Imagination
"Man has an irrepresibble tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination. He sees a camel in the cloud, a face hidden in th foliage of a tree, a butterfly or an anatomical detail in the ink-blot of the Rohrschach test."
--- Arthur Koestler (Ghost in the Machine)
“it is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and while the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often have I struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I don not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks and carbon, and blind throbbings”
--- Vladimir Nabokov in Speak Memory
But the road, as we shall actually travel it, leads through half the lands and all the seven seas of the globe. For we shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus-with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the demon of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus, haloes and hurricanes, lightnings and Laplanders; meteors and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of paradise, and the observatory at Peking; swoons, and spectres, and slimy seas; wefts and watersnakes, and the wandering Jew. Beside that compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodological. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry.
In the British Museum is a small manuscript volume of ninety leaves, which is, in my judgement, one of the most illuminating human documents even in that vast treasure-house. It is a note book kept by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, partly in pencil, partly in ink, and always with most admired disorder. There are just two dates from cover to cover, but internal evidence makes clear that it embraces a period of almost three years, from the spring of 1795 to the spring or summer of 1798, the years which lead up to and include the magnificent flowering of Coleridge’s genius on which his renown as a poet rests.
It is, on the whole the strangest medley that I know. Milton's Commonplace Book is a severely ordered collecteanea of extracts culled from his reading, docketed alphabetically , and methodically as a ledger. Shelley's notebooks, written upside down, sidewise, and even right side up, with their scribbled marginal sketches of boats and trees and human faces — these battered and stained and happy-go-lucky little volumes are a priceless record of the birth-throes of poetry. But it is chiefly poetry, beating its wings against the bars of words, which they contain. There are few notes of Shelley's reading. The Coleridge note book is like neither. It is a catch-all for suggestions jotted down chaotically from Coleridge's absorbing adventures among books. It is a repository of waifs and strays of verse, some destined to find a lodgement later in the poems, others yet lying abandoned where they fell, like drifted leaves. It is a mirror of the fitful and kaleidoscopic moods and a record of the germinal ideas of one of the most supremely gifted and utterly incalculable spirits ever let loose upon the planet. And it is nothing else in the world so much as a jungle, illuminated eerily with patches of phosphorescent light, and peopled with uncanny life and strange exotic flowers. But it is teeming and fecund soil and out of it later rose, like exhalations, gleaming and aërial shapes...
--- From ‘The road to Xanadu, a study in the ways of the imagination. John Livingston Lowes. 1927.
--- Arthur Koestler (Ghost in the Machine)
“it is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and while the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often have I struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I don not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks and carbon, and blind throbbings”
--- Vladimir Nabokov in Speak Memory
But the road, as we shall actually travel it, leads through half the lands and all the seven seas of the globe. For we shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus-with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the demon of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus, haloes and hurricanes, lightnings and Laplanders; meteors and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of paradise, and the observatory at Peking; swoons, and spectres, and slimy seas; wefts and watersnakes, and the wandering Jew. Beside that compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodological. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry.
In the British Museum is a small manuscript volume of ninety leaves, which is, in my judgement, one of the most illuminating human documents even in that vast treasure-house. It is a note book kept by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, partly in pencil, partly in ink, and always with most admired disorder. There are just two dates from cover to cover, but internal evidence makes clear that it embraces a period of almost three years, from the spring of 1795 to the spring or summer of 1798, the years which lead up to and include the magnificent flowering of Coleridge’s genius on which his renown as a poet rests.
It is, on the whole the strangest medley that I know. Milton's Commonplace Book is a severely ordered collecteanea of extracts culled from his reading, docketed alphabetically , and methodically as a ledger. Shelley's notebooks, written upside down, sidewise, and even right side up, with their scribbled marginal sketches of boats and trees and human faces — these battered and stained and happy-go-lucky little volumes are a priceless record of the birth-throes of poetry. But it is chiefly poetry, beating its wings against the bars of words, which they contain. There are few notes of Shelley's reading. The Coleridge note book is like neither. It is a catch-all for suggestions jotted down chaotically from Coleridge's absorbing adventures among books. It is a repository of waifs and strays of verse, some destined to find a lodgement later in the poems, others yet lying abandoned where they fell, like drifted leaves. It is a mirror of the fitful and kaleidoscopic moods and a record of the germinal ideas of one of the most supremely gifted and utterly incalculable spirits ever let loose upon the planet. And it is nothing else in the world so much as a jungle, illuminated eerily with patches of phosphorescent light, and peopled with uncanny life and strange exotic flowers. But it is teeming and fecund soil and out of it later rose, like exhalations, gleaming and aërial shapes...
--- From ‘The road to Xanadu, a study in the ways of the imagination. John Livingston Lowes. 1927.
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