Celebrating the Imagination
Issue 1 May 2014
The Prime Agent
What do we imagine we are talking about when we speak of the imagination? Or, to put it another way, can we imagine the imagination? Lindsay Clarke explores imagination as an energetic process of negotiation between the inner world and outer world.
The Gist of Arvon
Is the Imagination a formative force, universally inclusive, whose failure to grasp it’s guiding and unfolding in the lives and ventures of every individual, and their society, and above all their education, amounts to a serious ‘missing of the mark’?
Mythic Imagination
Exploring the connection between memory, archetypal imagery and imagination, Jules Cashford suggests that we cannot simply ‘remember’ archetypal images in the way we remember a personal event in our past, but we can approach them only as symbols for which we need Imagination.
Imagination in Education
The Pushkin Trust has become synonymous with creativity, inspiration and expression, encouraging both children and teachers to find their ‘Voice’. Its founder, The Duchess of Abercorn, discusses what role ‘imagination’ plays in this.
Secret Fire
This article is a personal tribute to John Moat, where Patrick Harpur discusses, among others things, the transforming power of imagination in alchemy and ‘seeing’ the world through myth… “To see with the eye alone is to see the world as it appears; to see through the eye is to see the world as it is.”
The Magic of Metaphor: What Children’s Minds Teach Us about the Evolution of the Imagination
Metaphorical thinking — our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other — shapes our view of the world and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. Brain Pickings founder and author, Maria Popova, discusses how children have an instinctive metaphor-making ability.
How Intuition and the Imagination Fuel “Rational” Scientific Discovery and Creativity: A 1957 Guide
Originally published in ‘Brain Pickings’, the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, this forms the second part of her article on W.I.B Beveridge’s ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’ in which she examines his ideas on the role of intuition and the imagination.
Imagination and Art
An artist with a deep sense of working with the ‘poetic imagination, Helen Garrett discusses her work and the ‘conversation’ she has with her work during its creation. She asks “do these expressions of creativity come from the imagination or is the imagination a portal that opens this space and allows the conversation to occur?”
Spirit Stories
A ‘visual’ article from artist and storyteller, Jessica Hines, in which she uses the camera’s inherent quality as a recording device to explore illusion and to suggest truths that underlie the visible world. At the core of her work lies an inquisitive nature inspired by personal memory, experience and the unconscious mind.
Imagination may be more important than knowledge: The eight types of imagination we use
Murray Hunter explores imagination as a multidimensional concept which encompasses a number of different modes that may overlap, work in tandem, be functional, or even dysfunctional.
Sound Work 01
Sound Work 1 is a collaboration between Paul Schütze and Andrew Hulme of O Yuki Conjugate. It is the first in a series of releases documenting their ongoing sound design for film and installation works. This was created for one part of the Red Riding trilogy, a television adaptation of David Peace’s neo-noir thriller quartet.
Angels and Harvesters / Set Text: Philoctetes
James Harpur is an interior poet with a fascination for spirituality. Angels and Harvesters is taken from his published collection of the same name, a collection that displays both human tenderness and an otherworldly wonder. Set Text: Philoctetes is a new poem. This is its first publication.
How do Brains Imagine?
Cognitive scientists hypothesize that our ability to imagine is the result of something called a “mental workplace,” a neural network that coordinates activity across multiple regions of the brain.
Discussing his latest research, neuroscientist Alex Schlegel explores this in its relation to consciousness and the future of ‘fathoming the mind’.
Cloudy with a Chance of Joy
Clouds are often given a ‘bad press’ but, as the founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society discusses, looking at clouds puts you in a frame of mind that involves embracing the fortuitous formations, the stimulation of the imagination and the creation of ideas.
Celebrating the Radical Imagination
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives. Eco-poet, Helen Moore, provides a glimpse of a change of thinking that points to us visioning a new ecological age… to be continued in a future issue.
Serious Meditation
On a bright, still December day author, artist and poet, John Moat, meditates on the connection sea, streams and fountain have with the Imagination and the Sacred… and much more.