IMAGINATION, POWER, AND THE NECESSITY OF CREATIVE PLAY

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real
All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody's head

Peter Gabriel, "Mercy Street"

THE ABILITY TO REASON, to draw conclusions from observation and experience, has been crucial to the success of the human species.  Of this there can be little doubt.  But the flip side of reason, the ability to see the world "as it is," is the ability to see the world "as it might be."  This power, imagination, is one of our most extraordinary gifts.  It is not merely the source of our arts and cultures, but our technologies as well.  It lies close to the heart of what makes us--for now, at least--the dominant species on the planet.

Despite its power (or perhaps because of it), imagination tends to make people a bit nervous.  Like magic, a word to which it is related, imagination is at turns dismissed, trivialized, and condemned.  There is a sense that it must be restrained, sanctioned, quarantined.  We chuckle at it in children, but expect them to bridle it in adolescence and enter the "real world" (something I have written about here). We could argue this is due to its mercurial nature; imagination is often erratic and unpredictable, acting as an external muse rather than something we switch on and off like a coffee maker.  Imaginative work is a sort of dance, where the imagination acts as an equal partner rather than a subordinate.  As any artist will tell you, imagination needs to be wined and dined.  It can be controlled, but doing so cripples and eventually withers it.  To really let imagination do its thing, you have to be willing to let go. But most people only feel comfortable engaging with imagination in a limited, controlled way--such as by reading a novel, playing a video game, or watching a television program.  Actually unleashing it and allowing oneself to be carried away is usually left to artists...widely considered an odd bunch to begin with.

It's unfortunate that such attitudes exist, that people are afraid of letting their imaginations "run away with them."  It is also completely understandable.  At issue here is the nature of "power," and of society's attitudes towards it.

The beginning of despair lies in being unable to imagine anything better.  That leads to surrender.

There is a deep misunderstanding of what "power" is.  The word comes to us via French from the Latin potis, "to be able, capable," and is cousin to the English words potential and possibile.  There is a hint to its identity in this.  While we are generally taught that power is synonymous with "control," as in power "over" something, true power is the capacity to do and more importantly to create.  On some level we all understand this; Abrahamic faiths often refer to God, the Supreme Power, as the "Creator," and few aspects of human existence are treated with as much awe and sanctity as the power to create new human life.  Paradoxically we look askew at imaginative power, the power to create new ideas.  Indeed, it has often been said that the tragedies of history all stem from a lack of imagination.  It goes back to the obsession with control, and the desire by societies to control, regulate, and dictate the ideas that make up that particular culture.  When we talk about dictators wanting to control what people think, what we are really saying is that authoritarians want to control what people can imagine.  The beginning of despair lies in being unable to imagine anything better.  That leads to surrender.  In the interest of keeping control, those at the top of a society must limit the populace's ability to dream.

So very few of us then allow ourselves the experience of imagination as creative play.  This is tragic, because the imagination--like a muscle--only grows stronger with use.  Many of the same activities that lead to weakness of the body simultaneously lead to weakness of the imagination.  Sitting passively watching the latest big budget superhero film, the new season of Game of Thrones, or playing the most recent release of a favorite video game all seem to be exercises in imagination, but in reality these are mediums where all the imagining has already been done for you.  This benefits both authority and the entertainment industry--which like a drug dealer makes the public dependent on its product for "escape"--but does little to benefit the individual.  This is especially pernicious for children.  Where once they went outside to run and play, making up their own adventures and stories, today they remain indoors spoon-fed someone else's.

We end up in a situation, then, where people require re-education to do what should be completely natural for them.  No, not everyone should have equal imaginative capabilities, any more than we should all be able to lift the same amount or run just as fast, but we should all know at least how to sit down and make up stories, close our eyes and visualize, or engage in creative play without feeling self conscious about it.  Even reading--which like sex or dance is a creative pairing between two individuals, one providing the words and the other painting the images in his or her head--is becoming less common these days.  I have no doubt that this deterioration of imagination lies at the heart of many of the political movements we see these days, and I feel strongly enough about this to write an entire blog about it. 

