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Sunday, 21 August 2016




Our world is made by the imagination, the secondary imagination if you like since it is mostly an obedient imagination which installs us in a common world of forms. Even if we insist on the priority of a material world we may only immerse as much of the experiencing machinery as we can in this world of public causes and events and it never reaches as far as the crucial, the definitive, parts. Impulses travel up their nerves, disperse in their ganglia and then with all the credited and uncredited contributions of a post-production crew the magic transform is brought off and a world appears, and no-one can ever tell you how it was done. After all, who would they be telling, but the character, or rather one of the characters, upon the screen? This character has his own imagination, a more limited, very much looser, but no less extraordinary affair, and one of the things it tells him when he gives it the right kind of attention is that the two imaginations are really one. Thus it seems that the freedom, the fluid quality, the indefinite relations of subject and object that are natural to one ought to be just as natural to the other; and so he tries, he feels it his duty to try, to elevate the most serious of his concerns, his despairs, his sense of mortality, the falterings of desire, as nothing but creations of imagination, into its native element of freedom. The strangest thing is that this strategy succeeds, it succeeds splendidly, but it makes no difference at all to the despairs, the sense, the falterings - which go on as before - except to reveal the enormous joke of which they are a part.

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