The despair and lassitude was general — the dog was curled up in the dog woman’s footrest, completely still; the footballer removed his cap to bang his forehead repeatedly on the back of the seat in front of him — but anything involving the huge man was dramatic. If he had appeared cussed at the start of the trip, by now he was impossible. He had been telling everyone around him that the situation was ‘too much’ and he had ‘had enough’. This would have crossed the minds of many people on the flight. If the world had somehow disappeared, while they were eternal, suicide was a nice thought to have in the circumstances.
It was nearly morning when the huge man stabbed himself in the chest with a cutlery knife and didn’t make an entirely triumphant job of it: the knife needed to go several more inches into the body. Joining the crowd around the man, Daniel saw him sitting there with his mouth open and the erect blade sticking out of him. It would take some time, but he would bleed to death. At that moment the huge man was attempting to get to his feet and — even in his condition — began to stagger towards the back of the plane, declaring, ‘I’m getting out of here.’
‘Good luck!’ someone shouted. ‘Shut the door behind you!’
‘Hold the door!’ yelled someone else. ‘I’m coming too!’
As he turned away from the man, Daniel stumbled and almost collapsed into the detritus on the floor. He had become so used to the calm trajectory of the unanchored, ever-turning plane that he was surprised to feel it roll and rise. He sat down and opened the blind. It was early afternoon and they seemed to be heading into the city again. The engines accelerated. Surely they would land soon. They had suffered, but all would be well; he would run from the plane and walk on the earth again. He would be glad to see everyone; they might even be relieved to see him. What a lesson in love this had been.
The plane banked, and rose. It seemed to have intention now. There was a moment of blinding sunlight, and he covered his eyes. When it straightened and he looked down again, he saw the suburbs with a motorway running through them; the traffic was moving smoothly. The plane followed this road until Daniel could see fields. It wasn’t long before they reached the coast. Briefly there was a beach with what looked like insects crossing it, and soon they were heading out to sea.
They were moving away from the Earth. He thought he understood it now. There was some disorder in the world they had to leave behind. As something appeared to be happening and he felt he was sitting with his feet in damp mould, he decided it was time to put his shoes on. He would be prepared. Turning one shoe over, he found a small stone within the corrugation of the sole. He extracted it and weighed it, looking at it in the open cup of his hand. It was round like the earth and smooth as a pearl.
Anarchy and the Imagination
Ever since I was a teenager I’ve collected ‘How to’ books about writing. I have a shelf of them, and recently I was looking at some material about plot, structure and narrative, the technical part of writing, thinking I might pick up something new. There are courses about this stuff everywhere all the time, and, as writing teachers, there are questions we are asked constantly: about the ‘arc’ and the ‘journey’, or ‘How do you make the structure work?’ ‘What is good dialogue?’ These are boring questions, and the answers are boring. The teacher and the student are enacting their roles perfectly, keeping everything nicely mundane, only talking about things which can be taught, or maybe learned. Through being mortified like this, the whole question of art then seems manageable, though. But obviously the most important element is missing.
If you think of the real thing — of, say, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, or Wilde’s Dorian Gray, or perhaps Cheever’s great story ‘The Swimmer’, or Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, or any of the work of Carver or a poet, such as Plath — you have to begin to think about the wild implausibility, boldness and brilliance of the artist’s idea or metaphor rather than the arrangement of paragraphs. Once you start thinking about this you have to think about the imagination and how it works, of where it might come from, and where it might take you. You’re in useful trouble.
Most people have good ideas all the time, they just prefer not to notice them. Yet the authors just mentioned found solutions to conflicts which were bothering or even tormenting them, conflicts which must have seemed like holes or impossibilities at the time, and which eventually demanded a creative leap into a new way of seeing. Their imaginations were transformative, a going beyond, requiring that a new thing be made out of old things, which were then put together in shocking and disruptive combinations which are fresh even today.
It could easily be the case that unbearable conflict might produce depression or self-hatred. You could call depression ‘a failure of the imagination’, a self-sabotaging refusal to consider a creative solution or look forward. Such conflicts might also produce art, the work itself representing the ‘impossibility’. In Franz Kafka’s masterpiece ‘The Metamorphosis’, the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find he has turned into a dung beetle. This illustrates, amongst many other things, Kafka’s relation to his own family, showing an imaginative flight from his own personal impasse, and how an altruistic sacrifice might benefit the whole family. Kafka was thinking about the emergency of his life. He couldn’t talk about it, and he couldn’t not talk about it. He couldn’t change his life, either; he was too masochistic for that; he just wrote. Being truly transgressive, when it comes to our own rules, is one of the most difficult things there is. However, Kafka’s internal editor made him inventive; his crisis provoked a metaphor, and he wrote a story, putting the malady in the reader, so that it might change our lives. Kafka found a beautiful compromise — at least from the point of view of literary history.
Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge knew that the imagination is as dangerous as dynamite, not only politically — the populace might have new, important, if dissident, ideas — but also inside an individual. The imagination can feel like disorder, when it is, in fact, an illumination. There is no doubt that the imagination is hazardous, and should be; there are certain thoughts which are combustible, and must be repressed or foreclosed. Good and evil, as in a bad film, must be kept separate. There are notions here which cannot be fully conceived of or thought, which must not be put together, which cannot fuse, develop or seem ambiguous. That is because like dreaming, the imagination can be antisocial. Plato would have banned art from his ideal state because it was fake, or ‘an imitation’, as he put it, and might over-stimulate the populace. And we know, of course, that writers and artists throughout history have been attacked, censored and jailed, for having thoughts or ideas which other people cannot bear to hear. From this point of view, the Word is always risky. So it should be.
The imagination rarely behaves well. It can be ignored and censored, but never entirely willed away. Such a willing away would be a mistake because, unlike fantasy, which is inert and unchanging — in fantasy we tend to see the same things repeatedly — the imagination represents hope, rebirth and a new way of being. If fantasy is a return of the already-known and familiar, you might say that an inspiration is a suddenly uncovered part of the self, something newly seen or understood. Emerson, who tells us in ‘Compensation’ that ‘growth comes by shocks’, writes, in another essay, ‘Nature’, ‘The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers.’