On Imagination, I.

Hello again, Reader,

As promised, this week’s post will have nothing to do with the Chronologies as such but rather it will be a different piece of me that I’m going to share with you. Now, I shall get a little vulnerable here, so be nice.

The topic at hand is imagination, and the fear of its loss.

There are times as a writer when you sit down and you stare an empty page, be it paper or digital, and nothing comes out. The mind is in a state that monks from sects all around the world train their whole lives to achieve, that state being entirely blank… I cannot express to you how vacuous my thoughts sometimes are, and on those days, if the phenomenon were to stretch by, say, a day, and at worst into a week, a sense of loss comes over me.

It is a curious loss; one I’ve struggled to bring into words. If you’ve ever broken an arm or a leg and subsequently had had to live for weeks with the unfortunate limb entombed in a cast, you’ll know, in some measure, what that loss feels like. It is a helpless loss, spiced by the salty and bitter “if only” and “if I hadn’t” types of thoughts. Another example I can give, which upon later reflection is more accurate, is the loss of the sense of smell during a flu. For I do genuinely believe that imagination is a sense like all the physical five, and thus the loss of it shoots you into a starkly contrasted reality where you, with horror, realize how much you took it for granted. The helplessness you feel overwhelms you when, despite all your efforts, you cannot bring it back. You realize only that you must wait and hope that one day you’ll wake up and smell the wet earth outside.

As a hyper-imaginative person since childhood, I’ve noticed a worrying trend. That being the spacing between these mind-flus, which I shall henceforth call them, have begun to grow shorter. I feel like a piece of me is dying, that some strange stagnancy-bug has bit me and its poison is spreading through my veins and nerves. It scares me that my daydreaming is becoming less frequent, that I cannot hold a fantasy for longer than a few minutes sometimes. Everything has turned to rumination of what IS presently at hand, (financial worries, school, life in general). That’s not even mentioning my day job, where I work strange hours and can never truly rest unless some other thing from my off duty time is sacrificed.

A difficulty also presents itself when trying to share this with others. I feel like no one really understands what I mean when I try to describe to them what I have to you now. It really is a sense, a sensation, when your imagination is strong and active. Being without it feels horrible and only then do I truly feel lonely.

I have my theories on why this occurs and why it has begun to ramp up in the past two years. Theory A is that an ordinary life, (not that there is anything wrong in leading one), atrophies this sense. Most jobs are materialistic, maritime being one, and the focus always lies on the concrete. That thing needs to be done this way. We are going from here to here. Ordinary work is absolute. Things, concrete things, need to be done, and all the focus lies in their doing, whereas imagination strives in leisure, it needs leisure to grow, to digest the food that is this world. If it doesn’t get that rest and nourishment, it morphs from a feed in-spit out highway with a processor in between, to a U-turn road that takes in but immediately discards what it gets.

Theory B is that the imagination, though remaining as a sense, works more like a muscle. It needs constant work at the limit of its capabilities, then enough rest for it to recuperate and expand. It requires use and practice to hone, to find the ‘mind-muscle’ connection, or the cognitive equivalent to that. As a child you tap into it naturally, and if you’re lucky, and have no naysayers or overly serious people around you, the skill remains alive until early adulthood when the first proper waves of quote reality unquote begin to bash against the rocks. It is then when it begins to decline, one of the leading factors being institutionalized thinking that overrides a more natural and open way of seeing your own thoughts and dreams. “Oh, that’s all nonsense,” or “stop fantasizing and focus on your schoolwork”, etc. During this time the ‘muscle’ that is the imagination atrophies, or without proper rest, becomes either overworked to the point of shutting off, or becomes dormant, which leads back to theory A and the ‘ordinary life’ argument.

There is a commonality in both of my theories: if not practiced, the imagination withers. Another, less formed theory, let’s call it C, is that the sharing of imaginative thinking with the wrong people, (you know the type), discourages the ego to the point that it disconnects from that aether where all beautiful thoughts come from, but more on that on a later date.

I hope my bad analogies make sense to you.

I’m sharing this because I am currently having one of my coined mind-flus. With experience I know it will go away, but when is the key question, not if. I know the medicine for these days is a strong dose of good reads and watches and art, (currently I’m brushing up on my Jung and also rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood with my girlfriend, so I’m set), and of course leisurely time where my mind can freely ramp up its unconscious gears to spit out new ZIP files from the collective aether. Not to mention sleep, but I need not tell you once more how life works onboard.

Luckily I’ll be on holiday from the beginning of June to the end of July, and though I’ve set myself to finish my thesis, (or at least partly so), I will endeavor to Chill with a capital C once my feet touch dry land, (a thing that looks like it’ll happen later than the planned date of second of June), and, of course, sleep my heart out. 

I hope there has been some, if any, value in this post. It’s something I’ve struggled with for some time but, as aforesaid, never penned, typed, or put into words. A relief comes over me as I reread this dense post. There is nothing new under the sun, so I know at least one of you Dear Readers out there has experienced this same malaise, though you might describe it differently. To you I want to say that it does come back. Trust me. Just give it time.

All artwork (excluding FMAB poster), in this post is from the National Gallery of Art Free Images and Open Access, at nga.gov and is under the public domain. They have a nice catalog so go and stare at some brilliant works. 

 

Thank you, Dear Reader, for being here.

Until next Saturday. By then you won’t be reading 26 year old Nicholas’ posts, but 27…