...the key to a better life, for oneself, one's family, one's society, lies first in the ability to imagine one.

The connective tissue in all that I discuss here is imagination as creative play, a guilty pleasure that so many people have been taught to keep away from.  But the key to a better life, for oneself, one's family, one's society, lies first in the ability to imagine one.  This is the Promethean theft of fire from the gods.  It is the mercurial and awe inspiring heart of true magic. The first step in attaining this power is to allow oneself to go against oppressive norms and prohibitions intended to stifle it.  The road to freedom begins with allowing oneself to engage in the simple magic of childhood, to give oneself time to play.        

    

THE LOOKING GLASS

Let's get our definitions out-of-the-way first;

Objective universe: the part of existence which can be sensed and quantified. It is the mechanical/organic cosmic order characterized by its regularity and predictability, by the presence of laws.

Subjective universe: the "world" of any sentient entity within the universe. There are as many subjective universes as there are sentient beings, each is the particularized manifestation of consciousness within the universe.

THE FIRST THING you learn as a magician is that there are two worlds, the one of the senses, and the one inside our heads. The second thing you learn, is that a great deal of mischief arises from confusing the two planes. Uber magician Aleister Crowley, once warned his students before beginning on any magical curriculum;

1. This book is very easy to misunderstand; readers are asked to use the most minute critical care in the study of it, even as we have done in its preparation.

2. In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

I have often thought a similar warning should preface the Bible.

Because "objective reality" and "philosophic validity" is exactly what too many religious people ascribe to the gods and spirits in their respective religions. Over the years, I have met people ready to attest to the palpable presence of Allah in their lives, or the Buddha, or Krishna, or Jesus Christ. And I believe them; I have no doubt that these entities are absolutely real for them. But this is where I always remember Crowley's warning. Just because they are real for them in their subjective universe does not mean they exist as objective realities, and more harm than good arises from believing that they do.

But this is also the mistake that atheists and positivists make. Simply because your microscope tells you differently, doesn't mean that Communion doesn't really become flesh and blood. It does; but inside the confines of the subjective universe. All the gods that ever were are totally real, even if they did not leave a shred of DNA evidence behind. And yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. They exist on a separate frequency from the material, the same frequency that the imagination vibrates upon.

Which does not in any way make them less real than a virus, or gravity. Make no mistake; ideas too can kill. This is the third thing that every magician must learn to understand; that the boundaries between the objective and subjective universes can be crossed. Alice can pass through the Looking Glass, but so too can the Red Queen.

We all know this but we forget. Objective experiences become memories, thoughts, and impressions all the time everyday of our lives. The subjective universe is a mirror that reflects images of the objective world. But it is also so much more than that, and that is the gift of being human. The reason that magic is classified as an "art" is because it takes something born in the subjective world and moves it into the objective. Like all arts, both fine and industrial, it is all about taking an idea and using it to reshape the objective world. It is about turning the mirror around so that the objective world reflects the subjective. This is why, of course, it is ridiculous to dismiss subjective realities as simply delusions or dreams. Too often they escape the confines of their cages and rampage around the "real" world.

As a magician my purpose is to go deep into the subjective world and summon things out of it. This dovetails nicely with my work as a writer. But that's nothing new; the connection between the Word and magic is deep and ancient. We speak of spells and spellings, grammar and grimoire. And all the old gods of magic--Hermes, Mecury, Odin, Thoth--were patrons of communication too. The spirits conjured by great writers have touched millions; who doesn't know Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, or Ebeneezer Scrooge? They move invisibly around us, occasionally seizing possession of actors, not unlike the loa of voudon. All writers--and artists--are magicians, and vice versa.

And here is where we come to the point.

