The Influential and Omnipresent Imagination
as connected to Identities
finished 10/30/03.
Imagination, with its ambiguous substance and endless possibilities, is an undeniably strong force that affects human lives in an entirely encompassing way. It is the driving force behind most aspects of our existence—invention and progress, creativity and art, thought and feeling. Imagination can be described as a certain consciousness or quality of the mind—a varying mode of interpretation, reasoning, design, and fantasy—that surrounds one’s thought and emotion at all times, whether he or she is aware of it or not. Its very presence not only affects the way one thinks, feels, sees, and believes, but also fills the voids of the mind that are unknown or misunderstood. However, imagination is not easily explained, as it lies deep in the human psyche, far removed from scientific analysis and objective study. It seems to have infinite variations among human beings, for humans have yet to find any two separate minds as entirely and unquestionably identical, even in the cases of matching genetics, experiences, or opinions. Thus, since imagination is boundlessly diverse, each individual imagination carries with it a unique identity, which makes a person distinguishable from any other being in the world. Amin Maalouf wrote that “[m]y identity is what prevents me from being identical to anybody else” (149). If one were to equate identity with a single defining factor, imagination may well be that factor. The influence and importance of imagination ranges from the internal, acting as the light within each being, to the external, as it may be a vehicle for progress, art, and communication.
It is rather common that people define themselves by fitting together many different pieces from their lives, whether those pieces be biological, historical, political, occupational, or social. Each aspect one possesses is shared with many other people on this planet, and as a result, one person is automatically placed into many different categories all at once. Furthermore, if one considers all of one person’s qualities and experiences as a collective whole, a unique identity can be seen in the complex mixture. Maalouf remarks, “Every one of my allegiances links me to a large number of people. But the more ties I have the rarer and more particular my own identity becomes” (153). However, this “mosaic” technique used to describe identities somehow seems incomplete, as if it is leaving something ignored or uncovered. In many cases, we simplify the method and tend to define someone by only a single or few pieces of his or her identity—it is even common for people to define themselves in this manner, especially if certain aspects of their identity are more rare than others, or are threatened in some manner (Maalouf 158). Many of the aspects associated with identity—including nationality, occupation, opinions, social status, among other things—change with time or experience. This may be seen as identity itself contorting and morphing: Maalouf notes that “[i]dentity isn’t given once and for all: it is built up and changes throughout a person’s lifetime” (156).
On the contrary, it may be argued that there exists some constant sense of being, some basic instinct, that is present throughout one’s entire lifetime. People are not always sure of who they are, and they are not always happy with who they think they might be, but at the same time there is rarely any doubt that they exist as individual creatures in this world. One may say that they are a “completely different person” after an especially powerful inspiration or experience, yet he or she never completely disconnects from their former “person,” because there is something that carries through all things. Joseph Campbell once wrote, “although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all” (128). In other words, one can either think of their identity “as the glass shell of a lightbulb or…the light radiating from within it” (Goldman, Stanton, and Wink). One’s identity does not simply lie in the external categories of aspects and experiences, but also includes the internal way one thinks, dreams, and interprets.
This leads us into an alternate way of defining identity; ironically, this method involves something that is ultimately indefinable—imagination. One’s most basic sense of identity may lie in the untrained workings of the mind, the subconscious mental processes that are ever-present, yet untraceable and often unnoticed. Exercises in creativity or logic may alter the way a person thinks, but that person’s mind still tends to color any mental processes with its own unique hue. The vast array of perspectives and ways of thinking is evident when many people interpret the same question or problem in completely different ways, and then proceed to answer or solve it in equally different ways. It is true that certain people tend to think alike, and may come up with the same basic ideas, but the path to these matching conclusions may never be quite identical. The most minute differences in imagery, word choice, or distractions can easily disrupt any solid continuity between the thought processes of two working minds.
The realm of the mind coincides with identity on both individual and species-specific levels. The amazing stretch of the mind's qualities can be seen in works of artistic expression, through which artists are constantly attempting to express the mysterious auras that live in their minds. In “The Self,” George H. Mead states that “it is the task not only of the actor but of the artist as well to find the sort of expression that will arouse in others what is going on in himself” (113). This is especially difficult to do, not only because every mind sees things a bit differently, but also because the translation of mental workings into any solid forms of sensory communication is likely to be imperfect, as the realm of the mind is separate from the mundane world. However, as our lives and cultures are concretely set in this world, translation of thought into reality is essential. John Blacking remarks that “men are more remarkable and capable creatures than most societies ever allow them to be. This is not the fault of culture itself, but the fault of man, who mistakes the means of culture for the end, and so lives for culture and not beyond culture.” This idea suggests that there is something beyond the borders of so-called reality, perhaps something that is closer to the heart of the species than anything else—the human mind.
