A man and a woman are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.

A man and a woman and a jug of maple syrup and an old tennis shoe and a Roman statue are one.

A woman and her imagination are one.

It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea.

I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it. It is my daimon if ever there was one. “The daimon is a kind of twin that prowls alongside, is most often vivid when things are tough, that pushes you toward the life you signed up to live before you fell into the amnesia of birth and forgot the whole affair.”

I am going to tell you now, before I begin, what my conclusion is to my thoughts on the imagination: I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one.

Wittgenstein: “Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition.”

The evolution of our languages—the different languages of the human species—was a great act of imagination that continued enacting itself over a very long period of time and is still enacting itself. At some point in this continuum, when one spoke or wrote the word “tree,” the one listening or reading (which is a form of listening) had to see the image of a tree in their mind. Anything involving an image in the head is an act of imagination. We think in both images and words, and since words are imaginary enactments (the word “tree” is not a tree), thinking and imagining are one.

What irks me: that artists of all kinds are always praising the imagination and telling us that it is the single most wonderful and important thing in the world of the human psyche; they speak as if there were nothing pejorative or destructive about it. But the imagination is a full, rounded, complex thing, and, like any daimon, has more than one aspect.

Shakespeare imagined Othello and that was a good thing. Othello imagined that Desdemona was unfaithful to him, and that was a bad thing.

I once sat next to a young woman at dinner who believed that the CIA had bugged her salad, and it terrified her, and she was unable to live a normal life because of her imagining this terrible thing, and I think this is a negative aspect of the imagination.

Later I thought: well, she had a marvelous point after all, because very often when washing lettuces I find a slug, and my lettuce really is “bugged,” and I thought my thought was a positive aspect, because I was using my imagination when I had this thought.

When I was a child I talked to my dolls and my dolls talked to me and we were very happy together. Sometimes too I would talk to flowers or stones and we were very happy together. I know a man who when he was a boy played with marbles and each marble had a name. One day one of the marbles was lost, never to be found again, and all the other marbles, along with the boy, held a funeral for the marble who was gone for good.

Perhaps you are thinking “ah, play, the robust imagination of a child at play, we must regain that and engage in it as often as we can,” but that would be naïve, for it is far more complex than a game of marbles: the imagination has its own life and its own autonomy, the imagination is not what you play with, the imagination plays with you. It has the power to both create and destroy, in form and deform. The funeral made the boy very sad, even sadder than a real funeral, he said.

When I was a child I thought—imagined—that my parents did not love me because of all the terrible things they said and did to me. I was not yet experienced enough to imagine you could love someone and still do terrible things to them for reasons having nothing to do with your feelings for them. I could not then imagine having compassion for the people who did terrible things.

I still, in many circumstances, cannot. But I know my parents loved me, despite the terrible things, and this has been a great leap forward.

Common sense, or rational thinking, is often opposed to the imagination, or magical thinking. This, too, is deeply troubling in its complexity.

Robert Frost said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. But it is easy to play tennis without a net, you simply pretend it is there. Or, if you prefer, you can play tennis without a ball or a racquet, I’ve seen people do it, they play without a ball or a racquet at the end of Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, and it is very beautiful to watch. Even the spectators turn their heads back and forth in awe.

I can imagine there being a god, an organization to the multiverse we love. I can imagine there not being a god, no organization at all to the multiverse we love.

And now, if I might depress you for a moment, I want to remind you that it is imagination that kicks in every morning when you wake and every night when you go to sleep and tells you that you are safe and all your loved ones are safe and all your belongings really do belong to you and are safe as you are safe.

Of course you are not safe nor is anyone you know safe and nothing really belongs to you, not forever, your most beloved keepsake will one day belong to another. But who wants to live in insecurity and fear?

So here, too, if you think a bit differently, you will see that the imagination you employ upon waking and before sleep is a great solace and joy, duplicitous as it is, and the fact of its solace should not depress you but elate you. Now that you are elated—to possess a faculty as comforting as the imagination—I feel it is safe to move on.

