{"id":14898,"date":"2013-11-22T06:43:49","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T11:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=14898"},"modified":"2018-11-23T12:09:11","modified_gmt":"2018-11-23T17:09:11","slug":"reimagining-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/reimagining-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Reimagining the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'Imagination'<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “Imagination,” one of a series posted on Flickr<\/a> by Inara Pey. (Click image for full-size original.) The images in this set are all digital creations — scenes from the\u00a0<\/em>Second Life alternate-universe “game”\/virtual world. See Pey’s blog post about it<\/a> for more information. Image used under a Creative Commons license.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From\u00a0whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Imagination can so easily be trapped by the wish to escape painful facts and unbearable conclusions. The New Age idea that one can wish oneself out of any circumstance, disease, or bad fortune is not only sadly disrespectful toward suffering, it is also, in the end, dangerous if escape replaces awareness.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the act of seeing changes those who see. This is perhaps most clear with self-perception. By my perceptions of who I am or what I feel, not only do I re-create my idea of who I am but I also change myself. Perception is not simply a reflection of reality but a powerful element of reality. Anyone who meditates has had this experience: Observing the activities of the mind changes the mind until, bit by bit, observation creates great changes in the soul. And the effect is the same when the act of perception is collective. A change in public perception will change the public. This is why acts of imagination are so important.<\/p>\n

Like artistic and literary movements, social movements are driven by imagination. I am not speaking here only of the songs and poems and paintings that have always been part of movements for political and social change, but of the movements themselves, their political ideas and forms of protest. Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Susan Griffin [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Susan Griffin [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Uley, Glos<\/strong><\/p>\n

The moonlight is suddenly large:
\na brightness on the fields that only shows
\nwhen this house dims
\nand something clearer rises
\nthrough the parish I know by heart,\u00a0bricks and glass, the dead
\nimmersed in stone,<\/span>
\nsubtle erasures, siftings of blood and bone,
\nas if this was the story of a place
\nthat I could tell without impediment:
\nfirst thought, then form, a drift of native souls
\nscattered across the land like seed or snow,
\nordered and lost; a sieve of consciousness
\nthe making of this commonplace domain:
\nrespected borders, marriages and births,
\nthe giving up and taking on of names.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(John Burnside [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from\u00a0whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Permission Granted<\/strong><\/p>\n

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
\nor misshapen pepper others pass over.
\nYou don’t have to bury
\nyour grandmother’s keys underneath
\nher camellia bush as the will states.<\/p>\n

You don’t need to write a poem about
\nyour grandfather coughing up his lung
\ninto that plastic tube—the machine’s wheezing
\nalmost masking the kvetching sisters
\nin their Brooklyn kitchen.<\/p>\n

You can let the crows amaze your son
\nwithout your translation of their cries.
\nYou can lie so long under this
\nsummer shower your imprint
\nwill be left when you rise.<\/p>\n

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
\nCook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
\nRevel in the flight of birds without
\ndreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
\nraw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.<\/p>\n

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
\nyourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
\nEach beat of the world’s pulse demands
\nonly that you feel it. No thoughts.
\nJust the single syllable: Yes …<\/em><\/p>\n

See the homeless woman following
\nthe tunings of a dead composer?
\nShe closes her eyes and sways
\nwith the subways. Follow her down,
\ninside, where the singing resides.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(by David Allen Sullivan [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

One Art<\/strong><\/p>\n

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
\nso many things seem filled with the intent
\nto be lost that their loss is no disaster.<\/p>\n

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
\nof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
\nThe art of losing isn’t hard to master.<\/p>\n

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
\nplaces, and names, and where it was you meant
\nto travel. None of these will bring disaster.<\/p>\n

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
\nnext-to-last, of three loved houses went.
\nThe art of losing isn’t hard to master.<\/p>\n

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
\nsome realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
\nI miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.<\/p>\n

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
\nI love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
\nthe art of losing’s not too hard to master
\nthough it may look like (Write<\/em> it!) like disaster.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Elizabeth Bishop [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

The Himalaya is the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India, in the Oligocene<\/span>, crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan Plateau and drove the Himalaya five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had formed into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.\u00a0If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(John McPhee [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “Imagination,” one of a series posted on Flickr by Inara Pey. (Click image for full-size original.) The images in this set are all digital creations — scenes from the\u00a0Second Life alternate-universe “game”\/virtual world. See Pey’s blog post about it for more information. Image used under a Creative Commons license.] From\u00a0whiskey river: Imagination can so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,250,37,5,50,251],"tags":[122,1097,1798,3642,3670,3671,3672,3673,3674],"class_list":{"0":"post-14898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-art","9":"category-onlineworld","10":"category-06_writing","11":"category-language-writing_cat","12":"category-poetry-writing_cat","13":"tag-imagination","14":"tag-elizabeth-bishop","15":"tag-john-mcphee","16":"tag-susan-griffin","17":"tag-second-life","18":"tag-inara-pey","19":"tag-john-burnside","20":"tag-david-allen-sullivan","21":"tag-geology","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-3Si","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14898"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20754,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14898\/revisions\/20754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}