Some astute reflections on "Imaginary Characters in Your Head?" from blog member Mike Flowers.
Comments welcomed.
Maybe the feeling to which Anne Tyler is alluding is familiar?
I’d/we'd like to riff on this a bit and try to find a mode of expression that feels more accurate to my/our experience.
What first struck me/us was the bold, red-lettered question: IMAGINARY CHARACTERS
IN YOUR HEAD?
It’s the “in your head" part that doesn’t feel descriptive to me/us, and that’s how i/we read the
question mark. i’m/we're inclined to abandon the spatial metaphor with regard to these presences
(the term i/we prefer at this point to “Imaginary characters'), and report, as best as i/we can discern,
that they defy being located in that way.
From early childhood I’ve/we've felt a belonging-together with these unlocatable presences that
seem to be neither “self” nor other as we typically deploy those terms. Rather, whatever is meant by
“i” feels inseparable from them, nor are they reducible to a “me” inside. Think, perhaps, of community,
that same “com” as with“companionship”, but without the bread. i/we do like the image of breaking bread together, but
what i’m/we're trying to get at is, perhaps, pre-agricultural: a being-together prior to the familiar
binaries of inside/outside, subject/object, nature/culture. i/we don’t even want to call it a relationship,
insofar as that tends to emphasize the terms of the relationship rather than the being-together. More
like an unbroken continuum.
Said another way, perhaps this is a more ontological rather than psychological sensibility,
perhaps more accurately conveyed if we use the plural pronouns rather than the singular, clumsy
as they may be and grating to our habit of listening.
So, no imaginary characters in my/our head, but a being-with that might be better expressed
by way of another set of metaphors, eg., mycelial or rhizomatic communities, where boundaries are ambiguous
at best.
This may not be what Anne Tyler is hinting at at all. At any rate, we appreciate the invitation and
provocation to feel and think together.
Comment from Merrilee Beckman:
I like the idea that these aren’t “imaginary characters in our head”, but are “presences” that defy being located there. Mike writes that from “early childhood” he felt a “belonging-together” with presences that were neither “self” or “other” in the way we normally use those terms. I remember, between the age of three and four, lying in bed at night feeling sad or scared or lonely, and this light would appear. A soothing pale yellow light came up over my head and hovered like an aura around me. If I tried to turn around to see it the light vanished, so I soon stopped doing that. Once it started shining I felt all was right with the world again. I called this presence “Ullo” because I couldn’t pronounce yellow, and I’d often talk to it. How much of me was Ullo? I always felt “Ullo” was from “elsewhere”. And now after Mike’s comments I wonder: where in the world is this “elsewhere”?
I agree with Mike that these presences coming through our dreams, imagination, reveries, etc. resist being colonized or categorized by our rational mind. They certainly don’t emerge from the rational, left hemisphere. They seem to dance at the edges of unconsciousness. For young children the characters are just there. Children meet with, and engage these presences naturally (perhaps because they are still part of an unbroken continuum), which is what I also feel is happening in Fex & Coo. And it’s happening because Russ and Paco still have access to the magical young child in them. I remember how my young child delighted in creepy crawly things: worms & ants, spiders & snakes. I found a bat flattened on a parked car and brought it home in my pocket one time. Children live in a space where such things are far from being gross or disgusting. Native Americans on the east coast of the U.S. told the colonizers that the beaver stopped speaking to them when the first colonial ships crossed the ocean. Animals and humans could speak to each other — and “presences” speak to children stil —because the boundaries of what children can be do, say, or think are porous and easily bypassed by stint of their delight and openness.
In Fex & Coo these “presences” seem to startle themselves with what they’re capable of doing or becoming. The possibilities of their eachness and uniqueness keep widening and deepening for each of them. I feel them galloping out of the stable that Owl Man & Heron Man so naively thought they had them corraled in. Owl Man & Heron Man, too, continuously transform in ways they could never have anticipated. The whole thing is such a playful, fun, magical process! To break bread with such amazing presences — and in a far more conscious and active way than any of us are used to. Is that possible?
I’d also like to explore Mike’s idea of an ontological sensibility. Only instead of such a sensibility being opposed to psychological insights, I wonder if the two of them might try a game of table tennis together? Perhaps the psychologist might be inspired to risk an enthusiastic leap into the fray to join the hunter-gatherer in a rip-roaring, sweaty, breathless, “Drive the bison over the cliff” game? Or, better yet, perhaps a whole new game can be created for them, one we can’t begin to imagine yet?