It is common sense—I think it is common sense—to repulse an enemy who has committed a transgression, and in some cases to slay the enemy, to leave the most terrible ones dead. Our ancestors in thinking, the chimpanzees, did it. There is that terrible moment when Jane Goodall records her horror upon discovering what her gentle, beloved chimpanzees were capable of.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, now called Osho, calls the historical figure who was Jesus Christ “a milestone in human consciousness.” Jesus is a milestone in human consciousness because it is an act of imagination to forgive your enemy and regard him with compassion.

Perhaps the transgression was imaginary. Perhaps the enemy was imaginary. For Othello, the transgression and the enemy were both imaginary, they were in his head, they were him. He was his own worst enemy. He slay himself.

The imagination is my daimon because it is my best friend and my worst enemy. It is my twin because I am my own best friend and my own worst enemy.

I am making all this stuff up. After reading a poem out loud to an audience, Robert Creeley was asked, “Is that a real poem, or did you make it up?”

He made it up, of course; it was a real poem. Real things are made things. Are you a real person, or did your parents make you up? Is that a real mountain or did the forces of the universe make it up? Is the virtual reality of the Internet real or did imaginative people like Steve Jobs make it up?

Is a plastic fish a fish?

I don’t like artificial flowers, but when they look real I fall in love with them.

All these things live in the same house, the house of the head, and in the house of the head trouble is real. But when I talk to my dolls, it goes away.

Beware the difference between real pretend and fake pretend. My friend Kate was visiting me, and we were having tea. My stuffed animal Ivan asked for a cup, and she filled his tiny teacup with water and brought it to him. “What do you take me for,” he cried. “A fool? This isn’t tea, it’s water!” Kate was taken aback, and refilled the little cup with tea.

Wallace Stevens says: “It does not seem possible to say of the imagination that it has a certain single characteristic which of itself gives it a certain single value, as, for example, good or evil. To say such a thing would be the same thing as to say that reason is good or evil or, for that matter, that human nature is good or evil.”

That is what I have been trying to say by giving you all these examples.

Now I will speak as an artist. As an artist, I like many mistakes. Not all mistakes, but many of them. A mistake is just another “take” on things. Mishearing or misreading is a joyful mistake for an artist. Someone says, “The door is ajar,” and you hear them say, “The door is a jar.” How can a door be a jar? What’s in the jar of a door? And it gets you thinking about doors and jars. This is what Gertrude Stein, among other things, is famous for. So don’t be troubled by her anymore.

A man taught art at a university. When he came home after work his daughter asked him what he did that day. He said, “I taught people how to draw.” And she said, “People forget how to draw?”

Artists are just people who have not forgotten how to draw, by which I mean create. But don’t be taken in; they have forgotten a great many other things. Sometimes they forget they are no longer eight years old. This is why artists are of a troublesome nature. Just so you know, and can stop thinking about it.

“If you look at the human spirit, you’ll get a lot of good ideas.” That’s Johnny Cash on songwriting, and I liked it so much I imagined I could just throw it in and that it would make sense, even if it appeared to be random.

Randomness is very often considered a mistake, but it can also be a good one. We equate randomness in art with the twenty-first century but it goes back a lot farther than that. I collect primers from the nineteenth century. A primer was the first book a child had, and it taught her how to read and write. The first page of a primer begins with the alphabet: a, an ax, b, a boy, c, a cat, d, a dog, and so on. Soon she is reading “A man and a hat,” and then “This is a log hut, is it not?” and later “Let us all march up this way to the park,” and finally “But this poor bird became the prey of a big cat, who ate it up.” This all makes sense and the children learn it, they eat it up. Then, on the last page, page fifty-four of one primer I have, which was printed in 1880, it all gets mixed up. It no longer makes any sense and still the children eat it up. This is the page they have been waiting for, this is the sum of all they have learned.

THE PRIMER

LESSON XXXI

REVIEW

Give the poor girl a piece of bread, or a piece of pie. One ton has 2000 pounds. My friend is kind to me; he gave me this new book. The sun, the moon, and the stars are in the sky. Did you hear the cry of the boy who fell in-to the brook? No, sir, I did not. Have you found man-y nuts? No, We have not an-y. The eyes of the hawk are sharp. Sam found a young dead bird on the ground. I will not buy a doll, and give it to Jane on her birth-day. The Son of God said, Suf-fer the lit-tle chil-dren to come un-to me.

