Living by Imagination

Mark Saba, Manager of Illustration, Graphics, and Medical Photography, Yale University, mark.saba@yale.edu 

Statement of Purpose

In response to the current American penchant for “reality” TV shows, the news, and celebrity biographies, I wrote “Living By Imagination” to illustrate (from my own experience as well as the perspectives of such people as Czeslaw Milosz, William Blake, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt) the validity and indeed necessity of utilizing imagination in order to plow through life. I touch on the imagination’s role in such universal human preoccupations as religion and love, and present many ways in which lack of imagination can lead to despair, intolerance, and lack of purpose in living. I believe we are due for a rebirth of belief in the power of imagination as we plod along in our technologically hyper-motivated world, a world in which everything is seen as increasingly relative, and we must supply the rules for ordering that relativity.
 

Living by Imagination

My friend Billy’s dad raised canaries in the basement, just like the Birdman of Alcatraz, which was a movie I’d seen on T.V. On summer days I’d come storming through the Bauers’ aluminum screen door, hop through their linoleum-floored living room, and find Ray Bauer, a steel mill worker, sitting intently at the kitchen table, wearing his glasses, mincing up boiled eggs with a fork. To these he carefully added drops of liquid vitamins. The mother canaries would feed this mixture to their young.

I had my own plans for raising birds. In fact, the pale blue robin’s egg I’d recently borrowed from a nest now lay at the bottom of a rag-padded coffee can, sitting under a suspended light bulb in the middle of our cellar. I could see the barren room a few years hence, filled with cages of robins, cardinals, sparrows, and bluebirds. (I had never actually seen a bluebird around Pittsburgh, but knew they existed somewhere.) No matter that, having waited patiently for a couple of weeks, I decided to break my egg’s shell to help the chick out but found it hard-boiled. There were plenty of nests in the neighborhood to further my plans.

As it turned out though, I gave up on bird-raising the day I brought home an injured bat I’d found down at the creek. Cradling it gently all the way home, its small head looking up at me silently, I had no choice but to deposit it into the one abandoned bird cage which sat on a dusty shelf near my mother’s laundry area. There it hung happily upside down from the little swing for a day or two before my mother finally discovered it: I heard the scream from my bedroom two floors away.

During a conversation my wife and I were having about the possibility of happiness, she asked me, “When were the happiest years of your life?” I hesitated, thinking it must be a trick question. It was true, the first year we spent together, following a six-year estrangement, was a gift from God. I could also think of other years that had set me on fire: my year at Hollins, my final year at Wesleyan, the year our daughter was born. But collectively, the happiest consecutive years of my life had to be my childhood.

“Your childhood! Mark, how can you say that? Your father was dead and your mother had no money.”

I hesitated again, somewhat persuaded by her argument. Yet I felt instinctively that it was true: my childhood had been the happiest part of my life. I was even puzzled that anyone—even my wife—could pretend to apply any objective criteria to rating it.

Every one of us has a flotilla of clouds that hangs over us through our lives: they are misfortunes, circumstances beyond our control. You can either cower under them, or concentrate instead on the changing scenery around you. As a child, I was aware of our misfortunes, but I was also aware of the surprises that lurked around every corner. My own backyard was an adventure, where I interviewed every crawling and blooming thing. Everywhere I went, people fascinated me; they made me feel things I had never felt. Sometimes they kept me up at night—as did the blooming cherry trees. And above all, no matter what I saw, where I went, or what may have happened to me, I knew that I was loved. I also knew that love was more real than anything I could see.

Of course, children are free of moral responsibility, and (hopefully) of providing for themselves. These alone should contribute to happiness. But so does point of view. If you can not see anything because you are surrounded by material clutter, you might have trouble appreciating what interests you. But if you take cues from what you see for things you cannot see, you will have opened up endless doors to a rich interior life, a life that will sustain you when you find your senses overwhelmed, or taking in only the agonizingly familiar. Children are particularly adept at doing this. In their play they can use the simplest of props to conjure up bigger worlds, worlds in which they attain power and deep satisfaction. They invent everything as they go along: wars, pageantry, gender roles, occupations. They invent worlds that are more real, more interesting and exciting, than the ones they see around them. They do this, it seems, to exercise their powers of humanity. Without considering how or why, children use their imaginations to take them to places where they feel more alive.

