What is Imagination?

good evening I'm Frances levy co-director of the Philip Teddy said there I'm pleased to welcome you to tonight's roundtable what is imagination which marks the beginning of our inaugural weekend since the inception of this project we spent many wonderful evenings discussing everything from Coleridge and the workings of the child's mind to the impulses to collect to form nations to abstract and to evaluate artworks but amidst all the heady talk and when we say heady in the context of the Philip Tate 'center we mean it literally it is easy to forget that the discussion of the brain ultimately has to do with emotion for instance I'm the funder of the Philip Katie Center but what made me start to write the checks those who know me well attest to the fact that I don't write checks all that easily and I look in certain quarters over there and what made me choose the name Philip Tate ease here are two everyday acts of imagination the answer to why I did them is rather simple first imagination is the palette of psychoanalysis and I'm a patient so I was interested in imagination and I was interested in applying psychoanalytic theory to art another of my interests second in the graduate program in drama in which I was enrolled I had studied Sophocles full of teddys which tells a story of the ostracized warrior with the noxious wound who also holds the key to the Greeks victory at Troy I then gone on to read Edmund Wilson's the wound and the bow in which the myth was transposed into modern literature trauma and insight none of the auspicious attendees at one of our early round tables liked the idea but I stuck with the name another emotional rather than intellectual decision though I do have to confess a certain degree of perplexity about why many artists reject the notion that pain motivates creativity obviously I'm not out to disparage intellect I just have to remind myself that it was a motion that got me here and that my liking being around the group of artists and scientists who comprise our advisory board is not rational however reasonable and intellectual the results may be for instance when dr. Edward recession our co-director introduced me to a psychoanalytic essay on imagination which describes the process of mental representation that allows the child to separate from the mother by maintaining an image of her in it's mined it's stuck what allows me to read and retain what are the forces and filters that make us like this and hate that what makes us fall in love when we first gathered artists and scientists together Edie asked them what their ideal imagination Institute would be no one directly answered the question but we had no problem with adherence Antonio Damasio Joanna Coachella Laurie Anderson Sharon Knowles Elaine Pagels Jonathan leer Len Chen gold Marcel kins born Jason Brown were all part of these early exercises and self-definition and many became part of our permanent advisory board along the way we successfully formed partnerships with the National Academy Museum and film form the latter turning into a regular film series in which we previewed such movies as in the realms of the unreal writer of oh and Ballet Russe we also funded our first project a study of intuition and education conducted by Oliver Turnbull of the University of Wales some results of which will incidentally be presented in the course of the weekend our initial conversations took place in Edgar sessions living room and we hope that the emphysema intimacy of our new space with its round table setting will still stimulate you as an audience to become active participants in this endeavor from Ed's first question what would your ideal imagination institute be to tonight's topic what is imagination might not seem like progress if contemplating imagination is a little like 15 century explorers setting out to discover a new world we've barely made it out of the shipyard but it reminds me of what the Nobel laureate and cell biologist Christian de d'oeuvres said at one of our recent panels evolution isn't a theory it's a fact imagination isn't a theory it's a fact it has to be progress when you're ready to hit the nail on the head before we begin tonight's program thanks are in order I have already mentioned ed recession the co-director of the Philip Katie Center who has taught me so much and whose vibrant ideas an astonishing work ethic have infused all our projects I have had two great collaborations in my life one with my downstairs neighbor Claudia Mayer on the repair of her ceiling which is my floor and this one with that nurse aciem seriously Edie Edie has been fearless he's been tenacious and inspired in the prosecution of his ideas and returns emails almost as quickly as I do I also want to thank Ellen Frederick our programming director Matthew Vaughn unworthy a coordinator and our other staff members Adam Ludwick Kristen Parekh Jeb Knight and Sam Sagar we congratulate Matthew Vaughn unworthy on the recent publication of his book Freud's Requiem lastly I would like to thank Mary Lou Allen who's mrs. Edward no seccion for her constant input on all our projects and for her graciousness patience and insights I would also like to thank my wife Holly Cohen for her inspiration support and loving criticism Holly has always edited me and I know she would have expunged these very lines if she had seen them rest assured without Holly's editorial comments tonight's address would have dragged on even further than it already has I would also like to remind audience members to turn their cell phones off and so now I finally give you Edna seccion who will introduce tonight's panelists the participants of the roundtable tonight or Marsha cavil who is a philosopher and a psychoanalyst and teaches at the University of Burt California Berkeley taught at the University of California Berkeley and her latest book which will be available in 2006 his reflections on philosophy and psychoanalysis Harry go ahead it's called becoming a subject Harry Ayers is a journalist a poet a teacher a theater critic and in my book also very important because he's a wine writer he writes a column for the Financial Times weekend and it's the column that kind of sets me straight every weekend and makes me go away from my work and relax Rocco Landesman is a theatrical producer very successful one he's produced the producers proof and he's also an operator of ta Broadway theatres owns and operates Broadway theatres and has written essays for the New York Times rick moody is a novelist and an author and i'm sure you all know his books the ice storm demonology purple america nedra room is an internationally known composers Pulitzer Prize winner renowned Irish tan essays on music and his I believe authored fourteen books CK Williams is a pulitzer winning poet and has been won numerous awards aside from the pulitzer and he teaches writing at the at the program at Princeton University the way I moderate these meetings is that I essentially do what Halleck own calls non moderating moderating which means I don't do anything but I try to encourage the participants to get into a kind of spontaneous conversation as if they were