I share things I’ve enjoyed on Sundays, and I publish an essay, story, or book review (no spoilers) on Wednesdays. This is an essay.
Most of my childhood memories are now vague, but the ones that remain vivid involve fantasy and play. I remember, for example, winning the Super Bowl at nine-years-old. I threw the ball three feet up, three yards forward, a perfect spiral. The sun was coming in through the six-foot French windows, painting the wooden panels and the oriental rug; then it stood still, as still as a picture, for the big moment in which I caught it.
Later that year, I made a putt to win the Masters not once but eighty-two times, a new record. Every time I won, I was alone, the last one on the practice green, the darkness coming in over the sculpted plains, my family’s car approaching, hidden in the distance. On the way to the parking lot, the press suffocated me for interviews; I gave them magnanimously, lengthy answers spoken aloud in whispers with the praise directed first at my parents and next at my work ethic. I never bragged that I was the first person to win both the Super Bowl (twenty-one times) and the Masters (eighty-two times) in the same year.
We constructed poems and stories, invented and performed The Hula Dance, wrote the lyrics and the tune to Coconut-head and Egg-head. We were wonderful kids.
Coconut-head and Egg-head, back together once more…
Then my imagination went bye-bye for a while. It still worked in fits and starts, sporadically, rarely, but, usually, it was turned off. I suppose we grow up faster than we recognize. Monsters die at three, Santa Claus at five, the Tooth Fairy at eleven; it’s massacre, dash it, and by the time high school swings around we, like adults, have goals and ambitions, one more pointless than the next; we, like adults, go after them, vigorously, within the confines of reality. We might have fallen off of the precipice if it hadn’t been for our supernatural adolescent libido.
But a few years later, during my sophomore year of university, The Razor’s Edge flipped my imagination all the way on again. I started going to Washington Square Park at eight o’clock in the morning, when the city was still asleep, when the benches were empty, before the saxophone set the somber tune, and I would sit there and read and read and read.
The experience was a singular pleasure of the sort I knew as a child. The physical world around me would disappear. Suddenly, I was at a Parisian cafe with Somerset (such an austere name) and Larry; then on a sordid street in London with Philip and Mildred; then so lost in Oceania that I missed my train stop in New Jersey. The beauty of literature, I discovered, was how intellectually active it is. I was the coach, the star, the ball; I was the caddie, the player, the course; I was the director, the actor, the lights:
I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.
Of course, it could have been another equally engaging activity that opened up the senses and spread the seed of creativity; for me, however, it was reading; for a while, I became obsessed.
But cravings, ideas, people, places, priorities, months… I slowed down—stopped. The full extent of my imagination, the dreamlike dimensionless boundlessness, went bye-bye.
After a gap, sterile and dry, of three years, I tried to read again; this time, it was arduous. Now, there was the omnipresent YouTube and Instagram; there was the weight of the iPhone against my thigh; all momentarily rewarding in their own ways but with a pull so violent that I installed software to try to block the first with the high guard; unsuccessfully bobbed and weaved the second; tried to step back and away from the third. Their inventors, and the army of engineers who optimized them, were reaching into my brain, activating my latent addiction, fiddling with it until it pulsated on a metronome in accordance with their timing, every thirty or forty minutes, bright red, aggravated, in need of relief, a silicon mosquito bite buzzing in the limbic system. Books did not make the world disappear, they lathered my brain in histamine, and all I could do was itch and itch and itch. The overstimulation dulled my mind, turned it twitchy and brittle, damaged the optic nerve, turned me into an addict. Worse yet, I walked around with the bottle in my pocket; I trained at the pub, the whole world was the pub.
So I checked myself into rehab, became a sight for people to photograph with a flip phone that, to nearly everyone except myself, was a humorous relic, a prop. I showed up to events as if I was the neighborhood nutcase swinging a candle-lit lantern, the lunatic tap-dancing on tables with a top hat and a cane. Even the few that sort of understood tracked my eccentricity back to an efficiency metric, but no one, not even myself, mentioned imagination by name. We had forgotten that; we had been taught to readily give that up.
Two months later, however, I could feel myself getting back into shape; after six months of daily reading, I could lose the space around me, almost at-will. I had, through my therapy, escaped the vicious cycle of addiction in which the more one imbibes, the harder it is for him to function; thus, he imbibes more more frequently, and it becomes even harder to function.
How strange it is then, given the severity of my addiction, that my health itself whisked away my temptations; they were gone. I no longer needed software or self-criticism or calculators to calculate how much of my life I was wasting. I did not want to spend time online because the experiences were so poor compared to the alternatives. The bottomless bag of technological Doritos started to turn my stomach. I could see more clearly.
I guess it is time to finally make my point: a break from the algorithms can create the space for us to revitalize our innate childlike imagination. The instrument, whether it is musical or fictional or otherwise, does not matter as long as it can fling us into that intangible part of the mind that can expand into the size of the universe. Nature has given us a lovely gift that the frenetic digital world cannot recreate; what a shame it is to forget that it exists.
Thanks for reading! On August 30th, I’ll publish a review of Of Human Bondage (August’s selection for the book club); on September 6th, a short story; on September 13th, a review of Bright Lights, Big City; and, on Sundays, a round-up of things I’ve enjoyed. You can subscribe if that sounds interesting to you:
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I'm so glad social media never stopped me from imagining continuously. I'm an avid daydreamer since childhood and while I no longer dream of being a fairy and flying in the sky, I still imagine all kinds of things. Dude I even imagined being a vampire once after watching the Twilight series! (Thankfully Cinema Therapy made me realize what a shitshow it actually is). Anyways, I watch a lot of series (and I don't mean those like Stranger Things but mostly Korean, Chinese and recently Thai), but haven't been watching them ever since I came to university. I recently started watching anime, and to be honest, these actually make me imagine even more XD
Beautifully Written. I believe imagination makes us "humans", and yet here we are, destroying the ability to imagine deliberately.