these countries for reasons that remain murky at best in their public presentation. Creative evolution in humans requires remembering. Erasing elements of history carved in stone, shaped into architecture, sculpture, painting, and literature, risks forgetting that we are human and therefore capable of being destructive as well as humane.
Returning to the Charleston shootings (and numerous others that led up to them): Bringing a violent person to justice is one thing; gleeful public virtual slaughter is another. This year we have witnessed far too many instances of swinging from physically violent acts to virtually violent reactions. Even now, a man is being virtually hanged in effigy for his gruesome killing of a lion, a deed that deserves condemnation for his failure to imagine the lion as a creature worthy of life as much as he (remember that the Other includes all that is not me, myself and I). This man was being true to a "safari culture" glorified by Ernest Hemingway and many others, though Hemingway would not have been so careless as to kill a lion in sanctuary or so defensive as to declare that he wouldn't have done it if he'd known the lion had a name. Ironies abound. For the media, representing the public's appetite for sensation, then to destroy the lion killer by public shaming, betrays striking similarities between him and his critics. Surfing the Internet, we can see clearly that many people would like to behead and skin the man.
We forget that we are all capable of ugly and destructive behavior. One way to remember is to leave memorials alone so that there is some hope that some people, over long time periods, will learn that some of their species did wrong against some others. Maybe education will cause us to react in a thoughtful way, pondering the many points of view that go into the making of a culture and perhaps even finding the generosity of spirit to create the world anew. Maybe, even among the tourists looking on a mountain-sized sculpture of three military heroes from a war the soldiers lost, someone offering a smug response to wrongdoing will hear the voice of Jesus. Or, if not a fan of Jesus, that person may have an aha moment that will avert the offense of smugness, which I consider to be one of the worst ways of failing imagination and failing to make the best use of one's time on earth.
If we continue with strident insistence on dragging down flags and digging up an enemy general's bones and defacing or erasing monuments, we are recreating the enmity that brought on war in the first place, as if the long process of forgiveness somewhere failed and left too many people harboring too many violent emotions. Where will that take us next, except into more polarization and ultimately, again, to war?
I recall some brawling race riots in Boston sometime during the ten years I was living in New York that shocked my sense of history and the received cultural idea that all racism comes from the South. The Boston riots created harsh contrast to the serene atmosphere inside the Montessori school in Nyack where we had prepared an environment for learning not only about math and science and art but also about cultural diversity, represented visually by little flags from all the countries of the world. There would be no flag dragging in that atmosphere because there, imagination reached out to embrace the fullness of being human wherever humans are found. That fullness includes failure, humility, and the presence of empathy, of soul.
The children also learned something about respect for other-than-human species. Part of my Montessori teacher training back in Atlanta included a lesson in (non-poisonous) snake handling. It involved all the teacher trainees sitting in a circle, and the passing of a snake from one to the other. Once the trainer set the lesson in motion, we had no choice but to accept what was being handed over from the left and pass it without freaking out to the person on the right. Great lesson in loosening and shedding (like the snake) our snake prejudices. That did not mean we would go into the woods to play with snakes, but it might have kept us from careless and deliberate slaughter of serpents and other animal life (lions come to mind). In our Montessori school, we left these children, most of them under age 5, with a perspective that would help them imagine a world of people living intelligently, creatively, compassionately, peacefully with other people of all kinds and with animals and plants and the earth itself.
That was in the 1980s. Let's hope their imaginations and ours are up to the present challenges.
Recommended listening:
Here is a link to an hour and a half of wonderfulness. You can listen to the whole concert, which I recommend, or you can go directly to the fourth movement that begins around l:02 on the timeline at the bottom of the page.
The Berlin Celebration Concert - Beethoven, Symphony No 9 Bernstein 1989 Conducted by Leonard Bernstein, THE BERLIN CELEBRATION CONCERT is an historic performance marking the fall of the Berlin Wall. Performed on Christmas Day 1989 in the former East Berlin, the concert unites an international cast of celebrated musicians and vocalists for a moving performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
The lyrics for the choral "Ode to Joy" in the 4th movement are based on Frederich Schiller's poem. And here is a translation of the words as adapted by Beethoven for his symphony.
And here, for a real change of pace, is a video recording featuring Leonard Cohen's 1992 Democracy:
Recommended reading:
Roberts Avens, Imagination Is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield and Cassirer. Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, Inc., 1980.
Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Selected, tanslated, and introduced by Colette Gaudin. Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, Inc., 2005.
Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Rochester, Vt: Bear & Company, 2014.
James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000.
Copyright 2015, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved.