Topic: Imagination

It was 10pm on a Saturday night and my friends, Kevin and Kristi, and I were sitting at Chris' Diner, waiting for our pancakes and our eggs and our hashbrowns. We were discussing the little kids that had been running around at the party from which we'd just left. They'd had sparklers and had been etching stars, hearts, and their names into the sky and were excitedly waving them in the grinning, drunk faces of adults. "Four at once! Four at once!" one boy had yelled, a sparkler between each of his fingers on his right hand.

"Remember imagination?" Kevin asked. He sort of threw the question out there, tossed it to the wind, not really expecting an answer but he was looking at Kristi and I perhaps with the hope that we too remembered imagination.

Despite all the coming-of-age novels--bildungsroman, if I remember correctly--I've read, despite the trite themes of lost innocence or the regaining of some childish wide-eyed worldview that infiltrate all forms of pop culture, this question (and maybe it was Kevin's concise phrasing), like recycled plastic, keeps coming back to me.

When did our imaginations die? I imagine it was an intensely slow, painful death, as so many character traits suffer. Did we decide one day that it was time to put the cataract-ridden, cancerous, limping dog out of its misery? Or was imagination gradually phased out of our ever-aging psyches, along with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the fact that the Disney characters are actually bored, angsty, zit-ridden teenagers in costumes?

I can't answer that. I can only cite personal experience: my imagination is most active in my dreams, when I happen to have dreams. Really, sometimes I think that's all dreams are--they're not symbolic, they're not stress outlets, they're not the translations of your restricted sexual desires of consciousness, despite what all the Freudians, New Agers, and stargazers will try to tell you. Dreams are your unbridled imagination which, I suppose as you age, becomes constricted by your conscious reality. So, perhaps your imagination doesn't die in the strongest sense of the word, but weakens over time--it moves from the outer world (imagining external things as a kid) to a more restricted inner one (imagination = dreams).

The fact that memoirs exist kind of illustrates the demise of imagination--both because people read and write them. I mean, really, you're hard-pressed to meet a person that hasn't read A Million Little Pieces or Running With Scissors (and you can say blah blah blah, James Frey didn't really write a memoir, but that's not the point). Do people write them because their lives are more interesting than anything they could ever imagine? I find that hard to believe, but perhaps it's because sometimes I find my own life so uninteresting that if I wrote about it, I wouldn't even want to read it. It seems more logical to reason that it's because the authors' imaginations have become so weak that they can't imagine anything more interesting other than their own experiences and readers would rather essentially gawk at the experiences of others rather than read about a world spun out of another's mind.

You could also reason that people write memoirs because it's the only way to deal with the terrible things that happened to them in life. Writing is their coping mechanism. Writing is their way to tell the world, "Look, you fucked me over, but I'm living through it," and a way to tell other people that they're not alone. And that's all fine and good, there's no problem with that, but it still doesn't explain why they write a memoir and not a work of fiction.

Which leads me to my next set of rhetorical questions: if imagination can weaken with the aging of a person, can imagination also weaken with the aging of our society? What novels from this era of history--the postmodern era--will students be reading in 20, 30 years? Kurt Vonnegut's most popular book, Slaughterhouse-Five, is semi-autobiographical, and that was published in 1969. Angela's Ashes is the most well-known book of Frank McCourt's and it's already required reading in some schools. So, if our era is remembered for our heart-wrenching memoirs, will we appear sympathetic or wholly unimaginative in the context of historical literary trends?

I'm not knocking memoirs here--sometimes, they're hilarious (Augusten Burroughs' Possible Side Effects) and sometimes they're horrifying (Anthony Kiedis' Scar Tissue). But what happened to imagination? Kevin asked if we remembered it. That phrasing alone shows that we believe imagination to be something of the past--something dead or dying--since we can only find it in our memories. I mean, I have no idea, but the wild popularity of something so ingeniously imaginative like Harry Potter gives me hope that imagination can still endure throughout your life. Maybe literature's just experiencing a fictional drought. Or maybe--hopefully--I'm wrong about everything.