imagine that

I got a note from Gary Robbins, science writer at the San Diego Union-Tribune.  He said "I’m putting together a science page that focuses on the opening of UC San Diego’s Center for Human Imagination. I’m asking  (various writers)  a simple question: What is imagination?  . . . . "


Off the top of my head, I'd say imagination is what you get for free – and if you don't have it, you can't "purchase" it with any currency.

I suppose that brain scientists can locate some place or process that's the locus of imagination – but then again, I wonder.  No one ever suffered a head injury and said, "Oh, no!  There goes my imagination!"

Imagination seems to be a characteristic that eludes qualification.  Certainly there's a random factor to it – but just as certainly, there's a quality of distinction.   You could write an abstract poem that used a random number generator to "choose" its vocabulary (I've done that, in fact), but telling a good poem from a bad one made that way is discrimination -- the opposite of randomness.

I shouldn't try to improve on what Ernest Hemingway said about imagination – that "it is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting."

Joe