A lecture by Stephen Lowe.
For “The distinguished lecture series” at Leicester University. October 20th. 2004.

POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION: A lecture by Stephen Lowe. Distinguished lecture series at Leicester University. October 20th 2004.

One thing I’ve learned from life is, it’s always good to apologise at the outset, because you never know what state you’ll be in later. So, sorry if this turns out not to be quite the kind of lecture that you’re used to! It may be less polemical and more personal, less didactic and more diverse, more anecdotal than argumentative. I like to get the alliteration out of the way at the beginning. There are no major conclusions here – it’s more a monologue composed from some of the flotsam and jetsam that’s washed up on the beach from a lifetime of being submerged in the sea. And the sea is the imagination.

It’s a personal statement. As I believe that art is the sublime expression of the imagination – it always is, for all the talk about it attaining universal truths. For me, art does not aspire to the objective or even, most of the time, to the rational.

It is by its very nature subjective, a celebration of the uniqueness of each individual maker, whilst at the same time possessing the extraordinary capacity to reach out and to touch head and heart of another – often building bridges across massive divides of age, gender, race, lands separated by seas and mountains, time-travelling across aeons of history to collide with the imaginings of unimagined witnesses, to provoke in turn, new “subjective” creations.

The Latin for Priest is pontifex– the builder of bridges. For me, the word is more applicable to the artist. And I marvel at the variations of the artistic mass, the moment of sharing.

The Kwakiutl Native American Indians would meet their neighbouring tribes in a ceremony, part feast, part gifting of art, part sharing of tales – which they called a potlatch. Their neighbours were not necessarily their best friends. Indeed, this ceremony was a dangerous, delicate meeting ground between two forces, often in conflict. But they perceived it to be more dangerous, if there was not this sharing, this attempt “to connect” as E.M. Forster would say. The threat of remaining locked in their own separate tribal fantasies, where they were the only humans and their gods the only acceptable divinity, reinforced an image of the neighbours as the opposite, “THE OTHER”– the non-humans: The dark side of life.

This vision of the potlatch – this remarkable, human meeting ground of almost infinite complexity and staggering simplicity, was the reason we named our small, experimental theatre company – Meeting Ground Theatre. And the potlatch principles lie at the very heart of its work.

Theatre is the great communal art form – as so many people are creatively involved in a multitude of ways; actors, musicians, dancers, photographers, filmmakers, directors, designers of set, costume, lighting, prop makers, wardrobe, poster and publicity artists… It’s an almost endless list.

As a playwright on route to the potlatch, my intent is to inspire the imaginations of my fellow artists, because it is the combined imaginations of us all in a united form that will finally inspire the imagination of the audience. What a thirteen century Japanese Monk, called Nichiren Daishonin expresses as Itai Doshin: many bodies in one mind.

This desire to inspire others rather than just require to paint sets by numbers or assemble a play, like a car on a Ford’s construction line – led me to become fascinated by the imaginative processes of others, as well as my own. I’ve studied theatre design, directed, worked as assistant stage manager, made short films, and was an actor for some years with Alan Ayckbourn’s company in Scarborough, until I realised two things about acting. The first, that if you did a full length play, under the old licensing laws, you’re too late to get a drink at the bar, and the second was that in general, one only played one part per night and that was normally a part close to yourself. (If Freddy Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion, and Richard Rich in ‘Man for All Seasons’ were really close to myself!)

However, my imagination desired desperately to also become a childless woman at the end of the war, or a Tibetan shaman, or a young boy of mixed race wanting to set up a flea circus, a ghost of my grandfather, a multiple murderer or even an old woman. In order to discover how the world is seen from their differing points of view, it was writing that offered me the freedom to be anyone, anywhere.

I wanted desperately to be multiple. Psychiatrists can make what they want of this, but if you are going to be multiple, playwrighting is a great career move. You can imagine anything, no one locks you up but yourself, and sometimes you can get paid. And what am I selling?

Imagination.

We sometimes talk about imagination as though it’s something that, if we just had a bit more spare time, we can all do. Give me an extra week’s holiday and I could write a novel. If only…. Half the population of the country think they could knock off a Coronation Street script in a morning and still have time for a game of golf. Dream on.

