William Blake vs The World Chapter 7. ONCE, ONLY IMAGIN’D
Author: John Higgs Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2021 Review Date: Status:⌛️
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For Blake and Swedenborg, the imagination was a faculty which could be exercised and strengthened, and which ultimately became a path to the land of vision. But what, exactly, do we mean when we say ‘imagination’? It is a common, everyday word, yet tricky to define. Examining what has been written about the imagination over the years, it is clear that the concept is understood in a number of different
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Claims like this are usually made by artists, poets, mystics and the occasional scientist of rare genius. They serve as a reaction against the opposing trend in Western thought, which is more frequently expressed by philosophers, intellectuals, politicians or academics. This tradition argues that the imagination is of little value compared to the rational intellect. Imagination, from this perspective, is just the brain at play. It is entertaining in its own way but of no real use.
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This dismissal goes all the way back to Plato, whose dialogue Phaedo included the argument that ‘a theoretical inquiry no more employs [mental] images than does a factual investigation’. In Platonic philosophy, imagination belonged on the lowest rank of mental faculties. Aristotle also argued that ‘imaginings are for the most part false’. Later philosophers took a similar dismissive view. The English philosopher John Locke argued that there ‘was nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses’. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl did not see imagination as a ‘productive’ act, because measurable things that exist externally, in time and space, were important in a way that things that exist internally were not. This way of thinking was, according to Husserl, ‘the natural standpoint’.
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Perhaps the philosopher most dismissive of imagination was the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed the world of imagination as a non-existent ‘anti-world’. According to Sartre, imagination was a ‘nothingness of being’ that could not be cured of its ‘essential poverty’. His stance was more than a little disingenuous, however, as he had personal experience of imagination’s vividness and power. In 1926, Sartre took what turned out to be, with hindsight, an excessive dose of mescaline. As a result, he spent many years hallucinating sea creatures, who made a nuisance of themselves while he attended to his duties. As he told the political science professor John Gerassi in 1971, ‘after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “OK, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.’ That Sartre had to persuade figments of his imagination not to be noisy during lectures suggests that they should be regarded as something more than nothing. Of course, Sartre took the view that everything suffered from a lack of meaning or value, and he was never going to make an exception for imagination.
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Opinions on what imagination is and how it should be valued have clearly varied wildly over the centuries. It may seem curious that what some consider to be the most vital aspect of our minds should be seen by others as so unimportant. This does, however, serve as a reminder of the extent to which the world as we perceive it is a self-portrait. Philosophers and intellectuals are proud of their rationality and believe that the external world works logically. Artists, on the contrary, value their imagination, and perceive the world to be a place where it is of primary importance.
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The difference of opinion is heightened because we have traditionally had difficulty defining exactly what imagination is. In many accounts, imagination, fantasy, hallucination, consciousness and even memory blur into one another, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The American philosopher Edward S. Casey is one of the few academics who have attempted to define what we mean when we talk of imagination. According to Casey, much of the philosophic and artistic discourse around the subject is vague, undefined and can safely be discarded.
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Casey believed that the arguments among Greek philosophers about where imagination ranked in the scheme of mental faculties were essentially meaningless. The hierarchical models of mind used in the classical world fail to understand that the brain is a network, with different facilities interacting with and affecting each other at the same time. ‘A recognition of the multiplicity of the mental’, he argues, ‘must replace a vertical view of the mind if we are to avoid the harmful consequences of thinking in exclusively hierarchical terms.’ Casey also believed that poets have overstated the association between imagination and creativity. While the two terms are clearly linked, they do not refer to the same phenomenon. It is possible for imagination not to be creative; many everyday acts of imagination prove to be banal and repetitive.
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Imagination, Casey tells us, is unusual in that it is separate from other forms of thought. Memory, perception and abstract intellectualising easily flow into each other, but an act of imagination is a stand-alone experience. It can be either spontaneous or self-controlled, and it occurs in the mind in imaginal space and time, on a mental stage.
