Imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality. ~Gaston Bachelard
Imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality. ~Gaston Bachelard
Story Challenge | Week 4 | Image ... Ezra Pound said imagism deals "with the fleeing and the immediate, and carries both intellectual and emotional force," so let's capture that force in our stories!
Quickly, some wonderful news to share! Although I had assumed nomination season was long over, I just learned that my essay, “The Cost,” one of the three long-form literary essays I published in 2023, was nominated for Best American Essays by the editors of The Ilanot Review. My other two 2023 essays were a craft essay, “That Little Voice,” in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and “What My Father Knew,” in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. The latter was actually first published online in 2022 by very prominent literary journal, but that journal pulled my essay offline immediately in response to a brief email written by my estranged half-sister’s wealthy boyfriend. It took me over a year to find a new home for that essay (given that it was now considered previously published and had a complicated backstory), and I am very grateful to the editors of DPA for republishing it so beautifully, and for fighting the powers of shame and silence that allow child abuse to flourish.
I wrote “The Cost” in response to “What My Father Knew” being pulled, and I actually got the news about the BAE nomination on Christmas Eve morning, but have not had a single moment between hosting our multiple large family gatherings to stop and soak it in. It means a great deal (I cried), especially because this essay directly addresses the incalculable cost of speaking up about childhood sexual abuse, and the painful silence, shame, and familial estrangement that can result. You can read “The Cost” here, and find out more about the its genesis and backstory in this Substack post (including my response to my half-sister’s wealthy boyfriend who wrote that brief email). Meanwhile, my profound gratitude to Ilanot Review and especially to my editor Marcela Sulak for doing such courageous and groundbreaking work in the world and for treating my essay with so much respect and care, for being brave on behalf of women, children, and the otherwise voiceless and powerless, and for celebrating my work in this way. Finally, my heartiest congratulations to Ilanot’s other nominees, Lydia C. Buchannan and Rachel Shai, as well as every other nominee. I am profoundly honored, and I am grateful to this Writing in the Dark community for the support you have shown my work this year.
Whatever holidays you do or don’t celebrate, I hope this season of the light’s slow return has brought you moment’s of peace and joy.
Thank you!
Images are not mere description or decoration. The most powerful writing is not random, and neither are the images that writing contains. Images have the potential to mean something, to be more than they first appear, and to exponentially deepen the meaning of our stories. This week’s six-part structured exercise will help us do just that!
Simone Weil told us that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” I believe this (and highly encourage reviewing this previous post on it before this week’s Story Challenge exercise). Attention is, I suppose you could say, my spiritual practice. Because how, I have come to wonder, can we actually claim to love without learning to pay attention? Without learning to see?
So yes, although I just hosted four major family gatherings at my house over the Christmas holiday —because it still feels wonderful to bring everyone together to decorate a sparkling tree and hang stockings and tell stories and bake and eat and put on children’s pageants and laugh and laugh and laugh—I do not consider myself a Christian and never really have, despite that my family attended a Lutheran church in my youngest years (my mother was ex-communicated from the Catholic church for her divorce, or so she said). The sermons never moved me, and neither did the songs. I never felt anything, even though I so dearly wanted to. I was always yearning for that connection to something outside myself. Then, as a young mother in my early twenties, I became interested in the pagan and Wiccan traditions, especially around reverence for the earth and all of nature, and the cycles of the year as well as a respect for the power of the feminine. I still hold regard for these beliefs and practices, and it also feels natural to me to have complemented them with a longtime informal study of Buddhism and meditation.
I share all of this to illuminate and perhaps underscore the sincerity and genuine fervor I feel when I say that I resonate with Weil’s view of attention as prayer. I also want to be transparent about the immeasurable importance I place upon the attentive image in our creative writing. Image is, in some ways, everything. So I guess this is kind of a disclaimer. I really, really care about image, because image represents our effort to pay attention to the world and then depict that world in a way that means something more than the image itself, and that evokes something in the reader, even if that “something” is simply an experience of being closer up to the world. It is like Georgia O’Keeffe said:
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
But … before we can speak in depth about how to use the power of image in our stories, let’s explore what an image actually is. Luckily, in my quest to find good readings on this topic, I came across something quite interesting on the Purdue Online Writing Lab website, which, in an essay called Image in Poetry, says this:
What is an image? This is a question that philosophers and poets have asked themselves for thousands of years and have yet to definitively answer. The most widely used definition of an image these days is [the one given by Ezra Pound]: “...an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
Pound also said, “Imagism deals with the fleeing and the immediate, and carries both intellectual and emotional force.”