The somehow inexplicable, yet incredibly encompassing, imagination is worthwhile to consider when dealing with identities because it plays such a large role in human life. On an individual level, imagination plays a big part in formation and recollection of memories. It is impossible for a person to take in and store all the information he or she experiences, so the imagination lends a hand by filling in these gaps left by an imperfect memory. In Leila Ahmed’s memoir, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America, the author often refers to the possibility that her imagination could be coloring and altering her memories of what really happened, and even specifically says, “[t]hat is how I remember it, and yet again this cannot quite have been how it was” (85). The way one’s mind alters memory varies on the certain quality of imagination he or she possesses (which, as already determined, is somehow different from all other imaginations). These variations in memory affect the way human beings see the world and act in it. The same influential effect imagination has on memory is also present when a person is thinking of the present or future. If people didn’t think in such radically different ways and see such different things about the world, conflicts within groups of people (large or small) would be unlikely and uncommon. But at the same time, progress would not be allowed to grow so easily with the fuel of new and unique ideas, and art would not thrive as it does on multiple perspectives.
On a more basic level, imagination allows us to interact with others in social settings. Mead describes how imagination plays an important role in children’s games: “the child who plays the game must be ready to take the attitude of everyone else involved in that game, and…these different [roles] must have a definite relationship to each other” (115). If humans were unable to relate to each other, and imagine what others think in social situations, communication would be quite difficult if not impossible . Everything one does or says around others is affected by what that person believes the reactions will be. Varying imaginations are likely to see situations with many separate possible outcomes; thus, different people act in unique ways around others. At the same time, one individual may act differently when with different people, as his or her imagination adapts to varying situations.
Because of the mind’s influence on knowledge and behavior, imagination is involved even if one chooses to define identity by using the aforementioned method of collecting many pieces of connected information. The way a certain mind perceives the pieces causes a person to place more value on some pieces than others, to like or dislike certain pieces, or to decide what pieces are missing. In this way, each person views and shapes their identity in their own unique way. So while the mind picks and chooses which aspects of identity are the most relevant and pure, the imagination itself is ever-present. It is this influential omnipresence that allows imagination to be directly and singularly connected to identity.
It is possible, when searching for identity, for a person to get lost in categories and characteristics, feeling all the while that there is something deeper and simpler than the vast mixture of traits and experiences to which identity can be linked with. Imagination may be that thing, because it is a single feature of a person that has no identical twin somewhere in the mass of human beings. The mind is a beautiful thing, though often indescribable through the current mediums of communication; it may be a comfort for a person to know that there is no exact clone of his or her mind anywhere on this earth. The imagination is what illuminates each human being with a slightly different light and allows each individual to be unique, even when compared with an infinite number of beings. The vast array of individual identities, as defined by imagination, blends into a larger whole, an unspoken connection between all people. If all the possibilities of the human mind could be merged somehow, the human race would no longer be a species but a single being, a single identity—an awesome presence that could not be described with words or any other known form of communication. This vision embodies the essence of imagination as a whole; as we know it, this presence is endlessly scattered while it exists within the individual beings of the human race. The overall identity of the human race lies within the incredible mixture of individual identities, each of which may be defined by workings of the mind—this is the beauty and power of imagination.
Ahmed, Leila. (1999). A Border Passage from Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey. New York: Penguin.
Blacking, John. “How Musical is Man?” Liberal Studies 1: Human Dilemmas. Seventeenth Edition. Ed. Michael Steven Marx. Acton, MA: Copley, 2003. 181-186.
Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York, NY: Penguin Compass, 1972.
Goldman, Matt, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink. “why there are no action figures.” April 6th, 2001. Blue Man Group: Community: Message Board. October 24th, 2003. http://blueman.com/cgibin/fanboard/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002465.
Maalouf, Amin. “from In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong.” Liberal Studies 1: Human Dilemmas. Seventeenth Edition. Ed. Michael Steven Marx. Acton, MA: Copley, 2003. 148-169.
Mead, George H. “The Self” Liberal Studies 1: Human Dilemmas. Seventeenth Edition. Ed. Michael Steven Marx. Acton, MA: Copley, 2003. 104-139.