Imagination’s Risk

“The more I’ve learned in my life, the more acutely I’ve felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I’ve felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness.  At times I’ve felt myself to be clinging onto the rim–of what I hardly say without the risk of sounding ridiculous–only to slip and find myself deeper in the hole than ever.  And there in the dark, I find again in myself a form of praise for all that continues to crush my certainty.”  Nicole Krauss, Great House

It is one thing to enjoy imaginative works, to ride aloft on waves of music, to co-labor with a writer  and spin worlds in our minds, or to absorb a painting’s impact and let it reshape us.  But it is quite another to attempt to make such things because  to make is to risk ourselves.  This is not to say that opening ourselves up to the forces of created works is not without risk.  To open ourselves up to any shaping force is a form of bravery precisely because we can never gauge the impact.   Our assumptions might be undermined.  Our prejudice might be exposed.  Our ignorance might be challenged.  Our certainties might be shaken.  And this is often far from pleasant.  To have our world enlarged is only romantic until it is enlarged, and we find that we have been standing on the edge of a yawning abyss.  But the risks one incurs in consumption are altogether safer than creating because to create, to make something of the world, as Andy Crouch defines culture making, is to find ourselves in the dark.  After all reading might blow one’s hair back, but writing might very well unleash the winds of Zephyr.

When we create we risk uncertainty, failure, exposure, and misunderstanding.  In Annie Dillard’s book long meditation on writing, The Writing Life, she compares the act of writing to the laying out of words.  This line of words could lead anywhere, and in pursuing them there is the risk of losing the way. All creating is both a journey out of the self into unknown territory and a journey into the self into even wilder territory.  To create is to embark on an Arctic expedition, to make out for El Dorado with nothing more than a hunch and a half-remembered legend.  It is to risk shipwreck and unnumbered days adrift at sea, only to wash up on a deserted island with nothing more than our salt-worn wits.

If it is all so risky, why do this at all? When we lay out words, mold clay,  cook, sing, design rooms we are declaring that we refuse to settle for the often sheltered smallness of the world as we know it.  In creating we refuse to settle for the warm malaise of shop worn assumptions and ways of being.  In creating we refuse to permanently contort our bodies into the posture of consumer or critic.  Ultimately, though, Christians ought to create as a form of praise.  The shape of our gratitude for the world God has made often comes in the form of a sculpture, a song, a poem, or a meal.  In creating we reclaim our dignity as image bearers, and we fill and subdue the earth with the work of hands.