My daughter’s got this chart in her classroom.
It’s a two-column thing that teaches kids the difference between fiction and non-fiction. According to the chart, fiction is anything that isn’t factual. It’s made up, and its purpose is entertainment. Non-fiction, on the other hand, is truthful.
Look, you gotta start somewhere, I get that. But there’s a reason that my daughter at second grade feels far more confident discussing “author intent” than she does whether or not she even likes a story. I’m doing my best to help her learn to have fun with what she reads, though, so let’s get back to that chart for a moment.
One place I might start updating the material is to add another column and label it “myth.” Then, I’d start to write down some bullet points that would definitely get me in front of a school board, were I a teacher in our district:
We’d be here all day if I started going off on every point made here, so maybe we’ll just chip away at it a little. Let’s focus on the last one. (We can do the others later on if there seems to be enough interest.)
For my money, one of the best voices to listen to regarding external imagination is the Mariner’s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And the man to help us understand Coleridge’s place in our world today is Rev. Dr. Malcom Guite. We’ll start with what Coleridge calls “primary imagination” at the end of his Biographia Literaria. He calls it “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM,” which is about as wild a claim as you can make before someone might lock you up. Malcolm has spoken and written several times and at length on this topic, so I can only hope to respond to his scholarship on this. Nonetheless, let’s unpack a few implications here.
For starters, this means that imagination is not fantasy. Despite what my daughter’s classroom chart might have you believe, imagination is not about making stuff up. It’s the very tool we use to perceive reality itself. It’s not that we miss out on understanding the world meaningfully or in a fun way without an imagination—it’s that we can’t understand it at all.
Wanna know something fun? Cognitive science proves this out rather nicely. Simons and Chabris’s famous gorilla experiment will give you proof enough. We think that we see objectively with our eyes. We don’t. In a physical sense, our eyes fetch what our imagination tells them to.
Anyway, if you aren’t a Coleridge fan, Blake was on the same page when he said that “Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” And according to Owen Barfield, “Figuration is not a mental process… but a participation in the world’s meaning.” Coleridge wasn’t an island regarding this idea.
As a practical example, there are several ways you can look at a fox in the forest. You can see a sack of meat, sinew and bones roaming atop dead plant cells, I suppose. Or you can see the fox as a wild animal, a possible threat to your dog and a reason to call animal control. But you could also see glow-eyed Cunning, once again taking his careful steps along the moonlight. The ocean is a jostling mix of H2O molecules with a little bit of Na+ and Cl- thrown in, sure. It’s also a calm place to get a tan or get away from it all, or a place to meet the warrior, the mysterious stranger or the old man, depending on the conditions. As Malcolm put it, the sea can be something you understand personally. Perception doesn’t just foster knowledge. It can foster relationships, too.
What this means for myth—if you ask me, anyway—is that there’s a difference between a myth and fiction. I like watching Lord of the Rings as much as the next dad of a certain age. And at regular intervals, I will say stuff like, “A day may come when the courage of this kettle fails, when it forsakes its duty and no longer provides temperature control—but it is not this day!” (I’m a dad, after all, and this sort of thing is outlined in the manual.) But I can spot Perceval among a crowd of other dads during a school trip. It’s possible to hear Daireann’s whispers when a certain kind of trouble darkens a friendly barbeque. And Mars can easily be found lurking behind today’s headlines.
There’s much more to say on this, but I wouldn’t want to keep you. Go and give Malcolm’s talk a watch if you haven’t already; his investigations are a lot more thorough. Take it seriously enough, though, and you may just see the moon a little differently the next time you’re out at night.
