CHAPTER 20

Character Imagined

The idea of “image” has threaded its way throughout this book. I have claimed that people are formed into images and age progressively into their images. Memories of them are as much products of imagination as deposits of fact. We saw the dissolution into image in a passage from Gide. We saw Jung merging into images of nature, “plants, animals, clouds,” while his image endures in the imagination of his public. The story of the woman driving off, leaving a lasting image, provided another example. All that we discovered about the face further reinforced the thesis that character and image are inseparable.

Although our memory images of people’s characters are as much products of imagination as deposits of fact, this does not mean that our images are purely personal fantasies and that imagination is a function inside each privately enclosed skull. I do not consider imagination to be a mental faculty only.

Here, I follow the Romantics, who took the power of imagination right out of the head and into the cosmos. “Jesus, the Imagination,” exclaimed Blake, by which he meant the cosmic creative force of the world soul, or anima mundi, which produces the images that we perceive—and receive. Images come to us, in reverie, in dreams, in sudden clear insights, and during the long struggles of careful thought. They come to us from the world’s imagination, with which ours corresponds and, according even to such skeptics and rationalists as Hume and Kant, on which our understanding of the world depends. “Without Imagination we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but we are scarcely ever conscious [of this],” said Immanuel Kant.

Because consciousness has become identified with the sense of sight, “to see an image” has come to refer to an optical experience. Images have been conceived as visual representations, rather than as presentations of significance, or even as presences. As we feel feelings, sense sensations, think thoughts, so we imagine images. We do not have to see them literally. We do not literally see the images in poems or the characters in novels, or even those in paintings. We “see” images with imagination, and that is how we see character, too. It is like the presence of a person.

To train the eye to see imaginatively we could not do worse than take university courses in psychology, or approach with a diagnostic manual those oddities called abnormal. The study of character does not appear in the curriculum of psychology; more appropriate methods of study go on in other departments—film, theater, literature, biography, political science, military history, and art history—and in law, because the courts still call character witnesses to testify. To improve the faculty of imagination, we must go where we are encouraged to practice imagining.

More than a faculty, imagination is also one of the great archetypal principles, like love, order, beauty, justice, time. We sense these principles coursing through us and even hold their reins in our hands. Yet they are also beyond us and never in our hands. We do not put beauty or love or order in the world. We find them there, and we respond to them as smaller correspondents of these larger powers.

So, too, imagination. It endlessly produces possibilities, which our imagining capability receives and elaborates. We make small human versions of order, measure out time, construct things of beauty, codify justice, and demonstrate love. All the while, we know that justice and beauty and love are never fully captured by the corresponding human institutions. Why shouldn’t the same be true of imagination? As we cannot command love, or produce beauty without the aid of luck or inspiration, so we cannot bring imagination to heel. Fantasies are more like the spirit. They blow where they will, and we are lucky if one comes near enough and lasts long enough to grasp.

We are part and parcel of the world. Our bodies share its carbon, oxygen, and salt water, and we also participate as images in its imagination. Although the elements are formulated into numbers and acronyms like CO2 and H2O, they contain a rich symbolic imagery. The French physicist, chemist, and philosopher of imagination Gaston Bachelard showed in book after book how imagery forms our thinking about elemental nature, although, as Kant said, “we are scarcely ever conscious” of this.

Our bodies are both anatomical and imaginative structures. What is left at the end are the bones of the body and the lines of character that form images, or that images have formed. We are like materialized poems capable of intense exhilaration and suffering. This imaginative body is the stuff of dance and sculpture, and impels the rhythms of oratory, music, and writing.

Every breath we take, we take from the cosmos. We inhale its air; we speak with its breath; its pneuma is our inspiration. “Cosmos” indicates a world formed by aesthetics. “Cosmetics,” derived from kosmos, gives the clue to the early meanings of the Greek word, when it was linked with the dress of women, with decoration and embellishment, with all things fitting, in order, furnished, and arranged, and with ethical implications of appropriateness, decency, honor. The aesthetic imagination is the primary mode of knowing the cosmos, and aesthetic language the most fitting way to formulate the world.

Characteristics last as images. Great-grandfather in his huge, old restaurant kitchen at daybreak, unkempt, slippered, night-shirted, prying into leftovers. What’s been stolen; what’s been wasted. Great-grandmother’s jutting jaw, darting eyes and piercing glance. She may have lost her mind, but not her wit; lost her balance, but not her thrust. These traits become independent variables, coming and going. They flash back as images the older one gets. The individuality of the person becomes a shifting kaleidoscope, each of us becoming more unique, instable and complex. It is a conclusion from research that “with increasing age there is increasing variation among individuals.”1

“Late-stage thinking is complex,” concludes another investigator of aging.2 It is complex because it is imaginative—metaphoric, multileveled, suggestive. It harbors a different kind of intelligence than the brightness of youth and the judicious pragmatics of middle age. To borrow a phrase from Robert Bly: “The image is a form of intelligence.”

I can imagine a purpose for the complexity of late-stage thinking: A new and necessary intelligence is forming. Hades, the mythical god of the underworld, where souls go after life and continue to exist as images, was described by Socrates (in Cratylus) as having the finest intelligence. This, Socrates explains, is why souls do not come back. In the company of Hades, their greatest desire is fulfilled: endless intelligent philosophizing in a world wholly composed of images.

If the character of a person is a complexity of images, then to know you I must imagine you, absorb your images. To stay connected with you, I must stay imaginatively interested, not in the process of our relationship or in my feelings for you, but in my imaginings of you. The connection through imagination yields an extraordinary closeness. Where imagination focuses intently on the character of the other—as it does between opposing generals, guard and hostage, analyst and patient—love follows.

The human connection may benefit from exhortations to love one another, but for a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.