Think of the unpredictable objects that children may become attached to. At our local Five-And-Ten store I found a series of small statues, each replicated in tidy rows, each meticulously painted (or so it seemed to me) in the tenderest of colors. Together, these three to five-inch statuettes made up a nativity scene. They cost anywhere from ten to twenty-five cents each. I wanted them.

And so I walked home from the Five-And-Ten on Brownsville Road reciting a string of Hail Marys and Our Fathers to myself, so that either God or Mary (or both) might intervene in persuading my mother to let me buy the set. I figured I would open my argument by setting up a plan whereby I would purchase them at intervals, in sets of, say, three, until the whole nativity scene rested on the table next to my bed.

How could I have been so obsessed with the idea of owning a nativity set? Thinking back now, it was not only that they represented religious figures for me. If the set had been all white I would not have cared in the least for it. What attracted me most was the color, the interesting robes, tunics, and hats the figures wore. The blue (my favorite color then) of Mary’s dress. Why, I could own my own Italian Renaissance painting—and better yet, in three dimensions! Their diminutive size also interested me; it made them a bit more mysterious. They lived in a vast desert, not the choking gray-green of southwestern Pennsylvania. They spoke an ancient language, rode donkeys and camels to work. I imagined setting up the figurines on my table, first covering it with a cloth, throwing a bit of straw over it, and cutting slim twigs of evergreen to stand around the stable. It would look completely natural, a world I’d created, like the scented and sublime world I pieced together every May with a shoe box, blue crepe paper, ribbons, and peonies when I erected my altar to Mary.
 

These days I create worlds not by building May altars or nativity scenes, but by writing, painting, and reading. In elementary and high school I had favorite teachers here and there—mostly in science. My sixth grade reading teacher (a man) wasn’t all that bad either, as were my trigonometry and world cultures teachers in high school. But if I think of history, all I can remember is a foul-smelling old book filled with obsessive dates and the same story repeating ad nauseam: this king started a war, that king lost. The way this cardboard material was presented to use was no more inspiring. I plodded through history classes as if through a desert of quicksand.

Why, then, in my forties, am I utterly mesmerized by history? I can’t get enough of it. I attach to historical bits in periodicals; I stop roaming at the History Channel; I read about Genghis Khan, the Visigoths, Polish nobility, American Indians, alchemy. When will it end? I imagine that I am more interested in these things today because I finally have enough of life experience to carry some responsibility for the actions of my fellow humans: what one of us has done, we all must bear. I also know now that anything that happened once can happen again. Most importantly, though, I am reliving the history I read because I read it in a comfortable room, on my own time, without fear of being tested on it. It makes a great deal of difference where and how you learn something. Think of anything you learned in school. What odors, décor, feelings, and sounds do you associate with it? Only the strongest imagination can overcome a bad sensory experience, and the prison-like classrooms we have all found ourselves in provide enough disagreeable stimuli to haunt us for a lifetime. The “correct” time for us to begin learning may be in our thirties, after our hormones have settled, our children are born, and distractions are not as easy to come by. A sense of urgency begins to awaken as we grow older: that sense is the necessary ingredient for feeding a hungry mind.

A sense of urgency guides (or if lacking, impedes) all that we do. Are the choices we make, and priorities we set, easily defendable? We might think they result from practical considerations: financial arrangements, material acquisitions, security, and the like. But dig deeper, and you may find that you make decisions for no apparent reason.

What color to paint the room? What book to read, or program to watch? What to wear, to eat, to think about? We often choose something because we “like it.” Faced with a set of tasks to accomplish at the office, how do we order them? Some of us would get the most unpleasant things out of the way first. Others may knock off only little things to start with, leaving bigger projects for later. Still others may attack the biggest, most complicated job first and fit everything else in systematically during the day. We differ in our approaches because we imagine tasks, and their implications, differently. We imagine things differently because our experience, education, and upbringing dictate it. We may even be wired differently from the start—who knows? Imagination plays a pivotal role in all that we do, think, and say. In the end, there is no definitive reason for doing anything.