The secret that magicians possess, the one that positivists and theologians lack, is that the objective reality of the spirits we conjure is wholly irrelevant; what matters is their ability to effect the world. Just as the identity of light as photons or waves changes with perspective, so too does the reality of gods and spirits depending on whether your vantage point is in the objective or subjective world. Theists and atheists will squabble endlessly over the existence of God, but the magician knows they are both correct. Further, he is more interested in how "God" effects things than proving or disproving him, just as with any other subjective being. And in the end this might be the greatest point of contention between magic and religion; the magician is concerned with what the gods can do for us, not what we can do for them. This is why it is impossible for me to bow down and worship a god; I am by extension bowing down to the magician who conjured it, and whether his "spell" is meant to control who I sleep with or to persuade me to fly an airplane into a skyscraper, I would be a poor magician indeed to fall under it. I am, however, entitled to listen to the gods conjured by other people. Jesus of Nazareth does not need to be the Lord and Savior of my own subjective universe for me to give him an ear. As a magician, I am free to listen to and to learn from any god, spirit, or devil and weigh what they have to say equally.

Which brings me to the fourth and final secret that being a magician has taught me; the definition of what a "spirit" is. It is more than just the personification of a phenomenon, it is the imposition of meaning on phenomena. We know this when we talk about the "spirit" as opposed to the "letter" of something, or the "spirit" of how it was intended. The objective universe is completely devoid of meaning; it just "is." But our inner subjective worlds are fraught with meaning, bursting with it. Magic, and art, are struggles to bridge the two worlds and infuse our lives with meaning, with spirit, but to be fully aware that we are the ones doing the defining. We must avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of accepting that life is meaningless or that it comes already defined. It is our job to do magic, to transmute lead into gold, and to give meaning to our own existences. That is the greatest magic there is.

Since I began with Aleister, I would like to finish with him as well.  

"...WHY should you study and practice Magick (sic)?  Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."

LOVECRAFT - A LOVE LETTER

"One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them."

- H.P. Lovecraft

LIKE ONE OF THE CYCLOPEAN entities he so often wrote about, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) towers over the landscape of 20th century horror fiction. None of us, who work in the genre, can escape his shadow. He is just that big.

He changed the entire game. Before Lovecraft, we had ghosts and demons and vampires, witches and werewolves, goblins and revenants. Horror was rooted in the old supernatural models of the ancient and medieval worlds. It came from curses by God(s), the sins and transgressions of man, the wickedness of devils after the human soul. As horrible as the vampire is, for example, he is also comforting. The fact that he is repelled by all that is holy proves the existence and superiority of God. Before Lovecraft, horror was a moral fable, a test of man's courage and goodness by eternal evil.

And Lovecraft dropped the H-bomb on it all.

You have to put yourself in his place, in the places of all those living in the dawn of the 20th century. Everything they knew was turning out to be wrong. Sure, they knew the sun didn't go round the Earth, but they thought the Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Then it became just one of billions of galaxies. The entire human race was reduced to a status smaller than microbes on a tiny speck of dust. Classical physics were being shattered by things like Einstein's theory of relativity, making the Enlightenment notion of God the Clock Maker look like a bad joke. And paleontology proved the world wasn't five thousand years old, wasn't created for us. It was millions of years old, and dominated by many other species before us. They came, they went extinct. Was there any real reason to believe we were destined for anything else?

If you can understand the psychic trauma of those decades between the Victorian and Cold War eras, then Lovecraft is easy to get.

His early fiction played around with the supernatural, but he rapidly discarded such causes for science fiction ones. You may never have read a Lovecraft tale, but if you saw Ridley Scott's Alien, you have experienced the kind of Horror Lovecraft created. In his fiction, there is no God, no cosmic forces of good and evil. Man is just a life form in a cosmic full of beings larger, older, and nastier.

And it wasn't just the scientific odor surrounding his creations; Lovecraft was a master of documentary fiction. He knew how to make you swallow it. He created texts, towns, and beings that showed up in dozens of tales, ideas that he freely allowed his imitators to borrow. He gave them rich and detailed histories. His infamous black book, the dread Necronomicon, appeared in so many tales, but so many authors, that people were looking for it in library card catalogues just a few decades after his death. Indeed, starting in the seventies, people started publishing what they claimed to be "real" copies of the book.