So – the first question we face is quite simply- is the world divided into “the creative” and the “receptive”- the makers and the audience? On one side those rare individuals whose lives hover above the mundane, constantly swooping and rising through “agony and ecstasy” and the rest of us poor souls, who feed off their rich pickings? To answer this question we have to explore what is that imagination that lies as the force behind it all? We have to go back to source. In this case mine.

My post-grad research was largely spent in the splendid reading room of the British Museum. My thesis was – Consciousness and the Artist- and it focused on the relationship between magic and the artist’s imagination. Well, it was 1969! It centred on the occult order of The Golden Dawn at the turn of the C20th and it’s extraordinary collection of artistic talents, which included not only the totally barking mad but legendary figures; Aleister Crowley (later unjustly judged as The World’s Most Evil Man) the poet, W.B. Yeats, and his partner, the extraordinary actress, Florence Farr.

I practised ritual magic, attempting to reach the highest state of human consciousness – IPSISSIMUS. Unfortunately before I got there, the post grad grant ran out and I came crashing down to what is called reality, and enforced employment as ‘temporary assistant clerical officer’ at the Department of Health and Social Security in Kingston on Thames. In those days, with no protective glass between frontline DHSS staff and their “audience” it was a constant show.

I wrote a TV piece about it called Fred Karno’s Bloody Circus, the title of which, about sums it up. The job’s only advantage to an artist, was that although appallingly paid for ten – twelve hour shifts, for every 28 days worked, you were entitled to a half day paid holiday. I saved up these days and combined them with the Easter holidays, so that I had five full days, where I locked myself in a room to start and finish a play from scratch: And immediately, I had a wonderfully impossible idea, sparked off by a George Orwell Essay about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill.

Realising that Orwell was talking about the very artworks from which I had learned practically everything I knew about sex, (frightening but true), I set out to write a piece where little henpecked dad, big fat mam, buxom blonde and her brylcreemed boyfriend were in fact played by models ‘posing’ for the cards and we (the audience) are backstage – or actually on the beach – as they prepared for the “photo shoot”.

Strangely, years later I discovered that was actually how the very early Bamforth postcards were made. The play CARDS was my first play to be professionally staged, then re- directed by Alan Aykbourn and ultimately turned into a BBC 2 TV piece called Kisses on the Bottom.

But my point here is that, during this rare five days, totally dedicated to my imagination – this delightful idea leaped out, and flowed until…. it stopped!

It was like running into a brick wall!

I couldn’t see where the ending was and I panicked. And I realised that whilst I was intellectually ‘forcing’ the piece to some unknown solution, I could no longer ‘see’ it, the life had gone. The characters had become more static than the post cards themselves.

They wouldn’t improvise for me. They refused to play. They were packing up to go home. I could not animate or inspire the piece – and the word inspire of course, is from the Latin “to give breath ”.

Dead in the water, or rather stranded on the beach at Skeggie, I was furious and panic stricken. Then two things occurred that radically changed my life: Two simple sets of images.

I was immersed in the classic “bang your head against the wall for inspiration” technique – Willing a simple scene, with two characters, to come alive. And then suddenly, a completely different image appeared, unexpected, initially undesired. I suddenly saw my own ‘backstage’: It was a small empty room and inside it, was a child, a young boy.

I recognised him. I knew that only a few hours before he’d been as high as a kite having come up with a wonderfully open-ended crazy vision of a play but Now….

Now ……there was a shadow in the room, and the shadow was holding a gun to his head, and yelling PLAY. PLAY. PLAY.

I’ve been haunted ever since, not so much by the child, who I think of almost daily, but who is this in me, that can hold a gun to his head?

I will return to that question later.

