IMAGINATION AND FORM

Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual's

capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to "dream dreams and see

visions," to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension

involved in holding these possibilities before one's attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one's chances that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead.

In creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form. When these endeavors are successful, it is because

imagination infuses form with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose? Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthink-able? Dare to conceive of, and move among, new visions?

At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared world? WiB we lose the boundaries

that enable us to orient ourselves to what we cali reality? This, again, is the problem of form, or stated differently, the awareness of limits.

Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis. Henee some psychotics walk ciose to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to the edges, always preserving tiieir localization in the external environment. Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain whatever outward localization isavailable.

As director of a large mental hospital in Ger-many which received many brain-injured soldiers during the warr Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these patients suffered radical h'mitation of their capacities for

imagination. He observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the patient became panicky. He could not orient bim-self to the new arrangement, could not imagine a new "form" that would bring order out of the chaos. The patient was then thrown into what Goldstein called the "catastrophic situation." Or when asked to write his ñame on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person would write the ñame in some corner ciose to the boundaries. He could not tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—what I cali, in this context, imagi-nation—were severely curtailed. He felt powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs.

Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their world radically

truncated. Any "limitless" exist-ence was experienced by them as being highly dangerous.

Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The

boundaries of our world shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new forra will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order. As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imagina-tions and, at the same time, a sufficiently

developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic

situation. They are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore the future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncracies. For we will be better prepared for the future if we can listen seriously to them.

There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or per-haps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy— that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of proporcion to what actually has happened.

I may have worked at my desk morning after moming trying to find a way to express some important idea. When my "insight" suddenly breaks through—which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders, a sense of joy on a deeper level that continúes without any relation whatever to the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief. What is the source of this curious pleasure?

I propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to- be. If only for that mo-ment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the universe. The sense of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The paradox is that at that moment we also experience more vividly our own limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche writes about—the love of one's fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasyl