What is imagination?
Resisting a definition
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these, I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. […] You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me, this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination…”
- William Blake’s letter to the Reverend John Trusler in 1799. (Trusler had commissioned Blake to illustrate some of his texts but complained about the results as ‘too imaginative’.)
In a recent online dialogue from the Centre for Climate Psychology, one of the speakers suggested early on that “It is tempting but perhaps misleading to try and abstract a definition away from the moments in which imagination speaks. So I love to encounter it in the moment.”
This resistance to the temptation to 'define' something like imagination appeals to me, here in the early stages of the creative enquiry that I hope ClimateCultures & more will become. Seeking a definition early on is certainly tempting, however, and my natural inclination is for just the sort of clarity or agreement that definitions at least seem to offer. But that quick judgement on the ‘whatness’ of something can close down a fruitful exploration of what its ‘what-might-be-ness’ has to offer. What we risk then is that the prescribed words do the imagining for us.
Climate change and the imagination — you can find the recording of the event at the link, although it is behind the Centre's paywall — brought together poet Alice Oswald, theologian and scholar-musician Valentin Gerlier, painter and cultural strategist Alan Boldon and theologian & poet Rowan Williams, to explore the role of imagination in times of planetary emergency. Each offered insights drawn from their own creative practices, illuminating the value of our imaginative capacity — individual, collective, cultural — in helping us to engage more fully with our climate and nature crises.
Moving between modes
For me, that imaginative capacity is a means to open up our own reflections and our conversations and how we listen to others so that we don't rush too quickly to the 'obvious' solution. There are many solutions on offer, each one blindingly obvious to their advocates, all of whom are pushing to capture the common ground on its behalf. And we do need solutions. We do need agreements on which ones to enact and how. We do need shared commitments to a long-term vision.
And we need all that twenty years ago. So ‘rush’ seems a perverse accusation to bandy about. The feeling that someone should decide now and everyone else should fall in line now is a natural response to our sense of urgency within the emergency. But an impulse to resist the rush does not mean 'Delay' so much as 'Pay attention'. It's an invitation to resist (that word again) the foreclosing of possibilities, the silencing of quieter voices — those inside us as well as those in the room with us, and those beyond.
As one speaker put it, "To talk about the inadequacy of problem-solving is not to say that we shouldn’t try to solve problems. It’s that if you start with the aim of solving problems in the abstract ... you end up with a solution wandering around, looking for a problem because the solution sounds so good." That cul-de-sac is itself a product of our collective imaginations, of course: "when we plunge forward using an imagination that we’re not really aware of but that is telling us certain stories about who we are and what we are ... there are real, actual problems which our imaginations are blurring from us and putting at a distance."
Another quoted the poet John Donne: “He who would approach the hill of truth, about must go.” That ‘about must’ might be about moving between different modes — science, reason, logic, intuition, imagination. So I think imagination is sometimes exiled, and people are coming up with very big, global technical fixes for what we’re engaged with and they’re brilliant at doing that, but actually the process of finding the question that they’re trying to answer was very limited."
A third speaker addressed the question of avoiding the temptation to rush to solutions by saying, "Imagination has the word ‘image’ in it. We tend to prioritise image when we think about imagination, but I think it is really a temporal faculty, and it includes slowness and patience as part of its armoury. So there is something that you only learn slowly about."
Between unknown and the known
Within the notes that I took were fascinating glimpses of the creativity of imagination when seen as a tangible process that we engage in (cannot help but engage in), rather than something abstract that we take possession of only at particular moments. Reading back through them and selecting a few, I offer them up freed from names and the linear flow of an isolated conversation. Each quote feels like the start of a new conversation.
“The imagination is an ancient kind of thinking which moves by means of likeness … the setting of one kind of likeness after another. ... Seeing the internal lives of other living beings, I suppose.”
"It has this sense of a portal between the unknown and the known. There’s a sort of threshold aspect of the imagination.”
