I wrought chaos for a week—here's what I learned about imagination

Plus: a note of irrepressible joy and hope

Escher, Another World II

Hello,

This week, I meant to send you a roundup of recommended reading on this imaginal realm I’ve been talking about for the past few weeks. Instead, I spent the last week losing my ever-loving mind—but in an instructive way! That’s growth, right?? And since I don’t really believe in accidents, for this week’s letter, I’ll be mining my past week’s idiocy for what it can reveal about the imaginal.

So what happened?

It’s just over two weeks since I handed in my dissertation for the MA I’ve been taking, on the Poetics of Imagination. Post-submission, I decided to give myself a break from writing, since the last four days of dissertating saw me frantically rewriting 6,000 words from scratch.

Unfortunately, I forgot yet again that a break from writing is never a break, because I become absolutely unhinged when I don’t write regularly. Which leads me to my first observation about the imaginal:

• Getting stranded outside of the imaginal realm turns the everyday material world into a prison and a poison.

Without my morning practice of getting outside of myself and tapping into the stories much bigger than me that are always unfolding invisibly all around me, I quite quickly became wildly neurotic. This manifested in a churning anxiety about pretty much everything (life admin! health! finances! career! oh no is that black mould!), which soon fuelled a process of dismantling my house over the course of a week.

It began with waking up one day and deciding that I had to paint my bedroom ceiling immediately, progressed through me frantically trying to fix the shower drain and instead flooding the bathroom so badly that water came cascading through a light fixture and also flooded the kitchen below, and ended with me sleeping on the sofa, unshowered, for most of the week, spending every day up a ladder scrubbing raw plaster from ceiling beams, and begging showers from a neighbour for my poor house guest.

During the height of this madness, I did realize that my original misstep was in taking a step back from imaginal practice, and I tried to get back on track. But imaginal practice requires a certain degree of calm. For me, first I have to relax through breathwork and mindfulness, then I turn my attention inwards, then I allow my synaesthetic senses to engage, and before long, I’m in the imaginal realm.

Four days deep in my self-inflicted chaos, I couldn’t relax enough to get there. I was grasping too hard, when what I needed, and couldn’t manage, was to let go.

This leads me to my second observation about the imaginal:

• It’s extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to access the imaginal realm when you’re stressed, scared, or otherwise tightly wound. Which means it’s extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to access the imaginal realm at precisely the time you need it most (barring certain active interventions from the otherworld itself).

If you ask me, these first two observations about the imaginal explain an awful lot about the state of the world today.

Accessing the imaginal realm—through mythtelling, through fasting, through initiation rites, through prayer, through shamanic practices, through ecstatic ritual—seems to be an intrinsic part of humanity. Anthropological and archaeological research suggests that versions of such practices are found in every indigenous and traditional society. If, then, transcendence is part of what it means to be human (and I’ll be writing a lot more about that in future letters), it stands to reason that losing, or losing sight of, the capacity to transcend, compromises your full humanity. It traps you in a reality that is too small. It makes you thwarted, neurotic, stressed, scared—which then kicks off a vicious cycle, in which you’re too tightly wound to transcend the everyday and experience the bigger truth of existence, and without the capacity to transcend, you become even more neurotic, stressed, and scared.

I’ve made it my business over the past few years to learn how and why and when cultures like my own forgot or rejected the otherworld and the capacity to transcend, and got stranded in the material realm and in this very vicious cycle. I’ll be unfolding that research over the course of these letters, and also in the novel I’m currently working on. It’s a story that goes back more than 10,000 years.

But for now, I want to end on a note of irrepressible joy and hope. Because what I’ve found is that no matter how alienated you might feel from the deep, true imaginal realm of which you are a citizen, and no matter how many thousands of years it is since your culture had practices of honouring and crossing to the otherworld:

• You can never permanently lose access to imagination.

Imaginal capacity is an inalienable part of being human. Even if you’ve never been to the imaginal, even if you don’t believe it’s real, even if you’ve been stressed out of your mind for years or decades. It might be hard to get there. It might take support and structural change. But it’s hardwired into who you are as a human, and there are portals everywhere.

For this maniac over here, one such portal is colour. (Much more on this, too, in future letters, with thoughts on colour from Goethe, Hilma af Klint, and many more.) And the happy ending to this snapshot of my ridiculous life is that my bedroom is now the colour of the dreaming and the insides of shells. I cannot begin to tell you how articulate and delicious my dreams have been since I started sleeping wrapped in this:

More next week, and I’ll try not to blow anything up in the meantime,

xx Ellie