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In a similar manner to Swedenborg, Casey classified acts of imagination into different types, which he called ‘imaging’, ‘imagining-that’ and ‘imagining-how’. The three names are so similar that they are easily confused, but Casey’s categories do provide considerable insight into how imagination becomes deeper and more powerful.
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Imaging, Casey’s first category, is when you bring something to mind. You might, for example, mentally produce an image of the detective Sherlock Holmes. This usually presents itself in the mind’s eye as the image of a thin-faced man with a deerstalker hat and a large magnifying glass in his hand, although the actual form this image might take will vary from person to person. Some might see an image of the actor Benedict Cumberbatch in modern clothes, for example, while others may see the character from the Sidney Paget illustrations that originally accompanied Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Some will see a still image while others will see a moving one, but all will have a self-contained image of Sherlock and nothing else. We are unlikely to imagine a world around this character, unless we actively decide to conjure one.
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Imaging is usually visual, but the term also applies to other sensory acts of imagination, such as imagining bird sounds or the smell of fresh coffee. We not only see with the mind’s eye, we can also smell with the mind’s nose and taste with the mind’s tongue. Sherlock Holmes can also be brought to mind in an abstract way, with no visual or other sensory aspects, because we can experience non-sensory imaging as well, as we will see later.
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After imaging comes imagining-that. Not just the simple act of bringing a specific single object or person to mind, it is about imagining a more complex scene, with specific dynamics and relationships being acted out among its constituent parts. It is what Casey calls ‘a state of affairs’. Imagining Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty struggling above the Reichenbach Falls is an example of imagining-that. It is a scene that plays out over time, and one which is possible to imagine unfolding in numerous ways. Imagining-that is more complex than imaging, although it is still a scene that we witness in our mind, as if we were a nearby, impartial observer. In this scenario, the mind is watching the mind.
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Imagining-how is more complex still. It involves working out the details of how a scene is going to develop in real time, perhaps to rehearse a task or solve a puzzle. The person doing the imagining does not remain a separate entity who objectively views the action from a distance in their mind’s eye. Instead, they place themselves in the scene. They become an active participant, deciding how to feel, think, act or behave in the scene as it unfurls. An example would be imagining how you could escape from Moriarty’s attack above the waterfall, if you were Sherlock Holmes. You could imagine how the detective might grab on to a tree branch as Moriarty goes to push him over the edge, leaving him dangling over the side but avoiding the fall. Or perhaps you imagine how you as Sherlock elegantly sidestep Moriarty’s attack, resulting in your nemesis toppling alone over the falls.
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In imagining-how, it is necessary to enter the scene either as yourself or, as in this case, as a surrogate for a different character. The difference between imagining-that and imagining-how is like moving from watching a film to donning a virtual reality headset and playing a game. In this way, you can try out scenarios and rehearse different approaches for dealing with a situation. Again, imagining-how can occur using the mind’s eye or other senses, or it can occur non-sensuously; for example, when a computer programmer imagines how an algorithm they are writing will work.
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As we move from imaging to imagining-that and imagining-how, the act of imagination grows in complexity. We find ourselves being drawn into it, moving from passive observer to active participant. We are no longer the audience watching the mind, but an actor taking part in the play. This development mirrors that reported by Swedenborg during his journey from dreaming scientist to full-blown mystic. The contents of his imagination became more complex and compelling, until he fell into them completely.
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Casey, then, shows how imagination is not a single, fixed activity, but something that grows deeper as the person imagining becomes more involved in their mental creation and increasingly blind to the exterior world. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed a similar system. The practice of ‘active imagination’ was an important part of Jung’s therapeutic work, and he classified different types of fantasy as either voluntary, passive or active. Voluntary fantasy was superficial and trivial, he thought, while the imagination begins to take over during passive fantasy, and unexpectedly overwhelms the mind without being summoned. In active fantasy, however, there is a ‘positive participation of consciousness’, and the conscious self becomes a central part of the imaginative act, in a process that seems identical to the imagining-how that Casey describes.
