October Aside
I have been writing a great deal over the past three months about the relationship between dance, our embodiment as human beings, and our imagination. My thinking is about how the imagination is present on almost every level of our experience of life, although I believe 98% or more of that humans no longer have access to because it was imagined and accepted years, generations, and centuries previous to the present moment – having been activated in the life of each of our ancestors. The imagination I am speaking about is that which shapes us through our relationships, how we engage with the world, what we think we can know and how we inter/intra act with, on, at, or as the world (Spinoza, in Gaten’s Lloyd (2013).[i] Why this is important is because this imagination has structured human hierarchies of attention and concern through beliefs and preferences that we can no longer tolerate.
The imagination that really matters is the oldest and the most formative. Everything else builds upon its base. It is that which is an imagined understanding of how the mind and body come into relational being. What and who we are that we walk the earth. To some cultures, most indigenous cultures around the world, it is obvious that we are the same as the trees, the rocks and the waters, we are earth.[ii] To those of us with a European heritage we often imagine and behave otherwise, as have many peoples who have been swept up by its cultural indifference and disregard. We live lives independent of the earth and one another. The differentials of capitalism are built upon this imagined state.
If humans are to heal our earth, we must heal our relations with her, no matter our heritage. To do this job, we need to deeply consider that our states are formed by the lineage of our imagination, and each is generationally shaped. Ideas and concepts rely on images which are the vehicle of the imagination. Let’s look at a simple example. Imagine sitting in your car, hands on the steering wheel. How many iterations of a device for steering emerged through the past? Reins for a horse? The helm of a ship? A stick, a rope, a man? We dream what we need and compose it. Then it integrates with our living, becoming invisible.
Now the task is to question the far more subtle constructions we live since the imagination can show up in ways such as a simple choice to think of things as more alive, more vital, more valuable or closer to you. It’s a willingness to dance life. This sets a new ground for the “real.” And the “real” matters to us.
Remember, even the shape of scientific relational practices was and are imagined, so that path is not a certain “truth” and never was.[iii] As feminist theorists have demonstrated, believing that science is objective in its structure and analyses is rooted in the imagination, which is often convenient because things can be partly accurate or workable.
Can we take back the imagination and reconsider what is needed in our relations as we necessarily explore a new “real” within our lived experience and thus shift “truth”? Can we become closer to one another, giving more dimensions to our ideas of a separate self, considering what it actually can mean to be entangled in the world? Do we have flexibility in our ideas of what is “real?”
The world is changing and so are our imagined truths. We see that the imagination is not on the surface, it lives at the very root of our reality, and it always will.This is not a temporary condition. Like a target that keeps moving, the imagination is inescapably inflecting our realizations. Our only choice is to imagine well, not dream what is unattainable, but reach for a truth we can recognize is generative for all beings, not just ourselves. Yet understand, we dream, even as we reach into our “truth.” I imagine.
--------------
[i] GATENS, M. and G. LLOYD. (1999) Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present.
New York: Routledge. p. 58
[ii] Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts (2013, p. 27) writes, “Our truth, not only Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee people but in a majority of Indigenous societies, conceives that we
(humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an extension of soil.” This deep relationality has implications for how we relate to one another and how we view our place in the world.
WATTS, V. (2013) “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Vol.2, No.1. Queensland University, Canada. pp. 20-34
[iii] Please see the works of feminist anthropologists Donna Haraway and Karen Barad:
HARAWAY, D. (1988)"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599.
BARAD, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter