Tag: imagination

  • Future Tensed

    Thanks to Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, (Vol 2 of The Baroque Cycle) I’ve had to do something that I haven’t done since I started reading – read two books in parallel. Every 200 pages of The Confusion, I take a break and read a volume of The Hunger Games. Neal Stephenson, to me, is genius, and I’ve been a fan since I first read Snowcrash. I could speed read The Confusion, but I really want to pay attention and understand the nuances, the humour, the larger thought and so on. I cannot do that for 800 odd pages, hence this shift.

    I only understood the ‘connection’ after I started reading The Hunger Games. The Baroque Cycle is set in late 17th-early 18th centuries, and uses an excellent mix of historical and fictional characters to cover a whole variety of themes. In some ways, it uses the past to understand the present. The Hunger Games, on the other hand, is set in a dystopian future, and shows a potential fate of humanity. It uses cues from the present to predict the future. The connection ends there, almost. Though at massively different levels, both require imagination, the former at a much more larger scale.

    That’s what led me to think about imagination in the present. We’re in the midst of probably the biggest upheavals in the history of humanity – new technologies emerging at a rapid pace, institutional realignment, socio-cultural changes, behaviour alteration and so on. All of this means, that collectively, we’re having to run really fast just to cope. Where does that leave time for imagination? In fact, such is the assault on senses that I wonder if anything really disruptive is being written in the science fiction genre these days (I hope to be proven wrong and pointed in the right direction) because except for things like teleportation and time travel, pretty much everything that was science fiction is getting played out now, and so busy are we – trying to keep abreast – that science fiction is merely extrapolating the present (read) or giving alternate versions.

    There is a term in psychology called Functional Fixedness, wiki-defined as “a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.” With my limited knowledge, I wonder if that’s the dystopian future of the human imagination.

    until next time, the end of collective imagination

  • A momentous truth

    Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya’s “The Storyteller of Marrakesh” is not among my favourites, mostly because it didn’t deliver what I look for in  a work of fiction. But I’m a fan of it for a different reason – there is prose in it that will haunt me for a long time.

    The book’s narrator begins the tale with the statement that there is no truth, because the moment it is revealed, it is transformed into one of many possible opinions. A few pages later, he says “Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.“

    In terms of memory augmentation, despite the best documentation, I’ve felt many times that there are moments that have not been captured fully, or perhaps not captured enough at all. A presence that is felt, but cannot be captured. It is humbling to realise that acts which we lay importance to, moments which we considered precious, will be forgotten altogether or remembered in a different way from what actually happened, not just by others, but by us too.

    Much later in the book, a character shares a wonderful story, “This professor while addressing a large audience on the subject of beauty, asked that a piece of ambergris be passed from hand to hand until, by the time it reached the last person at the back of the massive hall, it had crumbled away to nothing. But the entire hall smelled of ambergris, and every person there had been touched by its essence. The professor concluded his lecture at that point, stating that he had nothing more to say on the nature of beauty.”

    ..of life, I would say. The smell of ambergris would drift between memory and imagination. If someone found words to describe it, it would exist in the imagination of the reader, but probably in a much different form than it actually was. The moment was the truth, everything else would be an opinion.

    until next time, truth be told…