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How, though, can this deep imagination lead to the vision states that Blake and Swedenborg describe? A clue may be the overwhelmingly fantastical nature of what they imagined. In Blake’s mythological system and Swedenborg’s tours of hell or alien worlds, there was little that involved autobiographical memory or worldly scenarios which require the brain’s default mode network to be active. As we saw earlier, deep involvement in a task that does not require much assistance from the default mode network can lead to a loss of the sense of self. This, in turn, seems to be a key to visionary experience. A similar process can be found in the practice of transcendental meditation, in which the mental repetition of a mantra works to quiet the chattering mind. This mantra is a collection of syllables which are meaningless in English and which practitioners keep secret, in order not to connect the word with any real-world experiences. As a result, there is nothing for the mind to snag on to when it is repeating the mantra, as there are no mental connections associated with it. It does not trigger trains of thought that distract from the meditation and activate the default mode network. That Blake’s mythology was his alone and had no associations to his wider culture may, perhaps, have kept social and autobiographical parts of his brain quiet and allowed him to reach deeper states of mind.
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Based on Casey and Jung’s models, it is possible to see how an increasingly complex and rich imagination could reach a point where the mind forgets all about the everyday world and experiences what it is imagining as vividly, or even more so, as it does the real world. Their models do not go any further than this. Blake’s accounts of his visions, however, suggest this is only the start, and that it is after this point that things get interesting. His ‘fourfold vision’, for example, implies the existence of a state of imagination more extreme than those in Casey’s work.
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As mentioned earlier, the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s thought that the fourfold visions Blake reported were similar to states of mind that could be induced through the use of psychedelic compounds such as LSD. Such experiences are worth considering here because they go further than Casey’s model in reporting increasingly deep states of imagination and consciousness. One of the more useful models of extreme forms of consciousness comes from the infamous Harvard psychologist and LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary.
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Leary was originally an academic who excelled at systematic thinking. Over the course of decades of psychedelic drug use, he developed and refined a model of the different states of mind experienced during expanded awareness. He called this the eight-circuit model, where each of the eight ‘circuits’ describes a different level or style of mental activity.
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The first four of these ‘circuits’ are uncontroversial and are largely borrowed from existing models of psychological development. They cover basic survival, recognition of power, manipulation of symbols and awareness of sexuality. It is not until the fifth circuit that we encounter the mind in a non-everyday state.
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The fifth level is called the neurosomatic circuit and deals with feelings of bliss, pleasure, wellbeing and the recognition of beauty. It involves sensual awareness of the body and is sometimes called the rapture circuit. Logic, purpose and utility become irrelevant in the face of overwhelming aesthetic experience. Importantly, there is a sense of detachment from the worldly concerns of the first four circuits. Our past and future, and our worries and responsibilities, fade away until they seem of little importance. The sense of self produced by the default mode network and other brain structures is being dialled down and weakened. This circuit matches what Blake called Beulah, a state of grace likened to a temporary earthly heaven. Beulah was a place of dreams, moonlight and love, and its function was to separate the material world that Blake called Ulro from Eternity above. This fits well with Leary’s model, in which the detachment of the fifth circuit acts as a buffer between the worldly concerns of the first four circuits and the higher levels of consciousness to come.
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Leary believed that this state could be deliberately switched on through use of cannabis, tantric sex or certain types of yoga and meditation. Blake would have argued that the creative exercising of the imagination was the real key, although the fact that Blake, Swedenborg and Leary were all highly sexed may be significant. Both Blake and Leary insisted that this buffer stage, for all its seductive appeal, should not be a goal in itself. Passive pleasure can be welcomed when it arrives, but our lives need more purpose.
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After the neurosomatic circuit comes the sixth level, which Leary called the neuro-electrical circuit. This is the circuit that we most associate with the psychedelic sixties; it is what everything from psychedelic music to 1960s poster design was trying to express. It is an explosion of perspectives and connections that can be thrilling or overwhelming, and which can be triggered by a psychedelic drug such as LSD. The self, though greatly reduced, is still present at this level, but the rules of the physical world have become very different.
