prefacing an imaginative life • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Area	a creative life

	prefacing an imaginative life gary e. davis	September 4, 2019

When I chanced to discover J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei’s Life of Imagination last March (actually, The Life..., October 2018), I was so delighted by merely the book jacket description that I decided to write to that, relative to its key phrases, during the several days before it arrived. I would intend to have fun, and I did. After all,...

March 9 , 2019

I have an imaginative life!—which feels facile to say. I know my title’s lame:
“a creative life.” It’s understatement, actually. I hope you’ll enjoy the path.

“He has an imaginative life—proven over many years by so much, well, playing around”—via two Web sites. “It’s not...not discursive—not professorial.”
(Well, often the play was and is.

September 4 again

But he was presuming a reader who already knew that the parts of what he’d done (here prefacing lastly, as if writing against his own completed pretense) are linked at the top of each page to some vaguely correlate part of his large-scale project,
as if anyone would care to “have that” linking....

March 9 , 2019

Yeah, I suspect that connecting parts of “a creative life” to Project “Area home” pages is not useful.

This project becomes a kind of grand scale preface to The Project, not directly associable to particular Areas of that. But I privately think of parts here in association with Project Areas. So, you have that, but, again, it’s probably not useful.

So The Life of Imagination (on order now) by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (“known” to me for over a decade) will be a chance to see imaginative life pro-spected by a kindred traveler?—or is that my imagination anticipating Jennifer
to so be?

In any case, I want to learn about “the” (?) imaginative life I have, from her stance (place, view).

Is that to be her imaginative life highly scaled to exemplary conceptuality of the imaginative life?

My, her, the finding—or not—is anyway a chance to be resonance (a liminality) of a life with the text—merely her text?: ours by my reading—hoping to be largely echoed (if not mirrored) by “her,” playing forth with our text, making leaps of mine. And re-grounding it all in the times.

Yet, first, he wants “to learn about...imaginative life I have,” then he’ll write to
the text for her, he promised in a note passed through the air, when she was glad
to know he cherished her poetic longing.

“I’ve had an imaginative life—imaginary, fantastical, idealizing—ever since I was
a precocious kid.”

But he digresses.... Well, not really, because some sensibilities find an “Inner Child” in it all, e.g., C.G. Jung and The Child archetype.

Anyway, I want to first dwell with a standard definition of ‘imagination’ before
I share an eight part improvisation (a brief journey!) on imaginability, then
to dwell with Imagination, which I’m not going to open until I finish here, drawn into flight by anticipating her desired gift in my horizon.

But I do use phrases from the book’s description—write to those, play with those— in my fare.

Lexicography is not like glossary-making. It’s rigorous ethnography of words
that may implicitly evince questioning why one would grant more (give more?)
to understanding a term, usually by interest in conceptions that the term is taken to trope—as if one imagines more for the term than history echoes.

Says Merriam-Webster Unabridged, of sense in the 14^th century, “1 : an act
or process of forming...as through synthesis...; also : ability or gift of forming....” As process, this was way back already associated with “mechanisms of defense” (still here at def. 1), as well as “especially for the purposes of artistic or intellectual creation.”

So, implicit here is self investment, not merely mental event by intent. To some extent, one’s interest is mirrored by “a conscious idea or mental image,” which implies an ambiguity, if not question: Is the idea merely an image? Or is the image symbolic of an idea?

In any case, it’s about “something never before wholly perceived in reality
by the imaginer (as through a synthesis of remembered elements of previous sensory experience or ideas modified by unconscious mechanisms...” Whew!
So, it’s ambiguous whether remembrance or modification of the emergent is more about “forming” a presence or more about presenting it.

Implicit, yet integral, is interest in forming remembrance, interest in forming
a modification. As process that one feels subject to, it’s as if an other is interested in forming what one witnesses. To be “merely one’s imagination,” there’s a sense of being visited by another’s intent.

But that visitation might be quite creative, because imagination came to denote (coming into modernity now?) “2 a : creative ability : GENIUS.” Indeed, a cultural attention to so-called “genius” was a hallmark of early modernity’s romance of individuality, which also attested “2 b: ability to confront and deal with a prob-lem,” that is: to become no longer a subject of (subject to) what is problematic. Subjectivity itself is antedated by ability to form by interest, to create, or to cope. Subjectivity of oneSelf is antedated by individuation of Self (temporal fullness of the life so far).

Yet, objectivist tendencies in modernity focused less on ability than phenomenon, perhaps: “4 a : a mental image, conception, or notion formed by the action of imagination b : a creation of the mind; especially : idealized or poetic creation”;
or is it “c : fanciful or empty assumption”? Is it admirable insight or dismissible idiosyncrasy?

“Is it just me, or is it truly...”

begenic love—>