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Imagination and Fancy 12/8/2014 3:45:03 PM
When I was a youngster, I used to watch a TV show that featured a character named Mr. I. Magination. The point was to get kids who watched it to use their inventive powers both for pleasure and problem solving.
Some of us forget from time to time that imagination is a vital quality throughout our lives. The use of imagination leads grown-ups to study nature, build skyscrapers, create cities, explore outer space, and so on. Imagination is a big factor, of course, in every artistic endeavor.
I suspect there are many definitions of imagination, especially in books that help their readers develop creativity. I find paragraphs by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on imagination in his Biographia Literaria to have enduring value, for example:
The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
I found an insightful essay on a website called "The Literature Network", in which Sana Sahid wrote that all people have a share of the primary imagination. The secondary imagination, more specialized, "reunites subject and object, the world of self and the world of nature to shape into one...to convey a new sense". Coleridge coined the word "esemplastic", which a Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines as "shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole." or, as Sana Sahid's essay puts it: "taking images and feelings from a number of realms of human endeavor and thought, bringing them all together." In another place Coleridge says that the secondary imagination works with "hidden ideas" and "hidden meanings."
And then there is fancy, which Coleridge hints is a lesser faculty:
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Fancy comes into play in actions that are "passive," "mechanical", and "imitative".
Sana Sahid points out that a poet (it must be proper to say anyone engaged in creative work of a high order) uses both imagination and fancy and seeks a balance between both faculties, but the imagination is the only faculty that contributes to the the creative process.
So what do we do if we're involved in a creative work and imagination appears to shut down. Here are some suggestions.
1.Take a step back.
2.Work at something else for a while.
3.Spend time with a masterwork in a form other than the one you're working on.
4.Sleep can help revive confidence and creative power.
5.When ideas come, put them down right away, even in a helter-skelter fashion. Then revise.
A very modest example. Is the man in these lines I wrote some time ago without conscious reference to Coleridge using Imagination, Fancy, or both?
Dusk. A street corner.
A juggler's spinning balls
Draw a dozen onlookers
Who smile when they see
How intently he concentrates.
The light that shines from him
Also shines in everyone.
