On the Limits of the Imagination
We come back and back again to the same old questions.
Because imagination is so important to both writing and the study of writing we praise the imagination as essential to the creation of narrative, poetry and all structured language. We, creators and readers alike, have a great stake in how powerful our engagement with human creativity is.
Yet we almost never discuss the limits to literature and the imagination. A couple of weeks ago I was having a discussion with a colleague about imagination, which he – a fine poet – proposed as the basis of empathy and our central human route into empathy. It was a good conversation: surely, in this diminished time of divisive politics, we need an abundance of empathy.
As we talked, I found myself confessing that I thought there was a limit to the imagination. Many years ago, when I taught African-American literature, I came upon – surprisingly to me – that limit. My largely white students, I thought, could understand what it felt like and was like to be black through an attentive, open-minded reading of, say, the novel Native Son or the extraordinary poems of Gwendolyn Brooks. But. But. They could imagine what it was like to be black, could experience the world of a black person. But what they could not experience was the long duration of being black: what it felt like to wake up every day being black, knowing that tomorrow one would be black and that a week ago one had been black, and that one’s children would be black. Intensity of experience, yes; duration of experience – that was the limit of imagination.
I recalled that a philosopher had centered his philosophy around the concept of duration. Henri Bergson, and his French term, ‘Durée,’ were once vital considerations for philosophers and thinkers alike. Alas, no more. Bergson’s day seems to have come and gone.
After conversing with my colleague, I felt the depth of my own ignorance. I had quoted the guy, but I did not have the slightest sense of what Bergson had written. So, I began to read Bergson. In college, we had dealt with him quickly, one in a stream of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century philosophers who have now been largely forgotten: Schopenhauer, Mach, Spenser. As have been many of their successors, the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and their British counterparts like A. J. Ayer.
Ah, Bergson. He has been left behind, partly for writing understandably and well (he, remarkably, won the Nobel Prize for Literature!), partly because he was so deeply at odds with the analytic methods which have prevailed for centuries. He was even at odds even with the less ‘analytic’ phenomenological methods that built upon his contemporary Edmund Husserl. If there is a radical challenge to philosophy, I have come to believe, it is to be found as much in Bergson as in Nietzsche.
Bergson’s first book, Time and Free Will (1889), is relatively easy. To my astonishment, it is largely a serious reconsideration of Zeno’s paradox. I remember that from college: if a tortoise and a hare are in a race, and the tortoise starts out ahead, logic tells us the hare will never catch up, no matter how fast she runs. For every measure of time, the hare will halve the distance to the tortoise, which meanwhile will keep plodding forward. Halve, and halve again, and halve again: the distance between them shortens, but the hare never catches up. Here is how Aristotle summarized Zeno’s Paradox in his Physics:
In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
A good problem for a sophomore in college. But serious philosophers? Well, after two millennia in which philosophers largely avoided Zeno, Bergson took him on. Bergson’s brilliant insight was that time is not space and should not be treated as space. Space is divisible into units, into an infinite number of points: if time is seen as space, the movement of time is a line that can be divided and divided again. But what, Bergson says, if we mistake time, seeing it as space rather than as something fluid and ongoing? What if time cannot, and should not, be conceived as space? If that is the case, Zeno’s paradox does not work: of course the hare will catch up to and surpass the tortoise. More than ‘solving’ the ancient paradox, Bergson posited a new sense of human consciousness, one that exists in ongoing time and encapsulates the ‘flowingness’ of time. That ongoingness he called ‘Durée’.
Better the French word than the English, ‘duration,’ for to Bergson every present moment – but that is the wrong term, since ‘moment’ suggests time is divisible like space, that it is a series of events rather than an ongoing stream – is part of the unfolding of the past into a present that always contains the past.
Bergson arrived at the fully developed concept of ‘Durée’ in his third and most famous book, Creative Evolution (1907). At the very start of that book, occurs a remarkable phrase: Bergson referred to our capacity “to think matter .” [Fifteen years later, Rainer Maria Rilke in his “Ninth Duino Elegy” would take up this way of approaching experience: he would claim that the objects of our world want nothing more than to be thought, than to be – through human consciousness and the human capacity for language—turned into consciousness and language.
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. ]
Later in Creative Evolution Bergson wrote this about Durée:
Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.
Duration is the past still present in the present, that forward moving stream of time which includes all that has preceded it. I think William Faulkner understood this, profoundly, when he wrote in Requiem for a Nun that “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Or when he said, interviewed by The Paris Review, “Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is.” But then, Faulkner was a Bergsonian.
