Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

A few moments later our poet found himself in a tiny arched chamber, very cosy, very warm, seated at a table which appeared to ask nothing better than to make some loans from a larder hanging near by, having a good bed in prospect, and alone with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked of enchantment. He began seriously to take himself for a personage in a fairy tale; he cast his eyes about him from time to time to time, as though to see if the chariot of fire, harnessed to two-winged chimeras, which alone could have so rapidly transported him from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there. At times, also, he fixed his eyes obstinately upon the holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality, and not lose the ground from under his feet completely. His reason, tossed about in imaginary space, now hung only by this thread. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Second, Chapter VII, “A Bridal Night”.]

Novels, stories and essays:

• Pam Munoz Ryan, The Dreamer (Scholastic Press, 2010).
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Scholastic Press, 1998).
• Francis Spufford, True Stories and Other Essays (Yale University Press, 2017): “His unifying perspective in ‘True Stories’ is the virtue of imagination, and the search for alternate worlds or possibilities raised by counterfactual questions. Thus, in his opening section, eight essays on cold, he examines the records of various polar expeditions and celebrates Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s travel masterpiece, ‘The Worst Journey in the World.’”
• Thomas Keneally, Napoleon’s Last Island: A Novel (Atria Books, 2017) “imagines Napoleon’s final exile through the eyes of a young girl.”
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (Doubleday, 2016): “It doesn’t merely tell us about what happened; it also tells us what might have happened. Whitehead’s imagination, unconstrained by stubborn facts, takes the novel to new places in the narrative of slavery, or rather to places where it actually has something new to say.”
• Mark Haddon, The Porpoise: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019): “Haddon’s writing is beautiful, almost hallucinatory at times, and his descriptions so rich and lush and specific that smells and sights and tastes and sounds — foam smashing across a boat’s deck; a breakfast of olives and barley bread soaked in wine; a woman trapped alive in a coffin — all but waft and dance off the page.”
• Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories (Knopf, 2019): “I think of my work as maybe not so much focused on technology or a particular technological invention, as more with the idea of scientific exploration in general”
• Marcial Gala, Call Me Cassandra: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “Raúl first determines that he is Cassandra when he has a vision of Athena, as some 20 other children torment him for being effeminate.”
• Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds: A Novel (Hodder & Stoughton, 2020): hundreds of earths exist in this science-fiction novel. “The multiverse is real, and Adam Bosch has figured out how to move people among 382 versions of Earth; his company, Eldridge, extracts information and resources from those worlds. The only catch: You can’t travel to an Earth on which a version of you is still alive.”
• Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet: A Novel (Penguin Books, 2005): “The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus.”
• Everina Maxwell, Ocean’s Echo: A Novel (Tor Books, 2022): “Sci-fi romance is a high-wire act: An author has to build a unique external world while also establishing a compelling interior landscape. It’s thrilling when it goes well — and I’ve rarely seen it done better than it is here.”

Visual Arts

While Duchamp's "Portrait of Chess Players" hints at the ability of the creative person to alternate with facility between primary process (e.g., dreams) and secondary process (e.g., reason and logic) thinking, many of our great artists, especially the surrealists, mainly emphasized primary processes. In expressing primary process through the visual arts, perhaps the surrealists, impressionists and others gave us essential tools for drawing the essential distinction between fantasy and reality. The most striking example of this may be the work of Salvador Dali:

• The Whole Dali in a Face (1975)
• Battle in the Clouds (1974)
• Path in Púbol (1973)
• Modern Rhapsody (1957)
• The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)
• The Broken Bridge and the Dream (1945)
• Invisible Bust of Voltaire (1941)
• Spider of the Evening (1940)
• The Endless Enigma (1938)
• Dreams on a Beach (1934)
• The Dream (1931)
• The Dream Approaches (1931)
• Playing in the Dark (1929)
• Late Night Dreams (1923)

Other extraordinary works include:

• René Magritte, The Imaginative Faculty (1948)
• Marc Chagall, Monsters, Chimeras and Hybrids
• Norman Rockwell, Boy Reading Adventure Story (1923)

