The carpenter, to test the master, marked the spot and then pretended he had forgotten. Was this the place? "Was this the place, perhaps?" the carpenter kept asking, pointing to various places on the column.
But so accurate was the tea-master's sense of proportion that it was not until the carpenter reached the identical spot again that its location was approved."
- Zen Koan 1
This article is dedicated to what I have decided to call Vitalistic Imagination (VI)2. This is a mental process which I am going to give special attention, that arose in my mind at the same time as SGP and a number of other effects, all of which seem to be integrated aspects of the same phenomena.
But what does it mean to say that an 'imagination' has arisen in my mind? I mean, this seems like it would be an incredibly odd thing to simply say, to announce to the world that a whole new kind of imagination has been born in you, especially one that, as I will claim, is different from imaginations that concern sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. The key thing to understand is that VI is a unique kind of imaginative faculty and form of perception3 that, from what I gather from my experience, not everyone will possess (given, as far as I can tell, it is intimately connected with SGP and won't exist in those without it), distinct from the imaginative abilities involving the 'typical' Aristotelian sense modalities. It is not a different sense or modality itself, but it allows anyone possessing it to experience entirely different kinds of thoughts that otherwise are not possible without it by extending the mind's abilities to synthesize Ideas4, and I want to make it clear exactly what the significance of this is. Where normally, various kinds of thought involving both concrete imagination (i.e. the ability to imagine an image or scene in your head or hear a tune playing in your mind) and abstract imaginations (i.e. mathematical structures and symbolic relations that are semi-independent of specific modality) are possible, Vitalistic Imagination adds additional possibilities, new categories of thought synthesis, over what is imaginable without it.
At the core of Vitalistic Imagination is a particular kind of comprehension that is achieved through metaphor. I want to make it clear that, even without SGP and VI, a certain, more limited, kind of metaphorical understanding is still possible, which I will term conceptual metaphor5. I want to make this point early because I really need to make sure that people aren't confused but what I'm going to say, which is that certain kinds of metaphor, vital metaphors, can only be properly experienced or understood by a person with VI. This is important, because otherwise people may think that because they do have the capacity to understand metaphorical ideas, as most people likely can (even if they do so only conceptually), that they actually have Vitalistic Imagination. But it was not until I gained SGP/VI that I experienced vital metaphors in full (meaning including both the vitalistic and conceptual aspects). Prior to that point there were certain kinds of experiences that I had not developed the capacity for, and certain aspects of language were hence comparatively lacking in significance.
I naturally understand why someone might be critical of this idea, given that in many ways it might seem to be unjustified. Why should I claim that the experience of metaphor is delineated into distinct types like this in the first place? The core reason, is that along with the ability to understand poetic metaphor in the context of 'high verse' due to the fact that SGP allowed me to understand the structure of such writing, I also found myself experiencing feelings similar in kind to what I felt reading poetry where I didn't before, even in language that didn't have any discernible poetic form like daily speech, thought and literary works in prose, along with poetry 'proper'. 'Stock phrases' became vividly alive within my imagination when I heard or used them, in contrast to before where I had always accepted them unrelentingly as simply additional 'parts of speech' that happen to possess a particular meaning. The metaphoric elements of language that would otherwise be 'hidden in plain sight' became apparent, so that the total multiplicity of the background of a word's meaning would hover around it within my mind whenever I encountered it.
To begin with an initial example take the word 'slacker'. Hearing the word in a modern context, it's generally immediately obvious what it means and its association with laziness should be readily apparent. Likewise, we can hear similarly derived phrases like "slack off" and understand what they mean. However the word 'slack' itself has another, quite different meaning, referring to the lack of tightness of a rope. Think about it a bit and you can understand how the former meaning might have come from the latter. You might imagine a sailor being berated for not pulling his line fast or hard enough, and hence such lack of grit becoming known as 'slackness' in a natural way. I'm not actually claiming that this is the actual etymology of the meaning though (which may be debatable[2]), simply that this kind of thought is likely to naturally arise unprompted in the mind of someone with VI due to the relation of meaning, as they will more readily feel the apparent connection between the meanings of words and phrases in disparate contexts and how they might be metaphorically reunited.
I feel at this point that it is appropriate to introduce Owen Barfield's relevant writing. Barfield is a writer who's philosophical works I happened to stumble upon after developing SGP/VI, and who I found had deeply penetrating insight into the nature of what I felt. Because he speaks of having similar experiences to my own in his own development of metaphoric understanding, and makes similar points about how metaphorical thinking may relate to the meaning of phrases as they are handed down through the generations (a thing which, as he himself points out, many people prior to him have also discussed), I intend to use his work in order to better reinforce my own ideas. Specifically, in his article The Origin of Language [3], Barfield makes this particular point, that many phrases have deadened or dried out metaphorical meanings which were likely what begat their origin and which were what was originally intended for the hearer of them to imagine. For a 'live' example of such an origin that's close to our current cultural understanding, the phrase "the bottom line" used specifically to refer to monetary earnings or otherwise the most crucial element of something that best sums it up, outside of the context of any specific document is essentially metaphoric, but it's generally fairly clear to most people who use it what actual potential context it is referring to. As a further contrasting example, we can see that phrases such as "toe the line" (another allusion with seemingly nautical origin), which may otherwise by misinterpreted by a modern person on hearing it to be the contextually arbitrary phrase "tow the line", may be used in complete ignorance as to its relevance by someone, and yet they will likely not care until this is pointed out to them.
