Author: myer4269

Lately I’ve been reading Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a book length transcript of a 4-day interview with David Foster Wallace. Wallace was considered by many to be the most brilliant writer of his generation. Sadly, in 2008 he succumbed to crippling depression and hung himself.  In light of his suicide, the book bears a poignant sadness, as throughout the interview Wallace talks extensively about the weight of fame and the seduction of hype, and about his own struggles with depression.  In reading Wallace’s account of writing and fame, I thought of Wright’s quote about art and wounds and resurrection.

Wallace knows wounds.  For him the point of books, “was to combat loneliness,” and the best books create a “kind of stomach magic” because they “talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings.”  That tingle, that stomach magic, is exactly what I’m after as a reader, and what I long to do with words.  But more than that, in reading this interview, I realized that as a reader I too often settle for books that are long on diagnosis and short on cure.  A writer like Wallace is a perfect example of this tendency in me.  He sees things more clearly and says things more brilliantly and with more humor than anybody I’ve read in a long time. He gets brokenness.  He gets that the world often doesn’t make sense.  He gets that somehow art is way to rail against all that. But even though he gets wounds, he doesn’t get hope.

I realized too that my problem with Christian art has been just the opposite because most Christian art is dishonest about the wounds of the world.  Often there is a kind of willful ignorance about brokenness. If there are wounds, it seems, then they exist out there, in the undefined regions of the world. The world–John’s poignant word for all that is broken–has become a lazy catchall for all that we chose to ignore and refuse to engage with. Wounds are something out there, not something we harbor and nurses in ourselves.  Christian art often hides its limp and hopes that its outstretched, pointed fingers at the world will draw the eye away from our own hobbles.

Though this is the opposite impulse, it actually ends the same.  In a world without wounds, there is no need for hope and you end up with platitudes scrawled in golden, gaudy fonts on landscape portraits of pastel, gazeboed gardens in neighborhoods where no burglars lurk and no drugs are dealt and no families disintegrate.  Art that only sees wounds can’t see hope, and art that denies the wounds has no need for it.

In all of this I realized, if I want to write, or if I want to make anything that might truly be called art then I must not simply be acquainted with the wounds of the world–I must became a cartographer of my own wounds. I must map their terrain and navigate their crevices to trace their fissures and fault lines. The gangrenous stench of their festering must sting my nostrils.  I must learn the cadence of my own limping.  But I must also hear the voice that echoes off the walls of the empty tomb–He is not here.  He is risen.  It is only in Christ where both the sorrow and the joy of the world perfectly meet.  It is the wounded one who purchases for us a woundless world where all the sad things become untrue.

Mistake 1: Imagination as Escape

Here the imagination is trivialized, cast as mere amusement or distraction meant to provide us with an escape from the humdrum of the everyday.  We might escape by way of our own daydreams or so-called “creative hobbies,” or by way of entertainment produced by creative types, probably in the form of TV or movies, or possibly even in the form of a novel, as long as it’s a page-turner. In this understanding imagination has no expansive qualities or positive social benefit.  It’s simply white noise meant to mask the din of the everyday.  Imagination might in some sense “take us out of ourselves,” but not for the purpose of expansion or improvement, but merely for the feeling of escape.  We emerge from our imaginative experiences, whether by way of consumption or production, like we emerge from a carnival full of spinning lights and clatter.  We stumble home at once light-headed and heavy, left woozy from the spinning rides and lethargic from sugar spikes and crashes. We might be satisfied in some sense, but imagination has made no demands of us.

Mistake 2:  Imagination as Madness

Here the imagination is feared. The fear recognizes imagination’s ability to take us out of ourselves, but dreads where that path might end.  We have seen enough greasy and wild haired geniuses to know that unrestrained imagination is nothing but a path to madness. And so we demand that imagination bend its knee to sovereign reason.  Once muzzled and tamed, imagination might serve reason the king but the Mad Hatter must never wear the crown. Artistic masterpieces serve as backdrop to political and social galas, or worse still as decoration for mouse-pads and coffee mugs.  Songs, some heart wrenching, some subversive, are invoked to sell cars, insurance, clothes, lifestyles, pills, ad nauseam. Fear is overcome by domestication. Imagination is neutered and declawed.

Mistake 3: Imagination as True Freedom

Here the imagination is exalted.  And here again imagination is pitted against reason.  In this understanding reason is something like a staid and unyielding governess, interested simply in rules and order. In a more extreme form, reason is a something like a sadistic nun bent on humiliation.  Only in rebellion against the rule of reason is there freedom. The Dionysian, the Romantic, and the myriad forms of the Bohemian all drink deeply from this wine skin.  And so the carnival becomes not a distraction from life in general, but the center of life itself.  There is no end to the revelry, and imagination becomes an end in itself, so that reason is not domesticated, but dismissed.  Reason is in exile while the Mad Hatter rules the kingdom. And this is the madness those who make the second mistake so fear.

Though each mistake is distinct, in each mistake, a god is made.  Escape becomes a god in the first mistake, reason in the second, and imagination in the third.   They all exalt the wrong thing because all three mistakes fail to consider how imagination and creativity might be used to serve our Creator.  Moreover, in these reflections, another question emerges.  What is the proper relation between imagination and reason?  Is there no reconciliation between the two?  To be sure there are real tensions between imagination and reason.  They are tumultuous brothers.  Like Jacob and Esau they battle for the birthright.  But can peace be negotiated?

When we piece together the puzzle of humanity, where does imagination fit?  Is it something like an anonymous piece of sky or ocean, that is turned and turned in our hands, only to be slammed into place somewhere in background, or, worse still, abandoned in the box?  Or if the Fall is something like a shipwreck, is imagination simply left adrift, while everything else we call human is gathered in the rafts?

Though we have had our share of imaginative geniuses, of poets and composers, of novelists, sculptors, and painters, as well as  creative entrepreneurs, explorers, politicians, and policy makers, the Church, it seems, has not really answered the question of the imagination.  In the unfolding drama of the church age, it seems the imagination has most often been cast as the villain or the fool, as Shylock or Falstaff. In which case, the imagination is something either to be repressed, restrained, even incarcerated, or perhaps  endured, tolerated, or perhaps occasionally  enjoyed. It seems we almost never ask what the shape of a Spirit-fueled imagination might be.

By contrast, we think we know what redeemed reason looks like, and for many it is reason alone that has remained untainted by the Fall.  But when you take Creation seriously, that it is good, and Ah, very good, then you must take the Fall just as seriously.  Nothing that makes up a person, not reason, not the will, not the mind, not the heart, not the imagination, emerged unscathed from the Fall.  The Fall is merciless–its stain is pervasive.

And I have known its stain.  When I think about how I daily use my imagination, I am ashamed.  When fueled by pride my imagination weaves tales of power and conquest.  By way of daydreams,  I come to inhabit something like a fairy-tale world of infinite wealth and affirmation, where I am the victor, the  hero, the king, and the conqueror.  When fueled by fear my imagination betrays me. I become an exile in a wasteland where health slips away, friends disappear, family dies, and love withers.  Peopled with swindlers and killers, cheats and liars, the fear-fueled imagination becomes a sort of prison in my own mind.  This not to mention the lust fueled imagination turning its tricks in my heart.

But even more I have known redemption.  Knowing the darkness of my own imagination on one hand, and my desire to serve the Church with a sanctified imagination on the other, over the next few posts I want to wrestle with the question of the Christian imagination.  What would does a Spirit-fueled imagination look like? What sorts of things does it produce?  Or to use Wolter’s language, what was the original “creational goodness” of the imagination?  What was its structure?  And how might it be regained and outpaced in redemption?