Welcome to the IMAGINATION!
In
imagination there is a revelation of the self to the self, and a definite
change in being, as there is in a vapor when a spark ignites it and it becomes
an inflammation in the air. Here images appear in consciousness which we may
refer definitely to an internal creator, with power to use or remold
pre-existing forms, and endow them with life, motion and voice. We infer this
because dream and vision sometimes assume a symbolic character and a
significance which is personal to us. They tell us plainly, "For you only
we exist," and we cannot conceive of what is seen as being a reflection of
life in any sphere. In exploring the ancestry of the symbolic vision we draw
nigh to that clouded majesty we divine in the depths of our being, and which is
heard normally in intuition and conscience, but which now reveals character in
its manifestation as the artist in his work. I had a gay adventure when I was a
boy at the beginning of my mental travelling, when I met, not a lion, but a
symbolic vision in the path. I had read somewhere of one whose dreams made a
continuous story from night to night, and I was excited at this and wondered
whether I too could not build up life for myself in a fairyland of my own
creation, and be the lord of this in dream, and offset the petty circumstance
of daily life with the beauty of a realm in which I would be king. I bent
myself to this, walking about the country roads at night in the darkness,
building up in fantasy the country of sleep. I remember some of my gorgeous
fancies. My dream-world was self-shining. Light was born in everything there at
dawn, and faded into a colored gloom at eve, and if I walked across my lawns in
darkness the grasses stirred by my feet would waken to vivid color and glimmer
behind me in a trail of green fire; or if a bird was disturbed at night in my
shadowy woods it became a winged jewel of blue, rose, gold and white, and the
leaves tipped by its wings would blaze in flakes of emerald flame, and there
were flocks of wild birds that my shouts would call forth to light with
glittering plumage the monstrous dusk of the heavens. Many other fancies I had
which I now forget, and some of them were intuitions about the Many-Colored
Land. After I had conceived this world, one night in a fury of effort I willed
that it should be my habitation in dream. But of all my dreams I remember only
two. In the first I saw a mass of pale clouds, and on them was perched a little
ape clutching at the misty substance with its fingers and trying to fashion it
to some form. It looked from its work every now and then at something beyond
and below the clouds, and I came closer in my dream and saw that what the ape
was watching was our earth which spun below in space, and it was trying to
model a sphere of mist in mimicry of that which spun past it. While I was
intent, this grotesque sculptor turned suddenly, looking at me with an
extraordinary grimace which said clearly as words could say, "That is what
you are trying to do," and then I was whirled away again and I was the
tiniest figure in vast mid-air, and before me was a gigantic gate which seemed
lofty as the skies, and a shadowy figure filled the doorway and barred my
passage. That is all I can remember, and I am forced by dreams like this to
conclude there is a creator of such dreams within us, for I cannot suppose that
anywhere in space or time a little ape sat on a cloud and tried to fashion it
into planetary form. The creator of that vision was transcendent to the waking
self and to the self which experienced the dream. for neither self took
conscious part in the creation. The creator of that vision was seer into my
consciousness in waking and in sleep, for what of the vision I remember was
half a scorn of my effort and half a warning that my ambition was against
natural law. The creator of that vision could combine forms and endow them with
motion and life for the vision was intellectual and penetrated me with its
meaning. Is it irrational to assume so much? or that the vision indicated a
peculiar character in its creator, and that the ironic mood was not alien to it
nor even humor? I am rather thankful to surmise this of a self which waves away
so many of our dreams and joys, and which seems in some moods to be remote from
the normal and terrible as the angel with the flaming sword pointing every way
to guard the Tree of Life. In this dream some self of me, higher in the tower
of our being which reaches up to the heavens, made objective manifestations of
its thought; but there were moments when it seemed itself to descend, wrapping
its memories of heaven about it like a cloth, and to enter the body, and I knew
it as more truly myself than that which began in my mother's womb, and that it
was antecedent to anything which had body in the world. Here I must return to
those imaginations I had walking about the country roads as a boy, and select
from these, as I have done from vision, things upon which the reason may be
brought to bear.
In all I have related hitherto
imagination was not present but only vision. These are too often referred to as
identical, and in what I have written I have tried to make clear the
distinction. If beyond my window I see along with the manifold hills a river
winding ablaze with light, nobody speaks of what is seen as a thing imagined,
and if I look out of a window of the soul and see more marvels of shining and
shadow, neither is this an act of imagination, which is indeed a higher thing
than vision, and a much rarer thing, for in the act of imagination that which
is hidden in being, as the Son in the bosom of the Father, is made manifest and
a transfiguration takes place like that we imagine in the Spirit when it
willed, "Let there be light." Imagination is not a vision of
something which already exists, and which in itself must be unchanged by the
act of seeing, but by imagination what exists in latency or essence is out-realized
and is given a form in thought, and we can contemplate with full consciousness
that which hitherto had been unrevealed, or only intuition-ally surmised.
