Anam Cara

The idea of the threshold is significant because the human body itself is actually a threshold. Each human individual is a threshold in many different ways. You are a threshold in that you are made out of clay. What keeps you alive is in the invisible air. Yet you belong neither to the earth out of which you have come, nor to the heavens towards which you strain. So, you are always in this oscillation, on this moving threshold. Within your own family you are also on a threshold—the threshold between all of the ancestral lines that meet in you, and the line that will go out from you. In many different ways the imagination tries to awaken, articulate and integrate all the presences that meet in us.

At the beginning of his book The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says, Das wahre ist das ganze, the truth is whole. Most of the time when we are talking about things, we seem so sure that we are right, yet all we are giving are little minuscule, half-truth glimpses. To become wholesome, we need living connection with the whole. Our access is always limited and partial; yet through the imagination, we can enter more elegantly into its field of creative tensions.

There are two great sentences in the Greek tradition: “Know thyself” and “Everything flows.” The human self is surrounded by change and is itself continually changing. Your body is constantly changing. In a philosophy class I once had, our professor told us that over a seven-year period all the cells in our body will have changed. There was at the time someone in England who had been in prison for seven years and he appealed his sentence. His claim was that he was not the person now whom they had sentenced seven years before! So, there is this constant changing. In the West of Ireland, visually we are very aware of this, because the weather and the light change all the time.

If everything was, as the Germans say, in Stillstand, or deadlocked in the same position, we would not need to worry about balance. We would all be totally fixated and atrophied in the one position. It is because there is so much movement and change that the notion of balance takes on such depth and urgency. The argument for change is put most memorably by Heraclitus, a philosopher in fifth-century B.C. Greece. He said that you can never step into the same river twice because if you step in at four o’clock and again at five past four, the river has completely changed, and you have changed as well. There is constant change all the time, and imagination is the most faithful force in helping change and continuity maintain a dialogue with each other.

Part of the reason we are so confused at the end of this millennium is that so much change has occurred, at such an acute and relentless pace, that we are not able to decipher and activate the lines of continuity into our own tradition. There is an intense isolation there, a haunting lonesomeness, especially in young people. They are uprooted and dislocated. Even adults a generation or two ahead of them are not able to speak their language. The isolation is intensified in that they are the relentless targets of marketing. Huge multinational marketing systems are targeting teenagers, and what they are achieving is incredible. Parents or teachers could never get teenagers into uniforms and yet multinational corporations have done it. Teenagers are all wearing designer gear. The label is more important than the garment. At the most subversive times of their lives, they are indoctrinated with this peer virus. Again, it is money and greed that have turned teenagers into targets for commodities.

The imagination tries to take change and inhabit it in a way that allows it to be transfigurative rather than destructive. The lovely thing about the imagination is that, whereas the mind often sees change and thinks everything is lost, the imagination can always go deeper than the actual experience of the loss and find something else in it. There is an amazing difference between the way the mind sees something and the way the imagination sees something.

Imagination and the Balance with Otherness

Another lovely quality of the imagination is its passion for otherness. “Otherness” is a technical term, but it means, essentially, everything that is other than you. The easiest way to register the notion of otherness is to think of somebody you dislike intensely. The experience of otherness registers most firmly in what we find strange or totally different from ourselves. One of the huge spiritual, psychological, philosophical and theological problems of post-modern culture is the question of otherness.