It may be that living in an imaginative state is the same as living in a primitive state, one ruled by the whims of obscure gods, gusted with unassailable pleasures and torn open by corpuscular terrors, one right in the middle of the blast furnace of the sacred. But that depends upon a present overwhelming awareness of the unknowable and fabricating the knowable allows for control, survival, progress. We know now where the gazelle lie down so we can sneak up upon them. We know what this seed contains and where these waters lead and the opposite-smell of fire is snow-coming. I am not saying that the triumphs of the rational mind, of the creation of cause-and-effect relation isn’t fundamentally imaginative, nor that the glories of technology aren’t imaginative, but much of that triumph has led to the notion of the imaginary as being something that is false, discarded with maturity because it produces no material result. So after years of condemning and destroying the forest, of our war on twilight and dawn and war on night, we wonder why we’re waking up in a desert. That’s why in art the presence of the imagination has become so disruptive and primitive, engaged often in first-mindedness. The rational intellect, so evolved and rewarded with stunning successes, with footprints on the moon and cures for TB, is now fitting too snugly over our minds like a too-small helmet, and it requires antlers to get through it. Our explanations are so powerful we’re suffering from the anemia of having replaced the world with explanations of the world. We need mystery in our lives, it is the presence of love: we need the beauty of the splash. We’re not just turkey necks used for crab bait, are we? We’re not math either. The imagination is the vital extra, the extravagance of the flower’s throat as well as the poverty of the weathered barn door. It is counterproductive, insurgent, undemocratic, and unknowable, but a true comfort. 

  ........--Dean Young



[via BOMB]