Invoking the Imagination
"Behind the Scenes" of Season 3, Episode 1: The problem of how to begin
I struggled with my return to the podcast following this year’s summer hiatus. That’s not so unusual. I talked about a similar experience last year in an episode titled The Struggle of the Creative Life. But this time was a little different. This time I was coming out of a summer marked by some challenging health issues that pushed all capacity for creative work to the sidelines. By the time September arrived, not only was I out of the habit of writing, but I was deeply tired from the demanding work of my recuperation (I’m better now).
Being able to find the energy and desire to even begin, at times seemed utterly beyond me. It was in wrestling with myself and in searching for a way out of this state of stagnation that I was led to reflect on the question of inspiration and the problem of beginnings, which I pose at the start of this week’s episode:
“I think this is an important question that is worth spending some time on — the question of how to begin.”
I know enough about my own creative process to know that nothing comes from trying to force words out of my pen. And so I put it down and I turned to those places where I know the hidden sparks of inspiration lie buried: poetry and stories. Sinking into the symbolic reorients consciousness from the immediate, the time-bound, and the concrete to a farther shore, a timeless and fluid place — a “twilight,” Carl Jung calls it, which he says we can only understand through empathy, “but which too much clarity dispels.” In the episode, I describe this as the experience of a subtle reality:
Regardless of whether it is expressed through one’s spiritual practice, through the work of psychological development, or in an artistic or creative pursuit , the symbolic life begins with a setting aside of our daily concerns and a tuning in to something else. And just what this “something else” is is hard to put into words because it is a kind of subtle reality that is separate and different from commonplace reality, and yet somehow seems to exist within and beside it at the same time.
The spark that I was eventually able to coax into a somewhat respectable flame I discovered in Mary Oliver’s poem The Swan, from her 1990 collection ‘The House of Light.’ There is a moment in that poem when, all of sudden, Oliver makes a jump from describing a swan as it glides nearer to the shore, to a seemingly unrelated sequence involving the poet William Blake:
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:
I miss my husband's company --
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
That was the moment when I felt Imagination begin to wake in me. That was the moment when I felt I could finally begin.
Jung once wrote that the creative imagination is “the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality.” In a similar vein, the Romantic poets saw Imagination as a divinely creative power in the human being. It was, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” This, as I point out in the episode, is aptly captured by Oliver’s use of the symbol of the swan:
In Mary Oliver’s poem this “living power” is embodied in the image of a swan gently making its way to the shore. We recognize this when the poem makes that startling jump and begins to speak of William Blake and his wife. Suddenly we see that this is, after all, a poem about the imagination. And as I suggested earlier, the swan is a very fitting symbol for this, for mythologically speaking, the swan is often associated with the arts and the life of the imagination.
When I said earlier that finding the energy and desire to begin felt beyond me, that was absolutely true. It was… and is. It is not possible to generate the movement of the creative imagination merely through an effort of will.
This is not to suggest, of course, that one should be passive when it comes to the work of the symbolic life. I know I have to show up, of course, and I have to put in the effort. At the beginning, however, all that lay in my power was to make a kind of invocation to the Imagination, to turn to poetry as one might turn to prayer, and to wait for the moment when I heard that silent something say, “begin.”
Listen to the episode here:
Upcoming Events
Anatomy of the Psyche Reading Group: Starting on Monday, October 17th, I will be leading an exploration of Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche with the Jung Archademy. This classic work delves deeply into alchemical symbolism and its relation to the personal individuation process. For more information visit: https://www.jungarchademy.com/anatomy
Circumambulating the Self: An in-depth exploration of Jung’s concept of the Self on Saturday, November 12th through the C.G. Jung Institute of New England. For more information visit: https://cgjungne.com/circumambulating-the-self-with-jason-e-smith/