Now, the key thing is, anyone who is only capable of understanding metaphor merely conceptually5 will still be able to grasp the meanings of many these metaphoric aspects of language, especially if this is first pointed out to them. This should be apparent to people reading this who suspect they lack VI and yet can understand the reasoning behind these allusions. They may intelligibly be able to comprehend that a word might have had a given origin (or at least could be argued to have an apparent connection between its multiple senses even if they do not relate to how it originated), and that in using it they're using something which perhaps happened to be a metaphor that came from a source that's generally distant from whatever context they are actually using it in now. 6 But they typically won't feel the full force and effect of the metaphorical origination, nor will they be fully aware of this at the same time as they use it in their new context in a unified way; that won't come naturally at all, nor do I believe it is really possible to the same extent. So both the unprompted, subconscious 'picking out' of (apparent) original metaphorical feelings from existing language in the act of use, and the simultaneous realization of the vitalistic feeling that this knowledge imparts in the act of using it, are things that those lacking VI are locked out of in general, even if they can otherwise be made aware of these etymological aspects of language in conceptual form.
In respect to this particular kind of thought experience though, I must point out again that the actual history of a given phrase is largely incidental. It doesn't matter strictly what the etymology of a word actually is or how it might have arisen as a metaphor as such (though this is often relevant in practice), what matters is this this sense is communicable in some way through a language/culture such that it engages a given person's Vitalistic Imagination and allows them to feel this particular multiplicity of meaning. It is this natural sense of multiplicity of meaning on encountering implicit metaphors, which are felt to be alive and vital in one's mind and which is the essence of the vitalistic metaphor when felt in non-poetic language. Without this, people will naturally use stock phrases without being consciousness of how they might have come about.
---
There may be things you might be wondering about at this point though, particular implicit questions that haven't been adequately addressed so far. For instance, if many of these decayed metaphorical aspects of words are in some sense ordinary (visceral7 or simply otherwise non-vital) metaphors, ones that - in contrast to largely poetic metaphor that is very much dependent on vitalistic imagination - can be imagined chiefly through conceptual thought if your mind is put to it, then why would the perception of them as such still not be as apparent to those without VI? I mean, it wouldn't be unusual for someone who might have used a phrase like "out of left field" for most of their life without thinking about it to realize that it is a baseball metaphor would it? So surely, someone should still be able to randomly recognize the metaphorical nature of a phrase even if they don't appreciate it aesthetically as long at its conceptual integrity remains intelligible.
I don't at all deny that this is possible, but I will claim it is probably much less likely to happen as frequently when lacking VI without prompting and that it won't happen in quite the same way. But in this case can I actually provide reasons beyond personal anecdote for this? To clarify and address this, I will first say that when I lacked VI and encountered a dried metaphor in the form of a stock phrase, I did not have the same impulse in me that would make me consider the meaning behind the phrase, no subconscious mental process that would inadvertently search through alternate meanings while I recalled the phrase in the same fashion. Whereas, in contrast, once I had developed Vitalistic Imagination, the mental processes this introduced created such impulses where they weren't there before, their aesthetic aspect popping up in my mind and causing me to pay attention to these elements of meaning and perceive how they might connect. We humans seem to process language in such a way that we can produce elaborate sentences without understanding why we have composed them as we have, blindly copying phrases wholesale from the contexts in which they are used and unthinking accepting that this is just a way of saying a particular thing. But VI draws my attention to the construction of phrases and makes it natural to dynamically reconstruct their meanings 'on the fly'.
To provide evidence that I'm not the only one this is the case for, we can look back at the Barfield essay and see that in considering the "excessit e vita"/"walked out of life" example, the author/subject recognizes this mental development occurring at some point during his teenage years, noting that he he went from having little reason to care about such metaphorical aspects of language, to considering them, as they are used in poetic language, the greatest form of art by the time he was 20. That Barfield recognizes that this particular metaphoric aspect of ordinary language, which he did not appreciate as a younger boy, was the same in kind as the metaphoric aspect that he came to appreciate in poetry as an adult, is crucial evidence that the phenomena he experienced is likely the same as what I am calling Vitalistic Imagination. My justification for this claim rests on the experience that while I could certainly understand metaphorical ideas in certain respects, there were particular aspects of metaphor that I simply did not experience until awakening the thought complex consisting of SGP and VI together. I will assume that the same was the case for the young Barfield, that he was very much aware that "excessit e vita" was in fact a metaphor for death, even one that other people might consider beautiful, and why this would make sense conceptually. Yet despite this, he would not yet be capable of experiencing or appreciating it as a vital metaphor until years later, when he specifically notes the new sense of beauty he feels for it. So VI is essentially a part of a unified thought complex that provides the metaphorical aspect of language and poetry, and in which SGP provides a corresponding structural component to poetry (and music if Encompassing Voice is also active, given that seems to allow musical form to be processed by the parts of the mind that parse the structure of language). In particular, it is the triggering of new, original thoughts and crafting of deliberately elaborate metaphoric constructions that make use of this faculty of Vitalistic Imagination through carefully structured language which takes advantage of SGP that is the main task of the poet who aims to write 'high poetry'.
---
Now I want to explain how I came to be aware of this particular aspect of what we might now call the SGP/VI complex and why I am so confident of VI's nature being what have I described.
Around a year ago, I was reading through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, an edition containing the introduction by the author written in 1831 [4]. In it, Shelley describes how the novel's conception came about, how she and three other writers came to take part in a competition on Lord Byron's estate to create rival horror stories and how this lead to the idea of Frankenstein's monster being born out of her imagination.
'We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more adept to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole - what to see I forgot -something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place to which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.
Here Mary Shelley expresses this particular idea, though not for the first or last time, that 'mere' prose writing, though adequate for writing novels, setting out plots, describing things and so on, even quite beautifully, was seen by a significant group of of people (including her husband) as being fundamentally limited compared to what was possible with poetry. She is just one example among many who have held the view that even grand and cleverly constructed stories could be lacking in comparison to what could be achieved with heightened language of a purportedly purer form. To them, prose could so express 'platitudes', but not the profound insights and original expressions that poetic language was capable of. There are many other examples of this line of thought, and among those who represent it, undoubtedly along with countless poets themselves, many philosophers.
Take this as an example:
There are many more myriad examples of how people say poetry can overcome the limitations of ordinary language:
http://everything2.com/title/The+difference+between+poetry+and+prose [6]
I bring all this up because, at this point, beginning to read through Frankenstein, I simply had no experience of any of this sort of thing what so ever as far as I knew. The apparently deep and penetrating power of poetry that people spoke of was a mystery to me, and had been so for years. I had dabbled in various ways trying to make sense of it, looking up what blank verse actually was and how it was meant to be structured (something which was never mentioned during my time in school), trying to scan the lines of various poems to attempt to mark out an understanding of their rhythm. But this was frustrating to me as I mostly got little out it, though there were a few poems I found I could somewhat grapple with in this way. Even then, the small pleasure I felt when I did find something I could understand was apparently of little meaning anyway, the few poems in which something aesthetically meaningful in an 'advanced' way was faintly comprehensible to me (specifically, verse poetry with entirely strict adherence to a given metre) were supposedly 'rigid' in form, while I was assured that truly great and creative poets made use of breaks, alterations and flourishes that broke any of my attempts to follow their beat. In the cases of simpler and more popular forms of poetry, the ones which fit into simple rhyming schemes and complete their thoughts on line breaks, including limericks and assorted song lyrics, I found I had little issue comprehending them. But the 'freer' poetry that critics exalted, Shakespeare especially and particularly, irked me; it didn't matter what I did, or how many times I went over the lines I wanted to honestly feel the effect of, no understanding came, no matter how much I looked up dictionary terms, or saw things acted out in films or on the stage. But it wasn't simply that I didn't 'get it' that bothered me, it's that, on top of me finding the material incomprehensible, it also just disgusted and bored me.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
- Hamlet
Reading this, it was difficult to imagine how could anyone find such language to be anything but repulsive.
We can also look at poetry that makes use of rhyme too and come up with examples that are similarly viscerally off-putting.
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
'We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more adept to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole - what to see I forgot -something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place to which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.
Here Mary Shelley expresses this particular idea, though not for the first or last time, that 'mere' prose writing, though adequate for writing novels, setting out plots, describing things and so on, even quite beautifully, was seen by a significant group of of people (including her husband) as being fundamentally limited compared to what was possible with poetry. She is just one example among many who have held the view that even grand and cleverly constructed stories could be lacking in comparison to what could be achieved with heightened language of a purportedly purer form. To them, prose could so express 'platitudes', but not the profound insights and original expressions that poetic language was capable of. There are many other examples of this line of thought, and among those who represent it, undoubtedly along with countless poets themselves, many philosophers.