In
imagination there is a revelation of the self to the self, and a definite
change in being, as there is in a vapor when a spark ignites it and it becomes
an inflammation in the air. Here images appear in consciousness which we may
refer definitely to an internal creator, with power to use or remold
pre-existing forms, and endow them with life, motion and voice. We infer this
because dream and vision sometimes assume a symbolic character and a
significance which is personal to us. They tell us plainly, "For you only
we exist," and we cannot conceive of what is seen as being a reflection of
life in any sphere. In exploring the ancestry of the symbolic vision we draw
nigh to that clouded majesty we divine in the depths of our being, and which is
heard normally in intuition and conscience, but which now reveals character in
its manifestation as the artist in his work. I had a gay adventure when I was a
boy at the beginning of my mental travelling, when I met, not a lion, but a
symbolic vision in the path. I had read somewhere of one whose dreams made a
continuous story from night to night, and I was excited at this and wondered
whether I too could not build up life for myself in a fairyland of my own
creation, and be the lord of this in dream, and offset the petty circumstance
of daily life with the beauty of a realm in which I would be king. I bent
myself to this, walking about the country roads at night in the darkness,
building up in fantasy the country of sleep. I remember some of my gorgeous
fancies. My dream-world was self-shining. Light was born in everything there at
dawn, and faded into a colored gloom at eve, and if I walked across my lawns in
darkness the grasses stirred by my feet would waken to vivid color and glimmer
behind me in a trail of green fire; or if a bird was disturbed at night in my
shadowy woods it became a winged jewel of blue, rose, gold and white, and the
leaves tipped by its wings would blaze in flakes of emerald flame, and there
were flocks of wild birds that my shouts would call forth to light with
glittering plumage the monstrous dusk of the heavens. Many other fancies I had
which I now forget, and some of them were intuitions about the Many-Colored
Land. After I had conceived this world, one night in a fury of effort I willed
that it should be my habitation in dream. But of all my dreams I remember only
two. In the first I saw a mass of pale clouds, and on them was perched a little
ape clutching at the misty substance with its fingers and trying to fashion it
to some form. It looked from its work every now and then at something beyond
and below the clouds, and I came closer in my dream and saw that what the ape
was watching was our earth which spun below in space, and it was trying to
model a sphere of mist in mimicry of that which spun past it. While I was
intent, this grotesque sculptor turned suddenly, looking at me with an
extraordinary grimace which said clearly as words could say, "That is what
you are trying to do," and then I was whirled away again and I was the
tiniest figure in vast mid-air, and before me was a gigantic gate which seemed
lofty as the skies, and a shadowy figure filled the doorway and barred my
passage. That is all I can remember, and I am forced by dreams like this to
conclude there is a creator of such dreams within us, for I cannot suppose that
anywhere in space or time a little ape sat on a cloud and tried to fashion it
into planetary form. The creator of that vision was transcendent to the waking
self and to the self which experienced the dream. for neither self took
conscious part in the creation. The creator of that vision was seer into my
consciousness in waking and in sleep, for what of the vision I remember was
half a scorn of my effort and half a warning that my ambition was against
natural law. The creator of that vision could combine forms and endow them with
motion and life for the vision was intellectual and penetrated me with its
meaning. Is it irrational to assume so much? or that the vision indicated a
peculiar character in its creator, and that the ironic mood was not alien to it
nor even humor? I am rather thankful to surmise this of a self which waves away
so many of our dreams and joys, and which seems in some moods to be remote from
the normal and terrible as the angel with the flaming sword pointing every way
to guard the Tree of Life. In this dream some self of me, higher in the tower
of our being which reaches up to the heavens, made objective manifestations of
its thought; but there were moments when it seemed itself to descend, wrapping
its memories of heaven about it like a cloth, and to enter the body, and I knew
it as more truly myself than that which began in my mother's womb, and that it
was antecedent to anything which had body in the world. Here I must return to
those imaginations I had walking about the country roads as a boy, and select
from these, as I have done from vision, things upon which the reason may be
brought to bear. 
