A few weeks ago I found myself on the campus of Michigan State University. That campus is large and, as befits a land grant college, studded with a variety of gardens that almost literally make your head spin. I was there in mid-August, and much was in bloom.
One of the special attractions of the MSU gardens is the Children's Garden--a garden created specifically for the pint-sized set. But it is not just the scale that makes the MSU Children's Garden, or any children's garden for that matter, work as intended. It is the attention given to the stimulation of imagination. For example, in the MSU Children's Garden there is a hidden "secret garden", with a little door just like you imagined the door in Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1910 story of the same name. Just to give you an additional idea, in the absence of photography, of how the MSU Children's Garden designers plan for imagination stimulation, there are fence posts around part of the garden painted like crayons. I think it probably helps to be or to have been a parent of young children to truly appreciate the wonderful shrewdness of this garden's design, but I suppose anyone can appreciate it if they study it long enough.
As I made the rounds of this garden an idea suddenly occurred to me, or rather not so much an idea as a simple discovery. It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that if a person does not learn to trust, use, appreciate, revere and even fear his (or her) imagination between the age of about two and a half and perhaps ten years of age, he probably never will. That is why imagination must be cultivated before it is named in the mind of the person, for the naming comes in a particular context, which by definition is limited. And the context, being limited, can stultify the expansionist tendencies of imagination––the tendencies that make imagination, after all, what it is. Naming is reifying, and reification is a form of death.
This is why it is so very important that parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and older siblings and cousins and even whole communities take responsibility for stimulating the imaginations of all young children, and one can hardly begin too soon. The failure to include even one child, to allow even one child to miss the chance to learn how to dream, makes all of us poorer. Whatever else families and communities do, they need to become expert aviation engineers, specialists in flights of fancy.
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Beyond the importance of recognizing, celebrating and furthering imagination, it seems clear that the (next) most important point you made is the adverse effect of "naming" our creativity as such: it seems essential to the process of cultivating our imagination that all those involved embrace the authenticity of the imaginative proce; without such an embrace there would forever be the stain of falcity on any idea, and thus--as you said--the key to achieving the full potential of our creativity we must be raised with its full embrace not only encouraged, but manifest. Cheers!
ReplyDeletePS: The study of Husserlian phenomenology also points to the fundamentality of imagination as the underpinning of all understanding, which--if I remember correctly--is developed out of the process of "creating" possible alternatives as the study of "essences," the central quality of things in themselves, that we recognize only by envisioning what they are not but could be... Sorry, that's too much;