The Purdue site also gives us this thought-provoking bit related to the philosophy of imagery:
Perhaps one of the most complete philosophical inquiries (and the one that seemed to create a dramatic break from classical philosophy) was that of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard believed that the image originated straight out of human consciousness, from the very heart of being. Whereas before the image was seen merely as a representation of an object in the world, Bachelard believed that the image was its own object and that it could be experienced by a reader who allowed him or herself the opportunity to “dream” the image (the “reverie” of reading poetry). The image then could not be intellectualized so much as experienced.
And this incredible bit on imagination, which, of course, is an etymological friend of the image:
Imagination
1) The mental laboratory used for the creation of images and new ideas.
2) “n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.” (Ambrose Bierce)
3) “Imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality.” (Gaston Bachelard, “On Poetic Imagination and Reverie”)
Ultimately, what Pound said when he expounded on his definition of image for Poetry magazine in 1913 in an essay called, “A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste” boils down to this:
1) direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective;
2) use no word that does not contribute to the presentation; and
3) in terms of rhythm, don’t write in regular metre (which is like the beating of a metronome) but in irregular rhythms (as in music).
Pound’s own Imagism masterpiece is said to be “In A Station Of The Metro,” in which he describes the faces of the metro riders:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
So, we are coming to some sense (or some increased confusion, which generally must precede any deeper sense) of what an image is, especially from a poetic point of view. But what about image in prose, in story? How do we as story writers make the most of images?
Actually, I feel that Pound’s advice is quite aligned to our work, too: direct treatment of the thing, no wasted words, and attention to sound (because language is music).
In addition, we want the images we use to matter. As I said at the outset of this post: Images are not mere description or decoration. Images have the potential to mean something, to be more than they first appear, and to exponentially deepen the meaning of our stories.
The images that we weave into our stories can have metaphorical reach. They are not (and should not be) incidental. Even though this work of meaning-making and carving out an undertone of metaphor may be mostly done in revision, the images we polish and retain in our work should ultimately be on purpose. And the best way for us to learn to effectively make images that matter is to first learn to allow those images to emerge from our practice of paying attention. If we can do that, we can next learn to recognize meaningful images when they show up on the page (which they can and will, once we stop forcing false images and start instead to allow real ones to grow).
I have one very specific example of this from The Part That Burns, where I describe a significant and painful moment just before my stepfather abandoned my mother and left for our home good—the narrator is ten years old here:
One morning before school, Mafia takes me to Mama’s bedroom. He pulls down my corduroys and rubs his hands between my legs like he does. He doesn’t do the chasing and tickling part. Mama’s dresser faces the foot of her bed. It has two white doilies on it. On one doily, a fancy brush and comb and mirror. On the other, two figurines with their arms outstretched. The bases of both figurines say, “I love you this much.” Mafia finishes. I listen to his footsteps going down the carpeted stairs into the hall. Next, the closet door opening and closing. Then, the front door. I do not know, as I watch from Mama’s bedroom window, that when Mafia drives away in his red truck, he will keep driving all the way to Duluth.
It took me quite some time to find the image of the dresser, the doily, that fancy brush and comb set I looked at throughout my early and middle childhood, and, from there, those figurines. It required me to look hard at that moment, to allow my imagination—that faculty that “forms images which go beyond reality, which sing reality” to land on that particularly meaningful image, an image with the metaphorical reach to say all that I cannot and will not about this loveless moment in this young narrator’s difficult life.
I have another couple of image-based scenes from two different novels to share as examples before our structured exercise on image, but first, I want to address the question of why I will not, in my stories, just explain things. Why must an image do the work? The reason I stretch so hard show what an experience feels like or means through a precise image rather than just summarizing it is this: I aspire for my work to reflect this essential wisdom of the acclaimed poet Paul Valéry, who famously and cleverly said: