Owning Imagination’s Troubles
“The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.” Jack London
Think of the dated children’s cartoon featuring Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner or the first-shooter video games of today or villains Neegan and Alpha in the Walking Dead TV series or any number of political adversaries. The very quality pegged in Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire” as a lifesaver, and one that I have claimed as a saving grace, is as troublesome in its paradoxes as so many intangibles encountered along the path to wisdom. The imagination is capable of generating negative energy from which damage flows.
What moderates the mental inventions that drive actions that rule the day when laws and group values become embolisms to justice and common sense? How does reverence for an idea like antisemitism deteriorate into a defense of the slaughter of Palestinian women and children? How does health care insurance deteriorate into no-holes-barred treatments for the privileged? How does a cell phone in every hand deteriorate into environmental devastation and slavery? How does ownership of private property deteriorate into gated communities? From imaginations that cannot think beyond desire, that’s how.
What is it with us humans? Can our imaginations be trusted? Is our creativity our biggest threat?
I admit the borderlessness of these questions. So unvetted, so unwieldy. So be it. I’m reaching for an explanation for the proliferation of humankind’s madness. Our collective problems include overpopulation, blight, drought, dictatorships, corporate greed, pandemics, water and air pollution, the misery and suffering of sentient beings, extinctions of creatures and cultures, unrestrained power grabs, abuses of time, space, place, and possession. So much hardened imagination resides in the conceptualizations of us and them and those others way over there.
Intersection with self. I make a grocery list to satisfy my latest craving. Strawberries with vegan whipped cream. Italian marinara with gluten-free pasta. Detox tea and organic lemons. My demand for those six items alone has costs. From their origins to their retrieval to their packaging to their transport to their storage to their pricing to their arrival in my pantry or refrigerator, damage has been done. How do I make amends for my habits of consumption? Surely not by giving them up!
Intersection with self. The temperature will climb to 104 degrees in a few days and three-digit afternoons will not be uncommon in the rainless months to come. The HVAC system installed a year ago to the tune of thousands will run at top speed, never achieving the thermostat goal, instead hovering, if we are lucky, in the low eighties as it drones on into the night. We are one small cottage in a megalopolis among many megalopolises that find themselves intense with heat for months on end. How is it that we have earned the right to stay cool if we have enough money to pay the bill at the end of the month? And what about those who don’t? And what, in God’s name, do the thinning heavens get to say about it?
Intersection with self. Lolling, I wonder how to leave no trace, to walk in beauty, to lend a hand. I do so while drinking small-batch coffee from a boutique roaster blended with almond-based creamer from a carton that requires refrigeration. I type on a Chromebook that hosts infinite imaginative offerings, angles, and entertainments guaranteed to elevate me above the rest, to put me in the driver’s seat, in the know.
And so, I ask myself, what do I make of that?
