It's time to inquire whether one who is trapped within the imagined–neither the imaginary nor the imagination, but precisely the imagined–suffers. To be trapped is to suffer, one would think. But there are reasons to ask anyway. The idea that imagination both escapes from and enriches the concrete, that it opens the concrete up for experience, this idea which resembles a contradiction, or a chimera, a form generated from disparate codes: to think this idea is to be trapped inside the imagined. (I don't know if the imagined would even have sides were it not for this trapping.)
There will always be this possibility: that one never really escapes the concrete. Likewise there will always be the possibility that one never really dwells in the concrete, that the concrete is always in development, and is nothing like a ground. The operative notion then is escape. The concrete comes into existence by being escaped.
This paradox of coming into existence by being escaped, like these possibilities, is imagined. To experience the irreal in ignorance of the possible irreality of escaping the concrete involves mistaking the product of irrealizations for the activity of irrealization, or living within the product, the imagined. That's also a paradox, or so I imagine.
How is it possible for irrealization, that is, imagination, to know itself? Surely there's a reason for personifying this idea. Would we want to personify negation? Meonticity?
If imagination comes into existence by being escaped, then one could speak of being trapped in the imagination as readily as one could speak of being trapped in the imagined. At the risk of repeating myself, however, nobody is really trapped in such a situation as the former until after they've escaped, until they're already on the lam. To speak differently of being trapped in the imagined, the imagined would have to be given other than by escape. Conceivably the imagined is given most horribly, as a confinement, while the concrete would forever leap into existence, with its twin, the imagination, by escape.
To be trapped in the imagined means this: to be out of touch with concreteness, with contingency. Contingency is the very antithesis of entrapment. Is it on the same escape route as the twins, or does its path open up only after the twins have gone their separate ways?
To be imprisoned in my solitude is not the same as being alone in my aloneness. It is being out of touch in a way of being inside being out of touch. This is what is forced upon us as the imagined.
The imagined has a wide currency, virtually as wide as solitude. In being out of touch with contingency does one suffer? How would I know whom to ask?
Could the contingent possibly be enriched? On the contrary, could it be among those things that are replete? Sometimes I feel desperately out of touch with contingency. I wouldn't abandon the imagined without reason, without an ethic. How would an ethical impulse against entrapment by the imagined be shared?
Labels: concreteness, contingency, escape, imagination, suffering
2 Comments:
maybe there is no 'trapped' except in the imagined.
Since you put "trapped" in quotes, as much as I am inclined to examine the quoted, I feel as if the next step for me will be to examine the feeling of being trapped qua feeling–and naturally, on the verge of freeing myself from the conceptual, I wonder about being trapped in world of feelings. In this post I was kind of still bouncing off my reading of Sacks' Seeing Voices, so I may have to seriously consider whether one might be trapped in (a world of) feelings. There are of course myriad ways of approaching that.
Could the imagined be an imagining that isn't quite felt as itself? Something uncanny, if ubiquitous, quotidian?
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