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Blake has described experiences which sound very similar to being thrown into Leary’s sixth circuit. When he was sitting for the portrait painter Thomas Phillips in 1807, he described an encounter with the archangel Gabriel which we’ve already noted. In this account, the moment when the roof of his study opened and he was thrust upwards into the heavens sounds much like an account of the sixth circuit activating. Blake seems to be trying to describe experiences like these when he talks of ‘fourfold vision’.
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This circuit is also sometimes referred to as the meta-programming level. Leary believed that this was a state of consciousness in which the mind became aware of how it works and could consciously rewrite itself. On the sixth circuit, the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ that dictate how you react to the world are revealed, and religions, prejudices, beliefs and social structures appear arbitrary and changeable. Here the self understands that it is just a story, rather than something real or fixed, and that it is able to rewrite itself if it so wishes. Blake’s declaration that ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ is evidence of this state of awareness.
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The ‘meta-programming’ made possible by this state of awareness helps explain why modern therapists have gained promising results from psychedelic drug therapy for the treatment of issues such as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also why psychedelic drug use can be dangerous, and why the 1960s and 1970s produced so many ‘brain-fried acid casualties’, to use a common description. Rewriting your assumptions about the world is not something to be done casually or even accidentally. There were many who came down from recreational drug experimentation with new beliefs that were wild, paranoid and entirely at odds with the rest of society.
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Although the sixth circuit still leaves you clinging on to an awareness of the physical world, this is left behind at the seventh circuit. Leary called this the neurogenetic circuit. What remains of the self is in a place outside of time and space. It is here that ancestors are encountered and the history of life is laid out before you. This is the realm of the archetypes, the collective unconscious that Jung wrote about. Swedenborg’s travelogue of heaven and hell seems to be the product of a similar state of consciousness, as do Blake’s references to Eternity.
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The eighth circuit, which Leary added to his model late in life, involves the complete annihilation of the self. It is entering the light at the end of the tunnel in a near-death experience. It is far beyond description, and as such there is little that can be said about it here.
Note: so called “dmt breakthrough” too maybe
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If Blake is to be believed, these higher states of consciousness reported by mystics, saints, poets and psychedelic pioneers can be triggered by exercising the imagination. Of course, both Leary’s structured list of states of expanded awareness and Blake’s visionary mythology are models – they are simplified framings of much richer and more complex phenomena. We can accept them as useful guides, but we shouldn’t confuse them too literally with the mental territory that they are trying to record and describe. Yet the fact that they fit together so well, despite the centuries and experiences that separate their authors, suggests that they describe a universal mental experience.
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As we have seen, imagination varies greatly in terms of depth and involvement. But it also varies in how it is experienced, as neurologists are only just discovering. The experience of the ‘mind’s eye’, it has recently been realised, is very different from person to person.
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If you ask several people to close their eyes and imagine a cow, the results will differ significantly. For most, an image of something roughly cow-like will appear in their mind’s eye. It may be vague and indistinct, and it may soon fade, but they will see something. This is not true for everyone.
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Some people will see nothing at all, which indicates a condition known as aphantasia. Even if you asked an aphantasic to mentally picture something extremely familiar, such as their own kitchen, they would not be able to do so because they have no faculty for mental imagery. Most aphantasics find this normal, and struggle to imagine how it could be otherwise. They tend to assume that the concept of a ‘mind’s eye’ is simply metaphorical, because although they couldn’t see a cow or a kitchen if you asked them to imagine one, they were still thinking about those things. Aphantasics are more likely to have difficulty recognising faces and often have weak autobiographical memories of events in their lives. Roughly 2–3 per cent of the population is aphantasic, which makes it a surprisingly common condition.
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At the opposite end of the spectrum are people with a condition called hyperphantasia. If you could glance inside a hyperphantasic’s mind when you asked them to imagine a cow, what you saw might shock you. A hyperphantasic would see a cow in their mind’s eye as vivid and real as if it was standing just in front of them. They would not only be able to see the cow in pin-sharp focus, but they would also be able to smell its damp hide and feel the heat from its breath. To a hyperphantasic, images are not things that you think, they are things that you encounter.