sitting in my living room and having had a couple of glasses of wine were relaxed and we're talking about the subject which I realized is not a very easy subject but with that this occurred to me especially given the place he wrote a pump called in memory of Sigmund Freud right after Freud died and basically what he did was poeta size Freud's ideas make them imagine that a Freud was already imaginative enough and what he did was recast the ideas in what we would call a poetical way and poetically imaginative way so I'll just read up the first three stanzas which are really his presentation of the theory of repression which is one might say is really at the base of most of Freud's insights he wasn't clever at all he merely told the unhappy present to recite the past like a poetry lesson till sooner or later it faltered at the line where long ago the accusations had begun and suddenly new by whom it had been judged her rich life had been and how silly and was life forgiving and more humble able to approach the future as a friend without a wardrobe of excuses without a set mask of rectitude or an embarrassing over-familiar gesture you think that's an adequate presentation it goes terrific yes I haven't read it along while I was surprised to hear it but I was thinking I'd been thinking a little bit when I was this subject what is the imagination I find somewhat daunting is it it almost seemed too big to take on and I found it slightly easier to think what wasn't the imagination or what came into my mind was the image of an unimaginative person and and there are a lot of those around I think and a lot of them unfortunately in high places and maybe some in this room even I'm sure we can all be like this person could be a government spokesman certainly in my country we will be talking about targets and objectives and national curricula and or it could be a kind of person he was invading another country without even thinking what they were doing or without being sensitive to the culture of that country allowing the museum's of that country to be ransacked with all the images of thousands of years so I think the unimaginative is rather with us and I find out a little bit easier than thinking about the imaginative but I was also thinking that in our culture there seems to be this endless opposition between imagination and reason and and somehow they've been opposed for a very long time and I was trying to sort of think of some way of escaping from that opposition but I think Freud is an interesting example because I feel Freud although he I like that very much but in some ways Freud talks about the reality for I feel Freud is sort of ambivalent about imagination and although he his psychoanalysis is a way of releasing the imagination in some ways his ideas about reality can be quite sort of repressive in themselves know about any of that um that's abroad or any of it and any of what you just say I want to come back to your lines from the Freud the Auden poem about the future in the past and to your comment that often we oppose imagination to reason and one of the things I've been thinking about is that imagination is absolutely central to what we call thinking and to reasoning and without it there isn't any sense of either the future or the past and without that but there's no sense of temporality as temporality which seems to me absolutely the essence of the human mind so I find the imagination all over the place and I think we're always engaging in accident and then I was asking myself if I had to assign the imagination to the reality principle or the pleasure principle I think I'd give it to the reality principle because it seems to me that it's not an act of imagination unless at the same time you also know what is the case by your own lights there's I don't think of dreaming for example it's an act of imagination because in the dream you're I don't think of dreams as acts of magic because you're caught by the dream when you're imagining so get may call it imagination if you like but then I want to use another word or imagination to for another sense of imagination it's only imagination when you when you see the cloud as a cloud but you're also able to see it as something else and that kind of activity we engage in all the time and I think it requires as I said a awareness of what's really going on and I I don't think forwards and building about the imagination I thought it was essential I think he thought it was essential to thinking as well nobody I hate excuses and I haven't been able to bone up on this really I've been feeling lousy for the past week but this morning i or this afternoon because i didn't get up until 12:00 I made a few notes the first of which was about Falak cities I'm not pronouncing it the way you did but for well I had talked to cheese because I never knew who he was but when friends of mine are about to have a baby what am I gonna call my babies yes I call him John I said I always said why not call him Flo like for like two days and then I looked him up in the dictionary and couldn't quite figure out who he was in relation to the Trojan War and therefore why this organization is called Falak titties and also I'm not quite sure what imagination is I think we I think we all I think for example the dreams that we were talking about we create our own dreams nobody does it for us and we created out of our imagination which is has yet to be defined but everyone's got imagination you either got it good or you or you ain't it's like the phrase creativity which gets thrown around very free we have to teach our children to be creative I don't know what creative means as a nobody likes to talk about art as hard work they like to hear about inspiration they like to hear about I had to do a long interview on the telephone about her opera I've just written by somebody yesterday I'd never met who said when did you first get that feeling of electric excitement of over this work well I never had that feeling I'm a professional composer and I write music and it's either good or it's not but it's it's expert but I don't know if it can come to life and nobody can a body gay the French poet said to be original to be original is not anyone can be original a real artist steals a second-rate artist borrows a real real artist knows that he is stealing and therefore he tries to cover his tracks the act of covering his tracks is the act of creation a second-rate artist doesn't know he's covering his tracks and you can see right through it i I don't I don't want to go on too much about this but I'm not a sentimental person and I think that hard work is the most important thing for an artist as for psychoanalysis I was psychoanalyzed I was as a kid everyone said Paul Goodwin who for example if Ned doesn't go to a psychoanalyst we aren't going to talk to him anymore because we're sick of being drunk all the time and I went to a man named dr. Kraft Eric Kraft who was a pupil of Freud's so that's just how old I am and then finally after a year I said to him I'm going to Europe and he said no you're only going to take your dreary self with you and I said no I'm not and I didn't I'll pass