Anyway, what I wanted to discuss in relation to this nostalgic jaunt down horrifying-memory lane is the power of the imagination. I might have given that away from the title, but that is why I threw in that loosely connected introductory paragraph: keep 'em guessing, boy, as my... fictional coach of a non-existent sports team I would never play for never said. The link was meant to be that my OCD was driven by a sort of extra-sensory or metapersonal compulsion; not necessarily a dictative alter-ego, but a definite and disparate separation between my rational self and my other. I'm not sure why I was thinking about this last night, I was probably checking the back-door for the eighteenth time since I went to bed. Oh, no, I remember. It's because I suffer from chronic insomnia, and as I lay there last night staring vacantly at my off-white, artex ceiling I started to wonder why some people's brains can't switch off. Why there's no consistency for the ability to power-down. I concluded that some people have too much imagination, and that this dictates their subconscious thought-processes, hence the lack of sleep. Too busy playing out the irrational hypothetical of chance. Admittedly it was a grievously flawed conclusion (well, probably), but you'll forgive me: it was 5.15 in the morning when I had this pseudo'iphany.
Anyway, this quite obviously lead me onto thinking about the why and the how of the imagination, and the different ways and means by which people are affected by it. Naturally, the reasons are too multifarious for me to cover in any sense of detail here, but I will outline why I find the imagination so enthralling, and thus why I have chosen to do it for my dissertation next year: The Gothic and the Power of the Imagination.
I think the imagination is so insanely fascinating because it's so infinitely unfathomable; it epitomises everything that the human body and mind isn't: infinite, unfenced, liberated, free, unguided, stimulated. It's each and every thing that a human mind aspires to be but can never achieve. You're beautiful in your imagination, you're smart, you're insane, you're a god, you're a snowflake. Boundless and immeasurable in your soaring freedom. The freest a man can be is in his imagination; where the confines of the mundane, dreary, 24-7 lifestyle fade into nothingness, and the brain can display what it truly desires. Now, this is all mindless idealism (as per), because obviously the majority of dreams and imaginations are the product of misfiring, or subconsciously prodded synapses shooting off random specks of information which become assimilated into your consciousness and confabulated together into a piece of vaguely coherent film. I'd still like to imagine - if you will - that the imagination is this colossal vastness, this gaping chasm into which you can fling yourself at any moment; soon to be plunging down into regions you couldn't even dream of, surrounded by these situations incomprehensible. Truly, and wonderfully, brilliant.
I feel unbelievably sorry for those people who seem to have a limited or fragmented imagination; those creatively stilted individuals who need to be sequestered eternally under a form of arbitrary guiding principles in order to function. I cannot bear to picture a landscape so hellishly sparse and unpopulated. How do these people escape the monotony and hatred? Where is their place of quietude and solitude? Just as living within the concrete jungle affixes the permanence of apathy on a person, so must living only as you are, not as you could be. I don't even understand how such people manage to go through post-compulsory education, let alone survive without committing the greatest ever mass-suicide. Or, I dunno, maybe that's over-reaching their imaginations? No, I was blessed with a fabulously replete imagination; and if you'll forgive the counter-intuitive bollocks I'm about to state - I'd be hard pressed to find a situation I cannot comprehend or picture.
I don't mean to obfuscate, but this is an incredibly odd concept for me to try to deal with. Normally I am firmly rooted in two camps: hatred, and physicality. I try to tackle obvious ideas which any idiot could see were wrong, and how they could be fixed; I also tend towards the loathing side of life. This kind of mindless happiness and glorification of a process is something alien to me, as is the metaphysics of this idea, so you'll genuinely have to forgive me if I seem to have no point/not go anywhere/make no sense.
This 'imagination' helps us evolve our society, it facilitates the creation of new ideas, of new ideologies, of new buildings, of new infrastructure; it is the imagination which underpins the intelligence which permits these advances (or regresses, if you're with me). It is the ability to quest outside of the normative structures rigidly imposed upon us by the unimaginative faculties of our brains; these abilities which help us reach our ideals and fulfil our greatest wishes. Without our imaginations we are lifeless and useless. Mere marionette in the sadomasochist's favourite show.
I could never attend to an essay, subtlety would be entirely lost on me -- imagine not being able to intimate. It'd be like that awful Ricky Gervais film where no-one can lie. It is these undercurrent ideas which help us build upon ourselves, gives rise to the abject, the self-efficacy and the Cartesian self-awareness. The outside sense of perspicacity where we can transplant our minds into the nebulous and transcend any physical boundaries restricting our knowledge of self -- to have those thoughts and hallucinations, those epiphanies when you see you as you really are. Like when you hear yourself recorded for the first time and you say "I don't sound like that... Do I?" As here where you first reach these unexplored ideas of the self, when you float above and beyond your physical self and look down upon who and what you are. Without our imaginations we could not comprehend these ideas - the rational brain is only capable of explanation through imagination.
With hindsight comes great insight, and here we reach such a juncture ourselves: previous to this crepuscular realisation, I was discussing blogging in general with a friend of mine who tried to set up his own. He became disheartened, started to hate what he wrote, and eventually (albeit quicker than normal) gave up. The one thing he mentioned, however, that struck me as strange was that idea of "I had nothing to write about". Now, if you've followed me across the... 4 months or whatever it has been since I started this, you will see that quite often I start my ramblings with the caveat "I don't know what to say today", but you will have also seen that I then tend to go on to speak for 4,000 pages about nothing. I don't think I've ever sat down to spout and had nothing to say; sure, I've had days and weeks where I've not written anything, but that's because I rejected every idea (and the ones you get to read got through... Jesus). Those ideas were too petulant, too infantile, too hackneyed, too simple, or too complex. Yes I've encountered writers block, but writers block and lack of things to say are two very, very different subjects: one is when you cannot discuss a certain issue, story, whatever any more, the other is when you're a husk and have nothing of interest to say about anything. Now, I can say this and still keep my bollocks - even if my friend reads this - because I know for a fact that he is interesting, otherwise we certainly wouldn't be friends. He just has a kind of stilted or fragmentary collection of neurons or something. Something prevents him from being able to communicate - however haphazardly - his ideas onto the page, or screen.
This kind of binary further fascinates me, and it fascinates me because I don't understand it. I can imagine it, sure, of course, I am the king of imaginaria, but I can't understand how people can have been created so different. I would have thought an active and rigorously tested imagination was inherent in all sentient beings. Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps there is no link between a lack of imagination and lack of interesting things to say. These people might just be incredibly unlucky and not be able to facilitate the process of forming these thoughts into rational ideas, or whatever, peut-etre, but unlikely.
For when I soar wildly above the clouds of cognisance, gently caress the beaches of unexplored, unreal places and objects, I cannot dare to dream of a life without such escapism.
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