I also love Mike’s metaphor of the RHIZOME. The rhizome seems to be worldwide, cosmic even — that vast, subterranean root system of presences thickened by whatever deposits of food we toss down there to produce brand new, never-before-seen shoots up here on the surface of our lives. I think of the great scientific breakthroughs in history — where, say, one researcher in China, another in Italy, and another in the U.S. make the same discovery, completely unknown to each other. They then become conduits for something radically new to emerge into the world.
Hi Mike,
Paco here (finally)! I appreciate your thoughtful comments. Your opening “Declaration of Intent,” to use a legalistic phrase, touches on a dilemma anyone faces who tries to come to terms with dreams—and maybe even with fiction-writing, fantasies, visions, poetry and so forth. You said: “I’d/we’d like to riff on this a bit and try to find a mode of expression that feels more accurate to my/our experience.”
In today’s Babel-world, that’s a formidable task. Fiction-writers—and dreamers too, of course—are constantly faced with the same language questions you’re dealing with: What is a suitable form of expression for any given personality, or any given “project” for that matter?
For many writers, I would assume that every word, every paragraph, every page, is an opportunity to try out at least a new “turn of phrase,” if not a new “mode of expression” altogether. Somewhere in Fex & Coo I used a brief French expression, “le mot juste.” The English translation for that might be “the correct word,” which is not nearly so aesthetic, to me anyway, as the French. So, for my odd, introverted, musical personality, there is an aesthetic-musical factor that I seek in writing. Or should I say that it is the aesthetic-musical factor or agency that seeks expression through me??? Sometimes I succeed, sometimes not. But I find lots of words and phrases from modern languages—mostly Spanish and French, some Italian, some Portuguese and some German—all of whose linguistic delights spontaneously creep or pop “into my head,” the way intuitions seem to do.
Truthfully, when I muse on language questions, I tend to imagine cloudy, mysterious, trans-personal fields of intelligence that, over time, tend to calcify into hard-defined categories or specificities. In other words, I don’t know where words and images come from. Materialistic scientists glibly assume that language is born, lives and dies, only in the human brain, which is to say, literalistically, “in our heads.” Hence, the modern metaphor you take issue with. I personally don’t mind using it, making allowance for its metaphorical nature. But I understand your critique.
Synchronicities often rip apart the Enlightenment assumptions we continue to impose upon the world collectively. When we find ourselves in that predicament, we are then at odds with our culture and its accepted forms of expression. I find that this culture doesn’t have much imagination for such outside-the-box matters.
Your reference to “pre-agricultural” forms of expression grabs my attention. But again, it’s challenging. The fact that paleolithic languages are pre-historic, pre-literate and—in modern parlance— “dead,” naturally makes it difficult to draw suitable modes of expression up from such murky, archaic depths.
And yet—
I can’t imagine any pre-agricultural form of communication that doesn’t draw to some extent on animal images and experiences, in some form. Maybe even animal speech! I imagine that the earliest forms of human language were derived from the vocal “patterns” of animals.
I once dreamed that two swallows were sitting on a phone line attached to my bronze-foundry building. They were busily chattering to one another. In the dream I understood what they were saying, in English translation. BUT I could also see a physical, graphic depiction of what they were saying, in the form of huge blocks of carved stone, each “letter” about 30 ft. to 40 ft. high. The vast text was composed from some archaic, unknown alphabet—similar in appearance to ancient Hebrew, but much older, quite pre-historical and unknown to humans. Yet in the dream, I “understood” that pre-agricultural language. When I woke up, I lost the translation, but was left with a shivering sense of having witnessed something incredibly profound: “The Speech of the Swallows!” At a minimum, the dream taught me that it is at least possible to understand the speech of animals, in a dream, or a dream-like state. If so, that in itself might be a form of archaic, pre-agricultural gnosis, common to ancient shamanic cultures.
There’s more, of course, Mike, but this is a start. Thanks again for your contributions.
“Imagine an apple, “ she directed. She then led a discussion on what we had experienced. Everyone complied, and she pointed out that our experiences were not gripping. They all amounted to putting a coin in a machine and out popped an apple image, a compound of memories of apples and such. No drama, no tension, no plot, no story. She then proposed a writing prompt in which a minimally described character was on the verge of a crucial decision. She wanted us to be prompt in our response as well. Then, as we went around the room, the room was filled with story possibilities. No one seemed to suffer any writer’s block, perhaps because we were not writing, just “imagining.” She pointed out that all the proffered story lines were realistic, as if we all were aiming to mimic Flaubert, Then, she said, “Now, the hard part. Close your eyes, let all contents drop away. No prompt, no need to be prompt. See what comes. Don’t try to do anything.” I don’t recall how long this went on, but after a time of such spacing out, “something” happened that was different. No one could name it, but there were references to “electricity in the air,” and “sparks flying.” The teacher said that we had contacted, to one degree or another, the story engine. She said she wanted us to write our short stories from “there.” No one could say exactly where “there”was, but we had had a taste. This experience and others during the summer session in short story writing at USC in 1959, stuck with me. It resonated strongly again when I read Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction.