this on on to you good for you because I I don't want to talk anymore of it I wonder if we could actually think of examples of imagination because I'm not sure that that there really is even is even such a thing or a particular kind of activity to which we refer when we when we use this word we think of it we think of it in terms of ideas in terms of art it isn't it's an aesthetic function I was glad to say here CK Williams read something so if you'll forgive me just for a second I'd like to read something from from Santayana whom Marsh probably doesn't consider a real philosopher but is nonetheless an interesting interesting thinker he said the truth is that the group of activities we call aesthetic is a motley one created by certain historic and literary accidents whenever consciousness becomes at all imaginative or whenever a work for whatever purpose constructed happens to have notable intrinsic values for perception we out of the word aesthetic but these occasions are miscellaneous and there's no single agency in nature no specific organ in sense no separate no separate task and spirit to which the aesthetic quality can be attributed and what he's I guess what he's saying is that there's no particular thing you can easily be shown as a sufficient and and and and really vivid example of what the aesthetic or imaginative process is and I would like to throw out to the to the group here what would be an example of imagination that we would readily identify as defining couldn't one say though that the imagination is taking place in every one of us every second of our lives that doesn't have any meaning I don't know what the next word I'm going to say is but it's in my imagination it's already there and so I'm forming a sentence now as I talk to you without even stopping imagination can be can be anything and I think the definition has to be a lot more restrictive than that before we before I talk about it it is in near where I live in Central Park there's a thing that says he imagined which Yoko Ono put up for her dead husband which i think is nice but imagine what it implies it's something poetic but it's not necessarily poetic okay I'll throw out a definition just because it's the only thought I had on the entire subject I have virtually no thoughts and I'm by far the dumbest person here as I was trying to think of anything that I could say in the course of the last week I did come upon a couple of short analogues for what I imagined takes place when I myself and being imaginative and I would propose two phrases intellectual recombination and conceptual fluidity intellectual recombination and conceptual fluidity recombination of what whatever conceptual fluidity I am I'm dumber than you are I mean I I know I'm not a philosopher and I was put around leading to tasks but I would select to come back to does seem to me that there has been a tendency in Western thought for very long time since Plato to make a distinction between thinking and concepts and thinking in images between logos and mythos and I mean I think that Plato actually is very inconsistent than that but it's very that has been there and you know there has people do tend to think there's a bit of a difference between conceptual thinking and imagistic thinking I mean and I I I don't think it's a watertight distinction but it is I do think if one completely dissolves that then you know you know that it it does make well I mean it that there is an intellectual history right now I mean when Plato wrote the Republic and this seems to be a great imaginative feat and you know he this is about imagining a whole new kind of society and at the same time he's a great sort of adherent of reason but when he came to his most sort of profound thoughts or Socrates who actually is this main speaker and the Republic he actually produces images particularly the image of the cave which you know so I mean I think it's very big it's a sort of ambiguous thing but there has been is there has been a big that opposition between reason and imagination I don't think we can deny it and there most have been people who've destroyed images of being the Puritans who set about actually destroying all the images and in in in Britain and 95% of all the religious art was destroyed by Puritans who then came and founded this country say we can't say say we can't yeah there's some history here yeah there's some anti imagination history here let's not forget it well one of the things you're pointing to I think is it's a it's a very ambiguous word I mean I there were many many meanings and one is the capacity to form visual images and that's me what you're thinking of but if you think of imagination in a broader sense that I was trying to get at and then I want to come back to and you know commenting on your remarks Rocco as conceptualizing conceptualizing requires imagining so let me now just say that I add one more essential condemned sorry one more essential condition to yours and that is that imagining is being able to think of what is not you say I don't think there is imagination you say visual images but it can also be auditory one of the most Erik Satie who to me is one of the great composers of all times and not just writing giddy music he said he wrote a piece called circlet or socrates which is three dialogues for Plato to music and whenever I play it to myself I burst into tears and it's a it's an auditory rather than its visual there's also an old pop song called imagination does anybody remember that yes imagination is funny it makes it be think of honey I think of you something like so it's what makes us sour a soured day sunny it makes it beef in a candy there was an article in The New York Times science section this week on the front cover of your neurons about mirror neurons in which would they have found that we have these cells that actually are the basis of imagination is this actual physical thing happens the example they gave us of a monkey who sees someone eating something and in his mental apparatus the same response happens as though he were eating an ice cream eating something himself and I thought that that really is the basis of what anything mentally we would call imagine it do all this other animals non mammals have this well humans have it which is most of it emotions as you mission but I would I began to think about I was in Africa this this is full and I was in on the savanna and I was thinking I've always been fascinated by Australopithecus whose which is our oldest ancestor and this was where it's supposed to have evolved if you believe in evolution and I began to think what must it had been like for him or her to be here and you know be looking through this grass and and the bushes and I I tried and tried and I couldn't really make it real for myself but I realized when just what you said when I began to think of this that any animal who thinks there's something around that corner and I'm not going that way has done this thing of making a reality that wasn't there before it's a very very primitive we would call it reality I know I wouldn't necessarily use the term imagination but it would seem as though if we go to the