That night, having “given up”, totally exhausted, depressed, and curiously ashamed, I went to sleep with all my fantasies of being a writer falling around me like autumn leaves in a sudden storm. And I dreamt. It was a simple dream. Banal in content. Rich in provocation. I was outside a door to a party. I didn’t know whose. My nightmare is entering rooms where I don’t know most of the people inside- you can perhaps guess how I feel tonight – but I entered, and nobody took any notice of me. I simply passed slowly across the crowded room, weaving my way through the people. A few minutes, that’s all. And I awoke sweating. I could recall it all – it was fully animated. There were no gaps. Everyone I passed was fully dressed in their own particular fashion (without my making any decisions about it or indeed about them). The fragments of conversations I heard in different dialects and tones were all utterly convincing, there were no blanks, the room and all its contents were fully realised – I didn’t have to search in my memory to select for a possible sideboard, or coffee table, rejecting this one, going for that – all was totally consistent, totally complete, totally alive.

I was furious. I was being mocked by my own imagination. Far from being the supreme occult artist possessed by the rare touch of the divine, I came thumping back to earth but to a different one. Here nightly all of us, whether we recall or not, have this extraordinary capacity to image with apparent freedom, without thought, intent or effort to dream. All of us inside have infinite resources of the imagination. But to bring them into the light, to combine with our waking consciousness, to go beyond surrealism or fantasy, is a challenge to us all. This is the meeting ground, the potlatch of creativity.

So this locked away weekend, with the financial patronage of the D.H.S.S, really centred crucial questions for the rest of my life. Who holds the gun that steals the child from play? What is this control we feel a need to enforce? Do we fear for the child? How do we build a bridge within ourselves, between the conscious and unconscious, and how, in a wider sense, do we celebrate and support this individual, innate possibility within us all? But is this imagination that I speak of, really our own?

In the mid-nineties, I was in Bulgaria, in Sofia, trying to set up a co-production with the BBC and Bulgarian film-directors. I had met many of them a few years earlier, when travelling with my old friend, Professor Malcolm Griffith. It was just after the fall of their tyrant leader, Zhivkov and the death of his insane daughter, Ludmilla.

Her particular passion was “culture” and she had wiped out almost everything that made genuine claim to that word. The artists were just beginning to breath freedom again. They were enervated by possibilities of what to imagine, now the gun had been taken from their head.

On my final visit, to Bulgaria some years later, playtime was over – another gun had been placed at their head – that of economic necessity inflicted by the carpetbaggers of the West.

Their studios in the mountains outside Sofia had been bought and taken over by Western entrepreneurs. They were allowed to play again, however the agenda was reduced to making pornography, starring their partners, their sons and daughters.

I’m reminded of a sixties song by Donovan – freedom’s a word I rarely use without thinking… And thinking about those artists, I realise that whilst the outsize “forms” may change, the artistic struggle – to find one’s own truth, romantic as that may sound- is still the great challenge.

But is that all I’m saying? Am I just restating the old romantic notion of the purity of Byron’s Childe Harold –that all inspiration and creation is good, life enhancing, transforming, and revolutionary even?

Well, not quite. There’s a major caveat- that the Bulgarians artists were well aware of.

Our imagination is also a product of the world, in turn influenced by it. Perhaps somewhere in the farthest highlands of our soul, there is a clear mountain stream. Where whilst tracking, like the salmon homeward bound, we have to struggle through polluted waters first – We, ourselves, have to make the rivers and sea safe to swim in. Then perhaps its purity may be rediscovered and re-affirmed.

So let us return again to the gun at our head – to what the South American theatre director Augusto Boal calls “the cops in the head”, and I call, “the guardians of the gate.” For this purpose I want to talk for a moment about the Fascism of the imagination”.

Goering is attributed with saying: “When I hear anyone speak of culture, I reach for my gun”.

But paradoxically tyrants can be said to be lovers of art. Or at the very least, they certainly value it more highly than many liberals do, who tend to place it way down in priority on the political agenda.

But to misquote T.S.Eliot; “The Tyrants come and go, talking of Michelangelo”: When the military junta seized power in Greece (in the seventies), on the first day of power, they closed the theatres – not just the contemporary venues, but also those most Greeks thought were there just for the tourists – the amphitheatres performing the great classic canon.

When Stalin began his own purge (or as he believed “purification”) of the imagination, he killed not just the obvious critical artists like Mayakovsky, but just as significant, nature poets like Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag in 1938.

Half of Hitler’s top ten ‘hit list’ when he came to power, were artists including a woman known for turning a chair the wrong way round and singing with a top hat on.