Take this as an example:
“Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1 [5]
Schopenhauer here, if I interpret him correctly, suggests that the function of poetry extends well beyond being a pretty or clever expression of something in a regular pattern, but that it can allow you to familiarize yourself with the fundamental, underlying Ideas behind reality through direct experience with them.There are many more myriad examples of how people say poetry can overcome the limitations of ordinary language:
http://everything2.com/title/The+difference+between+poetry+and+prose [6]
I bring all this up because, at this point, beginning to read through Frankenstein, I simply had no experience of any of this sort of thing what so ever as far as I knew. The apparently deep and penetrating power of poetry that people spoke of was a mystery to me, and had been so for years. I had dabbled in various ways trying to make sense of it, looking up what blank verse actually was and how it was meant to be structured (something which was never mentioned during my time in school), trying to scan the lines of various poems to attempt to mark out an understanding of their rhythm. But this was frustrating to me as I mostly got little out it, though there were a few poems I found I could somewhat grapple with in this way. Even then, the small pleasure I felt when I did find something I could understand was apparently of little meaning anyway, the few poems in which something aesthetically meaningful in an 'advanced' way was faintly comprehensible to me (specifically, verse poetry with entirely strict adherence to a given metre) were supposedly 'rigid' in form, while I was assured that truly great and creative poets made use of breaks, alterations and flourishes that broke any of my attempts to follow their beat. In the cases of simpler and more popular forms of poetry, the ones which fit into simple rhyming schemes and complete their thoughts on line breaks, including limericks and assorted song lyrics, I found I had little issue comprehending them. But the 'freer' poetry that critics exalted, Shakespeare especially and particularly, irked me; it didn't matter what I did, or how many times I went over the lines I wanted to honestly feel the effect of, no understanding came, no matter how much I looked up dictionary terms, or saw things acted out in films or on the stage. But it wasn't simply that I didn't 'get it' that bothered me, it's that, on top of me finding the material incomprehensible, it also just disgusted and bored me.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
- Hamlet
Reading this, it was difficult to imagine how could anyone find such language to be anything but repulsive.
We can also look at poetry that makes use of rhyme too and come up with examples that are similarly viscerally off-putting.
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
-T.S. Eliot, Burn Norton Quartet II
[7]
[7]
With the two instances above, I'd expect the average person without VI is unlikely to get much pleasure out of reading either. For such a person, it will not at all be clear, even in context, why anyone would want to read the language employed in these works, and save for the person developing VI and SGP for themselves this will remain a mystery to their experience. An unfortunate effect of this it that it will likely leave them with a false impression of the nature of this kind of art. They will generally see this kind of poetic language as being dull, depressing and overly serious, something that you would only subject yourself to because, like eating bitter vegetables, they are "good for you" somehow but otherwise offer little positive experience directly, even if this is not actually characteristic of the full experience of the works as intended by their authors.
But naturally as you might guess there is a solution to all this. One of the greatest aspects of gaining VI, with regards to the experience of art, is that it not only makes certain aspects of language pleasurable where they weren't before, but it also makes particular other aspects, which can otherwise be actively disturbing, disgusting and simply unpleasant in general, loose these qualities. It's not quite like these aspects disappear outright, but rather, the vitality of meaning that arises acts like a bright light and outshines the negativity of experience that might otherwise occur, turning art that would be experienced as something depressing and horrid into a thing of beauty. The effective experience of language, metaphor and meaning becomes vivid in a way it was not before. Experiencing the vital is in many ways comparable to having a lamplight shone onto language that at last reveals its full pallet of colors and how they can mix together to form new ones dynamically.
The vital is hence an abstract building up of meaning that is experienced vividly and with strong, positive emotion despite begin abstract in nature. It is not experienced directly as sight, or sound, or touch or as any kind of related sense or how each of the senses are felt when they directly affect a person, despite being able to metaphorically 'borrow' other peripheral feelings that might relate to phenomena experienced through these senses in order to build up metaphor. Reading a word relating to light may actual give the impression the word mentally radiates a kind of brightness if it tickles the vitalistic imagination, even if it appears no more luminous in the visual field. In contrast, the negative feelings that can otherwise stem from experiencing certain passages and the concrete things they portray in the absence of this vitality are often experienced in a particularly more grounded, visceral way, as being directly related to the feelings of a given sense experience in ways that feel like a more fundamentally gut based reaction. It is natural to be disgusted in being confronted with the impression of feeling flesh melting, being torn and disturbed, and contrasted with rotten vegetation, at least before ascending to a different level of imaginatory power.
---
It was while I was nearing the very end of reading Frankenstein, during the last couple of chapters specifically, that the activation of SGP/VI actually occurred. It is because of this particular case, in which there is a clear contrast between how I experienced the language in it before and immediately after the activation, that I have a ready example to illustrate this conceptual framework. As I mentioned before, vital impressions and feelings can come from language that isn't restricted to any particular form. So there is a sense in which any kind of language can potentially be said to be poetic in this specific way, to the extent that it makes use of these vital impressions, and this naturally includes literary works of all kinds, including novels like Frankenstein which make use of flowery descriptive language.
In re-reading the 1931 preface after attaining SGP/VI I found a clear difference in my own apprehension compared to my first reading. It was not what I felt to be the usual effect of going back over something you've read before to find you understand it better, like in the normal case where your mind has simply had more time to grasp the whole of it and hence now pay better attention to more details. Instead, I clearly felt a difference in the kinds of feelings that arose and were available to me. Not only did I understand what the author was talking about in explicitly mentioning poetic feelings, speaking of how Lord Byron's writing "clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth", as I had experienced this in actual works of poetry by then, but I also felt similarly poetic feelings rise from parts of Mary Shelley's prose itself where I couldn't before. The following passage is where the difference caused by the perception of new vitality within it was particularly noticeable:
"I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyrie of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then - but in a most commonplace style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true companions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."
