Anam Cara

Every heart is full of creative material. There are depths in us hungering towards the light. Many writers continue to excavate their childhood. For a writer, childhood can be a Grimms’ forest of treasures, wonders and shadows. Childhood is that time of silence when the deepest impressions become imprinted. Everything a new infant glimpses is a first intimation of mystery. The world is seen as if God were just creating it; it has the fresh scent of recent arrival. Later in life, when we begin to write, this is the kind of raw freshness and excitement of first intimations that we are seeking to recapture. The creative gift remains faithful to that rich strangeness of the world and the intimate strangeness of the self. As we journey through life, we gather a world around the heart. When creativity awakens, we discover that nothing is truly complete or closed in life. The deeper we attend to the soul, the more we realize what a treasure-house we have inherited. For instance, the discipline of creative writing brings us towards the depths of our inheritance but holds it away from us too; it only allows us to approach at an oblique angle. This prevents us from rifling our inheritance through second-hand psychological analysis or spiritual labelling.

T

HE

G

IFTS THE

I

MAGINATION

B

RINGS

I feel assured I should write from the mere fondness and

yearning I have for the Beautiful even if my night’s labours

should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine on them.

JOHN KEATS, 17 Oct. 1818. Letter to R. Woodhouse

• The imagination is like a lantern. It illuminates the inner landscapes of our life and helps us discover their secret archaeologies. When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see. Too often we squander the invitations extended to us because our looking has become repetitive and blind. The mystery and beauty is all around us but we never manage to see it. Similarly with the inner world: the imagination is the eye for the inner world. When the imagination awakens, the inner world illuminates. We begin to glimpse things that no-one speaks about, that the outer world seems to ignore. When the inner world brightens, we discover a new confidence and a surer grounding in the world.

• The imagination has retained the grace of innocence. This is no naïve, untested innocence. It knows well the shadows and troughs of the world but it believes that there is more, that there are secret worlds hidden within the simplest, clearest things. The imagination is not convinced by the world of external fact. It is not persuaded by situations that pretend to be finished or closed. The innocence of the imagination is willing to see new possibilities in what appears to be fixed and framed. There is a moreness to everything that can never be exhausted.

• The imagination retains a passion for freedom. There are no rules for the imagination. It never wants to stay trapped in the expected territories. The old maps never satisfy it. It wants to press ahead beyond the accepted frontiers and bring back reports of regions no mapmaker has yet visited.

• The imagination keeps the heart young. When the imagination is alive, the life remains youthful. This is often evident in a writer or artist who is old in years but is still incredibly vital in soul and mind. Sometimes in old age an artist can do her most creative work. It is quite fascinating to see how the inner harvest of years will not succumb to weariness or complacent predictability. The harvest of experience brings invitation to new risk and experiment. Even near the end of a life everything can come alive in new and unforeseen forms. The urgency, restlessness and passion of youth are all there as though everything is about to begin anew.

• The imagination awakens the wildness of the heart. This is not the vulgar intrusive wildness of social disruption. It is the wildness of human nature. Social convention domesticates and controls us; it also imprints deeply on the interior life and would turn our one adventure in the universe into a programme of patterned social expectation. We rarely break free; indeed, we are generally not conscious of how smoothly we slide along the rails of social ordering. The awakened imagination desists from this domestication. It returns us to our native wildness, to the natural and seamless fluency of our own nature. Other worlds come into view and we are invited to risk new and original ways of dwelling in the world.