Thursday, February 21, 2008

Sympathetic Imagination

Sympathetic Imagination is a quality that cannot be obtained without the “annihilation of the self”[i]; to penetrate an object and become the object suggests the termination of your will, dreams, and needs. So is the sympathetic imagination a quality exhibited by the caring, or the understanding? That is, are some people born with imaginations that lend themselves to this metaphysical understanding, or does this sensitivity come from knowing everything about the object or person? Is it something that can be obtained through observation, or can it be studied? Probably both. I think we can ask ourselves what our dog wants. Once we understand his faces and mannerisms, we can come to memorize when they occur. When these two things become automatic, like a simple multiplication fact, and a rhythmic part of our daily routine, our sympathetic imagination for our pets wants is unconscious. It is a sort of love, like when you stare at someone’s eyes and know they want to be kissed. In that "extraordinary affinity, or sympathy [no] flavour of grossness" in life remains; "to share each other's emotions, fancies, and dreams" is something "super-sensitive, something absurd" – imaginary and obtainable.[^IV] But how is this applicable to nature? “Ah, the heir, to his selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn”[ii]. Man is the heir here, and Hopkins suggests that our self-centeredness, our giant cities, sports cars, and monuments are clouding a special “vision” we should have with the universe. After all, mystical or not, we are the residue of an intelligent universe; human beings and our consciousness are a specialty in this vast space. But society is walking away from the “connection” – the sympathy, understanding, linkage to the world that spawned us. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”[iii]. Was Jesus’ sympathetic imagination so powerful he was constantly overwhelmed by a total understanding of the people and world around him? What of Gandhi or Buddha? Maybe the sympathetic imagination begins when we realize that we are human for no particular reason. Why wasn’t I simply born a German Sheppard? If God has a plan for all live on earth, you should be thankful you weren’t one of dozen blossoms on the unnoticed shrub against the Victorian-inspired building. And if you have no trust in God, then it is purely luck and coincidence that the universe bore you human. Either way, while you stop to smell the roses, or observe the birds, or laugh at gay bounce of an energetic French poodle, you must force yourself to imagine the brevity of life, and the constriction of its dynamic, the confines that your human brain does not possess. If you can imagine yourself flying, imagine yourself not being able to move. If you can imagine yourself not being able to move, imagine yourself not being able to speak. And then imagine yourself speaking to everyone at once, in whispers carried by the wind. Now, imagine trying to do all your living in a week, and you have sympathetically lived as a flower. And it was a life, short and sweet, filled with growth, maturation, consumption, and procreation.

[i] Carlyle, pg. 607
[ii] Hopkins, Tragic Vision, http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/Hopkins's%20Tragic%20Vision.html
[iii] Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

[iv] Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, pg. 243/253