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    On Imagination
    On Imagination
    On Imagination
    Ebook41 pages16 minutes

    On Imagination

    By Mary Ruefle

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    About this ebook

    "It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations.

    Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSarabande Books
    Release dateJul 25, 2017
    ISBN9781946448026
    On Imagination

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      Book preview

      On Imagination - Mary Ruefle

      A man and a woman are one.

      A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.

      A man and a woman and a jug of maple syrup and an old tennis shoe and a Roman statue are one.

      A woman and her imagination are one.

      It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea.

      I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it. It is my daimon if ever there was one. The daimon is a kind of twin that prowls alongside, is most often vivid when things are tough, that pushes you toward the life you signed up to live before you fell into the amnesia of birth and forgot the whole affair.

      I am going to tell you now, before I begin, what my conclusion is to my thoughts on the imagination: I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one.

      Wittgenstein: Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition.

      The evolution of our languages—the different languages of the human species—was a great act of imagination that continued enacting itself over a very long period of time

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