Ruefle - On imagination an essay

Copyright 2017 Mary Ruefle

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ruefle, Mary, 1952- author.

Title: On imagination: an essay / by Mary Ruefle.

Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2017. |

Series: Quarternote chapbook series

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049778 | ISBN 9781946448026 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | Imagination. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays.

Classification: LCC BH301.C84 R84 2017 | DDC 153.3/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049778

Interior and exterior design by Kristen Radtke.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contents

Table of Contents

A man and a woman are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.

A man and a woman and a jug of maple syrup and an old tennis shoe and a Roman statue are one.

A woman and her imagination are one.

It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea.

I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it. It is my daimon if ever there was one. The daimon is a kind of twin that prowls alongside, is most often vivid when things are tough, that pushes you toward the life you signed up to live before you fell into the amnesia of birth and forgot the whole affair.

I am going to tell you now, before I begin, what my conclusion is to my thoughts on the imagination: I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one.

Wittgenstein: Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition.

The evolution of our languagesthe different languages of the human specieswas a great act of imagination that continued enacting itself over a very long period of time and is still enacting itself. At some point in this continuum, when one spoke or wrote the word tree, the one listening or reading (which is a form of listening) had to see the image of a tree in their mind. Anything involving an image in the head is an act of imagination. We think in both images and words, and since words are imaginary enactments (the word tree is not a tree), thinking and imagining are one.

What irks me: that artists of all kinds are always praising the imagination and telling us that it is the single most wonderful and important thing in the world of the human psyche; they speak as if there were nothing pejorative or destructive about it. But the imagination is a full, rounded, complex thing, and, like any daimon, has more than one aspect.

Shakespeare imagined Othello and that was a good thing. Othello imagined that Desdemona was unfaithful to him, and that was a bad thing.

I once sat next to a young woman at dinner who believed that the CIA had bugged her salad, and it terrified her, and she was unable to live a normal life because of her imagining this terrible thing, and I think this is a negative aspect of the imagination.

Later I thought: well, she had a marvelous point after all, because very often when washing lettuces I find a slug, and my lettuce really is bugged, and I thought my thought was a positive aspect, because I was using my imagination when I had this thought.

When I was a child I talked to my dolls and my dolls talked to me and we were very happy together. Sometimes too I would talk to flowers or stones and we were very happy together. I know a man who when he was a boy played with marbles and each marble had a name. One day one of the marbles was lost, never to be found again, and all the other marbles, along with the boy, held a funeral for the marble who was gone for good.

Perhaps you are thinking ah, play, the robust imagination of a child at play, we must regain that and engage in it as often as we can, but that would be nave, for it is far more complex than a game of marbles: the imagination has its own life and its own autonomy, the imagination is not what you play with, the imagination plays with you. It has the power to both create and destroy, in form and deform. The funeral made the boy very sad, even sadder than a real funeral, he said.

When I was a child I thoughtimaginedthat my parents did not love me because of all the terrible things they said and did to me. I was not yet experienced enough to imagine you could love someone and still do terrible things to them for reasons having nothing to do with your feelings for them. I could not then imagine having compassion for the people who did terrible things.

I still, in many circumstances, cannot. But I know my parents loved me, despite the terrible things, and this has been a great leap forward.

Common sense, or rational thinking, is often opposed to the imagination, or magical thinking. This, too, is deeply troubling in its complexity.

Robert Frost said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. But it is easy to play tennis without a net, you simply pretend it is there. Or, if you prefer, you can play tennis without a ball or a racquet, Ive seen people do it, they play without a ball or a racquet at the end of Antonionis film Blow-Up, and it is very beautiful to watch. Even the spectators turn their heads back and forth in awe.

I can imagine there being a god, an organization to the multiverse we love. I can imagine there not being a god, no organization at all to the multiverse we love.

And now, if I might depress you for a moment, I want to remind you that it is imagination that kicks in every morning when you wake and every night when you go to sleep and tells you that you are safe and all your loved ones are safe and all your belongings really do belong to you and are safe as you are safe.

Of course you are not safe nor is anyone you know safe and nothing really belongs to you, not forever, your most beloved keepsake will one day belong to another. But who wants to live in insecurity and fear?

So here, too, if you think a bit differently, you will see that the imagination you employ upon waking and before sleep is a great solace and joy, duplicitous as it is, and the fact of its solace should not depress you but elate you. Now that you are elatedto possess a faculty as comforting as the imaginationI feel it is safe to move on.