fundamentals that it begins somewhere there if this is good at midnight or 4:00 in the morning sometimes I go in my kitchen and there's a roach as big as that and I hate to step on it because he or she his family is behind the thing to death and his little heart beating and so I just turned the light out good luck anyway I was gonna I was going to leave the insect world and anyway I was gonna get that it seems to me that you have to have these if we use pardon I think you have to have anything that's alive just to stay alive means you've got to have some imagine yeah we have to have some mechanism that allows us to see what's not there let's put it that way and I don't think insects can do that well then what keeps them alive all kinds of things animal instincts but not imagination but it depends of course on how you define it that was gonna say so define imagination well I've been trying to I've given a couple of position market fall to follow of what you said before but can I finish without yeah anyway when I when I started thinking about the different kinds of imagination and the fact that we have some artistic people here and implies that there's something that we think of as the artistic imagination and I realize when I look at art and judge let's say poetry that what I'm really judging is the disinterested miss of the imagination that the difference between this primitive thing that happens in which we can see what's not real and the thing that happens at the highest level which I do think is our is that somehow the self drops away that that's not there anymore in the same way and the art takes over the death in the or Denis can see that it's a marvelous pump for that it's a long involved very difficult poem about someone else and someone else's ideas never mentions himself at all he also wrote of ham about a dictator who was a poet mm-hmm if you know the reflections on a tyrant I think it's from the state lines you know perfection of a sort was whatever what he was after is how it begins like you seem to me it's easy to get to start thinking of imagination is something that's exclusive to art let me just give another example from another discipline it seems to me a very good example of imagination at its highest Galileo and then Newton who instead of asking the question that had been asked for hundreds of years quite as things move and with that you get the answer finally prime mover thought to ask why does motion ever stop and with that you get a whole new universe you get the laws of motion from Newton and that seems to me an act of paramount imagination froy that's one definition of it I'm not gonna absolutely wouldn't argue that but I would say that when the term imaginative is usually described for a certain kind of thought well scientific is described is to describe a different kind of thinking they're not of course mutually exclusive but those are the terms that our culture has sort of arrived why should be okay why should they be different handedness sake what makes them different well but I mean would you say give me an example of an artist whose scientific I've given you an example of imagination no I'm not trying to bargain with you at all I just said that the culture usually uses the term imagine I don't want the cultures definition of it invention which which I did not just in the sense of a scientific invention but if this was a word that was used about by musicians in the certainly in the 18th century people like Hyden or Mozart would talk about invention and so things coming to them in a way and I think that applies equally to scientists and artists and it's not it's not the same word as imagination but it's it's that you don't get that problem if you talkin Benny original they just wrote that what the contemporary music of hiding the mood such as Beethoven Stein was the music that was that was played all the time today it isn't the music that's played all the time today is rock music of one sort or another and not and not and the classical music is exclusively music of the past 99% of its Beethoven and Mozart that's yet people like me were were negligible negligible minority and compared to rock music were just 1/10 of 1% so they weren't thinking I don't know what they were thinking but it doesn't seem to me that I shall now write something different and new that's gonna shock everybody though as John Cage may have said or or Beulah's today they did write things that were new and and it was new by definition but you're you're hearing it with your 20th with your 21st century years I didn't Ollie I mean I'm thinking about the way hiden composes I didn't get that different from the way but people didn't get you get up and rush out of the hall the way they the way they did up until about 20 years ago begin since and since then they don't even go to a hole yeah I just I just mean the way as a writer as an artist as a pen and not not anyone that's a terribly special but there's this process by which things come to you and I think that that surely we as a parrot I mean I the the best things come to you you don't will I didn't feel you don't will them they come and you don't say in Rick you don't say I am now about to write something new that's gonna shock people or disconnect or do you actually I really like what you were saying earlier about thinking of yourself as a professional and and doing a job and I mean we're so we've sort of danced around the role that intuition plays an imagination and and I guess that's sort of unquantifiable but at least for me that's part of the job of being a fiction writer that I I take us as imperative and questioned and I don't try to make it scientific you know I just sit down and try to write my 1500 words and I think that intuitive muscle plays a huge role in it but I don't know how 1500 in in one sitting yeah it's a lot like when I wouldn't presume to speak speak for you Rick but I don't think as a novelist that the word invention would be the first word that was that would come to mind you yourself said it might be something more in the order of reordering or or synthesizing or putting in a different relate into different relationships it it is such a in exasperated and difficult problems we try to as we try to sorts try to sort out what exactly this process is to what exactly it refers Santayana in the st. in the same essay went on then to try to try to grapple with what it might be and and he went on to say that he felt the most important division in perception is that between what is found on the one hand and what is conceived or desired on the other and I think as you actually try to then get through that or get your mind around that it's not that simple at all because it may be not an either/or but very much a combination of processes it may be very much a a rear-ending of what you already know not invention but resynthesizing and and that may be at least the point of view of a writer what we're referring to it as imagination well there's that famous thing I know Stephen Dedalus talks about it in the lyses I think he does where it suggested that it's impossible for an artist to make a character better than he or herself and what's known yeah exactly and yet and yet the idea of a Newton an Isaac Newton or or Tycho Brahe or or or richard fineman i was thinking of a modern example to me of a physicist who was incredibly imaginative you know Fineman was all about metaphor izing things that we already knew but the metaphors were so limpid and so stunning that to me they're just like art actually when an artist a great artist could be a son-of-a-bitch their or evil the evil genius vogner was heedful he was a predecessor of the Nazis and either a great great great composer and that there are very very saintly people who was who a mediocre and as for as for the interventionist the broad convention was not in the sense of thinking of something new so much as - there's no fumes in the Baca invention but just an a different and inventive way of putting the Tom and after the tonics when people say to me when do you write because you write 1500 words a day which i think is terrific when people say to me when do you write your music I say I'm never not writing it it's in my head I the last part of the last the last thing is actually putting it on paper but that's the end and that's the least important all the time all the time I always say I have the worst slave driver for a boss me yeah yeah but I want to I actually want to ask Rocco question because as I was coming here I was really trying to think in my mind you know obviously we're gonna say that the artists are the great imaginers and so forth but trying to think of non artistic imagination in a way and I want to ask you in your role as an entrepreneur and a business person in addition to being a theatrical executive and so forth if you conceive of of great thinking in the world of business as imaginative in the same way as in the arts there are certainly creative businessmen there's no doubt about it but it's usually in the form of having a certain not so much you're thinking of something new but having a certain perception of reality that is that is is is fresh or different it's not necessarily having a brand new idea but but understanding what's what's in front of you better then then than someone else it has to do it may have as much to do with with perception of reality as it does with thinking of new things as it must in your work what you're trying to find is some essential truth in a relationship or a or a situation that's what you're doing rather than trying to you know invent per se which listen money in what is for money in business for money when you write your opera - and when I that's that's not I'm not writing it for the money really if I were I would not be in that in that business as I guess explain no I don't really could care less but if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door and that's what business is so it has to do with money has a predictive talent which has to do with that with I think of perception of the way things are and are going are going to be I'd love to address that same question from the point of view of my own art the art that I deal with every day which is which is playwriting which is which is which is theatre and I think that really touches on the very thing we're talking about whether it's where we're talking about it something invented or something or something found a playwright is has always been considered from the time of the Greeks really a craftsman a reporter it's its playwright W R IG HT s as in Smith right not not someone who is who is given an imaginative type title and what does a playwright do what he really does is report or in the end of the sense record conversation he observes people people relating to each other and reports on that and he fulfills a important role in what I think what I think of it as the most one of the most basic and fundamental of human activities which is why I think playwriting is the most fundamental art with all due respect to the composers poets and novelists what what what what we do one of the most fundamental things we do as human beings is we we gossip we talk about other human beings we observe their behavior and make judgments about them we observe conversations among other people we look at them talking and we say he's honest and he's deceptive and and this person can be relied upon this person's intelligent this person is is faithful this person does not and we make all kinds of moral judgments on people based on our overhearing them based on our observation of them and what a playwright does is simply serve as a reporter in this process by presenting to audiences who then observe these conversations overhear them as they're presented on the stage and then talk about them now they're they happen to be directed with certain perhaps moral intention but the audience's go observe these conversations and go home and gossip about them they that gossiping function is a fundamental and elemental human activity it's the letters playwrights are reporters in this in this process they're not inventors they are simply observing the way people behave for the benefit of our being able to make moral judgments about the playwright's were reporters they spoke of them having a daemon he being inspired to having a divine a genius basically all literature is Gus the Proust is nothing but the ultimate journalist shortchanging imagination here I mean look at Shakespeare and I didn't expect gossip and I'm thinking of a speech in the Midsummer Night's Dream which i think is a wonderful imaginative play in itself this is a speech by a man who does not believe in imagination King Theseus I don't know whether you remember this speech and he says the the lunatic the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact and he says these are the sort of people who have wild imaginings and they're you know they're either mag Arthur um well it's not written in gossip it's written in wonderful poetry and but if you think the perfect structure of the play as well that this guy who does not live an imagination is talking this way about imagination but he hasn't seen the play we've seen the play what we've seen in the play is an incredible feat of imagination and we've seen a you know a man turn into a donkey in the queen of the fairies falling in love with him Theseus hasn't seen all that so he dismisses it at the same time we're actually watching a play he's a character of the play he's been invented by someone to me this is an example of poetic you know dramatic imagination that goes way beyond gossip and not to speak of Aeschylus you know which i think is nothing to do with gossip so I feel well you know I feel I don't want to shortchange imagination and can I just people have read something can I just read some things that Coleridge said about imagination I thought you'd have to come in somewhere and so this is the great spokesman of the Romantic imagination okay we're getting away from it we're trying to I quite understand we want to not this is in a way what everyone Rick I quite understand this is sort of you know what went away were reacting against but what Coleridge said was the primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of whole human perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am and don't think he was talking about gossip the primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception it is rather what I think Marcy was saying and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am but he's saying it's a divine thing I'd like to come back to something that you said and you you you spoke of the businessman is motivated by money is if that meant it couldn't be imagination but I don't see if I the motive effect that you can be imaginative in the pursuit of power or evil or money or beauty the motive is irrelevant it seems to me perhaps some motives if they're really constraining psychologic constraining are less fertile in the way that they give you are always asking asking me how do you make any money as though money with the were the ultimate aim also I don't think music could be construed to be gossip no I know is that music doesn't have any meaning or as Mendelson said it's not the music's too vague for words it's too precise for words and when people try to when composes when non vocal music a song means whatever the words tell you it means and when people even even when people are writing up the Beatles for example they were they what terrific music listen to those words they never talk about the music and yet the music is what the substance of it is the if but if not vocal music you see decides to call I mail three scenes not on the ocean but on in Paris that dawn and in the day how noon and in a whorehouse evening in at the floor the listener will hear exactly what he's told in words to hear and you can music could be made to mean anything because it doesn't mean anything in real life and intellectually it doesn't and fraud Freud's to me best writings were on Leonardo he did a book on Leonardo he knows only one art that doesn't have a representational aspect to it every other word has one form or another yes which is why music can be can be conjoined with literature and also as we were talking about earlier that the different artists don't necessarily the arts don't necessarily overlap I was talking to him about the Elizabeth Bishop and her reaction to a form of hers that I said and she her reaction was a lot of great great great poets couldn't care less about music and it means it goes in one ear and out the other they don't know what it's about and painters can be pretty sick scold sometimes the greatest painters in the world I'd like to it there's two sort of paths I'd like to take the first one is that we're sprout we're sort of defining imagination as anything clever that the human mind let me finish we're not even rubbing as an artist as an artist for me the imagination in the artistic imagination I'll leave it with that has to do with form it has to do with the struggle reform whether it's formed novel form of music form of poetry that there are these things that's the strangest thing in human existence perhaps that there are these necessities that have nothing to do with anything that people put on an activity of the mind such as let's say Shakespeare's iambic pentameter there's absolutely no reason why anyone should speak in iambic pentameter there's no reason why anyone should write a sonnet but something happens in the exchange between consciousness and disinterested form let's call it that makes an intensification of experience that doesn't really happen anywhere English people who speak English speak in iambic the way the French speak in an imprimatur you get what I mean they don't speak in sonnets and the sonnet is a great intensive number they usually the other thing that I was going to go at having more in a target yet I'll keep it for a minute what is the expense the imaginative experiencing of art and of other products of the imagination and how do people who experience things experience it imaginative Lia I was thinking about what you said about government and I realized that one of the functions of government especially at a time like ours is the repression of the imagination of the people it's to keep people from imagining things too much because if you start imagining people in a war for instance that the 30,000 as he put it or so if you start imagining what happened to each of their bodies and what happened to each of their minds it's it would be very disruptive and then the other thing that's interesting is again in our time is religion and what is the place that imagine that imagination has in religion what happens when people if you're not religious you can't experience the religious imagination except this is the most artificial thing but people do experience religion in this incredibly in global engulfing way and it's just something I've been very interested in thinking about how does the those two things there's one that's and it's happening we have that happening at the same time the repression of the imagination politically and then the elevation of a certain kind of restrictive imagination move of the religious imagination I was thinking you know I was I came to me there's this thing that I think st. John says I'm not a great Bible person that there's faith hope and charity these three things about but the greatest or loved one at st. Paul's and cool but the greatest of these is charity or love and I always thought why does he say it's the greatest faith and hope faith seems to be the basis of religion hope seems to be what it promises why is charity the greatest and I realized that charity is the one that requires the most imagination it's the one that what sea currents are saying that I credit that Joseph Conrad talks about imaginative sympathy which which I feel is is you know this is something the perhaps we should think about is that imagination isn't just this mental ability we have or some ability to think in images or invent things but it's also the way that we can understand that somebody else is a human being you know like us or not as the case may be and that that's what Conrad talked about very movingly I think and that's what I think he thought his novel writing was about was was actually getting into the you know enabling someone to enabling a reader to understand another person's a human being and and this is what the religious person who thinks he's going to heaven or whatever by blowing up you know a lot of fellow citizens in the tube in London or whatever you know it's got some kind of imagination but I doesn't to be the right kind of instill me that you know imagination is such a broad term and having a group of creative people here you're essentially mostly talking about a particular kind of imagination in in in psychoanalytic terms the the most basic definition of imagination is to have a mental representation of something that's not that well isn't that yeah but that's what once you're talking so so this is a different kind of imagination than some of the things we are talking about and overages I actually uses the term fancy or fantasy like to distinguish that from just what we're talking about there are two different things I'm a Quaker and I was raised a Quaker but not in the religious sense but in the pacifist sense and I really hate