The Challenge of Imagination

Quirkiness reveals more of the man and the times than the normalcy of everyday life, I think. It is as if the screen of conformity is moved and what lies underneath is revealed.

There are two instances of this that I came across recently, both while reading:

It seems that W.B. Yeats, who was then the director of The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, rejected Sean O'Casey's play, The Silver Tassle stating that the war-play had not the authenticity of experience. "You are not interested in the great war", Yeats told O'Casey, "you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions." Yeats' objection was that dramatic power is paramount in a creative work, and there is no place for "messages" in literature. Yeats declared, "Among the things that dramatic action must burn up are the author's opinions; while he is writing he has no business to know anything that is not a portion of that action" (Keith Jeffery, "The last battle")

This is wonderfully liberating in that drama is all that is important in a story, popular novels and cinemas testify to the power of this observation- action is what counts in a work.

But it is a bit stifling that we shouldn't write about what we don't know: don't the tales of imagination, the fantasies and the fairy tales have no authenticity?

I don't think Yeats meant quite that. He himself wrote some great imaginative poems. I think if you are given to imaginative explorations- a daydreamer! a man inhabiting a world of fantasies!, Yeats would have approved your excursions into the world of make-believe.

I think it is the striking of a pose that comes so easily to us, which Yeats found distasteful.

(Dedicating the reopened Taj to the victims of terrorism- easy sloganeering, but what does it do to them? A great crowd of people stood on vigil watching it burn, may be a free take-home lunch? It would have been something useful and gratifying to those who irrespective of class and creed felt anxiety for Taj and the people in there).

What I meant to say is that this quirky act of Yeats reveals more of his personality, than what we would have come to know from his usual, habitual activities.

And here is something that reveals the spirit of the times:

During the 1960s San Francisco, Ramon Sender composed The Tropical Fish Opera. An aquarium had five lines painted on it and "the musicians seated around it played the notes made by the fish as they swam by. At one performance some of the fish refused to move, and the violinist Nathan Rubin dutifully played one unvarying tone, while the clarinettist Larry London, bored, began improvising, at which Rubin swung around and barked, "What's the matter, London? Can't you read fish?"" (Stephen Brown, "Rejoyce, Rejoyce")