The Danger of Imagination

The Danger of Imagination October 8, 2009

More and more, glowing rectangles tell us what to think, feel, and believe—including this one you are staring at right now. Under this regime of information, it is hard to be still, silent, and experience that rich fruit of contemplation: imagination. Even if we manage to imagine something, it cannot be taken too seriously. It must remain fiction.

After all, the lifeblood of the cesspool we call politics is the coagulated, stagnant mass that has now become a giant scab. A scab we dare not pick at since, if we did, new and warm blood would rush over our bodies and remind us of the flesh of the matter. We would be reminded that there are persons are at stake—real, living persons. Persons who cannot escape into the fetishes of individualism or self-sufficiency, who desire for love, who desire for desire. Who want-to-want to be alive and bleed and breathe and think beyond the horizon of possibility that this death requires.

Imagination risks it all. It possess a lurking danger that would melt the ice of the deep magic of secular, modern, liberal society and (rather than return to the old world of the Inquisition) make all things new, again and again, in the deeper magic of conversion. Imagination risks conversion that lives in the world as a whole, not simply in the private spaces that have been designated for the convert.

Most of all, imagination risks the image, the imagus Dei. An image that is not our own possession or a thing we can possess in significant, rational proportions. In that excess, we find our cup overflowing with the blood of life and death, revelation and mystery.

But this is too dangerous to experiment with outside of language, grammar and prose. Certainly not in politics. Even though we may want-to-want a new way of life, we do not want anything but what we have, such is the danger of imagination. So we live in fear of the possible.


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