without it, there would be no dreams, no hope, no drive to stay at work because we may get promoted.
without imagination we would have no patience.
i mean by what other means would i be able to win the lottery and move to louisville, open up a small video rentail place, which would also be a photography exhibit, in which i display and sell only-prints of my and other locals' works. get a studio apartment and have parties every weekend, in which people would have a lounge and a few cool arcade games to hang out by, plenty of alcohol, a jukebox, a small dance floor, and a movie room?
in what other way can i have the starring role in a real life movie-like scene in which two people who are desperately in love reunite for the first time in way too long, and to them words are nothing but sounds that express not enough, and so they tell eachother more than they know by smiling and standing there in silence for minutes that pretend to be h
ours?how else can i sit at my desk, with greying hair and an unkept beard, smoking a pipe, translating a very succesfull european book that is about to make its debut in america; and my wife, who(although the years have given her wrinkles on her face and taken away the pigment from her hair), by her very presence, reminds me that i am the luckiest man alive, brings me a cup of tea. and while she places it down in front of me on my desk, she puts her other arm around me and kisses my head. then she sits next no me, in a rocking chair, knitting, or smoking, or reading, or pleasantly playing an instrument. and we are both happy to just be able to sit by eachother, and we smile. and we are happy, because we know with every inch of our hearts that we have found true love. and even though we live in a house made of wood, surrounded by trees and nature, we would want nothing else.
i am very grateful for imagination.
1 comment:
this is a comment my friend joseph love made about my post. for some reason he sent it to me as a message,but i thought it was more than share worthy:
I've recognized this before, and told you, but you're a very good writer.
This, by the way, is in response to your note on imagination.
I've thought about your note for a while, Sarah read it to me over the phone one night. Ever being contrary, I can't help but fall into the dusty thoughts of the 18th century, that imagination, in bulk, is detrimental. In what other pasttime than daydreaming can one lose oneself entirely to whims and made-up realities?
How, when people are through with me personally, can I wipe the slate clean and dust their chalk from my mind, pass it off as "fate" or "not meant to last"? I only fool myself. Somewhere there was a problem, a real life problem, and I only imagine it was with the other person, and not me.
And when I close my eyes and follow the colors that pulse from my eyelids, and dream of floating in nothing, maybe in space, maybe in some unconscious abyss, how destructive is it to wake up and have my senses overwhelmed by the persistence of everything?
Can I dream of anything worse than to be a writer, than to accept failure over and over and continue to trick myself that my break is just one brilliant sentence away? And what perpetuates this dream is my imagination.
It is within my imagination that I live, holding onto the idea that I can have a perfect marriage, knowing a love unknown to all. It is my imagination that demands the impossibility of normalcy, that demands we are all different, and that I am not alone in that. I imagine myself smarter than I am, better looking than I am, and wiser than I am. I imagine myself a better friend, and happier than I think I've ever actually been.
So, is this all that destructive, if other people imagine things this way, if they imagine me to be as I imagine myself, because my imagination makes me project myself this way, or if others imagine life as I do? If we all imagine ourselve at the centers of our existences, then how different are we, and what difference does it make if we fall face first into the abyss of self-deception?
If I can keep ignorant to the pitfalls of all this glory-thinking, then I'm good. I certainly won't ever turn my back on imagination, but I certainly won't let it think it's pulling something over on me. Imagination is a fox, jumpy and hard to catch. But, there's no need to catch it, or for it to stand still.
Maybe what I'm against is the glibness of reality. The mounds of homework, the sadness of being 5 hours away from whom I love, money I don't have, money I owe, mistakes I've made, and the always-exhaustion. And maybe Imagination delivers me from the wilderness, pampers me for a while, sets blinders on my head and massages me into happiness. Surely this is what the great thinkers of the 18th century were so upset about. People being happy.
Anyway. Tally-ho, imagination.
Post a Comment