I love the last primer page. To me, it sounds like a wet voice in the warm air of a room.

At Dia: Beacon, the museum of modern and postmodern art along the Hudson River in Beacon, New York, there was a great deal of planning before the museum was built and opened. As you can imagine. Among the many decisions that had to be made was what temperature the air inside galleries would be kept at. Perhaps there is a universal standard for museum-air temperatures, I don’t know, but most, in my experience, are a bit cool, and I assume this is done for reasons of art preservation. But the architects in Beacon took it a step further and decided that a person should not be too comfortable when looking at art, that art should make a person uncomfortable; presumably, if art is doing its job it should do that, and so they decided to keep the museum too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, going with the flow of the seasons while oddly going against the flow of normal temperatures for those seasons. If you go to Dia:Beacon and feel uncomfortable, this is why. People make decisions for you all of the time that you are completely unaware of. But a peculiar thing happened when I visited the museum. I entered a gallery of work by a contemporary Asian artist (whose name, sadly, I have forgotten) and on the wall a text explained that one of his pieces was an invisible installation; he believed that art should make people feel good, feel especially happy, and therefore into this gallery was piped extra amounts of pure oxygen, and if you stayed in the gallery long enough you should be able to feel its effects. For the rest of the day, whenever I felt tired—for very often that is how art makes me feel—I went back to the gallery and lay down on one of the benches. And I felt better, or imagined I did. And there you have a case of three different imaginations colliding.

There is a Ukrainian art, the art of dyeing Easter eggs using extremely vivid colors and extremely intricate patterns. The Ukrainians, however, don’t first empty the eggs, as we do, by extracting the liquid through a pinhole in the bottom of the egg. They use fresh eggs just as they are, and unless you are very clumsy and accidentally crack one, the eggs over time, over months, will not rot or smell but slowly dry out until the liquid inside is desiccated; you can even pick them up and shake them like rattles. Ukranians do this because eggs are a symbol of life and it is inconceivable to them that anyone would drain the life out of an egg at Easter, the time of coming to life again, both the coming to life again of Jesus Christ and the coming to life again of all things that grow. I suppose, in a superstitious way, it would be bad luck. But in fact, on that first Easter morning, the cave Jesus had been buried in was found empty, so why the fear of emptiness? Couldn’t an empty egg be a symbol of the empty cave from which Jesus had arisen? Would that be a mistake, or just another take on events?

When I had this thought, was I using my imagination? Again, I tell you that I do not know the difference.

John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey written in 1817, says this: “The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” Adam had a dream of Eve the very eve God created her, standing her up before Adam in the morning. This is what Keats is referring to. But in telling you this I am relaying only Keats’s imagination, who in turn is relaying Milton’s imagination, as the dream he cites is from a passage in Book VIII of Paradise Lost, in which Adam tells the angel Raphael what he remembers of creation. Even the words “he awoke and found it truth” probably rely on Cowper, who used the words “woke and found it true” in a poem written in 1789, six years before Keats was born. Whoever’s imagination is at play, none of them match the record. In Genesis nowhere is it written that Adam had a dream. It says only this: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and he brought her unto the man.”

What an imagination Keats and Milton had, that they supposed, Adam being sleeping, he was dreaming of a woman! If you are asleep and a rib is taken from you, is it likely you will be dreaming of a woman? Far more likely you will be dreaming of something being taken from deep inside you. It was, of course, something Adam needed, as he was exhausted from naming all the animals, from being a poet as many have pointed out, and he had no help, he needed some help. Help came in the form of a rib taken from the depths of his own body—in other words, what he needed was somewhere deep inside himself, something deep inside himself came to his aid. How astonishing, that help come from so deep within. Perhaps we can go further than Keats, perhaps we can go further than simply comparing the Imagination to Adam’s dream, perhaps we can move from a simile to a metaphor and say the Imagination was Adam’s dream. Imagination, deep in each of us, can give us what we need and want, that which we dream of, the reality of love and communion, help in our tired loneliness. Haven’t you heard it said that one has to imagine the possibility of such dreams before they can become a reality, that one has to have dreamt of them?

