Baptising The Imagination

“That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptised…” 

These are the words chronicled by C.S Lewis in his Autobiography, Surprised by Joy: My imagination was… baptised, he says.

His imagination was baptised. What a strange concept - how can something immaterial; such as an imagination, become baptised?

The classical philosophers of antiquity said, ‘the soul never thinks without phantasm.’ What is being supposed here by the ancient philosophers, is that thought needs a material image and needs something to carry that material image; it needs something to carry that thought. This mental process is what we call… imagination. The imagination is different from other mental processes; such as perception and memory, in that, in order to perceive means that something would already need to be there, so that we might realise or understand it. This is what we call the mental process of perception. Memory on the other hand, requires that something would need to already exist; that something would need to have occurred in order to remember. This is the mental process of remembering. But the imagination is different. The imagination creates its image. There is nothing that exists until the imagination produces it. The imagination is not then or now, the imagination is a generation of processes. Thereby, the imagination bridges the gap between perception and memory, as it works to picture things – it is the materialisation of thought.

 So, C.S Lewis is essentially telling us that this part of his mental process was baptised.

But to baptise is to initiate a person into a particular activity or role. Once again, we might beg the question, how can one baptise a thought process? And how did this even happen? 

 The simple answer… with a book.

 How odd, you might say? How does one’s imagination become baptised by a book? 

 When we think of baptism or an initiation, we might think of a crying child being dipped into a pool of holy water, adorned in white garbs and a Priest anointing oil on their forehead. There present and surrounded by parents, god parents, family and friends; praying and preparing the child to enter into the universal family of God. Or perhaps it’s a ceremony in a castle, where all the esteemed guests of the Kingdom, gathered in a formal celebration, are dressed in their finest garments and present to witness the crowning of a King or Queen; ready to assume responsibility for an entire province. You may even think of a group of tribal Aztecs, steeped into the depths of the rainforest, chanting around a fire among the village people - gilded in traditional dress, dancing, singing and preparing ancient rituals for the initiation of a young boy transitioning and entering from boyhood into the realm of manhood.

 But that’s not what happened to C.S Lewis. His moment did not take place in a church, or in a castle or around a traditional fire. He wasn’t adorned in expensive garbs, or had his head anointed with oil. He wasn’t surrounded by family, friends,  the entire kingdom or his village. His initiation took place in an ordinary train station. In an ordinary carriage. With an ordinary book. And this is what he recounts occurred:

 “Turning to the bookstall, I picked out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names Saxon and sweet as a nut—‘Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new book… “The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new… That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer [...] I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes”

 In his essay on fairy stories, Tolkien says, “The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed… Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality or are flowing into it.” 

This is what had happened with C.S Lewis, whilst reading his book, Phantastes. It was the gap that had been bridged between perception and memory, that is to say, his imagination that was realised. The book evoked in him and permitted him to charter into another realm; whilst revealing something of the existing world in which he inhabits. An imaginary world must show us what kind of place it is, and in doing so, cause us to ask ourselves what kind of universe we live in. So, our perceptions and memories are coming into fruition. Lewis’ imagination was baptised by the MacDonald’s novel because, in the end, he saw in Fairyland a reflection of what is true about our world. This is what good art alike, does – it tells us something not only about our society, history and culture, but also about ourselves.

 Ok, so what does all this reading and entering into a secondary world have to do with architecture and design?

In a most recent interview on Art and Architecture, Juhani Pallasmaa recalls: "When I first began to study architecture, and as a young architect, I thought that architecture was the buildings out there in the world. I have then gradually learned that architecture is a mediation between the world and our minds. So [good] architecture tells us something about the world. It tells us something about history, about culture, about how the society works and finally, it tells us who we are. And good architecture, or art in general, enables us to live a more dignified life than we could without art."

 So, like good books, the architect or designer is supposed to reveal, through the creation of the built environment, something of our world – of who we are. In other words, it’s supposed to tell us a story about ourselves. And through that imaginative story, the architecture produced reveals knowledge, because cultures learn about themselves, to themselves; through their art.

