Anam Cara

6

I

MAGINATION:

B

EAUTY’S

E

NTRANCE

Beauty as an explosion of energy perfectly contained.

RICHARD HOLMES on Coleridge’s concept of beauty

‘T

EANNALACH

’

A FRIEND OF MINE WHO OWNS AN ART GALLERY TOLD ME THIS story. There was an exhibition in the gallery and a poet of no small renown had come in to view it. Just when he was finished a farmer arrived. This farmer came to the gallery about once a year. He lived on the shores of Loch Corrib. The gallery owner had great interest in and respect for him and so he introduced him to the poet. The poet then revisited the exhibition with the farmer, pointing out all the intricacies and hidden symbolism of the exhibition. The farmer listened carefully but said nothing. When they were finished, the farmer said to the poet: ‘Thank you very much. That was really interesting. You showed me in those paintings things I would never have noticed myself. You have a wonderful eye; it is a great gift and I envy you your gift. I don’t have that gift myself but I do have Teannalach.’ The poet thanked him but was mystified as to what Teannalach was. The farmer said: ‘I live beside the lake and you always hear the ripple of the waters and the sound of wind on the water; everyone hears that. However, on certain summer days when the lake is absolutely still and everything is silent, I can hear how the elements and the surface of the lake make a magic music together.’ So the story rested until one day a neighbour of the farmer was in the gallery. The owner told him the story and asked him what Teannalach was. The neighbour paused for a while and smiled: ‘They have that word all right up there where he lives. I have never seen the word written down. And it is hard to say what it means. I suppose it means awareness, but in truth it is about seven layers deeper than awareness.’

I love that story for its imaginative richness and its gentle art of displacement. The farmer disclosed his gift, a capacity for profound attention that could pierce the silence and hear the unheard music of the lake. That ‘Teannalach’ is a distinctive and unique local word testifies to a certain tradition of such listening. What kind of echoes might the word hold? Could it be an abbreviation of teanga na locha, the tongue or the language of the lake? Or could it be an tsean loch, the ancient lake – perhaps the lake beneath the lake? The story also underlines the hiddenness of beauty, a beauty that dwells between the worlds which cannot be reached with known language or bare senses. It only reveals itself when the mind’s attention is radical and the imagination is finely tuned.

T

HE

C

ELTIC

I

MAGINATION:

E

XPERIENCE AND THE

‘W

EB OF

B

ETWEENNESS

’

Thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary.

HERMANN BROCH

BECAUSE WE TEND TO SEE OUR EXPERIENCE AS A PRODUCT, WE have lost the ability to be surprised by experience, the sense of the mind as a theatre where interesting sequences of complex drama are played. Whether we like it or not, the depths in us are always throwing up treasure. For the awakened imagination there is no such thing as inner poverty. It is interesting how contemporary English has the phrase: ‘to have an experience’, with the suggestion of possession, property and ownership. In the folk culture of the Celtic Imagination, experience was not a thing to be produced or to be owned. For the Celtic Imagination the focus was more on the experience as participation in something more ultimate than one’s needs, projection or ego: it was the sacred arena in which the individual entered into contact with the eternal. Experience in this sense was an event of revelation. In such a world, experience was always lit by spirit; the mind was not a closed compartment ‘processing’ its own private impressions, the mind always had at least one window facing the eternal. Through this window wonder and beauty could shine in on a life and illuminate the quiet corners where mystery might be glimpsed. A person’s nature was revealed in experience; it was also the place where gifts arrived from the divine. Naturally, experience was one’s own and not the experiences of someone else. However, it was understood as being much more than the private product and property of an individual. Expressed in another way, there was a sense that the individual life was deeply woven into the lives of others and the life of nature. The individual was not an isolated labourer desperately striving to garner a quota of significance from the world.

