I am sitting in my garden again, for perhaps the last warm evening of the year. The deckchair was packed away weeks ago, and the sun has already fallen behind the high ash to which the rooks are flocking home. These new arrivals disturb the whole colony. Perhaps a hundred flap into the air, then circle round cawing loudly before sweeping off to the other end of the village and the rookery above Gwernfythan. What a contrast they are to the swifts Ipsy and I wondered at (or at least I wondered at while she slept) a few weeks ago. How coarse and quarrelsome they sound. But, of course, they seem quarrelsome to me only because they sound like humans when we are quarrelling. I suppose, in truth, they are filled with all the enthusiasm and life-force of the swifts, like a fat man sweating on the dance-floor – no Fred Astaire, no Michael Jackson, but just as compelled by the need to dance. And the swifts (Apus apus) are not, I have discovered, always feeding when they soar and wheel. They simply do it because it is what they do. Because (forgive me!) they’re Api. For them, Api-ness is the truth. Who knows how balletic we might be if we could rediscover the same aboriginal truth about ourselves?
Lizard
A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
And swirl of a tail!
If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they’d be worth looking at.
D. H. Lawrence
If I can’t see grace in the rooks or hear their music, it is just my prejudice. Our preferences, our distinctions, taxonomies and hierarchies have no objective reality. Objectively, the universe is based on egalitarianism – an artwork (or, if that suggests ‘Design’, a patchwork) of zillions of individually perfect pieces, none more significant than another, like mosaic or pointillisme – and individuality-with-interdependence rather than common identity or atomization.
Christianity has recognized this in theory (at least for humans) even if it has frequently failed to practise what it preaches (or even to preach what the New Testament preaches). ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,’ wrote St Paul to the Galatians, which would have been a startling doctrine of human equality anywhere in the world two thousand years ago. Jesus himself was still more dismissive of innate distinctions: ‘Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? … whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.’ It is your actions that count, not your birth. Society has not caught up with this notion yet.
It would be a poor philosophy which treated one’s child as the most important thing in the world, with one’s cousins a little further out, second-cousins further still, other members of the tribe next, then perhaps chimpanzees, with the ripples of one’s concern finally disappearing as one reaches the amoebae and bacteria – a philosophy which has oneself making the splash at the centre of the universe. It is extruded vanity rather than philosophy, and only invites conflict with others’ tribal self-centredness. Even as egotism it fails: the microbes resident in your gut are more important to your continued existence than your cousins, or even your child (from a purely ‘scientific’ and practical perspective). We couldn’t live without those microbes, nor they without us. In nature’s eyes, we are all equal and all interdependent.
‘The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life … Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness – completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. … A pure or holy state of anything, therefore, is that in which all its parts are helpful.’ (Ruskin)
Is this book a tree, as I had hoped?
or is it just a pile of leaves?
and am I just an annoying bloke with a leaf-blower disturbing the peace of a Sunday morning to no discernable purpose?
And yet, every leaf and every twig on a tree is different, exposed to and shaped by different experiences. It’s only our laziness and poor eyesight that make it all look the same. (‘We never see anything clearly … What we call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough to make out what it is,’ Ruskin adds.) So, even though I’ve gone pottering off to visit rooks and St Paul and genetics and rhizocephalans (and I’ve pruned the remarks on dodos and hoopoes that were originally in that chapter), so long as they all have a common pulse of STA beating through them, I will uphold my claim that I’m still ramifying rather than merely burbling. Cabbages and kings are cousins, after all.
Ruskin’s ‘life’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘art’ have the same constitution. She writes in her diary: ‘A work of art means that one part gets strength from another.’ Whether that could be applied to this book is doubtful, but it helpfully links the last remarks on interdependence with the next section on
acceptance equals imagination
… the art of making life meaningful and beautiful, which involves finding connections between what seems to have no connection, linking people and places, desires and memories, through details whose implications have gone unnoticed.
(Theodore Zeldin)
Much as I adore Coleridge, I confess that there are times when I struggle to understand what on earth he is talking about. Large tracts of the Biographia Literaria are as impenetrable to me as if the whole text, and not merely the title, were in Latin. So, when I say that I follow his famous and invaluable distinction between Fancy and Imagination, it may be that I am misinterpreting him – but this, at any rate, is my version.
Imagination is the integrative power of seeing the connection and unity between things and, when applied in art, of making work that shows forth that unity. Fancy is the capacity for making things up without any precise corresponding reality – James Bond and the Jabberwock, for example. (Confusingly, this is what we think of as ‘imagination’ in everyday usage.) To put it briefly, Fancy is the invention of things that do not exist, Imagination is the uncovering of things which do exist but are not apparent to our senses. On its own, Fancy creates a fantasy world, entertaining but unfulfilling. Imagination does not make any connections, they already exist; it reveals them, as they are in the real world. [Footnote: Coleridge’s ‘Imagination’ is inescapably religious: our very perception, let alone our creativity, is ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. I am, by contrast, keen to keep God at bay, at least for the time being, and so am content with my definition given above. My attitude to God in this may be slightly precarious. Essentially I am trying to look at the world as it is without that hypothesis; not necessarily unwilling, if it seems appropriate, to introduce God at the end and congratulate Her on it all (like bringing an author on stage at the end of a first night), but unwilling to introduce Her too soon as a Dea ex machina and easy explanation for anything that gets a bit tricky. This may be unworkable: if there is a God, an explanation of the world without including Her might well seem inadequate, but I cling to Flaubert’s hope that the tale can be read without the author’s intrusion.]
So, acceptance of all that has been said in the previous chapters – the objective reality of physical nature, and ourselves as entirely within it as equal and interdependent partners with all other creatures in a single, unified creation – and imagination are one and the same thing. Imagination, that flighty flim-flam of painters in garrets and poets expiring on couches, is in fact the most down-to-earth attribute we possess. It is just seeing aright, recognizing what really is there.
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