Dear Friends,
I’m sharing an essay on imagination. Btw, I keep meaning to say it more than I do, that switching to a paid subscription is deeply appreciated if you do read this regularly. Earlier this week I sent out a behind-the-paywall piece on Ernie Pyle but was non-tech-savvy enough 🤦🏻♀️ that I managed to send it only to paid subscribers.
Best,
Sam
ON IMAGINATION
Recently, I was in the very pleasant company of a three-year-old, who, as her mother put it to me, had recently ‘discovered imagination.’ And, in a word, it was awesome what she was doing. To hang out (I was on a shoot and, to stay back of the camera, would spend time with her), she would “watch TV.” But what she meant by that was that we would sit on the floor of her room and stare at the blank wall and she would narrate what was ‘on TV.’ “There are crocodiles,” she would say and we would both gasp. Or “there are elephants” and then we would laugh at the elephants. Or “there’s Bugs Bunny,” and we would make bunny ears.
I had the sense that she could do this for hours — and it would be very sad when she got a little older and the faculty of imagination started to desert her. (Actually, I saw that only a few months later. I came back and she’d been given an iPad and, now, she wanted me to watch her play Roadblocks as opposed to watching the elephants and crocodiles on the bedroom wall.)
But, as I’ve talked to people over the years, I’ve gotten the sense that — for more people than I might have expected — this child-like quality of imagination actually stays with them for a long time and takes on a sub rosa existence. People I’m close to have described their childhood games staying with them for years and years. Sometimes life interrupts, and then (as soon as everyone else has left the room) they return to winding tales that involve the same imaginary friends or fantasy worlds that they inhabited when they were kids.
Every time I hear a story like this, I find myself being very envious of it. My own imagination is much more literal than that. Not long ago, I came across a video of myself at age three or four. On the video, my grandfather told me a joke about a duck crossing the road and, when he asked me to repeat the joke, suddenly the duck was on a train and I was describing the make of the train and the gauge of its rails — that was the mind I had. And, throughout my childhood, I never had imaginary friends or fantasy realms; instead, I worked out detailed facsimiles of baseball games and football seasons. Those imaginary tournaments and seasons stayed long enough with me — deep into my adolescence — for me to be a bit embarrassed by them, but, eventually, without my quite noticing their departure, they faded away.
What became more mortifying to me, though, as I got interested in writing different types of fiction (prose and plays) was the idea that my imagination might be defective; that people who had these very active childhood imaginations, replete with characters, etc, would have a tremendous advantage in generating fictive worlds. And, for a long time — writing as a teenager and well into my 20s — I was achingly aware of the non-receptivity of my own imagination, of not having these imaginative worlds swirling around in my head to just plunk down.
But, in my mid-20s, when I’d been stuck for a while, writing autobiographical stuff that deeply bored me, I had a sleepless night during which I started hearing voices talking to each other. I didn’t know who they were or what they had to do with me, but I was interested (definitely more interested than in recapitulating the college stories that were my ‘fiction’ writing at the time) and, for the first time, had a strong impulse to write plays and to find a vessel where my voices could freely communicate with each other without, as it were, any interference from me.
That started a whole new phase of my life. For a while, playwriting was very slow. I’d write in drips and drabs — sections from different parts of the play; and then there would be ‘holes’ in the story and I wouldn’t know how to fill the holes — and then, for one reason or another, the holes started being able to fix themselves. I’d be able to sit down to write a play, with no particular idea where the play was going (usually only a few lines; a general direction) and, in the process of writing, would be able to do the rest. Imagination would kick in. If I didn’t know what the character was going to say next, some deeper voice, coming from I didn’t exactly know where, would be able to supply it for me.
I don’t think there was anything that remarkable about being able to write plays quickly and fluidly — lots of people are able to do that — but, for me, and I think exactly because of the well-documented limits to my imagination, it felt like magic.
That experience, which really profoundly reshaped my life and my orientation towards myself, took me in a few new intellectual directions. One was that I came to be more skeptical of ideas about ‘talent’ or about ‘special brains.’ What I felt was that the imagination was basically a muscle, like any other muscle, and that just about anybody could develop it. Some people were lucky enough to access it when they were young, and were able to keep that (that may be what’s really meant by the word ‘talent’), and some people, like myself, only found their way to it much later in life. But, practice more, and, like any muscle, the imagination would reward activity; would keep developing in unexpected new ways.
And the other direction that opened up for me was an understanding of just how limited our culture was in so many different ways. Around this time, I came across a book by Alexandra David-Néel in which she describes a trip to Tibet in the 1920s. The Russian Revolution came up in conversation and David-Néel’s interlocutors described it as a struggle of red and white dragons, each making an appeal to the Buddha Avalokiteshvara, each sent back by the Buddha with a set of impossible tasks to fulfill that they never quite got around to fulfilling but with ‘Nenin,’ the red dragon, able to convince the people through a certain tonality of voice that the Buddha had spoken through him.
She was charmed by this description and I am too — it seems to capture something of the essence of the event that a protracted analysis of Mensheviks and SRs would not; and it makes use of imagination — imagination becomes a vital tool for comprehending the world in a way that it simply isn’t in Western political discourse. It was impossible for me, at this stage of my life, to reset my whole mental landscape to have the imaginativeness of, for instance, a Tibetan, but I did have the feeling that it was possible to open one’s mind very wide and to take in the world in a completely different way. It struck me, for example, that there had probably never been a time in my life, at least in the West, where everybody had sat around and started telling stories, never been a moment (apart from maybe jokes) where imagination really came into play in any social setting. That was an unfortunate loss but it was’t necessarily irrevocable; it was possible, at least by oneself, to keep developing imagination, to just keep pushing one’s mind out in the direction of fiction, and then some plasticity of the mind would start to enable that to happen.
There was one more thought that I had about imagination — and which came from Daphne du Maurier’s book on Branwell Brontë. Branwell was the only boy of the Brontë siblings. He was the pet of the family, brilliant in every possible way, and he had one of these active imaginations. He spent his childhood regaling his siblings with stories about an imaginative kingdom on the coast of Africa and all the characters inhabiting it. Bramwell, virtually alone of all of his siblings, didn’t go on to be a famous author. He cracked up, had trouble adjusting to reality; his novel, when he did write it, never came close to seeing the light of day. But, at least in du Maurier’s construction, Bramwell’s sisters were able to take the childhood imaginative heritage that they had woven together and apply it to literature. Their writing was far more realist, far more grounded, but — at least in Emily’s case — also took in the flights of fancy of childhood imagination.
Thought of in this way, imagination wasn’t exactly something that people either possessed or didn’t possess. It was more like a tool, and much of art was about figuring out how exactly to calibrate it, how to set its range so that the imaginative muscle itself would be satisfied while outside people could be brought in to it.
There are so many striking observations here, but I’m most struck by your insight that imagination is a muscle, one that requires practice. This sounds obvious when stated as I have, but your essay leads there slowly and intuitively, deepening what it means to view the world imaginatively. I was also caught off guard by your observation that you rarely experience imaginative or playful interactions in adult social situations, which rings true for me as well, although I can think of exceptions. All of which leads me to consider what the best qualities of a good conversation are, one in which the imagination and intellect depend on more than one person. It makes me think of Mrs. Dalloway, always a pleasure on a quiet, sunny Sunday morning. 🙏🏽