In the intuitive world-view of the Celtic Imagination, the web of belonging still continued to hold a person, especially when times were bleak. In Catholic theology, there is a teaching reminiscent of this. It has to do with the validity and wholesomeness of the sacraments. In a case where the minister of the sacrament is unworthy, the sacrament still continues to be real and effective because the community of believers supplies the deficit. It is called the ex-opere-operato principle. From the adjacent abundance of grace, the Church fills out what is absent in the unworthiness of the celebrant. Within the embrace of folk culture, the web of belonging supplied similar secret psychic and spiritual shelter to the individual. This is one of the deepest poverties in our times. That whole web of ‘betweenness’ seems to be unravelling. It is rarely acknowledged any more, but that does not mean that it has ceased to exist. The ‘web of betweenness’ is still there but in order to become a presence again, it needs to be invoked. As in the rainforest, a dazzling diversity of life-forms complement and sustain each other; there is secret oxygen with which we unknowingly sustain one another. True community is not produced; it is invoked and awakened. True community is an ideal where the full identities of awakened and realized individuals challenge and complement each other. In this sense both individuality and originality enrich self and others.

T

HE

W

ORLD

B

ETWEEN

THE HUMAN EYE ALWAYS SEES TWICE IN THE ONE LOOK: THE THING and the emptiness. This difference is registered by the eye and conveyed to the mind. Because the eye discovers and guarantees the world, it has little difficulty schooling the mind in the habit of separation. The instinct of the eye is not to trust sequence. The eye prefers to insist on the loneliness of the object. No object intensifies the neighbouring emptiness like the human body. The eye underlines this separation. Because the mind knows the passion and difference of the interior world locked inside the body, it easily comes to believe the individual is an island. The conviction that each individual is separate and utterly alone makes us blind to that subtle world that dwells between things.

Because the eye loves to hit its glimpse at the centre of a thing, it has no radar to pick up this in-between world. Though it may not be seen directly, the eye of the imagination will often be drawn to the edges of things where the visible and invisible worlds coalesce. There is a subtle and unknown intimacy around each of us which is usually more evident in our homes. The things we have, the clothes, furniture, paintings, music, books, rooms, all are infused with us. In truth, there is no distance between us and the things we live among. This nearness is intensified a thousand times when it comes to the people close to us.

There is no map for this invisible territory, yet sometimes its force completely engages your heart. The atmosphere between you and a friend takes on a life of its own; though both of you influence its rhythm and shapes, neither of you ultimately controls it. Indeed, it is fascinating how much we can awaken in each other. There are some people in your life with whom you felt a wonderful affinity the moment you met them. The more they told you, the more you felt as if they were talking from a common world you had somehow secretly shared before you ever came to know each other. Within the newly discovered affinity, so much can be assumed and intuited. Nothing needs to be said, tested or proved. You sense each other’s spirit and in some inexplicable way, you do know each other. Trust is not a question; you settled into an embrace of belonging that seemed to have always held you. Sometimes this interim world – this invisible territory – knows more than we do, even things we have yet to discover as we continue to imagine who we are.

N

O-ONE

W

ANTS TO

R

EMAIN A

P

RISONER IN AN

U

NLIVED

L

IFE

But beauty interrupts restrictions in every place and thing.

STEPHEN DAVID ROSS

THIS IS ONE OF THE SACRED DUTIES OF IMAGINATION: HONOURABLY to imagine your self. The shortest distance in the world is the one between you and yourself. The space in question is tiny. Yet what goes on in this little space determines nearly everything about the kind of person you are and about the kind of life you are living. Normally, the priority in our culture is to function and do what is expected of us. So many people feel deep dissatisfaction and an acute longing for a more real life, a life that allows their souls to come to expression and to awaken; a life where they could discover a different resonance, one which echoes their heartfelt dreams and longing. For their short while on earth, most people long to have the fullest life they can. No-one wants to remain a prisoner in an unlived life. This was the intention of Jesus: ‘I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.’ Of the many callings in the world, the invitation to the adventure of an awakened and full life is the most exhilarating. This is the dream of every heart. Yet most of us are lost or caught in forms of life that exile us from the life we dream of. Most people long to step onto the path of creative change that would awaken their lives to beauty and passion, deepen their contentment and allow their lives to make a difference.