 

I write because I am. For those of us who don’t write, paint, dance, sing, or make quilts, this may be difficult to understand. But anyone involved passionately in the business of creating will tell you that it is second only to breathing in sustaining life. Why? It is purely a matter of imagination, and imagination gives life. It gives us a reason for being. Imagination allows us to actually have a say, not to merely stroll by life begrudgingly.

The works I’ve created in the past 25 years give me peace of mind. I do not order them; I have no favorites among my novels, stories, poems, or essays. Each has sat at the pinnacle of my accomplishments upon completion. The time I spent writing them never wavered in its demand, its urgency. And so they recede, albeit equally, to make room for the inexhaustible supply of others. This will likely go on until I die.

A number of these works have been published. One of my novels, as well as an epic poem, appeared publicly a dozen years after I’d written them. I send out poems in groups of five or six; in any group there will be a couple I’d written say, two years ago, one or two more than ten years ago, and maybe one during the past year. I am very often surprised at which ones win those hallowed slots in literary magazines. I have tried for a quarter of a century to figure it out, but I can’t: it simply makes no sense. Not that I dismiss the whole ordeal: I am grateful and honored to have anything I’ve written formally disseminated. But when I think of the rejected poem that digs down so deeply into me that I can’t shake it loose, I see the folly in this process, and realize once again that publishing has very little to do with that act of the imagination which appears as writing.

Public recognition, or acceptance, of imaginative works depends on a sort of communal imaginative faculty which, I’m afraid, may be easily affected by anything from current events to mass media projections and advertising. There is little chance that a majority of individuals will allow their unique sense of appreciation to surface independently of these sorry influences. That is not to say that it can and does happen, but it more often takes a few decades, or centuries, to peel away the layers of inauthenticity that have affected nearly everyone in order that they may see an imaginative work clearly. And once that happens, the work will be remembered; it will succeed because it will reach everyone uniquely, like a warm wind conforming to the contours of our various bodies. I think of my writing, then, as occurring along a straight and consistent time line, with ticks marking out each work’s completion. Public awareness of them may come at any random time, like little red x’s overlaying the line in a separate universe, utterly disconnected from the births and lives of the works themselves.
 

Religious figures often approach the collective imaginations of their flocks carefully. The first encyclical Pope Benedict XVI has written in his tenure is not about controversial issues such as gender roles or homosexuality in the church; nor is it about interreligious strife in the world today; nor about guilt, materialism, or a prescription for saving one’s soul. It is, instead, about love.

Many people were surprised. They had fully expected the new pope’s words to be a call to doctrinal arms. He chose instead to write about something which has always had a deep connection to religion. Why?

 Our first impulse, when we think about love, is to see wine and roses. Our western idea of romantic love. We all hope to “fall in love.” But in order to fall in love, it seems you must cultivate a readiness for it. You must, in your own terms, set the stage for a future experience you are fully expecting to happen. In some countries, such as India, this may not be the case. There, it is likely that your parents will decide who your spouse will be, based on good reasoning, common sense, dowry—anything but romance. But in the West we cling to our notions. We like to feel empowered, and able to guide our own destiny. We also like a note of mystery, suspense, something to add spice to our lives. Too often though we don’t realize that we are responsible for fertilizing our own ground. Love, mystery, color—all will come our way if we prepare by cultivating a state of mind. Love is probably a state of mind, but that which we create by imagining is more real to us than thorns. We remember love; we pass it along in all its forms to other generations. It is, plainly, the pinnacle of imagination, the one thing that can keep us going.

“…put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony,” says St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians. John the evangelist also reminds us that “God is love”. Here again, the thing none of us will ever truly grasp—God—is equal to that other thing we strive for, prepare for, cherish and honor: love. St. Margaret Mary Alocoque’s vision of Jesus’ heart in flames has become an icon for Christian love. Other religions, such as Hinduism, honor aspects of love as well, as it does in the Kama Sutra, a guide for reaching the ecstatic pleasures of erotic love.  And the Shariah code of ethical behavior in Islam states that “Marital love is not static. It grows and flourishes with each day of marital life. It requires work and commitment.”