Madame Mao so understood the power of theatre that she totally obliterated it, to replace it with six operas of her own creation. And here we perceive their deep understanding.

They were wise enough to understand that perhaps the imagination could never be fully eradicated, but that it could be controlled, it could be turned to their ends; the central thesis, of course of Orwell’s novel – 1984.

In 1934, Stalin, at the height of his purges, set out his own aesthetic – the only “accepted” forms of art were to be those that complied with his doctrine of “Soviet Socialist Realism”, a misnomer, as it was neither socialist nor realistic.

Anything else was decadent. To this day, whenever I see a tractor I still catch a fleeting image of that beautiful young couple, smiling as they drive on their way into the promised utopia of barley fields.

In the late twenties and early thirties, world cinema was largely led by the extraordinary imaginings of Berlin filmmakers like Von Stroheim, and Fritz Lang. Not quite to Hitler’s taste, but he didn’t close the cinemas. He replaced them with work based on his own aesthetic. The clearest example of what that is Der Jud; a film so nauseating that all of us, I’m afraid, should see it to understand the dark depths of the fascism of the imagination. It is a call for genocide.

It is a snuff movie. Not all we imagine is good.

In Spain in the thirties, Franco’s friends were quick to take a young, passionate gay poet into a field of olives and blow his brains away, and equally quick to champion the construction of the fantasies of an apocalyptic architect. Recently in Barcelona, I watched the tourists scramble from their buses to take photos of Gaudi’s nightmare cathedral. Compared to the Cathedral of Sacred Familia, Bosch’s vision of Hell looks like a Saga Holiday. Now it’s largely viewed as some monument misplaced from Disneyland. We can see it that way largely because the context of its aspiration has been taken away- the back up is no longer omnipresent. And what was that back up? Gaudi’s belief and membership of an ultra- conservative Catholic sect- Santa Llucs – set on world domination, and centred on personal redemption by scourging and flagellation.

But whilst its context may have been taken away momentarily, perhaps it’s just been moved? Mel Gibson’s father is a member of the same cult and Gibson himself, in interviews about his sado/masochist PASSION OF CHRIST stated similar views. It’s also worthy of note that Gaudi has just passed with flying colours round one on the process towards official beatification.

We may marvel at the apparent madness of Stalin in having his thought police track down flower poets and idle dreamers? What challenge could such poets be to his system? How can stanzas on stamens and pollen threaten the very bedrock of his state? And yet Stalin instinctively understood that they did. They spoke to individuality, to the private experience beyond social engineering, to metaphor and metaphysics that leads to transgression of the mind: Our ability to take it wandering down country lanes, forgotten paths and not along the main motorway of tanks and tractors. Poetry speaks to the delights of diversity.

The fascism of imagination, the totalitarian aspect, is essentially “mono”:

Monotheistic, mono-simplistic and mono-manic. It stands against the celebration of diversity. There can only be one way and one ideology, one ultimate and sacrosanct means of seeing the world. This of course, when allied with power – the violence of the gun – leads us to a secure philosophical support of censorship.

It self-justification is that it strives to prevent “the contamination of the people’s imagination”. It operates out of Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the pyres of the Inquisition, the Witch-finder General, as well as Madison Avenue, Wall Street, the White House, or out of the mouths of spin-doctors in our own fair land.

Ultimately, it works effortlessly without the need of external guards flaunting their muscle. After endless repetition and underlining, self-censorship is internalised, so fixed into our mode of perception, that it remains an unchallenged “truth”.

So embedded is it, that we cannot even see how our imagination is controlled by it. Yet our imaginations flower in every back alley and every street corner. They rage behind lace curtains and window boxes. Imagination can poison lives as well.

And in so doing bring forth strange fruit.

Some years ago, actress Tanya Myers and I as artistic directors of Meeting Ground theatre decided to explore the most contaminated, most unimaginable love story; the journey of two young working-class, bright, English lovers who would end up systematically killing one child after another.

Myra Hindley and Ian Brady: The Moors Murderers. The play was called DEMON LOVERS. The politics of the imagination operates at all levels in our company’s work, including the actual technique of acting itself. We were not content to simply “imagine”” the characters, we worked to literally “imagine what they imagine” – to see with their eyes, to live in and move around under what we call “their ceiling of consciousness”. This was a terribly painful route of transgression but its aim was to bring the nightmare into the light of day: To face the horror and look beyond.