The past is never past, it is always part of the present, which is why the present can never be – for Bergson – an isolated moment but is always part of the ongoingness of existence. (Does that phrase sound like a hippy said it, an alternative-consciousness kind of statement? Have courage. It is that, but it is also more.)
As one reads Creative Evolution, one senses Bergson going back, again, to confront the pre-Socratics, only this time with what I think is approval. I have always loved Heraclitus because he challenges us so deeply, even if what we have is no more than a handful of fragments. The most famous is: well, I will give two formulations, “We cannot step in the same river twice.” “In the same river we both can and cannot step.” Heraclitus sensed that everything took place in time, and that time was always ongoing. That river is that river, just as I am myself, but it is—because its water is ever flowing – always a different river. [Heraclitus also believed ‘reality’ was composed of the fourth (beyond air, water, earth) of the fundamental Greek elements, fire, and that change and conflict, and not stasis or solidity, was the basis of existence.]
We live in time, we think in time, our consciousness exists in time, and so the everchanging quality of time permeates all we see and think and experience. That is what Bergson saw. That time past is always present in our ‘present’ consciousness (remember, for Bergson time flows, and so there is never an isolable moment).
We’ve come a long way from where I began, which was with a discussion between a colleague and myself about imagination, and its capacity to engender empathy. I believe in the power of imagination – it is more than belief, for my experience and the experience of others supports it – but I also think there is something beyond the power of imagination. Let me cite some lines written by Theodore Roethke, the end of an elegy to William Butler Yeats. The words come to my mind often, maybe more often than any other lines of poetry, yet I have no idea what they ‘mean.’
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
My introductory statement about those lines is no hype. I don’t have any idea of what the lines signify. But I do know that they testify to a limit to imagination – it is exceedingly rare that such a limit is invoked in a poem, which is itself dependent on imagination. The lines understand that the universe is something that perhaps devout Buddhists or Hindus can experience: existence is vast and immeasurable and profoundly empty.
A limit to the imagination. That is what I want to write of, and why I have invoked Bergson. Because fiction or poetry or drama can help us to feel intensity, the intensity of not only our own experience but, at wonderful moments, the intensity of a different human being’s experience. That is why my friend, appropriately, yoked imagination and empathy. We can feel not only for others, but with others, if we respond imaginatively.
But – this short essay is full of buts – there is a limit to imagination. You know it now: Durée is beyond imagining. What it feels like to have that intensity in ongoing time, to have felt it yesterday and the day before, and to have those feelings rolled into present consciousness: That I think is beyond imaging. Rilke understood this. Let me return again to his “Ninth Elegy.” He is wondering what men or women have that angels – god-like creatures – do not understand. He writes,
Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it–they are better as they are: unsayable.
Those words I have bolded, “the heaviness’ of existence, the mark of duration upon our lives, is what cannot be expressed. It is “wholly unsayable.”
I have taught literature for fifty years. I am not happy to be expressing its limits. But it has limits. It can provide to us, through denotations and connotations and symbolic reverberations, the substance of what we and others live. It can, through structure, provide an intimation of the shape that can be apprehended in experience and in the universe. But here is what it cannot do: It cannot provide us with the experience of duration. When the cover of the book is shut, when the page is no longer before us, we are released, although maybe changed, back into the world of our durée, not the author’s. It can, to be sure, show us duration at work in the lives of characters we encounter: Faulkner, whom I have mentioned, is almost without parallel at this.
But duration, the long heaviness of being, that is beyond expressing. Durée can only be lived. Neither the imagination, nor empathy, can provide us with that aspect of human consciousness and experience.
It may also be that duration is what distinguishes each of us from all other human beings. We all feel, or can feel, love and triumph and despair. We all suffer and (hopefully) experience at moments the wonder of joy. But for each of us, our experience is in time, and the specific quality of durée is our own. All of our past is rolled up into our present, and our ongoing present is different from any other person’s present We are ourselves, with our own heaviness to carry in the stream of time. Imagination can isolate what it feels like, what it is like, to be an individual consciousness, but it cannot encompass time, that ongoingness that is not only our present, but the accumulated history of our past. Nor can it fully encompass that we have futures that will always, always, contain the residue of our past.
So, sadly, I conclude what I have long known, that imagination can do much but it cannot do it all. We each have our own lives to live and experience. Poems can, as William Carlos Williams wrote, “enter our lives,” but we must live our lives, ourselves, in time, with the fulness of durée in us and around us.