The Marginal Imaginal

"I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared? "We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy."

“‘Take the example of one Jane Austen,’ he said with what appeared to me a patronizing munificence. “‘You used to preach to us all that she ignored politics, not because she didn't know any better but because she didn't allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her. At a time when the world was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars, she created her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy. Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?’ he continued patiently. ‘You keep talking about democratic spaces, about the need for personal and creative spaces. Well, go and create them, woman! Stop nagging and focusing your energy on what the Islamic Republic does or says and start focusing on your Austen.’ “I knew he was right, although I was too frustrated and too angry with myself to admit it. Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world-not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires. He was right. I was not listening, otherwise I would have had to admit that my girls, like millions of other citizens, by refusing to give up their right to pursue happiness, had created a dent in the Islamic Republic's stern fantasy world.”

I'm working on a paper for my Master's degree on lectio divina/sacred reading of fiction, partially inspired by the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. For a lot of reasons that probably don't need explaining, Harry Potter doesn't really do it for me anymore. I took a look at my bookshelf and very quickly found my answer: it had to be Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Something about this book is so subtly powerful that I had to revisit it.

“A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.”

Active imagination begins by evoking an image or feeling into consciousness. You sit quietly holding the image and/or feeling in consciousness. As the image or feeling becomes more apparent (felt), you begin a dialogue with the image. You may ask the figure standing before you a specific question, or you may wait for the figure to engage with you. The initial encounter with a figure may take some time. However, experience shows once you have engaged with the image, the process takes little to no effort on your part. After (or even during) the process, it is important to concretize your experience through writing, artwork, or body movement.

Psyche dwells in the realm of the imaginal; and the imaginal is the portal linking the phenomenal world of everyday events to the world outside of space and time, the world of ‘Once upon a time.’ This portal sits at the nexus of the local and non-local, the temporal and the atemporal. Myth and all its rich imagery arise from this other world. Imagination reconnects us to our primal, archaic beginnings, our source. It exists so we can remember our participation in Nature.

The problem for the lover of the natural world in a culture of uncare is how to maintain the ecological self. It needs feeding through introjecting enough of real nature to counteract illusory phantasy. It is the introjection of experience of real nature that feeds the psychic imaginary needed for the life instinct to flourish. Instead, the culture at worst offers perverse seductive and corrupting distortions of 'reality', and at best it treats the soul food people need with indifference.

“…with synchronicity, an event (a psychological event, a dream, or a vision), links non-locally. Jung calls it 'acausal'—that is, outside of time and space—with something in the world. This points to the fact that we are nonlocally/acausally connected to the spirit of the earth. I think this is terribly important in terms of a feeling relationship to the ecological crisis. I think Jung was saying that the psyche/archetype is not only inside us but extends into nature—we are in psyche. And, as he was searching for ways to describe this psyche-matter connection or psyche-nature connection, he said in the end that psyche is really 'world.' “For me, the synchronicity hypothesis is so incredibly important, not just for describing an interesting, even transforming experience, which it is—and in my book, I elaborate the key features of such events—but for a whole new way of looking at our connection to nature, and of being in the world in general. The fact that we are deeply, deeply connected to the spirit of the earth—not just to the earth as a rock, but as Jung says, 'The earth has a soul. Nature is spirit, too.' So, we are connecting to the earth as a spiritual being: Gaia. "And I think that synchronicity events really point in this direction and can sustain a way of being in nature and walking on the earth, which allows developing a relationship that doesn’t split psychematter, and which focuses on our Eros ties to nature rather than our scientific understanding. Synchronicities can point the way—and of course they involve our participation, our noticing—but we can sustain this nonlocal connection to nature even when we are not having unique experiences. So, as an example, what occurs as we walk—attentive to what is showing itself from the spirit of the earth—can become quite a magical experience: you enter that universe where your own imagination is connecting, as I see it, to the imagination of nature. And there’s a oneness that happens there where everything seems to belong together, and the earth discloses itself as wise and beautiful, and deeply coherent, and you are just a little being in a much larger mystery."

One of the main aspects of the ego, as we know from elementary psychology, is to differentiate between the internal and the external. When we look to evaluate ego functioning, we look to see if a person is able to differentiate between his or her internal experience and the external. Today, that boundary is becoming blurred. We are bombarded by images generated by others or sometimes even by robots. The images from our interior are being replaced in many ways, by images from outside. A certain atrophy results, I think, since we are so bombarded. Our attention is drawn to so many of these external stimuli that we disengage from our interiority, and so the boundary between the internal and the external becomes blurred. The internal is overwhelmed by the external. As a result, reality is no longer only reality, and we may not exactly know what that is. It becomes virtual reality and augmented reality. It’s becoming qualified. So, the ego-Self axis, the rootedness within our interiority in what we may call soul, Self, that axis is becoming weakened. And what happens increasingly, is that it’s being replaced by an axis between persona and shadow. The persona is our appearance, what we look like from the outside, and the shadow is the side that we usually try to avoid or not let free in the public field. Online, especially given we can be anonymous, there is almost an explosion of shadow material coming out through the persona because there is not enough of a regulating ego between them.”