religion I think it's destructive and disgusting but some of the very best music I've ever written has been on biblical texts from the side from the from the from the Bible so the fact of poetry and what the poetry says are two different things I think religion is in the sense is intrinsically evil sorry I like bringing up the young the the way in which definite yes yeah and I think that people who are entrenched in religion the lack imagination can't get out of it say that I like your reference to empathy as an active imagination again it gets us out of just fascinate honor artistic imagination which I think is is one sort of imagination but there many others that were neglecting you know Werner Heisenberg had one of his assistants quit the physics lab and he said because he want to write fiction and he said for writing fiction he has enough imagination his imagination will suffice well Witkin stein that that kind of a mind is it imaginative to is in non non poetic way may I finish I'm sorry at the end of the tempest you may remember Prospero who is the imaginating par excellence has given up educated his power which by the way is a is tends towards a kind of grandiose grandiose am nipa Tain's which is one of them hazards of imagination I think and Ariel is telling him about the sufferings of all the people that have been shipwrecked by Prospero hour and the descriptions are horrendous and Prospero says something like were you moved and Ariel said I would were I human and Prospero at that point is both shamed by Ariel superior empathic imagination and also by the vividness of his description into feeling what I think would pose to feel for the first time is understanding that other people really are other and also like himself so I see that it's sort of one of the ends that Shakespeare has it's describing the imagination as functioning at which happens to King Lear as well which happened to Kings I attained to the four characters and suddenly thinks about the wretch and which he wasn't able to do before but that was good to be getting mad which is another thing question but we all have our own concept of the world and when when you die your concept of the world go is gone forever and there is many different worlds as there are people in this room with many different conceptions of the world there was another current events thing and the times today there was this judge who's in jail and he's making a big thing of how ah now I understand what jail is imagine it was to be in it you couldn't think my goodness what's it like to have the door closed on you forever many years I think that implies that that indicates the limits of imagination you can't really imagine what we're saying before about people let's imagine it it's just stupid he was he couldn't i don't think he could I don't think you can imagine what you can then actually go ahead and feel I missed the details of the new side of an old man that wrote a book and were threatened with being put in prison he's a judge and he had he had tried and sentenced many many people and then through a little malfeasance was convicted of felony and went to a prison where there were any number of actual convicts who he had sent up himself the story opens with him being confronted by a guy his his own book no it's not a book this is just a human interest story and paid no we're talking about two different things no we're talking about the same thing are we yeah it was an article in The Times today I thought it was about a man who wrote a book but but he was a liar no he well in any event he went to jail and he was then confronted by many many convicts and the story was all about oh now he knows what it's like on the other side and he should have thought twice before doing that one guide the two life sentences but and all the people who know him kept saying he doesn't really believe what he's saying did you notice that that was very strange like they thought he still even though he was there he still couldn't imagine that yeah when someone says I never imagined what they're really saying is I didn't know and I wonder can one imagine what one doesn't know yes yeah then yes but novelists do well and playwright sure is the fet is that clear and to some extent what you're doing as a writer is is about what you do know and maybe reordering what you perceive and what you know that's that's the miracle of art and that you don't know McCauley co-wrote not a story about a man being decapitated but turning into a cockroach or turn into a roach I have a whole chapter in my new book that that's what a woman's thinking as she comes out of a coma and I've never been in a coma and I don't know what it feels like and yet there it is but something else that imagination also precedes knowing you imagine something and then you begin to know it just as you imagine what it's like to be somebody else then you begin to know it or you imagine what it's like to think of bodies moving in a different way or to ask a different question about the relationship between mind and the world order is Vicki Stein did from de cartes question and once she's begun that active imagination then you begin to explore into know then you write the book and then you forget it images images come to you I mean this is this is something that seems to happen isn't it that I mean that certainly in territories of images come you don't know them beforehand is that you don't will them into being they come no that's not disparate so all of us surely have I mean perhaps this relates to the psychoanalysis in the unconscious that you can see the unconscious is a great seething mass of in the different of different poets you do different things though a poet can find the word because it'll rhyme with this another word and suddenly the rhymes make an idea that he didn't know was there beforehand it's an accident but I don't think it's ever like painting by numbers I mean I I mean IIIi don't think any good poetry is like painting by numbers I mean I think one would one would be able to notice that if it was yeah I would say come back to this idea of craftsmanship and professionalism I don't agree with that at all when when I'm when something's happened to me happening to me with my with a poem when I'm struggling with it and things are happening it's a kind of mental experience that's really not like anything else I don't know what you people call inspiration whatever but I just know it's not like just doing a job or doing my job we're writing produce fun or set to music but have you ever heard of poem of yours that's been sent to music yeah a few times I wasn't terribly happy about it were you flattered at least that someone had set the poem yeah sure but that didn't have anything to do is this ratio legitimate about right has lasted for you then since I totally disagree about this inspiration and well what I'm curious is is it that feeling that you're attributing to the to the sort of white heat of artistic creation has anything to do with with the religious imagination you were talking about before that I don't know because I don't have a religious imagination I've never had a religious experience