Some of you may recall, that the police discovered a tape of Christmas songs and sounds that they had constructed and played in apparent innocence, to friends and relatives. It was in effect a kind of “radio play” intended to make fools of all the listeners. It thrilled the makers with its conceit and deceit. Hidden within the tracks were the live recordings of the murders. They were making their own art for an audience of two. Themselves.

(Some time later, the writer Colin Wilson contacted me. He was in communication with Brady and it transpired that at practically every performance of our show a

Woman had been present who had secretly transcribed the piece and sent it to Brady. She believed (“imagined”) that she was Brady’s illegitimate daughter, and he certainly fed her fantasy as he had fed and cultivated those of Myra herself. Brady wanted direct communication and we passed letters – discussing Raskolnikov- his favourite book was Crime and Punishment, and his favourite film not surprisingly – The Third Man- and my theory was confirmed that he had been creating his own private theatre of terror. They were killing in order to produce their nightmare shows, to shock the world with their carefully composed horror. The murders were made for the media. And the audience had a gun to their own head with no choice whether to watch or not. This has echoes daily in The News. They were redeemed from their own personal sense of inferiority to a superior significance knowing they were the only ones who could read and understand the real Ur-text of their work, as Peter Brook would say. They were empowered almost to the level of Ipsissimus by their knowledge. I won’t go on about this remarkable correspondence, but to draw some simple observations from it on the fascist imagination:

First, Fascistic imagination is selective of its audience. It defines quite simply those to whom it speaks, and those to whom it threatens. It is an imagination not of bridge- building but of division, of increasing dualities, attempting to repress what it defines as the “unacceptable” imagination – the imagination of the question, doubt, of uncertainty, – as opposed to rigidity of static and statist art.

Ultimately it descends at breakneck speed into the most terrifying of all dualities- the duality of human v. non-human, the dehumanisation and subsequent demonization, of large sectors of humanity – The only true antidote to this is the constant reassertion and struggle to release the humanistic imagination from its confines. This is not an item some way down on the agenda. It is a question so central it permeates every other issue on the list. )

The world is made by our imaginings, and as paradoxical as it might seem, we learn therefore to IMAGINE EVERYTHING including the UNIMAGINABLE.

Every time we turn away from an image of horror, and put up barriers across the bridges that have been sprayed with the words – FORBIDDEN, DO NOT ENTER, EVIL, INHUMAN, DO NOT RISK UNDERSTANDING, DESTROY- we ourselves are potentially preparing the ground to become the same.

It is imperative upon us not to censor, but to face reaching from our humanity into the terrible inhumanity of others, in order to see the stepping stones, the wrong turns, the bad signs, warnings along the way.

It is important not to ban Das Kapital. Everyone should read it. Don’t knock down Gaudi’s monstrosity. Pile in your buses and take your snaps. Have faith in our understanding and imaginative compassion – neither to forgive nor to forget.

Art is not a retreat from the world, the world is art whether we like it or not. We create it. And destroy. Compassion and empathy are the key bridges to building peace, and they can only exist in the development of what I call the humanistic imagination. They are humanity’s highest attributes. And lead us ultimately to the revelation of “the wonder of being human”.

After seeing the recent exhibition of El Greco’s inquisitional nightmares, I’m still powerfully touched by the wonder, that a man can face such darkness and yet determine to communicate the dark warnings: His need to communicate, to search for the inner dialogue within himself, and to reach out to people he cannot know, nor even be sure exist, or ever will exist, seems to me a wondrous gesture.

Such communication from even the darkest hell (as Primo Levi’s writing illustrates) paradoxically expresses optimism in art and ultimately in humanity itself. It’s a profound belief that one true voice can change the world. But how do we go in pursuit of this? How do we move towards humanistic imagination in the face of an apparent barrage of distortion?

