Aspects of the Imaginal and Metaphorical

Like a black cat uncurling from deep slumber the ego yawns to be known. Perhaps this is the great descending desire of the unconscious. The egoic identity that invents something important we do not know. Paradoxically, it teaches us to dig beneath appearances of selfdom.

Unlike the unconscious the imaginal in “upward descent” is a vision of boundless awakened space. Appearances, including thoughts and events, occur within a relative position and direction, extension, and magnitude particular to the destination of reveries and dreams. Shadows and light, figures and spirits, lost horizons in outpoured skies more ardent than night embrace and magnify the stages of spiritual conditions. Pirouetted into the fraternal clime like the hair flight of the flame, knowledge is less objectification and more like the trompe l’oeil of relocation.

All that appears has a “place.” In the Imaginal there is the near recognition of outward forms and actualities. An expanse not of the literal world with defined geographic coordinates or borders but of energies and autonomous interior sensibilities. A force-field, an electrical flux, mutating and perpetually renewed at every instant and variable with each impulse that arises in the psyche. A bandwidth that tunes inward and simultaneously outward. The gaze behind the eyes, obedient to the spirit, that searches the precincts of numinosity. Highly integrated, an interface between Oneness and separation. A realm of “isness” free to becomes fully human. The divinatory looking that is the basis of both the psycho-cosmology of the imagination and the locus of the artifacts of consciousness.

Named by scholar Henry Corbin mundus imaginalis it is the world between the incorporeal, abstract, and the measurable, material, palpable reality we are so sure we know. It is the stem cell of creation. The archetype of synthesis, of “betweenness,” where images function solely to express themselves by forming, deforming, and reforming in one and the same moment. Not as ideas or ideals. Not to signify life or to symbolize it. But to embody it in its uniqueness. The “in between” of the polarity of matter and spirit (or intellect), conscious and unconscious that acts as a subtle realm, or field of middle ground connecting opposites. An obscure third that is both subject and object producing another transcendent function, the psyche.

Hierarchy is exchanged for permeability and imaginative consciousness. Analogue to what we normally perceive escapes our rationalism because the “where” resides distant to us. Ontologically real but beyond ordinary perception, “whose origin is nonrational and whose incursion into our world is unforeseen but whose postulate compels recognition”. (Corbin) The notion of a mental state or “interworld”, one that can be reached through imaginative capacities, goes back to the twelfth century Persian mystic-philosopher Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi founder of the School of Illumination.

There is no duality between matter and spirit, history, and myth. The imaginal is a space for painters of revelation. William James called it “eachness”, the precise particularities of essences. Remarkable and unbidden, in the bony planetarium of the head, they spontaneously constellate and are brought to light by “reorganized innocence”. In Rene Daumal’s non-Euclidian novel Mount Analogue it is called peradam, an object revealed only by one the who seeks it in virtue. For only virtue can reveal, in its virgin nakedness, the fluorescence of all perspectives at the heart of the image.

Metaphors differ from the imaginal in that they transport us from where we are to somewhere else: a scene, region, clearing or field. They transfer us (Gk. metapherein), expand our imagination. They can take unexpected turns and produce unexpected results. Often in non-linear, diverse, or incongruous ways, sometimes with shock or humor.

Metaphors dissolve traditional categories of cause and effect. They are just ambiguous enough to create levels of interpretation. They reveal emotion, summarize experience. They have no past, present, or future. They are figurative. They do not mean what they say because they “turn” through figures of speech. They can be intimate, inexplicable, mysterious, radical, and mythic shifting to address the need for something other than what is presented. Psychic loci affecting one’s role or task, indicators of our restlessness and somatic symptoms.

Metaphors make us itch with confusion. Similar to the imaginal they wink us into unpredictable visitations and parabolic places. Domains that are provocative or disruptive. “Televisual” submissions where acts of seeing are a realignment of what we seek to see. Aesthetic alembics distilling raw juxtapositions; that is, a mediation between something in terms of something else. Oscillating and heterogeneous they can exist side by side, image to image, or as one thing superimposed upon the other. The constitutive power of metaphor is, in the words of Yuri Lotman, Russian-Estonian literary scholar and semiotician, “a planet in the intellectual galaxy, and the image of its universum.”

How do we access the imaginal and metaphorical? The artist can access both through choiceless awareness, meditation, non-attachment, reverie, grace, and inspired letting go. The painting process is seen and experienced as an event, empty yet open. When there is an impersonal witness: a shift in the relativities of the moment that brings about a new disposition of energies. Anything can be anything. There has to be acceptance, however, that what was a moment ago is now gone and what will arrive has yet to come. Like the imaginal the “in- betweenness” contains the whole of it. In the metaphorical sense the work need not be seen in any particular way. Just be responsive to intimation, not certainty.

The artist’s inspiration comes into being somewhere in the deepest recesses of his ‘I’ wrote Andrei Tarkovsky. “It cannot be dictated by external, ’business’ considerations. It is bound to be related to his psyche, and his conscience, it springs from the totality of his worldview. If it is anything less, then it is doomed from the outset to be artistically void and sterile.” In other words, responding through the stirring and autonomous permutations that are midwife to the image. The Romantic poet Wordsworth called it “a sense sublime”. You turn the work inside out making it a living mystery to be explored and discovered. You channel each moment of painting into the veins of the universe until it breaks open in what I call “studio sublime.”

With incandescence of imagination, you will find the liberative potential in your work that links the personal with the archetypal. Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain wrote: “Let us put it like this: a spiritual – that is significant – phenomena is ‘significant’ precisely because it exceed its own limits, serves as an expression and symbol of something spiritually wider and more universal, an entire world of feeling and thoughts, embodied within it with greater or lesser felicity that is the measure of its significance.”