Emily Dickinson had an amazing imagination, but so did her nephew, who came home from school one day in tears, having been berated by his teacher—perhaps even whacked—for having told the class about the white goat who lived in the attic. He was attacked for being a dreamer, a liar, someone who made things up. Upon hearing this, Emily was furious, beside herself with fury, and said that the teacher could come to the house and see for herself the white goat in the attic, for indeed it lived there, Emily had seen it, there it was, munching a pile of grass under the beams.

This anecdote is the only thing I remember from reading a five-hundred-plus-page biography of the poet. I am not even vaguely interested in the men, or the women, or any of that other stuff; I am interested in the goat, whom I love as if it were mine own, and though I don’t have an attic, I have a place in my head where it can live, and go on living, as I feed it daily with mounds of fresh cut grass. Over the years, it has been given a blue ribbon round its neck, from which dangles a silver bell.

I asked the poet Michael Burkard about the imagination, and he had this to say: “The imagination is more like the moon than the sun because it is dependent on another thing and exists in no pure state by itself [the way the light of the moon is the reflected light of the sun, and has no light of its own]. It needs an openness to whatever is there at the moment and to not reject whatever is there because of any formulaic concept from out of the past. You can colonize a reader the way you can colonize a country. The imagination is not a privileged act; everyone engages in it. The imagination allows me to give a credence and an integrity to any existence outside of myself. Let us say I dream of deer in an enchanted forest and write a poem inspired by them. I don’t own the deer. They granted me their presence in the dream. I like to think of it as ‘spooky behavior over long distances,’ which is how scientists describe those electrons that respond to each other though far apart. Spooky behavior over long distances, that’s it. You can feel its presence.”

I argued that some people have more of it than others, but he said, “No, they don’t have more of it, they are just more open to letting it enter whatever aperture it wants to come in by. Even driving in a car for five minutes everyone employs it, but not everyone recognizes that they are employing it. And keep in mind that the very act of writing is an imaginative act, even a journalist uses his imagination as a point around which to rally what really matters—he must imagine what’s important. Even memory is an act of imagination, you never tell the same story twice, not even to yourself.”

Michael said that too often poets discriminate between imaginative and unimaginative acts. They are trying to be aware, always, of the difference. But if you stop trying to discriminate, if you stop discriminating, you can push the envelope of the mundane in an effort to see if it paradoxically opens a new door to the imaginative. In other words, unimaginative acts can lead to imaginative ones.

After listening to Michael, I thought with gratitude of the white goat, who grants me his presence in the attic.

You know, I think I am a worse teacher now than when I was young because when I was young I was more or less interested in the same things my students were. I mean when I was thirty and they were twenty, or when I was forty-five and they were thirty. Like them I looked forward to a rich, long, unfolding life full of writing, reading, thinking, and talking about poetry. But sometime after fifty, and especially after sixty, that all fell away; I don’t look forward now to much more than constant demise, and what with the endless explosion of postmodernism and technology into which all my current students were born (it never occurs to them that I was born into a world without Velcro) I am now more than ever not even vaguely interested in the things that interest them; all that stuff can, and will, go on without me. One way to look at it is to say they are interested in the future, and, having a very difficult and limited kind of future, I am not much interested in it, while at the same time I am more and more interested in the present moment, and I don’t mean the general state of affairs this month, I mean the bug walking across my lettuce leaf.

I told this to my oldest friend, a woman I have known for forty-five years, and she said, “I know what you mean, Mary, but it’s not that way at all, it’s actually quite different, and the implications are far greater. It’s that other people have never been interested in the things that interest you, and you understand that now, but when you were younger you didn’t understand it at all, so you didn’t feel isolated, but now that you understand it you feel isolated, and you are.”

This friend of mine, she has always been wiser than I am. I knew at once she was right.

So what is this thing I am interested in? My daimon, the imagination, of course. I could give you a long list of things I am not even vaguely interested in, but many of them would insult you for I am sure you are interested in at least some of them.

All I can tell you is that at long last I am myself and free, even if isolated, and I am happy when I want to be and sad when I feel like it, and about the only thing that troubles me is knowing how many people on earth do not have that privilege, some for external reasons and some for internal ones, and to these I bow and for these I pray.

And then I hear a little bell and go up to the attic and put my arms around a goat.