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Scientists have only just begun to study these extremes of mental imagery vividness. The term ‘aphantasia’ was first coined by the neurologist Adam Zeman and researchers at the University of Exeter in a 2015 paper. Studies of the condition are currently in their infancy, but there are already some interesting correlations being reported. Hyperphantasics tend to spend more time daydreaming than the average person. They are more prone to emotions such as regret, longing and nostalgia; they experience both greater anxiety and greater empathy than most; and they can find reading about a gory incident extremely distressing. Research into hyperphantasia is producing techniques that can help syndromes like post-traumatic stress disorder. Patients suffering from intrusive memories, it has been discovered, can be calmed by being presented with alternative strong visual imagery, such as playing the game Tetris – the mind can only hold one mental image at a time, and the vividness of the new image overwrites the old intrusive one.
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Although retrospective diagnoses of historical psychological conditions are problematic, the case for Blake being a hyperphantasic is strong. As we have already noted, Blake insisted that everything he painted he saw first in his mind. His contemporaries also commented on this. Thomas Phillips wrote how Blake ‘always saw in fancy every form he drew’. This situation was tested by a series of experiments Blake undertook around 1820 with the watercolour painter John Varley. He encouraged Blake to draw portraits of famous spirits that he saw, including Moses, Julius Caesar, William Wallace and Edward III. A cynic may say that these portraits, known as the ‘visionary heads’, owe more to memory than vision, because a number of his drawings of historical figures resembled previous portraits that Blake would probably have seen. The accounts of Blake producing these images, however, suggest that whatever their original source, Blake was indeed sketching people who appeared vividly in his mind’s eye.
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Sessions took place at night, usually starting around 9 or 10 p.m. and sometimes lasting until 3 or 4 a.m. Varley would suggest a historic figure, and after a brief moment, Blake would cry, ‘There he is!’ and get to work. As he sketched, Blake would occasionally look up, as if he had a real sitter before him. Sometimes he would abandon a portrait mid-sketch, saying, ‘I can’t go on, it is gone! I must wait till it returns.’ When he was asked to sketch the monstrous spirit from his famous painting The Ghost of a Flea, Blake started drawing the spirit he ‘saw’ but ran into a problem when it moved position and opened its mouth. He had to abandon his first sketch and start again next to it, this time showing the new position of the creature’s features. This suggests that he was sketching what he saw vividly in his mind’s eye, rather than making up the image as he went. From the many similar accounts, it seems that Blake was telling the truth about drawing what he ‘saw’ in vision.
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There are other aspects of Blake’s life which support the possibility that he was hyperphantasic. When people discuss the great moral problems of the day – in the modern world issues like climate change, inequality and biodiversity collapse – they can usually remain dispassionate and calm. Blake couldn’t; the issues of his age, which included slavery and child labour, pushed him into anger. For an hyperphantasic person, talking about the cruel conditions that plagued child chimney sweeps would conjure vivid visions of the suffocating, claustrophobic darkness that these young children were forced to endure. When talk of these issues causes the reality of those situations to play out in your mind’s eye, a reaction of righteous anger is natural. Blake was always quick to express fury about confinement. In the poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’ he writes:
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves &Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro all its regions
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The increased empathy and anxiety experienced by hyperphantasics suggests a link between Blake’s politics and moral outrage and the strength of his imagination.
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Many hyperphantasics are highly creative, and a striking number are drawn to visual art. It is not the case, however, that they paint to record what they see in their mind’s eye. The contemporary London artist Clare Dudeney is an example. Dudeney is hyperphantasic and her condition can affect her profoundly. ‘When people describe things, especially gory things, I visualise them so vividly it’s like I’m experiencing them first-hand,’ she has explained. ‘A few years ago, I was on the train reading a passage about someone who got a nail stuck in their foot and I passed out.’ Yet she does not have similarly strong spiritual experiences in religious settings, such as churches or cathedrals. Hyperphantasia does not seem to directly coincide with a tendency to experience deep mystical states, such as Blake’s ‘fourfold vision’.
