I finished reading the Scarry book Dreaming By the Book today.

There are lots of interesting paths to go down prompted by her ideas, but I found the book a bit disappointing in terms of making some sort of ironbound claims for its thesis. (Not what I should have expected anyway,) Of course, my reading suffers from being done with a particular purpose in mind. Had I been reading it with an interest in aesthetics or with a mind on the intersections of narrative and cognition in literary terms, I’d have found much more to use.

However, it’s a far from barren read for me in research terms, introducing me to vectors of authorial action and instruction in the text-for-the-reader (the instructions the author gives) and in the ‘dictation’ that the author takes (for example, Blake’s experiences of practicing dictation: mimesis of the imagined world unfolding). I also found Scarry’s exegesis of the shield of Achilles as the story of how a social world is knit together by story and by the shared dance of imagery in the story very moving, and together with Kearney’s work On Stories (his book about narrative, heavily drawing on Ricoeur) and Henry Plotkin’s The Imagined World Made Real (about scientistic notions of intention and culture searching for paradigms that sufficiently interact with social sciences and humanities disciplines), there is a sort of Aristotelian arc that takes us all the way from genetics to the phenomenology of the imagination.

That’s what Scarry’s book is about.

Technorati Tags: book, fractal, imagination, reading, review, Scarry, writing

I agree with Scarry in many of the claims she makes about mental picturing: that it exists, that it is mimetic of cognitive processes, that it is seen in many writers similarly, outlining the formal qualities of imagination’s mimesis of cognitive production. I want to differ from her in her use of flowers, though, despite her several justifications of rarity, beauty and so on. There are several points I would have wished her to attend to. Firstly, that perhaps not all writers writing well of motion use floral supposition and its related practices. Although the arts are crammed with vegetable metaphor, texture and cognitive climbing frames, they are a primal cliché of mental production. Their place (I think) is to hold imagination in a realm that can be resolved easily at many different magnifications of intensity. This property of flowers is not one that Scarry makes clear. They do their job because of mentally-scalable properties they have, I think. Yes, they are mentally pictured as flowers rather than as descriptions of flowers, but they help us to compose vivacity in our imaginings not because, as Scarry suggests, of their scale, nor really because they have such a wealth of cultural and emotional resonance for us (though this is undoubtedly important). I think that flowers and, potentially, other imagined substrates have qualities (which I will mention) that allow us to sketch them and look as closely at them as we like. Scarry does not allow the possibility of other substrates to enter her description, (for clarity’s sake, presumably). But neither does she describe flowers’ properties as being that which makes them suitable for the task. My thought is this: that flowers are easily composed because they are sufficiently ‘standardised’ to be sketched. But just as our peripheral vision is ‘sketched’ then brought sharply into being by the fovea of the eyeball, so too can flowers (or their counterparts) be brought into more robust being by our observation. Because they couple ‘standardisation’ with a rich typology, we step the magnification of their reality up a notch. Because we can render the curve and sensation of petals easily (another standardisation), we can render more deeply again. I am describing flower’s qualities as fractal expression here. They appear fractal in nature because of their genetic expression of natural fractal structures. But the iteration of fractals is what makes them work. Something simple which can produce endless complexity. Nature builds fractals, imagination deconstructs them. Flowers are a highly successful imaginative substrate because we can iterate certain simple rules about flowers (their rarity, their texture, their typology) as far as our imaginative resolving power cares to go. I think that this is what makes flowers and vegetable imagery potent in our imaginings, not any special significance of flowers per se. But what about flowers as ‘flowers of the mind’? Cognitively we see flowers clearly because consciousness bodies forth the evolving consciousness of the flower through to the extreme of a conscious human mind. This is still described in the ‘fractal’ theory of flowers-in-imagination. Imagination itself is fractal, bodying forth the complexity expressed by the flower in different ways. It can mimic the flower, because it remains, at some deep level of iteration, cousin to the flower’s expression of itself. The natural world is our most ready source of such images to describe in imagination (setting off resonances at deep levels of our fractally-costructed consciousness as we do so), but flowers are not necessarily the only store of such imagery: they are merely convenient, a primal cliché.

These notes tend towards an aesthetics of recognition. That which is beautiful is beautiful because of the similarity it has towards consciousness. Consiousness recognises it. In the laws of nature expressed in fractal form, we have many levels of such expression, from cliff faces to ferns to bees’ wings. This resonates with the forms that build up consciousness. That which is beautiful resembles consciousness. That which we are more keenly conscious of, we can the more keenly mimic. (Or, perhaps, we can more keenly investigate them in mimicry?) (The latter seems more convincing). Beauty isn’t truth, it’s consciousness.

And what about this line I glibly tossed in: ‘Nature builds fractals, imagination deconstructs them’? It certainly seems that a lot of what Scarry describes in movement requires us to deconstruct mental images, to move, slide, stretch, decouple, weigh, ‘insubstantialize’ and otherwise pick them apart in order to ‘pick them into being’. What do we do when we imagine something? We take up a position vis á vis the imagined object: we have a kind of visuality, a kind of situated imagining in relation to it. The exact nature of that relationship is made by the work we do in examining the imagined object, We create it by imagining it. We examine our apperception of the imagined object in order to say what we know about it. (We talk about it in terms of what we think, about how we think of the thing we’re imagining. "The realness of the imagined flower is in x terms to do with how I have imagined it).

This doesn’t say much about books, unfortunately for me. But it does say something about how we encounter stories, and how authors enjoin us in acts of imaginative creation. My hunch is that books both enhance this experience and symbolise consciousness to us. As a technology for creating story, they reinforce the compositional instruction of the imagination over time. It does this by having a linear structure, which asks us to do things in a particular order, and a nonlinear physicality, which puts us in touch with the diachronic reality: we hold the whole story at once, and we can move at will across the time of the story to any point. It has a tactility which aids our imagining because we are in touch with the material, created on the plane of the story (the page, the leaf of the book). It also symbolises authorial intention. A book is necessarily (it seems) a story of some sort. We can use this, as artists. Books are to some extent symbols of bookness. There is a power of bookness that they appeal to. A social construction of the book, if you will, that is actually immaterial but invests all bookforms with the power to be books. Thirdly, this social construction extends roles, functions and strategies to the artist as a book maker. The artist is now a storyteller, author, poet, printer, distributor, publisher, etc, with access to otherwise inaccessible means of production and modes of validation for their work. (their fields of production) For me, Scarry’s book is pointing towards this blank area on the map where visual storytellers have found tools in the form of books to enlist the imaginations of their readers and themselves.

The book itself is a metaphor for consciousness, much as the flower is on a more primitive level. Who cannot feel the paper sliding between fingers, and imagine the ox-ploughed-track back to the beginning of the next line? Haven’t all books got those same ancestral traits? (Even when they take pains to disown them?)

How detailed do you want your imagined book to get? There is a formula for beginning that journey:

"Once upon a time…"