Monday, November 11, 2013

I Imagine, therefore, something is!

PHANTASY

"Remarkably, in the ancient traditions, the imagination or "phantasy" was considered a sense. In that psychology, in the detailed summary of Robert Burton's 1620 Anatomy of Melancholy, in addition to the outward senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch,
we have three inward senses: the Common Sense, Memory, and Phantasy. Burton stated:

Phantasy, or imagination...is an inward sense which doth more fully examine the species perceived by common sense, of things present or absent, and keeps them longer, recalling them to mind again, or making new of his own.

This old idea of imagination as a sense that produces "monstrous and prodigious things by recombining and re-forming the more orderly perceptions of memory and the other senses. As in dreams, the ingredients are familiar but the new reality is not."
--from: Robert Pinsky's SINGING SCHOOL: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. 2013. pg 148.
. . . . . . .

I like "monstruous and prodigious things" --guess that's why I write fiction and poetry and am a Stephen King fan...and a Dean Koontz fan...and CSLewis and Tolkien and Asimov and...you get the drift.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I traveled far and wide today
   I did not take a cab
I took neither bus nor car
   nor trip on substance from a lab.
I rode in comfort, but not by train,
   nor boat nor aeroplane.
Departure...arrival--by seconds parted:
   Yes, I got there, as soon as I started.
No luggage, no seatbelt,
   and no need for "security,"
I arrived by conveyance
   of eld, not futurity.
Yes, book in my lap
   and others beside
I tip my cap
   to my magical ride.
--DLS 11/9/13


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