WE can’t all do a Thoreau and retreat to the hills but we can, (following the feminist strap line for social change “the personal is political”) work together to understand how our imagination is affected, perhaps even infected, and maybe find clues on how to break free? Discover new kinds of images, reveal new narratives, visions that are not submissive or manipulated, but are personally transformative, for us as individuals and potentially for our society as a whole?

As Mahatma Gandhi said – “Be the Change you want to See”.

We must first become ourselves – and the world we desire to see will manifest.

This seems to me a fundamental, humanistic, and democratic question that lies at the centre of all our lives. Some might say it already does. There are endless lectures, papers, articles on creativity, social/ political/economic arguments for the arts proclaiming key questions for culture and cultural diversity.

As Chair of ACE East Midlands I was involved in some of these debates. In terms of “process” itself, there are burgeoning workshops in “creative writing/ creative painting/ crochet/gardening/ cooking – opening the terrain of creativity” – Post-grad courses in writing for television/ writing for film/ writing for the theatre/ radio/ the novel/ poetry/ and there’s probably one on how to write haikus for e-mails.

I’m not mocking any of those – because some I helped to set up! They are intended in varying degrees to empower, depending on how much they are working to stop the “tail wagging the dog”- the dog being the individual artist’s search to find their own bark, the tail being the system’s own need to satisfy its own financial and other imperatives.

But what seems however to be missing is a “centre” that tries to pull together philosophically and practically, differing insights of practitioners, artists, scientists, madmen and magicians, in a non partisan investigation of the imagination.

In the sixties, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall set up the Centre for Contemporary Studies and it had, I believe, enormous impact. (Certainly on me at least as a student). Perhaps a Centre for the Contemporary Imagination is called for?

In its absence, I’d like to share a few practical ways to see perhaps something of which I’m speaking, to explore the imagination, and catch sight of sight itself. There are endless books and courses on exercises to develop your imagination. What I’m concerned with are exercises that reveal the state of the imagination itself.

I’ve drawn them from some unlikely sources. Some of the techniques are drawn directly from accepted practitioners of the arts: The richest source – the esoteric practice of hypnotherapy and magic. I worked as a controller for a deep trance medium for a few years, and others areas that have now acquired a semi-respectable standing like- guided image workshops (which is really just astral projection under a more fashionable name).

I once attended a guided image event at Dartington Hall in Devon. A London professor was exploring alpha/beta waves and putting people through a simple astral guided image process.

(I can’t do it now but basically; you lie down, imagine floating through the air, through a “cloud of unknowing” and then you are guided verbally down to earth, and asked to look at your feet and most people are surprised as to what they see- they’re wearing Medieval socks, or Wellington boots or Jesus sandals, then gradually they’re led to describe the world they see around them- castles, ruins, forests, whatever.)

This was a technique used by Doctor Arthur Guirdham’s, who saw this as proof of reincarnation – however a curious fact being, as he wrote in his book “The Cathars and Reincarnation” – practically everybody seemed to have been an Albigensian heretic burnt at the stake!

Another key area of study is to look at those obsessed by the threat of the imagination and the need to control it. Religious works are absolutely key. The heretics are of course fascinating, and leaving aside Crowley and Yeats, the magical diary of the séances held by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s 1st astrologer and his medium, Edward Kelly, are riveting. (If you want the shortened version of their journey you can read my play – Alchemical Wedding)

Indeed, medieval Christianity is a wonderful mine of such writings, and probably the most illuminating manuscript is Meditations by the founder of the Jesuit school, Saint Ignatius Loyola. Seminal reading. His desperate desire to save his followers from sexual fantasies, and dreams of depravity in all its forms, produces one of the finest studies on how the imagination works, and what “imaginative techniques” can be employed to control it.

Freud’s writings, of course from a similar fear of the throbbing repressed imagination, are also useful. Of course you have to stand them on their head to make any real sense of them, which leads me to what I call – DRACON WORKSHOPS.
DRACONS, by their nature, are “INVERSION” workshops.

The word dragon derives from the Greek dracon. Imagine a dragon. Most of us in our culture see the dragon as the enemy, spitting fire, awaiting some knight in shining armour or Harry Potter to slay it. It sits on the pot of gold, blocking the door to the castle where a damsel is imprisoned. In some way, it’s cast as hiding the truth, the Holy Grail, and only by it’s destruction can this be attained.