Juhani argues that the best way to enter into this phantasmal mental process, is to read good books. He points out that reading is perhaps the most important activity any person imbued in the arts can exercise. Good books, he emphasises, are real sources of wisdom. He says, “Reading is a fantastic exercise for imagination because as we all know, although we rarely stop and think about it, when we read good books, we construct each one of the figures, every room, every space, every house, entire cities, we construct in our imagination… That’s a wonderful exercise for anyone to rain one’s imagination, is to keep reading good books. And those do not have to be books on your own profession. I often tell my students of architecture ‘don’t read architecture books, read good literature and poetry and books on art…”

 Jordan Peterson, in a recent interview, speaks of the importance of cultural canon; which essentially refers to a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works. A genesis of canons, if you will, that shapes the discourse of art and culture at large - the source of wisdom, as Juhani points out. Peterson dispels the long held notion of post-modernism regarding the claim that there are no canons, and if there are, then they are a construction of a patriarchal enterprise. He shuts down the suggestion that canons are relative, and he pushes the idea that the canons are as true and important, and I would argue, as true and possibly even more important than all the scientific theories that have come about in the past century. Why? Because they reveal truths about us that can’t be measured, or explained, using the scientific method.

He goes on to explain what makes a book a book of canon, and the relationship in which they exist with one another. He demonstrates that some books have hardly any relationship to other books; and they could be trivial books. But if you go to the past, then books can be rank ordered to the degree that they have influenced other books, like citations in some sense. And the books that have influenced the largest number of other books are the canonical books. He deliberates, “the canonical books… you have to know them because it is implicit in everything else… and so you start there and you have that knowledge and it gives you the foundation… a metaphorical foundation, a conceptual foundation, a mythical foundation that you can use... well now then Shakespeare opens up to some degree, Milton opens up to some degree, Dante opens up to some degree… well you ask, why should they open up? … because you’re at least, in part, a historical creature… well then, those books are about you. The patterns in those books are the patterns of your perceptions and your actions. And without understanding them, then you don’t know who you are, and you can’t guide yourself properly through life. And so, you come into university and you encounter experts, and they say look, this is canonical… why? because it’s had a disproportionate influence on everything else. So, there is something here that you need to know about because it’s about you and it isn’t about you that is here now - in some sense, it’s about the you that can unfold across time in the best possible way, so each of those works is a call to adventure…” He goes on to explain that these canons, in turn, influence other great works of art. “ every painting that is a great painting or a building like the Kings Chapel… if that’s not a call to adventure, then I don’t know what it could be. These great ancient buildings that Europe is littered with; people were aiming at something beyond themselves. Beyond the span of their lifetime. They engaged in the collective manifestation of these great works to aim to participate at aiming at something that was beyond them. It was a divine aim. They had this will to produce this beauty that transcended centuries… maybe the will that produces…”

To invoke in this sacred task of the imagination. is to invoke in the richness provided by writers’ texts, and evoke vivid images; reproducing the deep structure of perception, and drawing on memories; both of the reader and of the writer. This initiation is so important, in my view, for the creation of good and holistic built environments.  It ensures that we are not designing according to fads or trends, but that we are, in fact, creating for the human person. That we are creating for a time and a place and a culture. That we are creating something timeless that transcends the ages. Something that will provide a snap shot of who we were and who we are and inspire generations after us of who they can become. As Juhani famously states, “Greatness is measured by timelessness.”

Imagination sets us on the path to knowledge. Imagination is productive. It constructs schema. That production, which is Art, discloses truths about the world by giving those truths an appearance. This is our role as designers and architects and artists. To sum up, “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space,” as Mies Van Der Rohe, famously and perfectly stated.

Stay tuned for part two of the blog, where I will delve a little more deeply into the embodied image and imagination and imagery in architecture. In the meantime, do yourself a favour, and pick up a good book.

And if you would permit me, can I recommend one, in particular? Of course, any of the classical literary texts are great, but one of my favourites is ‘Crime and Punishment,” by Dostoevsky. It’s a great book, and I have no doubt that it will open up portals and vistas for your mental processes.

Pictured above is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman. It is the apotheosis of this soul-searching - a vast grid of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth.

The Architect, drawing from perception and memories, has produced, with his imagination, an abstraction to powerfully convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality. As we can see, the complexities of human emotion being displayed, is being expressed in this beautiful piece of art.