For the last five months, this blog has been about my adventures in strange and distant lands, growing up, and the minutiae that make life abroad different from life at home. Previously, it was a place for me to write my thoughts, share a few scraps of poems and prose, record religious experiences, and even track the infamous "leg experiment" (which by necessity has begun again here in blustery Scotland). I'm bringing back some of the archaic purposes of the blog; that I'm sharing it with an ever-growing audience is exciting and unnerving and makes me all the more aware that I'm not alone, and that I can't get by alone. Thanks for sticking with me thus far.
I have lost of my imagination. Not all of it, but the parts that made it good, that made it special and mine and entertained me (or so I have led myself to believe) for hours. I do not think in as many pictures, cartoons, half-sketches, images, as I used to. More and more, there are words running in a little string, or a voice half-narrating in my head some reptilian flickers of thought. Sometimes there are pictoral memories that accompany them, and even rarer are the sounds, and tastes and smells, although if I concentrate on something specific – like the apple and crème pasty I had the other day – I can pretty reliably summon up the images, the sensations, the sense of place.
When I was in eighth grade (or was it ninth? I have forgotten), I would try to read the unabridged English translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables every morning during breakfast before I had to go to school. First thing in the morning, I could barely make my eyes stumble over the sentences, let alone understand what was going on. I got nowhere near the end of the book, but I remember three things very clearly: the description of the abbe’s home, which was so thorough I would be able to guide you through it today, Valjean’s escape from parole and running along a series of Parisian walls as he set out to find the hapless Cosette, and Fantine’s death. It must have been one of my more lucid mornings or in the afternoon after school, but I remember reading Fantine’s death, and I hold it up as an ensign of my imaginative heyday. I see her still, a pale wax imitation of a person sketched in pastels, with a few strands of faded yellow hair sticking out of her bandage cap, her head against her chest in her death throe, wedged downward because she had hit her head on the metal bars of the bed frame. Her mouth slightly open in surprise, though not enough to show that her teeth were missing. Her hands spread out, one resting lightly on her chest and the other wrist-facing outward, half of the welcoming embrace you find on infant Jesuses in nativity sets. And what I remember most was the fire in her eyes, the light that drained out of them. Gone. I don’t even have the words to describe it, that slow-yet-all-too-quick-extinction in her eyes that let you know she was dead. The eyes were dull.
I cannot imagine like that anymore! Even my description is dull in comparison to the image I still have in my head. My current task for a class is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, which is beautiful and reminds me so much of Slaughterhouse 5, but Monica Douglas, whose nose is always read and who is good at math and a prefect, I cannot imagine well. Muriel Spark, the author, did not give me much more to go on, and aside from that telltale marker, she is a blob moving around in my imagination with an uncommonly red nose; that is the only definite thing about her.
I’m being unfair; most of the other characters I’ve encountered and tried to visualize are blobs too unless they have a distinctive feature about them. Like Hagrid. Hagrid is a very comforting character to imagine, because there’s so much of him to grab hold of without getting too specific. He’s big, tall, and straight, rather like a gigantic doorway with a lot of dark hair on top and pockets. The pockets and hair get mixed up sometimes, but that’s okay, because it’s all shadows mixed among other shadows, with a pair of dark eyes and big hands and ruddy black boots mixed in.
I spent some time trying to imagine an Edward Cullen, and needless to say, I didn’t come up with Robert Pattinson (or is his name George?). I won’t go into the details, but he ended up being a snarky-nosed, thin-faced anime character with bronze hair and a slightly glowy complexion. Bella was just a lump that did… I’m not quite sure what… and yet I was roped into caring for her, and once I realized what had happened, I kicked and screamed to get out of it. Watching the movie and reading a Lol-Cat comic strip about it helped immensely.
En fin du compte, I am disappointed with myself because I have let my imagination fade over time. If it's not taken out and used once in a while, it goes away and is replaced by mundane things like charts and worrying about finances. Those things are very important, too, but you can't - I can't - let them replace what I think is a fundamental of humanity.
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| Oh, the chocolate. You can find it everywhere and anywhere. See the white things in the middle? Those are chocolate hedgehogs (not pinecones). |
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