"It’s something that happens whenever what is in front of our senses is something we recognise as where we start from, not where we finish. ... So starting from what is in front of us we have to have a kind of stillness, an attentiveness to what is there. We don’t start imagining by drifting away from what is before us."
“Imagination is always present in all our ways of thinking and acting, including analytical. They are dependent on implicit imaginaries that is always at work, perhaps especially when they least seem to be at work. In this time of great difficulty, we’re called upon to see how imagination could be a unitive faculty or thread among spheres of our lives which seem to be so disconnected and disparate."
"Imagination is more like an action than a noun or house or place that you enter. And for me it is the way we are when we’re using the whole of our apprehension. So it’s perhaps a manner of tuning and connecting up the senses. And it tunes and connects up the memory, which gives it this feeling of being somewhere actual. And then it also connects to the will. And when all those faculties are engaged, you not only feel as if you are dealing with something that is already there because you have it in your memory but you are also able to alter it according to your character."
“Imagination pushes back against a ‘Here I stop’ approach to the world in front of me. … An idolatry of short-term problem solving increasingly atrophies our capacity to listen for the joining up … We are in a culture that doesn’t understand metaphor, that thinks about thinking in a deeply flawed and impoverished way.”
"That’s why a cultural universe which doesn’t attend to all this is one that freezes, paralyses, petrifies, shrinks, because it doesn’t wait for the resonances to emerge.”
“And imagining is not just a way of doing something but of being fed. A sense that there is a world that wants to nourish us, which wants to fill the spaces in us, which wants to flourish and live within us. We’re not allowing ourselves to be fed. A non-imaginative or anti-imaginative world is one in which we don’t do ourselves justice, never mind anyone else. We refuse ourselves the nourishment we need.”
"The heart of education is nourishing, is feeding the imagination. And an essential aspect of the imagination is its vulnerability, its open-endedness, its constant dealings with the unknown. In such a way that there is no clear outcome."
"So there’s an invitation there really to notice to what extent imaginative thinking is always with us. And when we’re not paying attention to it and being in relationship with it certain imaginaries just gradually take hold and do the imagining for us. … An invitation to come back to our humanity, to come back to whatever being human means. It’s such a fundamental component, that imaginative dimension or imaginal dimension.”
Weaving some new thing
And, in a final snippet that I hope captures the essence of where ClimateCultures & more and other imaginative efforts can help:
"Dialogue, I think, is a practice or a craft. It’s not simply having a conversation and saying yes or no: ‘I agree’, ‘I don’t agree’. But in the art of a meaningful, organic conversation there is more than an exchange of views. There is a weaving together some new thing, which is the result of our encounter. And out of the result of our encounter, which hopefully will engage however many imaginations are in the room, some new thing emerges and that new thing is not just the summary of all our views but is genuinely different, genuinely distinct."
The Centre for Climate Psychology offers online learning and practices that transform embedded cultural, emotional and relational habits. “We weave psychological and systemic wisdom into the way we think, act and lead in a time of upheaval.”
And at ClimateCultures, there is a wealth of creative responses across our blog archive from 2017 to right now, as well as our Creative Showcase and Longer feature and other series.
This post is part of our new series here on ClimateCultures & more:
Starting a creative enquiry with climate & nature - Opening up to imagination in times of crisis
Making the invisible visible - Photography in conversation with the world
Object lessons in the Anthropocene - The power of small stories to connect across time and place
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A fascinating essay to engage my brain on a Saturday morning. Thanks Mark. I particularly like your observation around the imaginative capacity connecting to ‘how we listen to others so that we don't rush too quickly’. I felt this could also apply to the creative industry I coach in, because many artists and writers under the pressure of productivity can start creating as soon as an idea first nudges, without giving more time to listen. This rushing as I see it connects to what you say about imagination ’as a tangible process that we engage in (cannot help but engage in), rather than something abstract that we take possession of only at particular moments.’ If we trust that, we do slow down, rather than act on that first idea that comes through because we don’t know when the next might come!