Take A Word Like Puff

A young blonde woman drives a white Mustang down a desert highway. Can you picture that? Yes? There’s a word for that ability: imagination. You deserve a pat on the back. Imagining things is a source of power. It can also get a little dangerous. Imagine a dragon. Easy, yes? Sure it is. But let’s go further. Let’s say the dragon is you. You’re the dragon. You’ve got scales. You’ve got wings. You’ve got sharp teeth. You can breathe fire. What’s that like? How does it feel? It feels exhilarating. But also, when the initial feeling wears off, a little disappointing. And foolish. Because it’s not real. And we live in a culture that values pragmatism above all things else. Because pragmatism – the practical, the useful, the purposeful, the commonsensical – is a direct route to money. Which is ironic. Because money is a product of the imagination. Think about it. How is it possible that those numbers in your bank account can so easily be converted to things you want: a house, a car, fine clothes, fine food, jewelry and wine, a big swimming pool, drugs, thrills, exclusivity. Money is a symbol. Like language. Like words. Like sounds that carry meaning, significance, geography, adventure. Names, news, moods.

Imagination feeds on uncertainty. It’s the product of inquiry and speculation. Wonder. This is why dictatorial regimes are uncomfortable with imaginative energies and do everything they can to suppress it. Maintaining power requires ignorance and compliance. If a power can undermine or deaden the imagination the population is easy to propagandize and marshal its compliance to achieve greater levels of power. The one thing that the powerful want is more power. Imagination undermines power. Imagination must be suppressed. But it won’t. Can’t. Cannot be suppressed. It fires up out of embers thought dead. That glimmer in the ash is a word on the verge of fire. Whose flames dance walls of stone in the skull of a mountain. Where the images flicker in prologue to the stealth of an ocelot. And the ground is splayed with a ring of bone.

Money is also a dominant force and can be used to control the zeitgeist, the popular sentiments of a population, and ascribe vertiginous amounts of value to one artist or set of artists and exclude others. Corporate collections can include some tremendously great art which, at one time, was subversive and edgy, but once it was anointed great art by the financial sector its subversive tendencies became irrelevant and tame. It went from being an art of power and imagination to being an auctionable item at Sotheby’s. This is how an oil painting becomes the equivalent of an oil derrick. Art is a celebration of wildness. Finance is a calibration of value.

Poetry, unlike music and visual art, is impossible to convert to capital and financial investment. This is because, as Hegel pointed out, “poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.” It also requires its audience – what little audience it is able to convene – to participate in its production. We all know what creative writing is, but how many people talk about creative reading?

Readers, at least in the United States, have been rendered extinct by electronic media. Anyone who has gone for a walk recently has noticed the alarming number of zombies walking while holding and staring fixedly at an electronic gadget in their hands. “The ultimate famine,” wrote Diane Di Prima, “is the starvation / of the imagination // it is death to be sure, but the undead / seek to inhabit someone else’s world.”

Get out there. Engage. Cries the imagination.

Take a word like ‘puff’ and let the imagination run with it. That which puffs has proof of puffing in the pudding of the puff. Language and imagination are made for each other. No language without imagination. No imagination without language.

Is that true? Does imagination need language to exist? Who can say? It takes a few words to launch this phenomenon. It helps to be extracurricular. The rock is a rock with or without words. When we say ‘passage’ do we mean a way of exit or entrance, a road, path, channel or course by which something passes, or do we mean a corridor or lobby giving access to the different rooms or parts of a building? Do we mean the action or process of passing from one place, condition, or stage to another, or do we mean the continuous movement or flow of a river, say the Ohio? Do we mean something that happens or is done or do we mean a fog horn blowing as we find passage aboard the Boaty McBoatface? I think I mean a brief passage in the air through an aria.

It's all about context. From Latin contextus, a joining together. Originally, past participle of contexere, “to weave together.” This could be linen. This could be lace. This could be imagining combinations and this could be the voices of singers mingling together. This could be linsey-woolsey. This could be fuzzy wuzzy. This could be what you want it to be. What do you want it to be? You can say it and have it if you say it. But you’ve got to say it. Say it. Before it says you.

But that’s ok, too. Ok to let it out. Ok to be a channel for mysterious and invisible energies. Open the mouth. Make words. Make words create something. Convert to matter an idea with breath. With the assistance of air. What is it? What have you got there? Is that a twinkle in your eye, or the star of Bethlehem? Here comes a train. It’s a train of the imagination. It runs on coal. But the coal must be imagined. The train must be imagined. Here comes the train. Here comes the imagination flying to heaven to get the latest news. And roll and roll and roll and roll.