The RiGiD Imagination

Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture, page 36:  "The imagination , then, is the constructive power of the mind, the power of building unities out of units.  In literature the unity is the mythos or narrative; the units are metaphors, that is, images connected primarily with each other rather than separately with the outer world. 'Reality,' for Stevens," (Wallace) "is whatever the imagination works with that is not itself.  Left to itself, the imagination can achieve only a facile pseudo-conquest of its own formulas, meeting no resistance from reality. The long standing association between the words imagination and fancy may suggest that the imaginative , by itself, tends to be fantastic or fanciful.  But actually, what the imagination, left to itself, produces is the rigidly conventionalized."

This is the ocean of stories.  Our rigid imaginations taking us back to the same story, the same boring old plot.  (It makes me feel a little bad for Derek Walcott, the bold quote that is.)

What is most interesting here, I find, is the fact that we must draw on real world experience to give our imagination the set of tools it needs to engage in a fanciful fancy.  And here's the thing-- it's easy to retell the truth.  So creating a story from what would seem like nothing, though it is the embedded truth from reality, is actually a process that engages a mind further in a fancy.  To not tell stories that aren't true would mean never engaging in a day dream again, or never being put in a day dream from a story again.  This is the reason I tell and listen to stories that are untrue because I enter a state of mind that is peaceful and my own that can be found nowhere else but in stories.  Stories are a fanciful meditation that draw me away from the mundane.  It seems simple and short, this post but I feel it makes a point, at least for why I choose to be a part of unreal stories.  (and in the best ones you get to notice the reality the author pulled from their life to fancy)