Fido the Yak

Write your names in the sand. Listen to the tide roll in. Scarry says "the imagination, with its latticework of incompletely pictured elements, has within it both the actually imagined and the only-almost-imagined, the not-quite-imagined, and the not-yet-imagined" (Dreaming, p. 179). She goes on to say that imagination "magnifies its own work through negation and abstention. This is the way the imagination reflects on itself and becomes self-knowing" (ibid.). Imagine knowing yourself through your irrealizations, an image of yourself at the beach. Sketch a meontic portrait of yourself lost in imagination, as one might be lost in thought. Is it like being lost? Does this self that you imagine have any real consistency, such that it could ever be lost? Could we fully imagine being lost without the possibility of there ever having been a found? Why fully? Aren't we committing to irreality by asking that the imagination be fully itself when it so clearly resists fullness? The found of the lost may have yet to be imagined–one could wait an eternity, were eternity available for waiting. Only almost eternity, like the ocean. The image of the irrealizing self is the negative of the realizing self? No, the real problem is to imagine knowing. What would knowing be that didn't know the lost, that had no room for the lost, nothing to say about the lost?

Labels: imagination, irreality, Scarry, self-awareness

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:55 AM.