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The work of different hyperphantasic artists is as varied as you would expect from any random group of artists. While they tend to view their hyperphantasia as an asset, it is not the case that they feel compelled to record their internal visions on canvas. If there is a connection, it seems to be one of intent, rather than results. Dudeney, who has the strange ability to draw with both hands at once, produces work that is predominantly abstract, energetic, and focused on colourful shapes colliding. She describes the motivation behind her own work: ‘My practice considers how the subjective experience of “being” might be shared with another […] Imagining “the self” as a network of relationships in flux: fragmented, uncertain and complex. The works map subconscious thoughts and feelings.’ This also serves as a perfect description of the works of William Blake.
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The vividness of the hyperphantasic imagination, however, does fit with the idea that Casey’s imagining-how can tip into Leary’s higher circuits. When the experience of imagining-how is so vivid and real, awareness of both the self and the external world falls away. At this point awareness is focused on only the imagination, which interacts with nothing but itself, and a path to the world of vision is revealed.
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This would still be a rare occurrence, of course. It is not something that every hyperphantasic would experience. But occasionally there will be an individual like Blake with the temperament, upbringing and background for whom deep imagination lessens their sense of self and tips them into expanded states of awareness. In his letter to Thomas Butts from Felpham, Blake described how the twofold vision that was with him always turned into the delight of the threefold vision of Beulah and, finally, the ‘supreme delight’ of fourfold vision. Leary required psychedelic drugs to lessen the sense of self and undergo a similar experience. For Blake, however, the key was vivid, deep imagination.
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While hyperphantasia may provide insights into the mind of William Blake, the study of the contrary condition of aphantasia suggests reasons to be wary of being swept along by Blake’s understanding of imagination. In 2019, an exhibition of work by artists with aphantasia and hyperphantasia was held in the Tramway gallery, Glasgow. Called Extreme Imagination: Inside the Mind’s Eye, the roots of the exhibition lay in the realisation that a surprisingly large number of both the aphantasics and hyperphantasics that Zeman and his team were studying were creative. This was perhaps most surprising in the case of aphantasics, for whom a lack of a mind’s eye might seem like a barrier to imaginative visual art. Instead, aphantasics were drawn to creating images on canvas or as sculptures, often as a direct compensation for their lack of ability to create them in their mind.
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As the aphantasic Canadian artist Sheri Bakes has explained, ‘Recently, I’ve been thinking that maybe not being able to see things in my mind … maybe that’s a good thing. The paintings have become my brain. The paintings have become the picture inside that I can’t see.’ Other aphantasic artists talk about painting as a way to reveal what the imagination is hiding from them. As the British artist Michael Chance explained: ‘I must physically work on a drawing or painting in order for my imagination to become visually manifest […] Largely bypassing conscious decision making, the way images (usually figures) emerge from my subconscious is akin to dreaming, and the resulting work is often just as strange, surprising and revealing as that would suggest.’ A surprisingly high percentage of animators at Pixar are aphantasic, and so is Ed Catmull, the former President of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
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For aphantasics, creativity is not limited to the visual arts. The aphantasic writer Dustin Grinnell describes writing as a form of collage, building his work through the assembly of individual ideas. ‘From my perspective, a writer without a mind’s eye writes by patchwork, using multiple sources and collected ideas and concepts to build something original,’ he has explained. The biotechnologist Craig Venter believes there is a connection between his aphantasia and his scientific achievements. ‘I’ve known many people with photographic memories for facts who can’t even remotely combine them conceptually like I can,’ he has said. The lack of an ability to visualise in the mind, clearly, does not limit intellectual achievement.
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Bringing something vividly to mind quickly and easily is not something that aphantasics are able to do, so instead of relying on this handy mental shortcut they find other ways of understanding and thinking about things. These usually focus on the context and connections between objects and concepts. As a result, their thinking may be slower, but it can also be richer and deeper. To a visionary, the vividness of their mind’s eye is usually a quality they treasure. It is an ability that marks them out as special, different, and perhaps even chosen. It is not unusual for a prophet or a mystic to feel that they are in some way more important than the great majority who are unable to experience visions. From an aphantasic’s point of view, however, being distracted by the surface dazzle of a mental image sounds like a limitation, rather than a blessing. The mind’s eye seems, to them, like a distraction from deep thought and imagination. It is like someone trying to convince a blind person that the most important thing is 20:20 vision. The blind person, who can understand the world and navigate it perfectly well without the benefit of sight, is unlikely to find such an argument convincing.