It is more difficult, for when there is divine visitation the
mortal is made dark and blind with glory and, in its fiery fusion with the
spirit, reason is abased or bewildered or spreads too feeble a net to capture
Leviathan, for often we cannot after translate to ourselves in memory what the
spirit said, though every faculty is eager to gather what is left after the
visitation even as the rabble in eastern legend scramble to pick up the gold
showered in the passing of the king. By the time I was seventeen or eighteen my
brain began to flicker with vivid images. I tried to paint these, and began
with much enthusiasm a series of pictures which were to illustrate the history
of man from his birth in the Divine Mind where he glimmered first in the
darkness of chaos in vague and monstrous forms growing ever nigher to the
human, to men beasts and men birds, until at last the most perfect form, the
divine idea of man, was born in space. I traced its descent into matter, its
conflict with the elements, and finally the series ended in a pessimistic fancy
where one of our descendants millions of years hence, a minute philosopher, a
creature less than three inches in height, sat on one of our gigantic skulls
and watched the skies ruining back into their original chaos and the stars falling
from their thrones on the height. Most of these pictures were only the fancies
of a boy, but in considering one of the series I began to feel myself in
alliance with a deeper consciousness, and that was when I was trying to imagine
the apparition in the Divine Mind of the idea of the Heavenly Man. Something
ancient and eternal seemed to breathe through my fancies. I was blinded then by
intensity of feeling to the demerits of the picture, but I was excited in an
extraordinary way over what I had done, and I lay awake long into the night
brooding over it. I asked myself what legend I would write under the picture.
Something beyond reason held me, and I felt like one who is in a dark room and
hears the breathing of another creature, and himself waits breathless for its
utterance, and I struggled to understand what wished to be said, and at last,
while I was preternaturally dilated and intent, something whispered to me,
"Call it the Birth of Aeon." The word "Aeon" thrilled me,
for it seemed to evoke by association of ideas, moods and memories most
ancient, out of some ancestral life where they lay hidden; and I think it was
the following day that, still meditative and clinging to the word as a lover
clings to the name of the beloved, a myth incarnated in me, the story of an
Aeon, one of the first starry emanations of Deity, one pre-eminent in the
highest heavens, so nigh to Deity and so high in pride that he would be not
less than a god himself and would endure no dominion over him save the law of his
own will. This Aeon of my imagination revolted against heaven and left its
courts, descending into the depths where it mirrored itself in chaos, weaving
out of the wild elements a mansion for its spirit. That mansion was our earth
and that Aeon was the God of our world. This myth incarnated in me as a boy
walking along the country roads in Armagh. I returned to Dublin after a
fortnight and it was a day or two after that I went into the Library at
Leinster House and asked for an art journal. I stood by a table while the
attendant searched for the volume. There was a book lying open there. My eye
rested on it. It was a dictionary of religions, I think, for the first word my
eye caught was "Aeon" and it was explained as a word used by the
Gnostics to designate the first created beings. I trembled through my body. At
that time I knew nothing of mystical literature and indeed little of any
literature except such tales as a boy reads, and the imaginations which had
begun to overwhelm me were to me then nothing but mere imaginations, and were
personal and unrelated in my mind with any conception of truth, or idea that
the imagination could lay hold of truth. I trembled because I was certain I had
never heard the word before and there rushed into my mind the thought of
pre-existence and that this was memory of the past. I went away hurriedly that
I might think by myself, but my thoughts drove me back again soon, and I asked
the librarian who was the Gnostics and if there was a book which gave an
account of their ideas. He referred me to a volume of Neander's Church History,
and there, in the section dealing with the Sabaeans, I found the myth of the
proud Aeon who mirrored himself in chaos and became the lord of our world.
I
believed then, and still believe, that the immortal in us has memory of all its
wisdom, or, as Keats puts it in one of his letters, there is an ancestral
wisdom in man and we can if we wish drink that old wine of heaven. This memory
of the spirit is the real basis of imagination, and when it speaks to us we
feel truly inspired and a mightier creature than ourselves speaks through us. I
remember how pure, holy and beautiful these imaginations seemed, how they came
like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life, and the
astonishment I felt, I who was almost inarticulate, to find sentences which
seemed noble and full of melody sounding in my brain as if another and greater
than I had spoken them; and how strange it was also a little later to write
without effort verse, which some people still think has beauty, while I could
hardly, because my reason had then no mastery over the materials of thought,
pen a prose sentence intelligently. I am convinced that all poetry is, as
Emerson said, first written in the heavens, that is, it is conceived by a self deeper
than appears in normal life, and when it speaks to us or tells us its ancient
story we taste of eternity and drink the Soma juice, the elixir of immortality.
iMAGINATION, by AI (SOURCE: George William Russell, 1918], at dhaka365.blogspot.com