He died young. He died in poverty. He died alone. No one paid him any serious attention during his lifetime, except for a circle of ardent fans and imitators who understood the sheer--and pardon my French--fucking genius of what he was doing. His life was miserable and short, his fiction confined to weird tales magazines. By the end of the century though, his books sat alongside Twain, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck in collections of great American literature. And it belonged there. HPL changed the entire game.

There is a superb episode of Doctor Who in which the time traveling protagonist takes Vincent Van Gough to a museum in the 21st century to show the painter--who also died scorned and penniless--his legacy. I can't help but wonder how HPL would react to his. His new cosmic horror is everywhere, but what would he think of the affection his horrors are held in? What would he make of plush-toy Cthulhu (Lovecraft's Cthulhu here)?

TOLKIEN

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work...unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism"

- Tolkien, from a personal letter

I am probably the last person on Earth who should be a Tolkien admirer. As a skeptical materialist, and what the late Christopher Hitchens called an "anti-theist," Tolkien's Catholic-derived world view is diametrically opposed to mine. It isn't simply that, as a rational person, I find no evidence at all for the claims of the Catholic (or any other religion). It isn't that as someone who spent seven years at university studying various religions I find it remarkable for one person to wholeheartedly embrace the one he was raised in and dismiss the claims of others. Rather, like Hitchens I find the idea of supreme, unquestionable "leader" who makes all the rules and must be followed absolutely repugnant in the extreme. It is an insult to the things that I really do hold dear, such as intellectual freedom, self-determination, and personal liberty. Thus, were I trapped in Tolkien's Middle-earth, I would probably end up in league with Melkor and Sauron. Yet despite all of this, J.R.R. Tolkien is one of my favorite writers, and in part due to his religious vision.

The Philologist

The most obvious level where my interests intersect with Tolkien's is in his fascination with words, where they come from, and how their meanings evolve over time. Tolkien was a philologist, which means he was something of a literary archaeologist, digging through layers of language and text to uncover the past. Though this was never quite my area of interest, in my own university work linguistics played a very important part, as a key tool in studying the origins of mythologies and religions and how they develop from earlier ones. But Tolkien was one of the foremost philologists of his day, and even if he had never written The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings his studies of Beowulf or fairy stories would have been achievement enough. And in many ways philology is the engine that drove his literary work.

In some ways, Tolkien didn't see himself as "inventing" Middle-earth so much as "unearthing" it. Most modern fantasists are essentially people who "make shit up." They pull names, places, characters, and races out of thin air. There's nothing wrong with this, and some--like Howard, Moorcock, or these days Martin--do it very, very well. But it is categorically wrong to put Tolkien in the same lot. True, he did "make shit up." He invented two Elven languages and a bit of Dwarvish. But even these were linguistically inspired by Welsh, Finnish, and Hebrew. And in the case of the Elvish tongues, they were wholly consistent. Hell, I've met people who have learned to speak them. But aside from this act of invention, Tolkien was doing something very different. He was trying to answer questions.

For example, it bothered him that fairy tales had things like dwarves running around in them. There are dwarves in the Norse sagas. There are dwarves in King Arthur. There are dwarves in Snow White. But none of these bother to explain to us what the hell a dwarf is. The reader is just assumed to know all about dwarves, which indicated to Tolkien that at the time these stories first appeared, people did know about them. And so he set out to try an make an educated guess what those original dwarves might have been. The same goes for his elves and his dragons, and most of Middle-earth.

