Nothing Great is Ever Easy
“The imagination is the mind pressing back against reality.”
~Wallace Stevens
In order to press back against reality what is first needed is a pause. An absence of motion, and therefore an interruption in the natural flow or ongoing stumbling of attention over the objects placed in its path. This could also be described as a rupture achievable only by a more radical form of absence. In this sense, what is required is the imagination’s ability to destroy time, since motion can never be stopped by simply standing still. To stop time is to puncture the curtain of reality, but also to dissolve the space in which that curtain was thought to exist. That’s the problem. That’s the joke: there is no spoon.
How can we proceed within the territory of the imagination, if the entrance to that territory is the rupture in all concepts of process, stability, presence and absence? Is this a state of free play? The remainders of discourse may not be anything more than a hollow gesture towards themselves… or their negation.
First, before beginning–i.e. before anything is necessary–the openness cannot be grasped for or attempted, but rather inhabited and laughed at. What’s needed for imagination is possibility, but the possibility of this necessity cannot be treated idly in an offhand manner of cathartic removal, or absentminded wandering. Is there a way for the weak to escape from these blind meanderings and breakthrough into unknown territory… to stop asking questions and groping for something they haven’t the slightest idea of… to fix their own spelling and grammar without writing anything down?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
No Responses Yet to “Nothing Great is Ever Easy”