-Frankenstein 1831 Intro: Paragraph 3 Excerpt
You see, when reading descriptive text in a novel, what would typically happen was that, in order for me to properly immerse myself in it, I would visualize a given scene as best as I could in my "mind's eye", giving concrete form to it in my visual imagination.9 This was the means by which I felt and experienced scenes as described in novels which I chiefly relied upon to immerse myself in them. But now, reading over the same passages, I find that, while I can still imagine scenes in the same old way, I now have the option of imagining passages in terms of the vitalistic imagination, feeling out the descriptions of the scenery in a way that is abstracted from direct imagery. This is not strictly better in every way, but often it seems clear to me now that a given author, in writing such descriptive prose, will tailor descriptions to their own imaginative ability, and if they are immersed in vitalistic sensibilities they are likely to write for an audience who possesses this imagination and can take advantage of the possibilities this offers.
There are a couple of notable advantages of realizing textual descriptions in this way. One is that, given that such imagination deals directly with Ideas and their relations, you are freed from having to build up a specific concrete visualization at any given point, which may have to be 'rebuilt' if more descriptive information is given that subsequently changes the way you imagine something. With vitalistic imagination, Ideas more or less directly interact and combine with each other and so your conception and impression of the whole can be updated as you read through a description that is written with such imaginatory capacity in mind. It isn't always difficult to 'rebuild' part of a visual impression, especially if a description simply talks about different objects in turn or progressively adds details to small parts of something, but sometimes a description will be particularly hazy about details that would enable the buildup of a specific visual image or will recast significant parts of it seemingly arbitrarily. It is in these instances that it is often preferable that VI is used instead.
The second is something that lies specifically in this haziness. Part of the nature of VI is that it allows statements to be 'specifically ambiguous' in complex and elaborate ways, to ambiguously cover a certain area of possibilities, in a highly deliberate fashion. The use of metaphor is frequently a tool used in order to do this, to redirect the imagination's specific conception of an idea so that parts of it are drawn out or retracted, or split up or smoothly integrated with other aspects depending on how parts of a given idea are made to relate to a thing it is being compared to and unified with through the metaphor. Like with abstract, conceptual thinking, this kind of thing is still possible when experiencing language in a way that doesn't make use of VI, but the ease through which the specific scope of the various aspects of ideas can dynamically and fluidly form in a given mind is distinctly enhanced by VI. To properly discuss this topic in the appropriate detail that it deserves would require a broad survey of many philosophers of language and linguistics that I do not want to burden this article with, so I will leave an in depth discussion of this aspect for further writing and get back to my example.
Paragraph 3, quoted in part above, has details that illustrate these aspects. First there is how the terms blank and dreary are actually used in context. They in some sense describe the scene of her childhood home situated next to the River Tay, but as soon as that description is granted, the sentence after immediately modifies the initial impression of its sense. Then the words blank and dreary become qualified as aspects of the author's present retrospection of the reality of the past, allowing her adult judgement of the scene and her subjective recollection of her past experiences to become separate approaches to memories from that time. Then the vital takes off, her home becomes an eyrie of freedom, and pleasant region in her recollection, a nest where aspects of her imagination are born to speak and fly with her in metaphor. On the whole, it is notable how sparse of actual concrete, visceral description the text is. Aside from knowing of the trees of the grounds and the bleak sides of the contrastingly woodless mountains, all that we find out about about her old residence is that it is on the aforementioned blank and dreary river and not so picturesque. Any specific picture you might build up of it from this highly abstracted description alone is going to consist largely of details that you yourself have furnished it with. But in being able to vividly experience the whole scene through its metaphorical aspects, of imaginative freedom soaring, and illuminating the dreary and visceral with its vitality, this ceases to be a negative. It is, as I have stressed before, not impossible to apprehend these metaphorical aspects in a merely conceptual way even if you lack VI, you may understand perfectly well in principal why a writer's home is being compared to a bird's nest, but even then I doubt that on reading through this section of prose that you will experience the effect of it as I do now, of feeling the living qualities of her imaginary creatures along with their context within the metaphorical 'image' without needing to impose (on them) an overly specific realization of them in another imagination.
--- [extended version]
You may now be wondering something. While I may have undergone what appears to be a radical transformation (or so I claim), you may question to what extent this phenomena might actually occur in other people as such. Maybe this seeming rapidness of transformation is comparably rare, or possibly even unique to me. However, the capacity to comprehend vital metaphor is something I have, at this point, good reason to believe is shared my many others.
