Anam Cara

• The imagination has no patience with repetition. The old clichés of explanation and meaning are unmasked and their trite transparency no longer offers shelter. We become interested in what might be rather than what has always been. Experimentation, adventure and innovation lure us towards new horizons. What we never thought possible now becomes an urgent and exciting pathway.

• The imagination offers wholesomeness: heart and head, feeling and thought come into balance. To follow the mind alone inevitably leads to an isolated and lonesome life. When we follow the heart alone, it can lead to sentimentality and the marshlands of blurred emotion. An awakened imagination brings the warmth and tenderness of affection into the life of thought; and it brings clarity and light of thought to the flow of feelings. This is how a great piece of literature claims us. We enter into the life of a character. Our empathy and our minds are engaged by the depth and complexity of the character’s heart and by the quest of his mind for vision and meaning.

• The imagination offers revelation. It never blasts us with information or numbs us with description. It coaxes us into a new situation. As the scene unfolds, we find ourselves engaged in its questions and possibilities, and new revelation dawns. Such revelation is never a one-off hit at the mind. The knowing is always emerging. The imaginative form of knowing is graced with gradualness. We know this from our experience with a favourite painting. Each time we stand before that painting, it will reach us where we are in our life now, but in a different way from how we saw it the last time. While we sleep each night, the imagination offers us different sequences of showings. The imagination speaks to us in dreams. Our dreams are secret letters that we send to ourselves each night. The dream is never a direct message. Its meaning is always concealed in its actions and figures. It offers us a startling but oblique glimpse at what is going on in our life. If we want to see more, the dream waits for us to decipher its story and the more ready we become, the more it will reveal to us. The imagination reveals truth in such a way that we can receive and integrate it.

• The imagination works through suggestion, not description. Description is always direct and frequently closes off what it names. Suggestion respects the mystery and richness of a thing. All it offers are clues to its nature. Suggestion keeps the mystery open and extends us the courtesy of inviting us to see the thing for ourselves. It offers us the hospitality and freedom to trust the integrity of our own encounter with a thing. This is how a work of art can allow itself to be seen in so many different and often conflicting ways. It does not foreclose on the adventure of revelation. This point is clearly expressed by the English poet Don Patterson in his account of the difference between an aphorism and a poem: ‘The principal difference . . . is that the aphorism states its conclusion first. It is a form without tension, and therefore it is simultaneously perfect and perfectly dispensable. There is no road, no tale, no desire.’

• The imagination has a deep sense of irony. It is wide awake to the limitation of its own suggestions and showings. Because the imagination inhabits the province of possibility, it is well aware that the image it presents could indeed be otherwise. The imagination keeps this distinction open and thus enlarges the breathing-room for the gifts it offers.

• The imagination creates a pathway of reverence for the visitations of beauty. It opens up diverse ways into the complex and lyrical forest of experience. To awaken the imagination is to retrieve, reclaim and re-enter experience in fresh new ways. As Bill Stafford says: ‘You are the only world expert on your own experience.’ There is no-one else to illuminate our experience but ourselves. To put it in liturgical terms: each of us is the priest/priestess of our own life and the altar of our imagination is the place where our hidden life can become visible and open to transfiguration. Keats said it so perfectly: ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination . . . – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions or Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.’ The call to the creative life is a call to dignity, to a life of vulnerability and adventure and the call to a life that exquisite excitement and indeed ecstasy will often visit.

The passion of the imagination is nourished from a deeper source, namely, Eros. The force of Eros keeps the thresholds of our lives vital, dangerous and inviting.

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A space must be maintained or desire ends.

ANNE CARSON