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Because we take imagination for granted, we rarely stop to think about what a strange phenomenon it is. What we imagine is often trivial or useless and easily dismissed. It is the realm of dreams when we sleep, or daydreams when we are bored, and those fantasies and nightmares are frequently little help in paying the mortgage. Imagination, as intellectuals and philosophers claim, can appear to be a lesser thing than intelligence or reason. Yet when you examine those higher, more celebrated forms of cognition, you realise that they too are dependent on imagination.
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An engineer requires a plan of something that does not exist before they can start to physically construct it. The theory of relativity began when Einstein attempted to imagine how the world would appear if he were travelling on a beam of light. The discipline of philosophy is a centuries-long tradition of imaginative thought experiments. Before a verbal, spoken language can evolve and develop, someone needs to imagine a connection between concepts and sounds. Should you attempt to think of an activity, pursuit or cause that can be described as more important than the ephemeral act of imagination, you soon realise that without imagination it would be impossible. The ability to voluntarily or unwittingly conjure in our minds what does not exist, it turns out, is a necessary part of all the different abilities that differentiate us from the animals.
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Imagined ideas that arise unbidden, which don’t seem to be beholden to the laws of cause and effect, are perhaps the only situation in which we genuinely get something for nothing. This aspect of imagination can legitimately be described as godlike, because it is the ability to create something that did not previously exist. It is not a physical act of creation, of course, but that is not the same as it being nothing. We live our lives surrounded by a physical world, including chairs, desks, houses, laptops and clothes, which would not exist if the idea and design of them hadn’t first formed in somebody’s mind. We can add things like language, fashion, culture, economics and laws to this list of things that began in an act of mental creation. We can also add angels, demons, gods and other wonders. These are the flora and fauna that grow in the human imagination.
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Because imagination seems such a trivial, effortless, daft thing that we do, to declare it to be the most precious quality of our world, as Blake did, might seem anticlimactic. But as we have seen, there are varying levels of imagination. What is trivial in our everyday lives can, in the mind of someone such as Blake or Swedenborg, be profoundly powerful and overwhelming.
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Humanity is the only phenomenon we know capable of experiencing the light of imagination. It appears to be an unlimited resource, and we have only just begun to explore it. If the world of imagination was a vast continent, then we have only wandered along the shore – we still have no idea of the marvels that await us upriver. Imagination is required for that most important and vital quality of life, the generation of enthusiasm. The word ‘enthusiasm’ means to be inspired by the gods, and the gods, Blake reminds us, come from the imagination. It is through the imagination of human minds that purpose, meaning and relevance enter this universe.
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For this reason, Blake viewed the imagination as divine. True, some may have hoped for a concept of divinity that grants power and control over the material world, which imagination alone may not be capable of. But even power and control could not exist without imagination. We think of a black hole as powerful and controlling, but in a dead, pointless cosmos it is meaningless and irrelevant, and as much a random quirk of the physical world as everything else. It is only the human mind that can add qualities like awe and dread to a black hole. Likewise, there would be no concept of divinity itself without imagination.
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The Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen told us that there is a crack in everything, which is how the light gets in. From a Blakean perspective, imagination is Cohen’s crack in Urizen’s closed, limited, finite universe, a way in which something new can appear, as if by magic. It is how the inspired, the world changing and the mundane can arrive from out of nowhere. More importantly, it is a direct challenge to Urizen’s belief that he is the creator god of all that exists. This explains why, in Blake’s mythology, imagination is the key to freeing Urizen from his delusions and shattering the self-imposed limitations on his perception. It is through imagination, Blake promises us, that we will be redeemed.
Notes
Amount: 4