Y

OU

A

RE

N

OT

S

IMPLY

T

HERE:

Y

OU

I

MAGINE

W

HO

Y

OU

A

RE

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

THE WORLD NEVER COMES AT YOU ALL AT ONCE. SOME experiences barely register; others strike you. In the midst of everything, there is one experience that you cannot escape. This is an experience you are having literally every moment, namely, that this is you, in this body, here in the world, now. If someone were to ask you which fact you could not doubt, you would declare this to be the clearest and most intimate fact you know. Yet the strange thing is that the nature and meaning of this fact is neither clear nor obvious. In other words, whoever you consider yourself to be is also the result of your own imagination. You are not simply here. Neither are you definitively and forever ‘you’. You develop and change constantly; each new experience adds to you and alters your shape and image. You imagine who you are. Of all imaginative work this is the most intimate and creative. It is also a powerful and yet vulnerable position to be in regarding yourself. It seems that there is a stranger who has somehow stolen into your life, one who knows all your intimate feelings and thoughts and has gained control of how you understand your life and see yourself. By now this stranger has gained power over you. Your every thought is vulnerable to the stranger’s outlook and consideration. It is an unbelievable way to live: to be tied for ever in this caged inner conversation. The irony is of course: the stranger is you.

No person is a finished thing, regardless of how frozen or paralysed their self-image might be. Each one of us is in a state of perennial formation. Carried within the flow of time, you are coming to be who you are in every new emerging moment. Life is a journey that fills out your identity and yet the true nature of a journey remains largely invisible. Inside each journey a secret harvesting is at work. It is as though the beginning of a journey offers the pilgrim a mirror where something is glimpsed, something that is beginning to form as an image. Over the course of the journey the image fills and fills until finally at the end of the journey the empty mirror has become a living icon of spirit. When the new baby arrives there is barely a blur in the mirror, then at the end of its life when the person lies down to die, the mirror has filled, the image has taken on the depth of a great icon. Now there is a reversal and transfiguration. As the spirit departs it looks into the deathbed and sees barely a blur because it has filled with the invisible harvest of life’s experiences, transfigurations and memories, its inner narrative.

A G

OOD

S

TORY

K

NOWS

M

ORE

T

HAN

I

TS

T

ELLER

NOWADAYS EVERYONE IS CONSCIOUS OF THEIR OWN STORY. PEOPLE identify themselves with their stories. The story is rarely presented for what it is: a selective version. Rather the version is taken for fact and the fact takes on a mechanical and repetitive life of its own. Often when confronted with this kind of self-presentation, one has the difficulty of trying to correlate a fairly banal, predictable biographical script with an individual who seems infinitely more interesting and complex. Literature is the domain where story belongs. In good literature a story is always working on several levels at once; it holds within it a suggestiveness of the other stories that it is not; it has an irony and ambivalence about its own identity and posture and immunizes itself against take-over by any definitive reading or interpretation. From this perspective, it seems that much of what passes for story in contemporary spirituality and psychology is more reminiscent of tabloid pastiche than real story. Even the pre-literary tradition of oral culture had complex tapestries of story that left the most subtle openings into the resonance fields of myth and mystery.

A human life is the most complex narrative of all; it has many layers of events which embrace outside behaviour and actions, the inner stream of the mind, the underworld of the unconscious, the soul, fantasy, dream and imagination. There is no account of a life which can ever mirror or tell all of this. When telling her story all a person can offer is a sample of this complexity. The best stories suggest what they cannot name or describe. They deepen respect for the mystery of the events through which identity unfolds. Consequently, respect for oneself should mean that if one wants to tell one’s story, it should be worthy of telling. Since story is now widely used in psychology, spirituality and sociology, a deepening of the mystery of what a story is would serve to illuminate the beauty that dwells deep in the individual life. As the Jewish writer and human rights campaigner Elie Wiesel once said, God created man because he loved stories.

