OzIdeas

Using imagination

Real Imagination is fascinated by what is good, and is aware of evil but not obsessed by it.

Imagination is not bored by what is lovely, harmonious, peaceful, loving - because it can discern the loveliness and satisfaction in all these things.
It does not need a serpent in Eden to provide a sauce, a taste, a flavour to what is truly experienced as fully satisfying in itself, and endless to explore.

Hell is boredom - the medievals believed that the devil's greatest problem was boredom. Heaven is inexhaustible, uncloying delight.

Imagination loves life, and is aware of death but not obsessed by it.

Hundreds of thousands of artists and writers in the world today depict the world as it is, and as it could be - but not as it might be.

There is no end to the horrors and absurdities, cruelties and follies of the world for art and print to mirror to the public - but there are enough muckrakers already, as in Bunyan's parable, who cannot see the visionary crown they are being offered because of their preoccupations and their fears of proving kitsch,
as they try to assert their individual differences with dirty straws. 

Instead of crime fiction and cruelty-thrillers, there can be skilled fiction writing and film about struggles to reform, innovate, and save. Instead of Mills & Boon there can be stories of how true love grows. Instead of blockbuster destruction, there can be dramatic and spectacular stories of creation and construction, and the patience needed.

Biography and autobiography can be more a stimulus to imagination than many novels spun from an author's own limited experience and imagination, with an imposed form or lack of form.

Instead of creating dystopias, which then come to pass, as is indeed happening even now, writers and artists can depict new utopias and how they can be built - and then there is more chance that they can come to pass instead.

The light of art need not lead us to destruction.

To show evil is not to implant the love of the good - but rather to create a taste for evil, as 'appetite grows by what it feeds upon'.

And what of readers and viewers, whose tastes have now become too crude to love virtue?
Who if any, will buy fresh fish rather than stale?

Again imagination is needed to turn tastes again - before it is too late and our lack of imagination has destroyed the world, through blindness to the consequences of what we do.

Imagination realises connections - so that we do not live like splitophrenics, our very selves split into dissonant components - without integrity, which means that a person has 'put it all together'.
For example, imaginative people do not fight to save trees being logged while they lavishly waste paper regardless that this creates the demand for logging.

They do not spend hundreds of thousands to save one baby without matching it by spending the same amount to save thousands of babies.

They do not reduce mortality without also providing the means to prevent a consequent overpopulation and its consequent sufferings.

Imagination is the eye and the voice of the prophet.

"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream. He awoke and found it truth."
John Keats - a poet of youth

" Imagination itself is the redemptive power."
William Blake
For Blake, prophecy and poetry were identical, a single archetypal stream from the same source as the visionary imagination.

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was imaginative in its aims.

Laurence Lerner (Essays on the Literary Imagination 1982) considered that the literary imagination has always tended to see the future as evil or at least to be jeered at, but also says. If we are unlucky, our descendants will read Brave New World, The Space Merchants, WE, and will remark that the 20C imagination registered as evil what they have come to see as progress..
An antiUtopia solves our present problems by destroying what we most value.

We set our children to study George Orwell's horrible fables of the future. Has Orwell helped to prevent that future, or has he stopped us from seeing something better?
Yes, read 1984 and Animal Farm - but also read - what?

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