Love, like religion, requires work. “You must love until it hurts,” Mother Theresa said. It is a work in progress, requiring special attention and care. Sometimes love can resemble a dream. And why not? Both are the fine products of our imagination. Just as we learn from the symbolism and emotional impact of our dreams, we learn from our experiences of loving. Our lessons, in turn, make us better lovers, much as our dream lessons teach us how to be more aware of our lives. Without imagination, we would have neither.

William Blake, says the poet Czeslaw Milosz, had particular ideas about the realm of imagination:

The world around us is real, not illusory; neither can it be divided into that which has been discovered and that which awaits discovery by the human mind, but only into the true, or that which is contained by the Imagination, and the false, the “vegetative mirror” that is a parody of the former. The first is for man a living heaven, the second a hell…(C. Milosz, The Land of Ulro)

So the “real” world, according to Blake, is not to be shunned. It is, rather, to be read in a heavenly way. Why be a grouch when you can just as well live a life of bliss? The world remains constant; all that changes is your point of view.

During my bad days I go along doing much the same things I do on my good days. But on good days I don’t seem to mind my menial tasks as much. I think of them as taking up some space in my day, but throughout their execution I am giving a long wink to higher pursuits. I feel useful knowing, for instance, that I have produced two children, or that someone may have connected recently to a poem I wrote many years ago. And on good days, that’s enough. My overwhelming imagination is, for a moment, satisfied in knowing that I have done something worthwhile. Then I can sweep the floor, order office supplies, or attend a fruitless meeting.

If you deny the reality of your imaginative efforts, you may find yourself having only bad days—days in which nothing you can say or do seems to have any impact or relevance. As life seems to be made up of 90% drudgery, it’s up to us to make the other 10% noble, and more importantly, to ascribe a disproportionately greater value to that slice. The 90% may include “facts” such as those found in the news, non-fiction books, and “reality” TV shows. It’s no wonder we are depressed when we surrender our lives to these, for in the vast majority of cases they have nothing whatsoever to do with us, represent only that which is beyond our control, and offer no chance for us to exercise our willpower and imagination. These things which we consider reality are nothing but a prescription for death unless you are capable of sizing up those manufactured realities to yours. Franklin D. Roosevelt, living in the midst of troubles hitherto unknown to humankind, and also by the way responsible for solving them, would imagine himself sledding as a boy down the slopes near his mother’s home in Hyde Park. He imagined the thrill and ease of being able to move without the confines of leg braces and a wheelchair; he did this often before falling asleep. Thus was he able, the following morning, to continue guiding millions of Americans through economic ruin, sacrifice, and the burning losses of war. When your mind is free, there’s no telling what you can endure.
 

A friend of mine once said that when he thought of me, he saw me standing with arms outstretched, with forces tugging at either side. I suppose I made that impression because I tend to see both points of view; I will purposely seek to experience something that runs counter to my grain, to understand as much as I might about all the polar opposites in this world. In my mind, experience fuels imagination, and imagination gives reason to experience. Maybe these are the two forces that are pulling me, and pulling everyone, in opposite directions. In twenty-first century America, it seems, experience outweighs imagination, but without imagination, I can think of no reason to proceed with anything. After all, the principles our country was founded on are not winning, outsmarting, gobbling up possessions or knowledge, and condescending to our neighbors. Quite the opposite. This nation was founded on principles that are not easily quantifiable; they live in the realm of imagination: honor, equality, liberty, universal rights. The founding fathers must have seen the future, and the future would depend largely on these principles. Now that we are here in the future, it is pretty evident that we need to live for something. Many take refuge today in fundamentalist versions of religions, but that appears to be a cop out, for it absolves us of any imaginative effort that is sorely needed to address the host of contemporary problems we have created for ourselves. The sacred books still speak to us, but they speak most clearly in context; we need men and women of superior imagination to shed new light on them, precisely the way the writers of these texts shed light on their own troubled times.
 

Carl Jung has said that, in modern society, all we have left to make a mark, to live well and honorably, is to be in touch with our unconscious selves, to understand that aspect of ourselves and profit by it. It is the only true possession we own. We may feel insignificant and powerless in the face of behemoth industrial, political, and communications machines, but in the end, each of us can use our individual, miraculous palettes to paint our own realities, realities that can, as they have many times in the past, change the world.