michael-dean-k/

The imagination is as ugly as it is beautiful; they come together. If your inner mind consists only of pretty landscapes, imagined scenarios, and clever compromises, all bound by a safe and familiar virtue, your net is cast not below the froth of the ocean. To dive into the depths is to expose yourself not just to shimmering coral, but to the jump scares of stingrays. The moment I thought this, as I lifted my arm to drink orange juice, I saw a monstrous bug on my sleeve, hairy and hissing; it was only a bee, but unexpectedly there, and so I leapt and shooed and booted into my aboriginal fight mode. What a synchronicity! You are not tapped into the Source unless the fear of it lifts you off the ground.

This is on my mind because I had a strange fantasy on my walk home—a fruit of imagination—and debated myself on whether I’d write about it. I decided I wouldn’t, but I suppose, now, here I am. I will spare you of the hot specifics, which unwillingly formed in my mind. Contrary to how you may think this started, I was looping a religious mantra and I saw with total purity, closer to Buddha than the drools of a leg-humping dog. My sin was not in lust, but in congratulating myself on my discipline. I imagined myself writing a paragraph on this victory of inner-chastity—“I didn’t imagine [X]… I didn’t imagine [Y]...”—but that summoned a fantasy weirder than usual, one with unbelievable metaphors that I’ll never put to paper, and an arc that ended in spasms, shapeshifting, and shrinking into a mono-droning ball of white heat that exploded and shattered the windows of nearby houses, spiraling the town into a front-lawn frenzy.

Creativity comes not without deviance; and so extreme creativity comes with flashes of imagery that will shock you, shock whoever you share it with. It cares not of your preferences or values, commitments or morals; to cast a line deep into waters brings all sorts of riches and squids to the surface of your mind, and the choice is yours on what to bring into the boat (and of course, sometime a whale emerges, and your language fails you, leaving you only able to speak of the whale with nothing to show).

A more conservative mind has no such problems, because a conservative dares not enter the mind of God. To be creative is not a frivolous hobby, it is to be a microcosm of the larger engine of creation. And if being creative involves attuning yourself to the instability of imagination, then one can’t know God without a fair amount of psychic turbulence.

(I promise I won’t stray too far into amateur theology here.) The popular caricature of God is the archetype of an architect—one with a divine “plan”—but a better image is a thunderous volcanic eruption. The Big Bang, the rupture of cosmic seed; reproduction—evolution, life, and creation, in many places at many scales —emerges from billions of scattered instances, so that the rare two can fuse into a higher order. I have trouble believing God has consciousness, intention, and agency, but find obvious a divine intelligence that folds chaos into order. The cost of divine intelligence though, in creating something as magnificent as a human, is misfiring, mutation, bad combinations, and all things upsetting—violence, death, and evil.

So if we want to carry the logos, hold the flame of divine intelligence in our own head to make beautiful things ourselves, to continue the process of God, as God, then we have to accept defects and abortions—to not cower in fear at the strange and grotesque, to not turn off the lights. This is probably a known truth, that the path towards Enlightenment runs through dark woods, but you forget that in a fit of terror from your own thoughts. This is at least, my rationalization of the stray and unexplainable thoughts that occasionally pass through me, thoughts of lust, violence, theft, vengeance, conspiracy, tyranny, hauntedness—all demonic antipodes to the dearest things I treasure.

Instead of narrowing the aperture of mind and retreating to shore, I have to learn to swim. I can go into the depths and marvel at weird creatures, but not grab a fin to follow where it goes. This is where I think “Self-Reliance” by Emerson goes wrong; he is right in the sense that you have to take seriously whatever is presented through your natural imagination, but wrong in the sense that you must follow all of nature’s impulses, wherever they lead. Nature produces mutations, Ralph. The decision on how to respond to the mental fruits of nature is where morality lives. Morality is not a purity of mind, nor is it the total absence of evil, but it’s the character you show when dealing with darkness. I can’t be blamed for trying this, for it’s in my name; Michael—“he who fights the Devil.”

A simple maxim might be something like “don’t chase it, don’t avoid it, let it wash through.” One complication is being a writer. Odd thoughts often make for good material. One view is that writing is a useful release valve, a controlled plane where monsters can roam, keeping the head pure when away from the page. But if your best writing comes forth from the ugly imagination, then you’ll find yourself calling upon it as your Muse.

(A writing exercise after reading Emerson's essay on how once you can see nature, you've unlocked a constellation of metaphors that can be used to describe anything. Take 1:)

Our clipped potential, like a tree’s arms trimmed for obstructing power lines, left a mighty trunk that bears no fruits, offers no shade;

Our unborn ideas, cities and cities full, like scattered brown pollen accreted on riverbanks of sidewalk;

Our restless mind, pattered with the sizzling doinks of a pickleball frenzy;

Our dreams faded, like disappearing engine hums of transatlantic birds;

Our interiors unguarded, like the iron fence with a body-shaped hole, bent;

Step not into the confusion of a gnat swarm;

See history clearly, without the illusion of time, and as you enter the park, see at once all past visitors at their moment of entering; see some trodden zones as a cacaphony of bodies, a mob of holographic sound, light, and limbs; see the edge where you make out human forms making out; see over time the cloud getting thinner and thiner until you see those picnicking, those illegally camping, that one who died in the park.

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.

My head is tilted down 60 degrees, and I’m cut off from the people and world around me. My cousin’s cousin was actually in the shop, and I almost missed her. Reading Emerson while waiting online feels extremely rude. Isn’t reading a physical book in public just as bad as reading on your smartphone?

Of course, books aren’t evil. Neither are screens. It’s the action/context mismatch that’s wrong. I guess the problem is that screens make it easy to have all your books with you at all times, and so it’s convenient and normal to be rude.

What you reveal when you say screens are bad for society is that you don’t have the ability to wield tremendous power. It’s not the smartphones to blame, but the apps on them, and so often we realize how mindlessly we install them, and how long we’re willing to be mesmerized by a bad information architecture. When we reach the iOS vibe code singularity, there will be no excuses.