T

HE

I

MAGINATION

S

EES

T

HROUGH

A

T

HING TO THE

C

LUSTER OF

P

OSSIBILITIES

W

HICH

S

HROUDS

I

T

A REAL NARRATIVE IS A WEB OF ALTERNATING POSSIBILITIES. THE imagination is capable of kindness that the mind often lacks because it works naturally from the world of Between; it does not engage things in a cold, clear-cut way but always searches for the hidden worlds that wait at the edge of things. The mind tends to see things in a singularly simple, divided way: there is good and bad, ugly and beautiful. The imagination, in contrast, extends a greater hospitality to whatever is awkward, paradoxical or contradictory. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, in an interview shortly before his death last year, said: ‘The integrity of a society demonstrates itself in how that society engages with contradiction.’ The imagination is both fascinated and stimulated by the presences that cluster within a contradiction. It does not perceive contradiction as the enemy of truth; rather it sees here an interesting intensity. The imagination is always more loyal to the deeper unity of everything. It has patience with contradiction because there it glimpses new possibilities. And the imagination is the great friend of possibility. It always sees beyond facts and situations, to the cluster of possibilities in which each thing is shrouded. In a sense, this is what beauty is: possibility that enlarges and delights the heart. Nothing opens up the mind like the glimpse of new possibility. When everything has become locked inside a dead perspective and the consensus is that a cul-de-sac has been reached, new possibility is an igniting spark. This dead identification is made frequently every day in all kinds of situations. For example, the love and affinity between two people becomes sidelined into a repetitive and wearying pattern. They become stuck in a helpless symmetry of conflict. In a company boardroom a project that had great potential becomes suddenly frozen around some unforeseen impossibility. Or something happens to a person that is devastating; or some failure occurs that draws judgement and shame. In all of these instances, the rational mind would devote itself to direct engagement with the situation and soon find itself overwhelmed by inevitability. All of its efforts at direct analysis and understanding, even its efforts to directly loosen the context or break free from it, would only serve to further entangle it.

Frequently the imagination can bring completely new eyes to such a situation. This is often evident in the workplace. The work team in a company or school have lost their vision and creative intention. The energy has lapsed and their work has lost its flow of desire. Things have become stagnant and lifeless. The leader can see no way out. Then a new person comes in and takes over the leadership. She refuses to inherit the bank of dead perception which preceded her. She refuses the language everyone has been locked into. She refuses to use the old descriptions. She trusts her own energy and instinct. Her fresh imagination enables her to see beyond the accepted freeze. Where others saw only a cul-de-sac, she sees a new pathway, one perhaps more precarious and uncertain but at least initially one that offers a way out to fresh pastures. As she begins to perceive this more deeply, her language strives to mirror it. When others begin to glimpse it, new possibilities awaken. The old grid of frozen inevitability gradually melts and people are suddenly finding new inspiration, motivation and creativity. After a while, a dead situation has been transfigured into a place of invitation and excitement.

I

MAGINATION

: T

HE

D

IVINE

S

TRAIN IN

U

S

The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream –

he awoke and found it truth.

JOHN KEATS, 22 Nov. 1817. Letter to Benjamin Bailey

THE DIFFICULTY IN BEING HUMAN IS THAT ONE CAN NEVER BE merely human. Whether we like it or not, each one of us has kinship with the divine. This kinship can remain dormant for a long time or it can find other forms of expression. Sooner or later, it will assert itself in a form that is no longer possible to ignore. The divine is one of the most intimate and unpredictable dimensions of the human heart and there is no way of foreseeing when or how it might awaken. The source of our creative longing and passion is the Divine Imagination.

It is puzzling that in the Western world we have concentrated on the divine intellect and the divine will. Yet the breathtaking flow of difference in the world suggests the beauty of the Divine Imagination which we have utterly neglected. When we bring in the notion of the imagination, we begin to discover a whole new sense of God. The emphasis on guilt, judgement and fear begins to recede. The image of God as a tabloid, moral accountant peering into the regions of one’s intimate life falls away. The notion of the Divine Imagination brings out the creativity of God, and creativity is the supreme passion of God. When we bring in the missing dimension of imagination, the perspective changes and we get a glimpse of true beauty, the glorious passion, urgency and youthfulness of God. This portal of insight always needs to be balanced against the unknown in God which remains beyond the furthest dream of the mind’s light.

God created the world because God had to create. The world was not created to satisfy some desire for experiment. One of the concepts from the classical period was the idea of the ‘pleroma’, or the urgent fullness of God. There was such a fullness brimming in the divine presence that had God not created, he would have imploded. God had to come to expression. Just as the true artist is always haunted by the desire to bring the dreams of the imagination to expression, the failure to follow one’s calling to creativity severely damages one’s spirit. Sins against creativity exact huge inner punishment and as artist, God had to follow his imagination and reach towards expression. In his Letter to Artists, the present pontiff says: ‘None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.’