Though I said I would not burden this with an extended discussion of linguistic philosophy, it would feel wrong at this point to not amend this article with a mention of Josef Stern's paper, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A METAPHOR, OR THE METAPHYSICS OF METAPHOR [9]. In it he aims to describe a form of metaphor which he holds deserves particular attention as a phenomena, which he also independently (though perhaps not coincidentally) terms 'vital metaphor', and which I have little doubt is the same as that which is described here. If it is the case that our ideas do describe the same thing, and Stern's ideas are held by others to accurately point out something they also feel to be the case for them, this would suggest that this particular, peculiar form of imagination is widely possessed by many. On the whole, the third volume of the Baltic International Yearbook contains exceptionally rich discussion on on what it means to comprehend metaphor in this vibrantly poetic fashion, and I also want to single out Elisabeth Camp's discussions of metaphorically 'seeing-as'. I feel it would be unsurprising then, if it turns out that this faculty is a key aspect of the mind that poets possess to a high degree, but which may be absent in others. In keeping to my promise though I've left in depth discussion of this to a separate article, which I will update this one with when it is published.
All in all, I hope that all those reading this, whether poetry is alive or dormant in them, are illuminated to the nature of other minds.
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1 As you may have noticed, I have stated off this article with a quotation of a zen koan [1]. You might have suspected that I intended to use it to illustrate an aspect of metaphor (perhaps its potential to realize preciseness), or conversely that I simply wanted to make a trendy, yet otherwise irrelevant reference to Zen Buddhism for the sake of beginning with something deep sounding, but there is actually a deliberate and wholly other reason for this being here. You see, there are certain aspects of Zen philosophy that, as far as I can tell from my experience, may be impossible to comprehend without Vitalistic Imagination. To begin to properly apprehend koans and the essential effect I feel they should have on your mind, the effect that I feel whenever I comprehend one, VI seems to be needed, as I never felt these effects before acquiring it. When I read through a koan now, a common, characteristic experience occurs that is similar between each of the koans that affect me. What this feels like is in a way similar in a way to the reading of a poem or poetic language, but instead of building up a vital, conceptual4 Idea through this faculty, the vitalistic imagination is essentially arrested, a scenario is presented that seems to clear the metaphorical imagination once the koan is properly realized in my mind, in a way dismissing its powers and need to grasp onto any particular thing. I feel as if I encounter something that triggers an impulse towards the vitally imaginative process, yet the particular experience imparted by the koan is beyond it (and all other imaginations) and cannot be grasped directly by it. Something clicks, and a feeling of emptiness and clarity washes over and 'occupies' my mind. But when I possessed only 'ordinary' imagination, any experience of this effect will not occur, there was only instead the feeling that I was reading something strange that yet had no clear effect that I could actually understand (beyond the conceptual idea that koan are supposed to "clear your mind" and ready it for progress toward enlightenment, which I could not yet experience), the effect that koans seemed to have in common did not become apparent until VI was activated. Once VI is active though, it specifically will be felt to be cleared of definite content, through other forms of imagination will still be comprehending the koan's scenario. So in a sense koans do seem to help to clear your mind of unnecessary grasping for conceptual understanding through metaphor and to me this seems to be a significant aspect of their purpose.
2 This use of the term 'vitalistic' in no way implies the philosophical position of vitalism. Vitalism is a position that I am distinctly opposed to, as I hold that it is most likely that life and consciousness are things that necessarily arise in accordance with physical structure, regardless of the substrate that underlies that structure. This is naturally opposed to the idea that specific, 'special' substances are what underlie life, a position that we have less and less reason to believe as science provides more knowledge of how brains are structured.
I also feel the need to need to explain a certain issue here. Why not simply call VI "Poetic Imagination" (or even "Aesthetic Imagination" as Barfield seemingly does), given that it relates directly to understanding things is a particularly poetic way? Firstly, not all poetry actually uses it. There are even lines of Shakespere that, from my memory of when I lacked this faculty, I was more or less completely able to comprehend and of which my impressions have not changed since.
But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill
1 As you may have noticed, I have stated off this article with a quotation of a zen koan [1]. You might have suspected that I intended to use it to illustrate an aspect of metaphor (perhaps its potential to realize preciseness), or conversely that I simply wanted to make a trendy, yet otherwise irrelevant reference to Zen Buddhism for the sake of beginning with something deep sounding, but there is actually a deliberate and wholly other reason for this being here. You see, there are certain aspects of Zen philosophy that, as far as I can tell from my experience, may be impossible to comprehend without Vitalistic Imagination. To begin to properly apprehend koans and the essential effect I feel they should have on your mind, the effect that I feel whenever I comprehend one, VI seems to be needed, as I never felt these effects before acquiring it. When I read through a koan now, a common, characteristic experience occurs that is similar between each of the koans that affect me. What this feels like is in a way similar in a way to the reading of a poem or poetic language, but instead of building up a vital, conceptual4 Idea through this faculty, the vitalistic imagination is essentially arrested, a scenario is presented that seems to clear the metaphorical imagination once the koan is properly realized in my mind, in a way dismissing its powers and need to grasp onto any particular thing. I feel as if I encounter something that triggers an impulse towards the vitally imaginative process, yet the particular experience imparted by the koan is beyond it (and all other imaginations) and cannot be grasped directly by it. Something clicks, and a feeling of emptiness and clarity washes over and 'occupies' my mind. But when I possessed only 'ordinary' imagination, any experience of this effect will not occur, there was only instead the feeling that I was reading something strange that yet had no clear effect that I could actually understand (beyond the conceptual idea that koan are supposed to "clear your mind" and ready it for progress toward enlightenment, which I could not yet experience), the effect that koans seemed to have in common did not become apparent until VI was activated. Once VI is active though, it specifically will be felt to be cleared of definite content, through other forms of imagination will still be comprehending the koan's scenario. So in a sense koans do seem to help to clear your mind of unnecessary grasping for conceptual understanding through metaphor and to me this seems to be a significant aspect of their purpose.
