MAY 10, 2021 – Walk with me here . . . Early yesterday evening as I was returning from my “hill climbs” in Little Switzerland, the reclining sun played with my imagination. Backlighting nascent leaves, splashing across greening yards, and casting playful shadows onto westward facing walls, sun beams worked their magic.
Magic, I thought. In the light’s play, I pretended to see things that I knew didn’t exist—whimsical creatures in a make-believe world. This exercise triggered a memory—a bike ride, with my cousin Mats-Åke, late one summer evening along an ancient, narrow road in Småland (Sweden). The forest yielded to a bog over which a mist had formed. Mats suggested that we’d reached the land of the trolls, and I agreed wholeheartedly. We laughed at ourselves, but with only slightly more imagination, we could have frightened ourselves; we could have seen an actual troll or two.
. . . Back to my walk yesterday just before sunset. I contemplated “imagination” in a larger sense. Birds sing, and so do whales; otters play, and chimpanzees laugh; but what creatures other than our own species . . . imagine? What Baltimore oriole, when building a nest, decides to add a roof with a rakish overhang? What eagle flies for pleasure, pretending it’s an airplane?
We’re the only creatures that can pretend to see trolls in the bog; the only species (on earth, anyway) that can imagine all sorts of wild and wonderful things and combine them to create whole universes of everything . . . imaginable.
Surely if aliens from other worlds were to come down to earth, they’d be impressed by our imaginations and our ability to “pretend.” The challenge would be to know where to begin—and where to end. In the course of our guided tour, we’d likely be as impressed as our extra-terrestrial visitor—perhaps even more so. “Damn, but we’re good!” we’d be apt to say, as we inventory the full breadth of our powers of imagination.
But then might come the moment of shame, when the alien asks us to explain the point of killer drones or thermo-nuclear bombs delivered by guided missiles. And the moment of shame and embarrassment when we’re asked to spell out how a human being could possibly fall for the idea that President Biden “stole” the election from You-Know-Who or that the Covid-19 virus is “fake” or, alternatively, it’s not fake but the vaccines against it deliver a nano-micro-chip with mind-control powers.
Suddenly, we realize that human imagination is the proverbially double-edged sword; that the mental capabilities that allow filmmakers to “imagine” the next Pixar pic also trick human minds into thinking just about anything that defies the laws of . . . reality.
Just by chance, do the words “cult” and “religion” come to mind—and how the imagination can distinguish the two? But that’s all about . . . “faith”—a very touchy subject. If imagination produces faith, so does imagination allow the mind to question faith.
Explain that to an alien!
For now, let’s just pretend . . . we’re on our own.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