Everything that is – every tree, bird, star, stone and wave – existed first as a dream in the mind of the divine artist. Indeed, the world is the mirror of the divine imagination and to decipher the depths of the world is to gain deep insights into the heart of God. The traces of the divine imagination are everywhere. The beauty of God becomes evident in the beauty of the world. I once asked a brilliant young sculptor who her favourite sculptor was and she said: ‘the divine sculptor’. The curvature of mountains, the angular stillness of rocks, the variations on the seashore, the white graffiti of stars on night’s high black wall, all belong to God’s masterpiece; and like any great work of art, it invites endless contemplation. It has an inexhaustible depth and a fluency of presence that can meet us in all the different phases of our awareness with ever surprising invitations. The divine imagination has infused the things of the world with secret depths. We are neither strangers nor foreign bodies in a closed-off world. We are the ultimate participants here – the more we give ourselves to experience and strive for expression, the deeper it opens before us.

W

E

A

RE

M

ADE IN THE

I

MAGE AND

L

IKENESS

OF THE

D

IVINE

I

MAGINATION

The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again.

G.W.F. HEGEL, Aesthetics, vol. 2

EACH TRADITION IS AN IMMENSE ARCHIVE OF EXPERIENCE, MEMORY and wisdom. There are beautiful treasures in the Christian tradition and one of the keenest insights is that we are ‘made in the image and likeness of God’. We are from God and we carry in our minds and hearts the ripple of the divine mind. There are depths that keep watch in us, depths we have not created. When the neglected dimension of the Divine Imagination is brought in, we could restate that equivalence and say: we are made in the image and likeness of the Divine Imagination. The individual imagination is not its own invention: its source is elsewhere. The intuition, passion and luminosity of the individual imagination are infused with the urgency of the divine. Thus when we enter into our creativity, we are in the rhythm of the divine creator.

At the deepest level, creativity is holiness. To create is to further the dream and desire of the creator. When the world was created, it was not a one-off, finished event. Creation is a huge beginning, not a finished end. Made in the image and likeness of the Divine Imagination, human creativity helps to add to creation. The unfinished is an invitation to our imagination. This is what happens in experience: the unfinished reaches towards us in order to come to form and expression. Experience is also how we develop and grow. The human self is not a finished thing, it is constantly unfolding. Experience is, then, essentially creative. Everything we feel, think and do, even the smallest thing, expresses and unfolds the dream of God. No human presence is neutral for there is some deeper, hidden level at which all creativity comes together. Beyond the obvious psychological and social levels, the life and death of each of us exerts a secret influence on everyone else. There is a community of spirit but it is more subtle than overt social community. This is the realm of ultimate creativity. It is the arrival point – the harvest place of human presence and activity. There is an illuminating sentence by St Paul: ‘Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem’ – now we only see in a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face. Perhaps after death we will be given a glimpse of how everything holds together and how each thing that happens to us fits precisely in the blueprint of our creative destiny.

E

ACH OF

U

S

H

AS

I

NHERITED A

T

REASURE -HOUSE OF

W

ONDERS

I would like to be able to take a photo of a dream.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

TIME BECOMES RESTLESS IN US. THE HUMAN HEART IS FULL OF quickening. Each pulse beat draws us towards new frontiers. In every moment we see and feel more than we can ever know. If we were to live everything, we would be too much for ourselves. Yet the life within us calls out for expression. This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to bring some of our hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are. When we are creative, we help the unknown to become known, the visible to be seen and the rich darkness within us to become illuminated. No human being is ever actually there. Each of us is emerging in every moment. When we discover our creativity, we begin to attend to this constant emergence of who we are. Our creativity is excited by what is new, different and concealed within us. While the outside world has long settled for who we are in terms of name, personality and role, when we creatively engage our life, we enable the signature, taste and imprint of our uniqueness to emerge. This is what begins to emerge when we come to the desk and look into the mirror of the white page. Beneath that white page, in the stillness, a harvest of untouched possibility waits.

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.

• 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.