did you go to school? has someone supposed to teach you the difference between what is real, and what is imagined...in order to protect you from a fast car in the street, or from a conviction that you would be able to breathe underwater? did someone who knew that you couldn't fly tell you so, in order to protect you from a big jump? later, someone who loved you less may have taught you, in a classroom of science, the difference between dead and living. just as a matter of course.
by various methods, a world of imagination was obscured from your vision. people who stayed in a pretend world, who didn't discern between "real," and "imagined" came to be known as un-well. we're the grown-ups now. the sacred tenets of your childhood world of imagination, ringing cleanly through your heart and mind in communion with so many others of your tribe, got obscured... no longer a matter of collective choice. childhood rules for dead, for invisible, for what can be changed are no longer listed in some shining script, on a stone door, impenetrable by influence of logic. whereas you had played. and others with you, now you get to share, with other grown-ups, what's known as "time." a round, blank face, or a digital facsimile of the same, patterned concept in replacement of the moon and sun. we sharing time, now. you could call this concept of time a sort of "base," or zone of commonality to which we are all continually running. grown-ups running, checking in. see who has, or has not made it to join us, within a sequence of events. no going back, now. no rules for invisible. a clock has twelve neat numbers engraved upon it, and others quantified finely, between. a grown-up game. no invisible. life is, and will be newly quantified by the "done," or the "undone," seeing as you've got the time. what could be the point of such a transition, for us all? of shunting imagination to the perimeters of a new, shared culture, so that what is "known" is represented by logic, and dominates the wealth of information we deal in, have parlance in. so that what's "unknown" is reduced to a grab-bag, a random variable, at which one might throw the imagination, after logic runs its courses and continues to come up dry. and logic sans heart, sans imagination has come up dry--has pillaged resources with no feeling for sustainability. the logic of profit, as an end unto itself, for example. to sum it up: it is as if the whole culture were jumping from a plummeting airplane, without enough parachutes to go around, and those who get a parachute yell to the ones who are left behind: "use your imagination!" imagination is viewed as an afterthought, as a wild-card, as a thing to be entertained with great reluctance. such is the ready willingness with which most any culture will forgo any real agency in the processes of imagination, once its children have grown. and its children are left with the burden of this imbalance, as a legacy. their attention rests in deficit, in the disorder of minds and hearts starved of the chance to fully live. is there a culture which places value on the merging of imagination with logic, rather than replacing the former with the latter? which culture stems from what the Zen masters would call "beginner's mind?" the culture of children. children everywhere. in every part of the world. a few grown-ups are beginning to learn to act more like children...starting to head out into the field, from the factory,.because logic--logic sans heart,, the kind of logic lacking in imagination--has outrun its own, real resources, as it deemed them. logic sans heart, sans imaginations has used up all of the real stuff, burned it, pillaged it. some of our species have up trying to exist in a heartless, depleted world of the mind. crickets, frogs recede. a species of bird you hear at sun-up dies. the grown-up word for this is "extinction." there is also the phrase, "climate change." the writer Ray Bradbury had a name for the human who has beginner's mind. the one who could flip it, make it all a different way--so that it wouldn't hurt people. he said that you are a Dreamer. he said that any sane society should protect you. note: this darth post has been cross-published via Facebook.
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All reviews by Greg Bem unless marked otherwise.
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