Reclaiming our imagination

Has anybody else noticed how it has suddenly become terribly unfashionable to have an imagination?

It used to be a real point of pride among the terminally smug that they never enjoyed movies nearly as much as the books they were based on -

“because the books allow you to use your own imagination.”

If you were to read books like “To Kill a Mockingbird”, you’d discover the subtle joys of learning to walk a little in someone else’s shoes. You’d see how much both you and that other person might grow as a result, and how much richer the world might appear - not necessarily nicer, or easier, but undoubtedly a richer place for hearts and imaginations to roam.

The sequence at the end, where Scout discovers the strange, lost soul of Boo Radley, remains one of my favourite pieces of understated storytelling.

Where did that all go?

Sure, there are zombie-wasters and vampire-slayers aplenty in fiction. There are girls who can leap across tall buildings and scour the cosmic wastes for new worlds, pilot starfighters and face off alien invaders. Heck, we even have heroines who can mend themselves after being burned to a crisp. That kind of imagination is cool, and we get oodles of extra portions with each new movie, each new TV series - but remember that these are just stories. Watch them, enjoy them, but try to remember your place in the Universe when the real world floods back in.

Just lately, it seems to have become almost offensive to suggest we might be able to imagine ourselves in any clothes but the ones we were wearing… in any skin other than the one we were born with.

How dare we assume we could walk in another person’s shoes, or see through any eyes other than the ones our limited little life-experience would allow us?

I always used to baulk slightly when people described something as being “beyond imagination”. It always seemed, at least to me, to miss the point of actually having an imagination.

But just lately, such phrases appear to have become somewhat ubiquitous. We are told on a fairly regular basis about situations which most of us, apparently, “cannot even begin to imagine.” We are reminded that certain attitudes have been “hard wired” into us, and we are lectured about the fragility of our world view.

To lose all sense of meaning, we need simply to step beyond the comfort zone of our dominant cultural ideology - yes, that’s right, we don’t even have to leave the planet, let alone the star system.

Maybe it really is arrogant of us to defy the prevailing wisdom, to take the Atticus Finch route and show some faith in our ability to empathise with those souls who walk the other side of the street.

But what else is there?

Our world only becomes precious when we see beyond it, when we take it out of the test tube and spend some time with its textures - the way Jane Eyre would have done, when a woman’s heroism was defined by her ability to reach beyond herself, and the walls that others built around her.

Perhaps there’s a panel of experts disproving this even as I speak, calibrating the limits of our imagination to the nearest decimal point so that we can slip back safely into mediocrity, secure in the knowledge that those pesky spiritual aspirations were wrong all along, and our souls really are this small.

Resist them. The moment you let anybody other than yourself define the limits of your imagination, you will have lost the world in the test tube. You will have let small voices into your soul, where they have no right to be.

John is the writer behind Matterings where he writes about stuff.