The story of Fex & Coo, comes “from” some place, but giving that place a name assumes too much. I agree with you Mike, that trying to locate these phenomena in a specific geographies is fruitless. It is best, I think, to leave the location a mystery. Also, I like the term “presences,” as here too, trying to identify them in “conscious” terms, may serve the ego’s needs for understanding, but is off-putting in terms of the mystery such presences evoke. Still, I think it is possible to distinguish different qualities of these presences For example, when I am writing I do experience the characters and I do feel the companionship that Anne Tyler refers to. But I sense these experiences are “entrained” to the writing of the story, even if I feel more like scribe than author. Other experiences feel much less entrained to my intentions. From another angle. It seems to me that some presences come with much less “entanglement” with the processes I refer to as “I” or “me.” A quality of independence. Even trying to name them seems too clever by far.
From Tony Albino:
I really was struck by the sentence about a ‘quality of independence.’ I have always thought that poetry was the greatest form of that and I mainly can only think in that term and not in linear sentences when it comes to the discussion of this independence of thought and images. We carry a billion years of evolution with us and most of it is submerged. So my response is the following:
WITHIN THE RAIN
Within the rain
we speak.
We chatter of this and that
waiting for something to happen,
the river to part,
the restaurant to open,
our friendship to grow.
We listen and hear,
not only each other
but voices, whispers,
airy sounds of all who travel with us.
Souls dancing in our heads,
shifting sides with each sentence
we utter.
My friend, meet my family
and I will meet yours.
They say we are cousins.
I think we are more.
Where is Daddy Flowers?
It rained hard last night, pounding on the tin roof of my little tambo. The trails are turned to mush, and I’m sure glad to have these rubber boots for the slick and muddy walk up to my open air, hole-in-the-ground shitter. It’s only about fifty feet away. But in the pitch black jungle nights, it feels like a hundred yards or more.
Now, this morning, I’ve eaten my meal of plain quinoa and a boiled green plantain, washed my bowl and spoon in the little stream that runs nearby, and settled into my hammock to read, drifting in and out of “Savitri” and sleep.
Somewhere in there-to use a familiar turn of phrase-a sort of portal seems to open and a song begins to arrive, gently at first, then more insistently. It’s an effort to wade through this thick, humid lethargy. But somehow I manage to pick up paper and pen and copy down what’s coming.
Lyrics and melody arrive together, complete, animating.
I get up and walk around, sing the song over and over, trying to change the melody, give it an icaro-like sound, those medicine songs sung by ayahuasqueros, given to them, so it’s said, by the plants.
This song, on the other hand, sounds a bit like a Protestant hymn, not at all like those hauntingly beautiful melodies.
But the melody won’t change. It’s as though it is a being in its own right, with a life of its own.
It’s during this struggle to alter the song that I become aware of Daddy Flowers, my paternal grandfather, who died long before I was born. My father rarely spoke of him, and there’s not much that I know. He was a Baptist minister in Monroe, Louisiana, where he founded and administered the Louisiana Baptist Children’s Home, an orphanage, where he was the “Daddy” to scores of parentless children.
He’s not someone I’d had an active curiosity about, nor ever encountered in any discernible way.
But here he is. Here we are, deep in the Amazon. And he gives me to understand that this new song is just so. Not amenable to tampering.
He’s very matter-of-fact about it. But firm and clear. He’s also very supportive and encouraging of my explorations here in the jungle.
He is distinctively other, a completely unexpected and welcome presence.
But his otherness doesn’t appear in sensate form; I neither see nor hear him. It’s much more immediate than that.
Some years later, when I record the song, I share the credits with my grandfather, though, if you’ve followed me thus far, you’ll understand that my name on the credits is the more questionable one.
Or perhaps we can imagine the song as a sort of mycelial production, like the fruiting body of a mushroom, in which case the whole question of authorship becomes almost comic when we include in the attribution the muggy air, the insanely verdant forest, the adaptive changes in gut microflora, the single monarch butterfly that flittered over the stream around the same time every afternoon; that is to say, when imagining attempts to take account of my utter situatedness within this entangled web of forces and influences that seem to shatter any rigid boundary between inside and out.
I think of the practice proposed by Meister Eckhart, which he called Gelassenheit, variously translated as emptying, letting-alone-ness, allowing-ness, letting-be-ness.
Not “making” sense, but “listening”, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s felicitous phrase, “on the edge of meaning”.
Where did the song come from?
Where do the ancestors dwell?
Where is Daddy Flowers?
Maybe, just maybe…no where.