I wrote an essay yesterday trying to wrap my arms around the process of taking a big, deeply held, but rather incoherent idea and making it visible.
I finished it feeling like I’d caught something important, published it, and then looked at it the next morning and thought:
What the hell was I talking about?
As I sat with it, I realized something that was both mortifying and delightful. I had been participating in the very process I was trying to describe. The essay itself was moving through the same dance between intuition, image, meaning, and form that I was attempting to write about—and struggling to make visible outside my own head. I was talking about an incoherent idea with rather exquisite incoherence.
I’m learning something from my flailing—that the flailing is actually a really important part of the process. We don’t forgive ourselves when we’re there because we think we need resolution and clarity instantly.
But imagination rarely works that way.
In fact, I am increasingly suspicious of clarity that arrives too quickly. Fast answers tend to stop the question. They close the door just as something interesting is trying to walk through it.
Depth seems to require a period of uncertainty. A willingness to stay with something we can feel but cannot yet fully articulate. To let an image, a question, a fragment of a thought, or a strange coincidence work on us before demanding that it explain itself.
I have been caught inside this same creative paradox for decades.
As I have been building the world of SpillianQuest, I have found myself wrestling with it constantly. Not just in writing essays, but in creating tea tins, quest books, games, gatherings, and all the other curious objects that seem determined to emerge alongside them. I am trying to give form to something without flattening it. To make visible a web of relationships, stories, questions, experiences, and possibilities that often arrive first as a feeling, a glimpse, or a hunch.
While sitting with this swirl this morning, I found myself returning to a paper I wrote more than twenty years ago while trying to understand imagination itself.
Reading it felt less like looking backward than encountering another turn in a spiral.
Sitting in the discomfort of not making sense, of non-meaning, is actually our way into finding meaning. It’s not a failing, this flailing, but instead is a key (albeit frustrating) part of imagining something into being.
An excerpt from
Defining Logic, Defying Logic: Reflections on the Logic of Imagination
(written during my doctoral studies, 2003)
I have been in love with the concept of imaginal logic, both because it began to capture something that I have for years believed, and somehow on a cellular level known to be important, and also because, in the immortal words of Monty Python heroine, A. Elk, “It is a theory, a theory of which it is mine.” A. Elk’s theory, after an enormous build-up, eventually emerges as “dinosaurs are very small in the front, large around the middle, and very small in the back.” It has occurred to me to be concerned that my theories of imaginal logic perhaps carry much the same weight and intuit the same depth.
This is a serious wounding in my thinking. Just how shallow and distorted are my reflections? This comes from a woman who spent the first twenty years of her life in front of mirrors in dance studios daily, gazing with addiction at herself. Of course, I was near-sighted most of that time, and when I finally got contact lenses, only wore them for two classes. The elegant sylph that I had seen reflected in the glass disappeared into a different kind of truth: five foot three, with lines not nearly as superb as I had known them to be. I did not want to see my reflection that clearly.
Perhaps there is something to be said for a bit of a lack of clarity. Perhaps the sylph that I imagined myself to be was somehow as truthful as 20/20 vision. (It certainly was more rewarding.) Perhaps the distortion that always accompanies any reflection is not only inevitable but also, somehow, desirable. Perhaps, ultimately, this distortion is key to a theory on the logic of imagination: such a theory defies codification and definition, and slips, eel-like, from my comprehension. So far, I have been content to discuss what it is not: not Aristotilian, not Cartesian, not respected by our logos-driven culture. It has become an exercise in Zen Buddhism: I cannot describe what it is, so I define it by negation. Somehow, it becomes a koan, where meaning dances in the edges of comprehension, flashing past our eyelids almost before we can identify it.
Yesterday has a queer sound
I thought I was thinking
But it was only the alarm clock
Partner yourself
On either side of the mirror
I think it’s bedtime
Melander, 1997
Before I begin to unravel what the poem above means to me, I invite you to take a moment to reflect on what it might mean to you. Meanings shimmer and reflect both themselves and their perceivers, and while the gift of translation is a rich one, it also runs the risk of deflecting the authenticity of the experience at that initial moment of contact with the original thought. So before I move on, I invite you to be still with the poem for a breath or two, allowing its truth to work on you without my interference. As Hakuin says, “for the details, see the verse.”
That said, I wrote this poem after a moment of being caught in the liminal world between wakefulness and sleep. I heard my alarm clock go off, and in a swirl somewhere within the interplay of conscious and unconscious thought, I had the idea that sound of the clock was something vastly important that emerged from my head. This moment on the edges of consciousness is often when I do my best thinking; if I can turn my rational mind off enough and still hover above sleep, I enter into a world that glistens with possibilities and my imagination can create its own intuitive links not bound by the linear logic of a waking day world in 21st Century Western culture. At this moment, however, the opposite had happened.
I had claimed ownership of and apportioned meaning to the blaringly artificial and invasive noise of an electric alarm slamming me awake into my responsibilities. The idea of this paradoxical duality began to work on me, and caught by the irony of my assumptions, I began to try to melt that dualism into comprehension.
As my incoherence transposed itself into a poem, it became its own koan. The process of having a “non-thought” sparked, along with an amused sense of self-awareness, a thought that became a poem. Where then, is the validity of the “non-thought”? If it can move us towards a thought, which in then in turn moves away from any kind of obvious, pedestrian “sense,” does it become part of an infinite, spiraling riddle back and forth between imaginal and linear logic that begins to birth a different kind of understanding?
Koans seem to stand on their own accord, self-contained and with a crystalline quality. Multi-faceted, compressed like the proverbial diamond into a brilliant reflection of a larger truth, the flashes of their facets inspire similar flashes of illumination in the reader. All imagining, on some level, is sparked by the minutiae of something that catches our attention: a word, a leaf, or an idea, which then moves outwards into larger relevance. As such, koans perhaps become a unique kind of a mirror, teasing us towards comprehension, frustrating us with their seemingly disjointed irony, and if we sit with them long enough (or quickly enough, which is the joy of their mercurial nature and message), we begin to see into our own thought processes. They move from being the noise of the alarm clock into the sound of a quiet revelation.
It is perhaps in this moment of process that a logic of the imagination begins to become apparent. As we gaze into the mirror, be it a still pool of water, a convex or concave lens, flat, or shattered into a million pieces, we can try to become aware of not only what we are seeing, but also how we are seeing it.
Hakuin quote from Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record, translated by Thomas Cleary.
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