Curiously the derivation of dracon implies exactly the opposite. It’s from the Greek – ‘to see, look at, show’ – and in fact, in pre-Christian and oriental philosophy, the dragon is seen as the ally who will lead the searcher to a true realisation, to a higher consciousness. (This has begun to seep through at last in western story tales, for example – Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Farthest Shore’ trilogy).

Dracon workshops take images that we’re familiar with, and flip them over to see if there’s perhaps another meaning hidden beneath. And along the way we discover how difficult this is to do. It is an attempt to imagine the unimaginable, to see how we are really still controlled by internalised images we might well believe we are essentially free from. I’ll give one simple example:

I was leading a Dracon workshop at Riverside Studios with about forty people from diverse ages, ethnicity and backgrounds, some involved in the arts, but a large number not. In terms of religion very few of them acknowledged any strong feeling towards Christianity, and indeed there were a number who claimed it had no influence on their lives at all. All participants lived in the Western World.

A key rule of a Dracon workshop is no one needs explain or communicate what they see during it. It’s simply a meeting between you and your imagination. All you have to do is sit quietly for a few minutes, with your eyes closed for a few minutes. Nothing easier. I would simple offer them a verbal image to explore if they wished to.

The first image is the Dragon, turning it from foe to friend, but the second is-

The Virgin Mary and Child – Perhaps the most iconic image of all time.

For two thousand years artists had portrayed endless versions of this relationship.

It’s practically impossible to live in the western world, and not have seen an image of the Virgin Mary with child.

I asked them to visualise their own image of the Virgin Mary and Child. Perhaps they did it as an act of creative memory, recreating Raphael’s Madonna Of The Pinks, or pieced a picture together from their recollections of the school nativity play. I don’t ask at this point. Nor do I ask what feelings are evoked by this image.

But after five minutes most of them seemed well pleased. All had discovered that behind close eyes, guided in choice, and with references to call upon, they could do it. Within the confines of a certain cultural ethos their imagination could be triggered into play.

I asked them to do the same for another five minutes, but this time I suggested they imagine something else that we all were in agreement occurred within this story. I simply wanted them to track back the image of Madonna and child from the braying donkey and smiling sheep to a few hours earlier. I asked them to imagine Mary in that simple and essential, human act of giving birth. Easy.

Within minutes people were slamming doors on their way out, others groaning, as they twisted in contemplation. The remaining majority had struggled with massive resistance to imagine what? Why was it so difficult?

When asked if they believed in Mary as a Virgin Mother hardly any did. And clearly if Mary the mother of Jesus did exist, then she gave birth the way all women miraculously do? And this act would have been normal, beautiful, life affirming.

But apparently so guarded is the image of the Virgin Mary that this attempt produced in even non-believers, symptoms of sinfulness, and salacious sacrilege. It was, and they experienced the pain of it, a struggle towards a truly iconoclastic image. In order to arrive at it, other images had to be shattered, and the seer had to be prepared to walk on their broken shards to discover what came next.

What I want to stress is that the starting point for THE HUMANISTIC IMAGINATION is exactly where you are now.

It depends on how willing you are to uncover how your imagination is “controlled” and how open you are to searching out ways to break through to your unique deeper imagination – one that’s perhaps less contaminated, and more genuinely animated.

Here’s a lightning exercise to map out the landscape of the humanistic imagination. This is something you can try at home. You need a dragon for a friend- because this is the way to discover one’s own truly individual, hidden treasures.

To become one to one with IMAGE.

I – MAGE_ (MAGI) I – am the Magician of my own being. Image is power. I – Mage – is self-empowerment. We have this inner capacity. We’ve simply forgotten, not just the content of our dreams, but also the significance of the act of dreaming itself.

In order to understand the power of our imagination, you need to become a member of the PINK ELEPHANT CLUB. And I’m afraid that, whilst it’s technically open to everyone, it’s still necessary to pass a little exam, which can take you either fifteen minutes or a lifetime.

Here are the rules. Try it when you go home.

Three stages:

Stage 1. Eyes closed. Imagine a pink elephant for five minutes. There’s no catch, not a ‘dracon’ workshop. It won’t necessarily suddenly jump all over you! It’s for you to see how initially your imagination, under “guidance”, operates.

