thoughts on a place I've been
a place for recitation
Originally uploaded by crispy47. “Imagination is always pretty, reality is always cruel”
-Tony Leung in some terrible romantic comedy on TV
I’m looking at a photograph I took earlier today of a temple in Miao Li, where I went with a busful of Taiwanese preschool teachers and their friends. The photo isn’t very good, but it’s enough that I can still remember exactly what the temple looked like, and what was interesting enough about it to make me take out my camera.
The temple itself is enormous. Like many temples here, it’s built onto the side of a mountain, and exists as an elaborate system of winding stone stairs, terraces, and the vast arcs of red-tile roofs stacked with the colorful figures of Chinese legends. Today, Miao Li was immersed in a homogenous mist, so that after a certain, not-very-distant point, objects receded into shades of lighter and lighter green.
I took the photo on the top level of the temple, with my camera pointed up the mountain, so that the foreground is an intersection of roofs, and the top half of the photo is a foggy view of the side of the mountain, which curves away from the camera, so that the dark green on the right side of the image has faded into white by the center. On the left-hand side, a small enamel dragon thrusts his insect-like antennae into the white space created by the mist. One of my companions had commented, “It looks like a place where the Immortals would live.”
I’ve been thinking of this particular photo all day because of a revelation I had at the moment I took it, probably as a direct result of my taking it. I have memories from every period in my life of being intensely affected by physical environments, but here in the home of the Immortals, although I appreciated the beauty of the scene, I didn’t feel a thing.
It’s not entirely clear to me what bestows certain places with such the power to force one’s imagination is forced into action, the same way that one is forced to breath after being underwater for a long time. It goes much beyond beauty, I think, even though beauty, defined broadly, must be a component. For me, it may be the kind of beauty that Ayn Rand describes to characterize good architecture-a beauty deriving from thematic unity and unpretentiousness, or in my case, from an often-false perception of those things.
At first I thought that this might relate in some way to the presence of technology. When I was very small, I treasured places that were free of anything too complicated, which included evidence of factories and power plants. I loved old houses with no electricity; I was disgusted to see black wires strung along the walls of old missions and cathedrals, powering overhead lighting and glowing green exit signs. Modern conveniences seemed gaudy and fake and stifling to imagination. If my parents took me to a park, I would always try to find somewhere from which it was impossible to see any evidence of modern human development.
I wonder if this was because, at that age, I had such a limited understanding of what something like electricity actually was, and I had an aesthetic aversion to any construction that couldn’t easily be understood. Chain-link fences, plastic water bottles, and my colorful Fruit of the Loom T-shirts all seemed to stand between me and my imagination, which at the time was nearly indistinguishable from the world I had so recently become a part of.
Naturally, my views got more nuanced as I got older. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it ever had anything directly to do with technology. I wouldn’t want to be somewhere with no electricity now. I like hot showers and light switches. When I visited an ancient Buddhist monastery a few years ago, I didn’t mind the multi-media room and gift shop because I thought they were hypocritical-I minded them because they seemed to encroach on the forms my imagination had begun to take on.
First from my imagination and instinct, then from the books my parents read to me, and from TV and movies, and at last from my own reading, I’ve accumulated ideas about the way things are supposed to look, about what belongs in a Buddhist monastery, in a forest, in an old cabin, a bedroom, a fancy hotel. And I want my experiences to mimic those ideas. I want to the kind of pure experience I’ve always imagined comes with being part of the places that have been made to exist in my mind. They are the kind of places that people are meant to be in, that form an unbroken idea that can serve as a backdrop for imagination and all the things it makes possible, even if the idea itself is based on ignorance.
Of course, what I never realized as a child was that I already do have a pure experience, and a pure experience is invisible. The experiences I sought as a child were self-conscious ones; I wanted to be aware of how beautiful and natural they were. I wanted to take them for granted, but to somehow be aware at the same time. I wanted an experience that was both imaginary and literally real.
Because of the impossibility of this, what I felt toward such places as conformed to my imagination, when I found them, was a desire not entirely different from sexual love-the desire to become as close to the place as possible, to press myself against and into it; to be absorbed into it and at the same time to be obliterated by it so the it and I would become indistinguishable and inseparable. I was always aware that to do so, even if it were possible, would erase my understanding of the imagined experience itself as a contrast to any real experience, which would negate my understanding of its beauty. But it didn’t matter. The desire to be is stronger than the desire to observe.
