IMAGINATION
New St. Paul’s Cathedral resides in Central London. The adjective ‘new’ refers to the fact that the extant structure was rebuilt from the ground up after the Great Fire of 1666. The Old Cathedral dated back to Saxon times, circa 600 A.D. Saxon, of course, refers to the ancient Northern Germanic people, who spoke the Low German dialect.
The cemetery holds the bones and ashes of those who await the Second Advent and the trumpet call to eternity, among who: the Flemish artist Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who died of the Plague in Blackfriars; John Donne, the poet-priest; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, London’s foremost painter of portraits.
Entombed here also is Horatio Nelson, the cyclopean, single-armed libertine; and the Duke of Wellington, hero of the Napoleonic era and emancipator of Catholics.
And over in the corner, near the ashes of the architect Sir Edwin Landseer Luytens, rest the ashes of Walter de la Mare, poet extraordinaire.
Walter de la Mare maintained an easy intimacy with the idea of imagination, what the Jews call the forming place. In today’s world it is called the mind. De la Mare describes two imaginations: the childlike and the boylike. And, according to de la Mare, all children are born with childlike imaginations. Soon, though, the world intrudes with its worries, its cultural biases, its celebrity, its pecking order. In other words, that time when one slowly turns from the wonder of the world and the miracle of life to the bland values of men. One of these bland values is fear. A fear which stymies and quenches the childlike imagination. And thus intuition, said Walter, “retires like a shocked snail into its shell.”
The world, then, is divided into two groups: the intuitive and the logical. “The one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty.” Dylan Thomas and William Blake leap to mind as intuitive, while Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens represent the logical.
Blake, the poet and mystic, who believed that the sun was not a body of blazing gases, but a choir of archangels singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy — Lord God Almighty,” and Thomas, the Welsh poet, retained their childlike imaginations. Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, exchanged his childlike imagination for the fearful severity of logic and human intellect. Logic and intellect led him to the grim, dark tower of atheism, which hunkers in the middle of a barren land. A land where joy and amazement were long ago banished. Where stand stern altars upon which ideas have been sacrificed ‘in the name of reason.’ A gory ritual. For reason concluded there is no God, there is no heaven, there are no angels, and, after death, there is only nothing.
Doris Ross McCrosson explains intuitive children as “visionaries.” They breathe in harmony with their creativity. Those who are logical are connected to external reality, a disadvantage to de la Mare’s way of thinking. The latter — the logicals — know things, rate experience(s), espouse action. They worship at the altar of the present active indicative form of the verb ‘do’. Whereas the former — the intuitives — enjoy a kind of internal colloquy with the White Goddess, the female anima, their muse, who speaks to them, igniting their creativity.
In one state, the person is Unreal yet lives in a quantifiable, real world, where ‘doing’ is reality. The person in the other state is Real, but like Blake is considered at the very least dysfunctional, perhaps mad.
In another cemetery, this one located in Milford, Pennsylvania, lays the coffin of Charles Sanders Pierce. He was scientist, philosopher, mathematician, logician — an objective jack of all trades. Pierce propounded a philosophy called Pragmatism. The formal perspective of Pragmatism revolves around four focal points: logic as a formal semiotic; the theory of categories; logical graphs; and mathematics. Subordinate to these four articles are his dynamics of inquiry, composed of: the theory of signs, or semiotics; sign relations; types of signs; the theory of inquiry; and the logic of information.
It’s dismal just summarizing it. In a sentence, old Chuck was into symbols.
Sadly, Pierce suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, had a messy and unhappy personal life, lived most of his life in dire poverty, dying penniless in 1914, and suffered the ignominy of professional anonymity until after his death.
Fame after death seems somehow unsuccessful.
I’m actually going somewhere with all this information, trying to tie it all together. Here’s the point:
There was once a woman named Margery Winifred Williams. She was lucky. Her process of ‘becoming’ Real occurred while she was very young. Her father, who was a Real person, encouraged Margery ‘to become.’ He transmitted his love for literature to his daughter, and her addiction to reading soon transmuted to an addiction to write, to create something from nothing, using words as her narrative clay. For writing is the literary equivalent of walking on water.
When her father suddenly died, Margery was seven years old. This cataclysmic event closed one door and opened another door. Behind the closed door stood her father and all he had taught her. Through the opened door in-walked the shadow of Marcus Aurelius and his philosophy, which, keeping it simple ran along these lines: ‘becoming’ a Real person means suffering. Although Margery didn’t consciously adopt Aurelius’ philosophy, nevertheless, it flows through her prose like a river through its banks. Margery believed being truly human was a highly desirable thing, which contended with impulses of the human heart to remain artificial or denarrated (as Douglas Coupland has called it). And to become truly human one has to travel through David’s valley of the shadow of death, i.e., woe and adversity.
Thomas Merton called this process of ‘becoming’ point vierge, passing from one state to another, as when liquid goes from motion to motionless, called turbulence, or when humans go from unreal to Real.
According to Merton, point vierge is “the point where conversion begins in the human heart — the point between being and non-being, between darkness and light.” The Scripture for it might be found in James 4:5, where James, the Johnny-come-lately half-brother of Jesus, wrote “the spirit yearns jealously…” This ‘jealous yearning’ is where conversion from being a human doing to being a human being takes place.
Margery wrote novels, initially. They didn’t sell well. It was while she lived in Turin, Italy during World War One that she discovered the poetry of Walter de la Mare. She cast him in the theater of her own life as her “spiritual mentor.’ And he played his part well.
After the Great War, upon returning to America, Margery submitted to her numinous muse, writing her masterpiece, The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real. On one level, it is simply a child’s story. But on another and more elevated plane, it exposes the mystery of faith to the opalescent light of the human heart. Without a heart, that is, if one is Unreal, the story is dull; but if one has a heart and is Real, the story attains that ghostly quality called flow; and flow is shape along with change. Or motion plus form, if you will, like a ball rolling down a hill. Until the ball rolls, it merely has the form of a ball. But when it rolls, it ‘becomes’ a ball. It mixes form and function and achieves Realness. And flow, of course, is a Platonic idea, wherein things assume reality independent of the particular instant.
In other words, ‘becoming’ Real is not part of historical time, it is part of spiritual time. And spiritual time is magical.
Magic is how a person becomes Real. And in each of all her stories, the Unreal — the toys — find a way to manifest human emotions: feelings of love and affection: the Real.
In the Velveteen Rabbit, Margery wrote:
“What is Real?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time and not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because when you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”[1]
Jesus said almost the same thing.
“Then they brought young children to Him, that He might touch them; but the disciples rebuked those who brought them.
“But when Jesus saw it, He was greatly displeased and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God.
“Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.”[2]
[1] Williams, Margery. The Velveteen Rabbit; Derrydale Books, 1986.
[2] Mark 10:13–15; New King James Version; Thomas Nelson Publishers.