Do you put it together in bits, big ears here, and couple of ivory tusks? Is it black and white to start with? Do you have to paint it? Is it a pink cartoon elephant of Dumbo? Does it make it a sound? Does it smell? For Five minutes, play and explore. Discover your palate.

Here we are in the world of the commercial artist. My elephant tail is wagging the mammoth! But we’ve accepted willingly, so there can still be play, although the parameters are strictly controlled.

Now

Stage 2. Take a few moments. What’s flowing through your head? Select an image for yourself –it’s apparently of your own choice selected from that tumultuous stream of consciousness that’s endlessly throwing up its own flotsam and jetsam inside you- just pick one, a personal favourite, and now refuse all the others.

Beach the image, dry it out, bring it to life, and animate it. Does it change? Does it surprise? Does it rise up and lead you somewhere else?

Ninety per cent of artists, ninety per cent of the time works on the edge of this river. How much it’s really free choice, is another question. We would have to look at the nature of the specific image to explore that. But no matter how good you get at this here, membership of the Pink Elephant Club resides in the third and final stage.

Stage 3. This is something I’ve adapted from Tolstoy- he claimed that his club had a membership of only one who had ever succeeded in achieving the necessary qualification. Now it’s my ambition and dream that we should all join.

This is the final test.

I want you to imagine a circus ring. An empty space. You’re waiting for the great act. You’re a child, you don’t know what is, but in the immortal words of Stephen Sondheim, “something’s coming I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to be great, and the air is humming” …

Empty the space. Make no decisions. Don’t control it. You are audience not creator.

Do what Stanislavski says is the only thing the artist can actually decide to do simply– to clear the space. As images appear, say no, leave the ring, you’re not the finale. Keep that space totally empty for ten minutes, and then you can ask for your Pink Elephant badge!

Oh, but there’s one other condition- and this you must remember-

Imagine NOTHING And especially not the PINK ELEPHANT.

Now I’m not going to tell you what happens, but it’s an exercise with variations that I’ve done and encouraged other to do over the years, and it’s results still take me by surprise. And if we, as the creators are not surprised by our own creation, indeed if we, like Cocteau, are not ‘etonne’’ astonished – by our own imaginings, then how can we expect to bring others into the shock of the “wonder of life”.

But one thing I will tell you as encouragement, the pink elephant will keep trying to sneak back, a bum on the left hand side of the frame, its trunk creeping in like a snake, just say no, and suddenly, and most unexpectedly, there will be” animation” – your imagination will become alive and you will follow into life with the thrill of it.

A final coda: A Few last words. I want to return to “play” and to the little boy in the room. I want to offer the child a toy instead of a gun.

In 1938, the Dutch historian, J. R. Huizinga, a world authority on the medieval period, foresaw the imminent advance of Hitler’s fascism into his homeland. In the face of this threat, he wrote an extraordinary work trying to define what was the most inspirational and wonderful aspect of humanity.

His subject was “play”- the voluntary participation into structured forms of the imagination, from those of the playground to those of the playhouse, to the rituals of draughts and chess, to medieval tournaments and poetry. He believed “ the freedom of play” to be the specific target of fascism and totalitarianism.

Huizinga was searching desperately for the basic DNA code of what “play” might truly consist of – as the darkness approached. What created the distinction between the Art of Life and that of imposed Nuremberg ‘fascism of the imagination’?

He was trying to celebrate before it might be swept totally away. His aim was to remind us of how this very quintessential act marks out the extraordinary human potential that lies beyond the torment of the dualities created to divide and oppress us. His book is called Homo Ludens. Man as player.

I agree with him. I believe we should move beyond seeing ourselves simply as Homo sapiens, to imagining ourselves as beings that possess not only the power of knowledge but also the deep power of the heart – when we enter into a life of creative play.

That we understand there can be no play with a gun to our head. The battle between Heaven and Hell, War and Peace is no longer won on the playing fields of Eton, if indeed they ever were, but on the playing fields of the minds and hearts of each and every one of us. Thank you.

Copyright cinibr – Stephen Lowe 2004