2 This use of the term 'vitalistic' in no way implies the philosophical position of vitalism. Vitalism is a position that I am distinctly opposed to, as I hold that it is most likely that life and consciousness are things that necessarily arise in accordance with physical structure, regardless of the substrate that underlies that structure. This is naturally opposed to the idea that specific, 'special' substances are what underlie life, a position that we have less and less reason to believe as science provides more knowledge of how brains are structured.
I also feel the need to need to explain a certain issue here. Why not simply call VI "Poetic Imagination" (or even "Aesthetic Imagination" as Barfield seemingly does), given that it relates directly to understanding things is a particularly poetic way? Firstly, not all poetry actually uses it. There are even lines of Shakespere that, from my memory of when I lacked this faculty, I was more or less completely able to comprehend and of which my impressions have not changed since.
But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill
These lines of Hamlet, to my mind, contain no vital aspect of any significance. Specifically, the enjoyment of them is not diminished by lacking VI, nor is it enhanced by possessing it. This is in stark contrast to the dialog of the rest of the play.
So, poetic imagination as we might call it in full, if we are willing to try to identify all the aspects of the mind related to the apprehension of poetry, extends beyond what is made possible through vital imagination. It may not be possible at this point to meaningfully distinguish the mental processes that give rise to the experience of poetry at large from most or all of the rest of the mind in the same way that I propose that vitalistic thought processes seemingly can be, so I have chosen deliberately to not simply use the word 'poetic' (or aesthetic) where I believe something more specific is needed.
So, poetic imagination as we might call it in full, if we are willing to try to identify all the aspects of the mind related to the apprehension of poetry, extends beyond what is made possible through vital imagination. It may not be possible at this point to meaningfully distinguish the mental processes that give rise to the experience of poetry at large from most or all of the rest of the mind in the same way that I propose that vitalistic thought processes seemingly can be, so I have chosen deliberately to not simply use the word 'poetic' (or aesthetic) where I believe something more specific is needed.
3 The specific delineation between an 'imaginative' faculty and a 'perceptual' faculty is not something that seems to have a hard answer. So I want us look at it like this. Certain specific modalities, like sight, can be activated by external perception caused by signals from the eye, which will cause a vivid impression of color forms. Conversely, for people without visual aphantasia at least, it is also possible for the human mind to create an internal impression of color and form that is similar in quality (to that received through the corresponding sense) but which is felt to be less real. So here, we have a sensory faculty and a corresponding imaginative faculty. I will take this to be the model of a 'typical' Aristotelian sense and the associated modality it takes part in. In contrast, there also exist one-sided, internal modalities that seemingly don't have a directly corresponding sense organ, instead they only have the single faculty. We can use the spatial feeling to illustrate this. In seeing, hearing or touching objects, we might build up a sense of space, space within which we may move around and which may also contain obstacles, walls and other things that take up space. We don't always feel this arising directly from another sense, the knowledge that a wall is on a certain place relative to another can persist within this imaginative faculty of space, even if we can't directly see it [9]. Solids, as far as we have reason to believe they do through our experience, posses volume10 and we will feel, even if we only see an object's surface, that this volume persists. So, in the case of this particular modality, can we really say that there are two aspects of it, both a vividly experienced perception and an imagination, or is there not much of a distinction at all? I will call such a one sided modality a pseudo-modality. In this way you could argue in a sense that vitalistic imagination could be considered its own pseudo-modality - depending on what you are willing to call a modality - though one that more strongly relates to other modalities and the synthesis of many of their aspects, as opposed to being a 'ground' of uniquely and highly distinct feeling qualia (which the spatial pseudo-modality seems to resemble more). And I believe that this is exactly what many aestheticians intended when deigning the term 'taste' to refer to a sensitivity to certain qualities seemingly caused by a kind of 'organ of internal sensation' as Hume did. [10] But if you were to do so and grant it this status, you might have to admit that other things that are traditionally not labeled modalities, things like feelings of tension and anticipation, might gain the status of a pseudo-modality due to them being essentially 'hallucinated' in association with events received through other modalities. So for the moment at the very least I will continue to call Vitalistic Imagination an imaginative faculty, in accordance with other philosophical conceptions of imagination (like those of Kant and Wittgenstein[11]). That I label Encompassing Voice a perception in contrast is meaningful, but still somewhat arbitrary.