Film and Stage

• The Purple Rose of Cairo, about imagination as a bridge to a new reality
• Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau(Celine and Julie Go Boating), about “the fanciful world of two women literally lost in the stories they tell each other” showcases “the dotty logic of dreams”
• Terry Gilliam’s trilogy “about imagination versus reality” explores imagination as an escape from reality:  Time Bandits (review); Brazil (review); The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (review)
• Billy Liar, about a man with a “fertile ability to dream, to weave fantasies of himself as various heroes accomplishing bold and glamorous deeds”
• Heavy Traffic: on imagination as a means of escape

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Your commitment to kindness and civility might lead you to say that jazz legend Sun Ra was peculiar but in most circles you would be forgiven and probably understood if you said he was crazy. He was convinced that he was from the planet Saturn, and spoke of “altered destiny”. For a time, he embraced an idea called Afrofuturism, a blend of history, fiction, would-be cosmology and other elements. Yet he left a strong musical and discographic legacy and was the main subject of two documentaries, Space Is the Place and A Joyful Noise. We may never know what led the man whose birth name was Herman Poole Blount to his remarkable way of looking at not only the world but the cosmos, or what he thought any of that had to do with music. But we do have these lyrics from his song “Imagination”: “Imagination is a black carpet/On which we may soar/To distant lands and climes/And even go beyond the moon/To any planet in the sky/If we came from nowhere here/Why can’t we go somewhere there?” For the man who was named Herman Poole Blount at birth, the African experience in America was so abhorrent that he imagined a different reality to replace it. In that, he was not crazy. We are a symbolic species. We can imagine the impossible and the absurd. While we may want someone more firmly grounded in reality leading our space program, Sun Ra and his remarkably unique imagination made a major contribution to music. He is the subject of a biography by John Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon, 1997). Below are some of his albums:

• “The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra” (1961)
• “When Angels Speak of Love” (1963)
• “Heliocentric Worlds” (3 volumes) (1965)
• “Nothing Is” (1966)
• “The Magic City” (1966)
• “Sound of Joy” (1968)
• “Atlantis” (1969)
• “It’s After the End of the World” (1979)
• “The Night of the Purple Moon” (1970)
• “Discipline 27-II” (1973)
• “Lanquidity” (1978)
• “Unity” (1978)
• “Disco 3000” (1978)
• “Sleeping Beauty” (1979)
• “On Jupiter” (1979)
• “God Is More Love Than Can Ever Be” (1979)

Albums by other artists:

• Paolo Fresu, “Tango Macondo”: a tango of the mind only, this is a soundtrack album of real and imaginary landscapes. “The soundtrack builds an ideal bridge between Mamoiada, the town of Barbagia famous for the legendary Carnival with its diabolical and grotesque masks, and Macondo, the imaginary place born from the dreamlike and mythical universe of Gabriel García Márquez.”
• Julie Tippett & Martin Archer, “Illusion”: for better and worse, we interpret and imagine – this is more about the stories than about the music.

Compositions:

• Though Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) never visited Iran, he composed a set of sixteen piano pieces expressing an imagined trip. He also composed an orchestral version of the same pieces. Listening to Les Heures Persanes (The Persian Hours), Op. 65, is like riding in a dream on a musical cloud.
• Lambert, Horoscope (1937)
• Berners, The Triumph of Neptune (L’Umo di Baffi) (1926)
• Bax, The Tale the Pine Trees Knew (1931)
• Hans Abrahamsen, Schnee (2008): inspired by Bach’s canons, the work explores the movement of time. “Schnee explores the idea that our perception of nearly identical patterns causes the imagination to project new forms by itself . . .”

Poetry

Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at, / What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass, / What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed, / And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning.   

My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, / I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision.

Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, / Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, / Speeding with tail'd meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest, / Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, / Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads.   

I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product, / And look at quintillions ripen'd and look at quintillions green.   

I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul, / My course runs below the soundings of plummets.   

I help myself to material and immaterial, / No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.    

I anchor my ship for a little while only, / My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.   

I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.

[Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-92), Book III: Song of Myself, 33.]

Other poems:

• Giacomo Leopardi, “The Infinite”
• Emily Dickinson, “The Brain is Wider Than the Sky”
• Robert Frost, “Bond and Free”
• Pablo Neruda, “Poet’s Obligation”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Maria Thompson Corley, “Lucid Dreaming”