Think of all the creativity at our disposal now, and the lack of real imagination that has inspired it. You may assume technology has opened the possibilities up since the artist is no longer limited by easel & brush or a patron commissioning. Thomas Howard says, “There is an irony, of course, in the elusiveness of the very thing that all the technology claims to be about, namely, an increase of human freedom… [but] in the name of the immediate, we have lost our grip on the immediate.”Today’s freedom has allowed creativeness fall into mere random clutter, in that, we “discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and dramatists only as bored, vexed, frantic, embittered, and sniffling.” And you should see how the audience feels?!
What is lacking is the “immediate” or an immediate Presence that is aligned to our imagination. Imagination appears to be a tricky term, since we all know people with colorful minds and discombobulated output. But one bad apple never kills the Tree of Life. Howard notes, that real imagination “is a synthetic faculty in the first place, it is, secondly, an image-making faculty; that is, its tendency is from the abstract toward the concrete.” And for many, their colorful minds are too incoherent to synthesize, and too flighty to stay grounded.
If imagination is more a flight to the real than what meets our fancy, then why are so loose with the term? Howard discusses as to how we have lost our order to things (seeing God on top, and reality tv stars somewhere near the bottom). In addition, we don’t apprehend things as significant (what it means is whatever we want it to mean on top of any given feeling we may have about it). And lastly, we don’t have a purpose or telos to all of this creative output (where is this all going for you other than Botox injections and assisted living?).
Howard says “Whereas their forebears could evoke and celebrate a world in which the appearance of things answered to the nature of things, and hence furnished rich materials for the imagination, these men have to find some source for aesthetic satisfaction other than this fortunate correspondence. Hence also the overwhelming sense of experiment and exploration in modern painting and sculpture.” But all that adventure leads to our misadventure on Truth. It may be clever and subversive, but it is rarely transfigurative.
In keeping with the theme, I also read Gary Lachman’s Lost Knowledge of Imagination which perfectly overlaps with Howard’s terrific book. Lachman posits along with many of western esotericists he covers that our language may have initially been figurative and poetic, and it is only with the rise of civilization that we became so narrow and precise, and therefore losing our imaginative faculties. But today instead of going to the Source of this loss, we instead indulge in novel self-expression that lacks any self-mastery.
Lachman brings in Coleridge’s distinction of primary imagination and secondary imagination. “Primary Imagination, he said, is ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception’ ... It is ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. When we perceive the world then, according to Coleridge, we echo the Creator’s creation of it. Our perception is itself creative. … [On the other hand] Secondary imagination … is an ‘echo’ of the Primary Imagination, ‘co-existing with the conscious will’, and differing from the Primary Imagination only by degree. It ‘dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates, in order to recreate’. Its action is always and essentially vital, that is living, having an ‘inside’, whereas objects, as objects, are fixed and dead.” This is why true imagination as manifest is always both impersonal and personal. The mystic or master meditator isn’t always a masterful co-creator, because true images come from both “no-mind” and the personal sub/conscious mind. Moreover, true imagination also requires logic and reason so it does not fall incoherently astray.
Coleridge also notes that modern creativity is often more of a fancy, which is not any sort of true imagination. These are mostly fragmented ‘fixities’ to play with and is nothing more than “a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” It is not creative as the secondary imagination because its source is a narcissistic closed system of self-indulgence.
The truly imaginative creator works concretely from the bottom-up and aligns with Source as an open system so that he/she “can see those commonplaces as images of that ultimate glory, and find in them clues as to the nature of that glory” (Howard). It is God himself that Creates the intelligibility and creative impulse in us so we can participate in all creation through our imaginative potentials. And towards our end, there's nothing fancy in this.