Although my sexualized description is both a little gross and anachronistically Freudian, I’m sure that the type of desire I’m trying to describe is not unique. In fact, I’m thinking of “The Solitary Reaper,” of a poem of Wordsworth’s in which one can see the speaker trying to “press himself and into” a scene.
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?-
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;-
I listen'd, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
This poem is not about the type of desire I was just discussing, but it is characterized by intense longing for the particular image being described. The fact that the “Highland Lass” was a real girl who Wordsworth saw from the window of a coach on his way back from a vacation only makes me more convinced.
Actually, sometime during the last couple pages, I went to sleep for the night, and now it’s the next day and here I am in my little house on the roof, watching it rain on the thickly forest mountains that are just outside my window. I used to be able to watch the rain indefinitely. I’d feel about it exactly the way I described earlier. I wanted it in some way that transcended observing or even touching. It was the discontent and subtle pain of unfulfillable desire that I enjoyed, I think. Wordsworth’s own obsession with the weather makes me sure that he understood this.
Back to my photo. Having always been so under the sway of this Romantic idea of place and the way that individuals and imagination can interact with it, I was surprised and disturbed to be in this amazing place and to feel nothing. It occurred to me that I’ve been noticing the rain less, too. I wondered if this is what they mean when they talk about your imagination dying as you get older.
You could say that it has more to do with how I’d spent most of the day in a bus listening to two dozen preschool teachers singing karaoke, and that the temple didn’t even attempt to maintain the solemnity that its architecture signified (although under the Chinese, or at least Taiwanese, conception, the space of a temple seems to be more public than Westerners think, and not necessarily designated as spiritual)-not far away, construction crews were jackhammering the red-tile roof of a building covered with a huge bamboo scaffolding (I’ve almost never been to a temple that’s not under construction to some degree or another). And yet I can’t say that this feeling of disconnect from a place is entirely new. I seem much more fixed to the world of immaterial world of human concerns lately. Perhaps this temple, and this busfull of preschool teachers, wasn’t so different from anywhere else: perhaps there’s not such a huge difference between beautiful and ugly things, or between things that are real and fake, and I’m only starting to understand that.
If that’s the case, is this knowledge that I want to have? I’ve held this Romantic idea for so long, can I just let it go? Blake says that knowledge and imagination are fundamentally opposed, and of the two, imagination is the only virtue. Discussing this idea, Kensaburo Oe quotes a passage from Milton:
Judge then of they Own Self: they eternal Lineaments explore
What is Eternal & what Changeable & what Annihilable?
The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.
Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination
The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State
Created to be Annihilated and a new Ratio Created
Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated Forms cannot
The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife
But their Forms Eternal Exist, For-ever. Amen Hallelujah.
It seems to me that what Blake is saying here is that our imaginations give us access to something more fundamental, or at least valuable-“Forms”-than we can get at with reason. That is certainly true of my current experience.
Knowing that the ancient temple is mostly a façade, or knowing that the world is not entirely different when it rains-is that not the same thing as the death of the imagination? Or rather, as Blake might think of it, the transference of one’s attention from a higher truth to a lower one:
… in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
and Earth, & all you behold,
tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this world of Mortality is but a Shadow.
In contrast to a literal reading of Blake (which is never a good idea), I do believe in the idea of objective truth, and that knowledge is the acquisition of that truth. Which makes imagination whatever else we can use to fill the space that isn’t taken up by knowledge, like the mist in my photograph creates a space for the dragon.
Of course, imagine and knowledge are not as opposed as this passage makes them seem, but then when Blake says “knowledge,” he doesn’t necessarily mean specific pieces of knowledge. Oe’s reading of Blake is that imagination has the ability to transfigure our flawed and inaccurate experiences-what we “know”-into something true and, perhaps though not necessarily, beautiful.
On the other hand, in some ways knowledge does oppose imagination. I can imagine the way things might be, or would be, but I don’t know about imagining the way things aren’t. That is, if the power of imagination is to show us something more true, then I have to be able to trust my imagination. And it seems that as I get older, accumulating knowledge, my ability to do that becomes less and less.
It’s nighttime now. Actually, three in the morning, more than twenty-four hours after I started writing this. I spent today at home, not doing much except thinking and watching this terrible romantic comedy. The rain outside began to sound different, and reading over what I had written, it seemed that perhaps I do have some imagination left after all. Still, when I went for a walk in the light rain after dinner, many thoughts came rushing in to stand between me and the muddy puddles at my feet, chatting loudly like preschool teachers in a holy place and asking incessantly, “Wouldn’t you like to take a picture?”