One of my favorite examples of his thought processes is the character of Gandalf. As is now well known, Tolkien took the names of his dwarves and the wizard accompanying them in The Hobbit from a fragment of the Old Norse Völuspá called "The Catalogue of the Dwarves." Basically, this is just a list of dwarf names without any context. But what bothered Tolkien, as a philologist, was the one name blatantly standing out in the list. With names like Nori and Bifurr and Bomburr and Fili and Kili, there was a "Gandalf." Gand-alf. "Wand-elf." Now, an elf was certainly not the same thing as a dwarf in Old Norse mythology, so what the hell was an elf doing in a catalogue of dwarves? And what, pray tell, was a "wand elf?" Norse had its Light Elves and Dark Elves and Wood Elves, but "wand elves?" Or was a wand elf something like an elf, immortal and magical, but carrying a wand or a staff? Was it a "wizard?" And if it was a wizard, did these wizards come from the same place the Elves did? Across the Sea? All of this is just one example of how Tolkien's work was to create a mythical origin for the fragments of legend and folklore we have left to us today. (As a side note, there is a great deal of another fragment, "Beowulf," in The Hobbit. The character of Gollum in his cave strongly recalls 'Grendel,' and the man-bear Beorn resembles Beowulf (whose name mean 'bee-wolf,' or 'bear'). And just like the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Hobbit ends with a dragon as well.)

The Believer

As I mentioned though, in part my admiration for Tolkien is because of his faith.

The hallmark of all great fantasy is a strong, overriding world view. All the truly enduring fantasy worlds have a paradigm which informs them, a lens through which the setting understands itself. Perhaps it is because of our sympathy for certain paradigms over others that different people find themselves attracted to different settings; they show us the world the way we choose to believe it really is. In this way, fantastic fiction is a bit like philosophy or religion.

Consider Howard. Howard's Hyborian Age has no absolutes, no good, no truth, and no real evil (its demons may be alien and inhuman, but don't qualify as evil the way Melkor does, because there is no absolute good to be the opposite of). The Hyborian Age is an almost Nietzschean paradigm where strength is the only real virtue. The central tension in the Conan stories is between barbarism and civilization. Michael Moorcock (author of the influential "Elric," "Hawkmoon," and "Corum" sagas, offers a very different paradigm. His work seems to say that any absolute—in his case absolute Law or absolute Chaos—is intrinsically unbearable and that the only wholesome route lies through balance.

But in Tolkien's Middle-earth we have a world which does has an absolute truth. Eru created the world, and those who live in accordance with the “mind of Eru” are good while those who go against it are bad. Goodness, truth, and righteousness are the rewards of those who side with Eru and the Valar. Those who defy Eru, from Melkor and Sauron right down to the Easterlings, fall into error and ultimately suffer. This is the kind of absolutism offered by Tolkien's own devout Catholicism.

I world argue that it is this quality which makes Tolkien's work powerful, largely because it is coherent and flows through all his work (the same could be said for Lovecraft, but from a very different perspective). But in addition to this, it is the striking absence of the trappings of Catholicism which makes Tolkien extraordinary. "God" does not appear in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. There is no "Jesus," no "Church," no depictions of worship of any kind. Instead, Tolkien uses what he believes to be Catholic themes--of hope and compassion and redemption--to express his religious views, and these things are universal enough to touch anyone. He does not, as his friend C.S. Lewis did, simply regurgitate the Gospels under a thin mask of fairy tale. Instead, he took what he felt to be the true core of his beliefs and used it to lead him through his tale.

I could go on. I haven't yet mentioned the man's staggering diversity of styles (The Hobbit reading as a fairy tale, The Lord of the Rings reading as a history, The Silmarillion reading as mythology, The Children of Hurin reading as classical tragedy, etc) nor the brilliant ways he bridges the gap between Semitic religious tradition (Christianity) with Indo-European. For brevity I will omit this. Rather, I will close by saying Tolkien is one of those writers I come back to time and time again, and would place easily in my pantheon of the top ten. And this despite our agreeing to disagree. For while I would describe the telling of tales as a Promethean thing, stealing fire from heaven so to speak and becoming as gods ourselves, Tolkien would say;

"We have come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall."

And that's really just two ways of saying the same thing.