4 I have chosen to capitalize the word Idea, in order to specifically refer to the specific 'objects' of vitalistic thought that consist of a single metaphor constructed out of various aspects of meanings and dynamically integrated through the vitalistic imagination into a unified thought. As I intend to show in later articles, the ultimate goal of many poems is to craft such Ideas.
5 I use the term conceptual as I do here not to imply that vitalistic experiences are non-conceptual or not based around the building up of concepts, but to imply that without VI, the forms in which the imagination can conceive of things are limited in a particular way, to a more merely conceptual experience, one that is typically limited to either a more analytical understanding of concepts (which is more devoid of feeling) and/or a more visceral one (which will have feeling, but these feelings will be heavily related to those of immediate sense impressions conjured through imagining ideas via particular sensual modalities). Conceptual understanding underlies vitalistic understanding, but in the absence of the vitalistic there will remain the merely conceptual. So, essentially, vitalistic experience is a non-sensual imagination, yet it is able to synthesize vivid feelings in its abstractness. Yet still, the simple fact of being non-sensual and vividly felt isn't enough to uniquely mark out VI as what it is, as emotional experiences in general have these qualities; it is in the composition of multi-layered metaphor into particular kinds of unified, vitalistic and abstract-yet-vividly-felt Ideas that VI is uniquely distinguished.
6 The whole issue of how these apparently poetic metaphorical aspects of language might have arisen and how a given culture might have developed in order to produce them as products of language experienced in contemporary modernity is a topic that Barfield goes into much greater detail in his book, Poetic Diction. [12] There, he attempts to make sense of how it might have been possible for the original people and cultural forces that created various words and phrases to have produced them such that future peoples could perceive them in poetic terms, even if they were not necessarily intentionally created to be poetic. This allows for the possibility that the coiners of a term may not have been consciously poetic or deliberately crafting a vitalistic metaphor, but may have just been following a thought process natural to their culture, and yet produced something with such elements perceptible to us anyway.
7 Visceral is used here in the specific sense it is used in (5) above, in relating to sensory experiences, along with (not-strictly sensual) feelings that are produced by immediate sense impression or suggestions of such (imagined) feelings that could have been produced through those sense impressions. Imagine being savagely clawed by a tiger. Now, consider, in addition to the sensory aspects of the imagined 'experience', the aspects of your impressions that are not the image of the tiger, nor the sound of its roar, nor a direct imagining of the force or pain of being clawed in a particular part of you body; these 'gut feelings' of viciousness, unpleasantness and overwhelmment of strength. All these associated feelings are still the visceral as I mean it, unless the impressions are transformed and become something vitalistic through metaphor. I do need to note though that despite the examples I happen to have used in this article, visceral feelings can be pleasurable sensations too, so it is not always negative, but these pleasures will still be different from the vitalisic.
8 I am not claiming that I have solved the apparent paradox of how people might find enjoyment in otherwise negative experiences in general, but rather only want to explain how specific instances of this can be in part explained by the possession of Vitalistic Imagination. I do not intend this to be a general explanation of the issue discussed in such essays as David Hume's "Of Tragedy" [12], i.e. I'm not claiming that VI is necessary for all aesthetic overcoming of visceral negative feeling.
9 Conversely to this, it may well be the case that a person with visual aphantasia, and hence no internal visual imagination or conscious recollection of visual memories, may be unable to gain pleasure from passages written for people who are assumed to have visual imagination. [14] But even so developing VI may allow them to experience some of these passages quite vividly where otherwise someone without either internal imagination would be left understimulated. In each case, the possession of a given imagination seems to open up the reader to particular kinds of experiences enabled by writing relevant to that respective imagination.
10 We could very well imagine objects to be mere shells consisting of their currently visible and tangible surfaces, as they might be presented in the polygons of a video game of some sort. Or we could try to go even further, attempting to feel a general ambiguity as to the specifics of the solid volumes of things and forms, instead of the instinctive certainty that we typically feel we must know in general what the real constitution of a given object's form should be. But this will likely feel like an unnatural exercise to most, as it goes against our need to grasp things as they appear to us as particular objects embodied in a particular way in space.
[1] http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html
[2] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slack
[3] http://www.owenbarfield.org/owen-barfield-and-the-origin-of-language/
[4] https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro
[5] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=kF12CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT176&source=bl&ots=4IXN3y6nig&sig=5qkGJ8akOyK3Tu5HLTB1p7LH7Cs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFnp3opvHVAhWCe7wKHTaZBccQ6AEIMDAC#v=onepage&q&f=false
[6] http://everything2.com/title/The+difference+between+poetry+and+prose
[7] http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html
[8] Josef Stern, The Life and Death of a Metaphor, The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, August 2008
[9] http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-prize-for-decoding-brain-s-sense-of-place-1.16093
[10] http://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html
[11] http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdfG6mSAFS1zv.pdf
[12] http://www.owenbarfield.org/books/poetic.php
[13] http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/hume.tragedy
[14] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504