I've tried and one of my poems I used somebody read the line back to me I tried to pray a being and to pray a being who would pray to pray myself to be a being who could pray and I can't so I don't know I have no idea I mean they say it has been said in the past that the Mystics and the poets and everything had a similar thing I have no idea where the Mystics often seem to me rather psychotic what what you're saying is in the creative process you come to know things you didn't know before and I just wonder about that and whether that is it's not knowing it's it's again a thing with form it's when when I talk to my student it's like it's like the musical ization of consciousness it's like your mind becomes musicalized somehow and it's not just knowing or not knowing it's something that's not like anything else and it's incredibly exalting and addicting that's why artists are often sad it's because this doesn't happen that often and the rest of the time you're depressed it's not necessary I mean I was thinking of another Yeats poem and suddenly I saw the cold and rook delighting heaven agains which is an incredible opening and it does just because he suddenly saw something and it was there this was this that but this suddenly came to him with the force of her and it it also is a terrifying poem because it he thinks that he's being sent out to the punishment he thinks that souls would be sent out into the sky for punishment but it's not something you know that this the day was there it was a cold day in Galway but suddenly that as an image and also as a line of poetry because as you go and says of course it's also a line of poetry I mean that is much like when we dream we don't we may be completely maybe a completely different kind of reality maybe completely divorced from reality but it's not something we don't already know I think it's all saying we never tell marriages that you have in your brain for a dream so you don't know what's in a dream and you can't predict what's in a dream right I totally disagree with the idea that we know what's in a dream a dream you don't have the components are all known to us yeah what was the objects that you used to create the visual image they have to be objects that are known to you right about an architect who makes a building doesn't know what before he makes it he know it in his mind you know I know it if you know everything that you use then how do you witness it but another example would be mathematicians or physicists who discover things Einstein for instance said he feels something in his body he never has an idea in his head he only writes it down later as an idea it's just a sensation in his body you can't be an architect and do that the building would cave in I can't just let this go about dreams because I mean obviously I know how to dream the other night in which very this large hawk or Eagle be careful telling like I said go ahead I might've Jack did like if you interpret it too drastically a big hawk I didn't have Melanie Klein anyway anyway a large but a whole Crow Eagle just came it was in the room and it was almost as big as a person I mean you say I know I mean obviously it was something I recognized as a hawk but I didn't I I what I disagree with this is I knew that particular hawk because I'd never met it before it was something that came to me that I'd never met I'd never met her who I've seen a lot of Hawks but I never met a hawk like this that had come into my room and was looking at me in this particular way in that sense I didn't know it it was new well it's just condensation and displacement I knew it but you just didn't know it in that particular guys forgive me for selling echo philosopher but this is an old question philosophy and and the empiricists thought and Descartes played with the idea before them that every element in the dream is something you've experienced but when you think about it once you start asking what the elements are it doesn't become a very interesting proposition and and the way in which you can recombine and synthesize and so on it seems much more interesting than trying to locate what the particular elements are that you have in fact experienced right any more than poetry is language words that we've already we already know yeah okay can I just quite courage again on this because I think what Carew said about fancy which he opposed to imagination he said was different was that fancy has no other counters to play with but fix it is and definites and I think that's what part of our discussions been about and some people have courage didn't think that that was imagination he's all that was fancy and when he talks again about the Worth and dignity of poetic imagination that fixing unfix --is and while it melts and bidam's the image still leaves in the soul its living memory which which I I think is in itself a wonderfully poetic description of something which is not exactly what we've been talking about all the time and it's it's about a kind of image making that doesn't just deal with definites and things that we know but actually reforms them and so that's just another fear another way of restating that I don't agree that all artists are sad as she said I think everyone has said anyone who's got brains is just to live in this work but I think the artists are the least said of all people because they're the only people on earth who are doing what they want to do and are able to do it and are appreciated for doing it because most people just want to make money or go to the movies or do this or that but artists have an organization that allows them to express the sadness so that they may be sad because it's it's wrong not to be sad we're sad on bad days when we're not being artists I'm readjusting as other artists because they're saying our people I want to go on record just because the romantic area of the room is over here is saying that I don't actually think as an artist that what I do is significantly different from designing automobiles but I said I agree with it yeah that's the difference between novels and poems I just want to tell you a brief story whether it makes sense or not I don't know but there is a paper written by psychoanalyst on the psychology of imagination which was written back in the 50s and he does a very careful in our description of what he considers to be imagination and relies on clinical data and he relies on the work done by Piaget in terms of at which point in development of a child can the child maintain in his mind an image of something that is no longer dead and he was a great admirer of Coleridge so he also discusses fantasy versus imagination and so on and it's a very nice paper I think is the paper that Francis was referring to another analyst here's the paper and quips that he left the image out of imagination thank you very much you

Channel: philoctetesctr

Views: 5,807

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: Philoctetes, Psychology, Marcia Cavell, Harry Eyres, Rocco Landesman, Rick Moody, Edward Nersessian, Ned Rorem, C.K. Williams

Id: jxq2vYN9SRE

Length: 66min 45sec (4005 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2011