APPENDIX E
The Imaginative Type and Association of Ideas[167]
I have questioned a very great number of imaginative persons, well known to me as such, and have chosen preferably those who, not making a profession of creating, let their fancy wander as it wills, without professional care. In all the mechanism is the same, differing scarcely more than temperament and degree of culture. Here are two examples.
B......, forty-six years of age, is acquainted with a large part of Europe, North America, Oceania, Hindoostan, Indo-China, and North Africa, and has not passed through these countries on the run, but, because of his duties, resided there some time. It is worthy of remark, as will be seen from the following observation, that the remembrance of such various countries does not have first place in this brilliant, fanciful personage—which fact is an argument in favor of the very personal character of the creative imagination.
"In a general way, imagination, very lively in me, functions by association of ideas. Memory or the outer world furnishes me some data. On this data there is not always, though there should be, imaginative work proper, and then things remain as they are, without end.
"But when I meet a construction—it matters little whether ancient or in the course of erection—the formula, 'That ought to be fixed,' is one that rises mechanically to my mind in such a case; often it happens that I think aloud and say it, although alone. When going away from the architectural subject[168] under consideration, I make up infinite variations upon it, one after another. Sometimes the things start from a reflex...."
After having noted his preference for the architecture of the Middle Ages, B...... adds (here he touches on the unconscious factor):
"Were I to explain or attempt to explain how the Middle Ages have such an attraction for my mind, I should see therein an atavistic accumulation of religious feeling fixed in my family, on the female side no doubt, and of religiousness in ecclesiastical architecture—these touch.
"Another example illustrating the rôle of association of ideas in the same matter. One Sunday night I left Noumea in the carriage of Dr. F...... who was going to visit a nunnery five leagues from there. At the moment of our arrival the doctor asked what time it was. 'Half-past two,' I said, looking at my watch. As we stopped in the convent court in front of the chapel I heard the lusty conclusion of a psalm. 'They are singing vespers,' I remarked to the doctor. He commenced to laugh. 'What time are vespers sung in your town?' 'At half-past two,' I answered. I opened the chapel door in order to show the doctor that vespers had just been held: the chapel was vacant. As I stood there, somewhat non-plussed, the doctor remarked, 'Cerebral automatism.'
"I may add here, by association of ideas. The doctor had seen through me, and had with fine insight perceived why I had heard the end of the psalm. The incident made a great impression on me, all the more as ever since the age of eight my memory testifies to a like hallucination, but of sight in place of hearing. It was at L...... that on Good Friday they rang at the cathedral with all their might. It was the very moment before the bells remain silent for three days, and it is known that this silence, ordained in the liturgy, is explained to children by telling them that during these two days the bells have flown to Rome. Naturally I was treated to this little tale, and as they finished telling it, I saw a bell flying at an angle that I could still describe.
"But this transforming power of my imagination is not present in me to the same extent as regards all things. It is much more operative in relation to Romano-Gothic architecture, mystic literature, and sociological knowledge than in relation, for instance, to my memories of travels. When I see again, in the mind's eye, the Isle of Bourbon, Niagara, Tahiti, Calcutta, Melbourne, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the graphic representation is intellectually perfect. The objects live again in all their external surroundings. I feel the Khamsinn, the desert wind that scorched me at the foot of Pompey's Column; I hear the sea breaking into foam on the barrier reef of Tahiti. But the image does not lead to evocation of related or parallel ideas.
"When, on the other hand, I take a walk over the Comburg moor, the castle weighs upon me in all its massiveness; the recollections of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe besiege me like living pictures. I see, like Chateaubriand himself, the family of great famished lords in their feudal castle. With Chateaubriand I return in the twinkling of an eye to the Niagara that we have both seen. In the fall of the waters I find the deep and melancholy note that he himself found; and after that I think of that dark cathedral of Dol that evidently suggested to the author his Génie du Christianisme.
"In literature, things are very unequally suggestive to me. Classic literature has only few paths outwards for me—Tacitus, Lucretius, Juvenal, Homer, and Saint-Simon excepted. I read the other authors of this class partly for themselves, without making a comparison. On the other hand, the reading of Dante, Shakespeare, St. Jerome's compact verses on the Hebrew, and Middle Age prose excites within me a whole world of ideas, like Wagner's music, canto-fermo, and Beethoven. Certain things form a link for me from one order of ideas to another. For example, Michaelangelo and the Bible, Rembrandt and Balzac, Puvis de Chavannes and the Merovingian narratives.
"To sum up: There are in me certain milieux especially favorable to imagination. When any circumstance brings me into one of them, it is rare that an imaginative network does not occur; and, if one is produced, association of ideas will perform the work. When I give myself up to serious work, I have to mistrust myself: and in this connection I shall surprise people when I say that in the class of ideas above indicated the subject exciting the most ideas in me is sociology."
M......, sixty years of age, artistic temperament. Because of the necessities of life, he has followed a profession entirely opposite to his bent. He has given me his "confession" in the form of fragmentary notes made day by day. Many are moral remarks on the subject of his imagination—I leave them out. I note especially the unconquerable tendency to make up little romances and some details in regard to visual representation, and a dislike for numbers.
"It happens that I experience sharp regret when I see the photograph of a monument, e.g., the Pantheon, the proportions of which I have constructed according to the descriptions of the monument and the idea that I had of the life of the Greeks. The photograph mars my dream.
"From the seen to the unknown. In the S. G. library. A slender young woman, smartly dressed—spotless black gloves—between her fingers a small pencil and a tiny note-book. What business has this affectation this morning in a classic and dull building, in a common environment of poor workmen? She is not a servant-maid, and not a teacher. Now for the solution of the unknown. I follow the woman to her family, into her home, and it is quite a task.
"In the same library. I want to get an address from the Almanach Bottin. A young man, perhaps a student, has borrowed the ridiculous volume. Bent over it, his hands in his hair, he turns the leaves with the sage leisure of a scholar looking for a commentary. From the empty dictionary he often draws out a letter. He must have received this letter this morning from the country. His family advises him to apply to so-and-so. It is a question of money and employment. He must locate the people who, provincial ignorance said, are near him. And so goes the wandering imagination.
"When I feel myself drawn to anyone, I prefer seeing images or portraits rather than the reality. That is how I avoid making unforeseen discoveries that would spoil my model.
"If I make numerical calculations, in the absence of concrete factors, the imagination goes afield, and the figures group themselves mechanically, harkening to an inner voice that arranges them in order to get the sense.
"There may be an imagination devoted to arithmetical calculations—forms, beings intrude, even the outline of the figure 3, for example; and then the addition or any other calculation is ruined.
"I revert to the impossibility of making an addition without a swerve of imagination, because plastic figures are always ready before the calculator. The man of imagination is always constructing by means of plastic images.[169] Life possesses him, intoxicates him, so he never gets tired."
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[167] See Conclusion, [II], above.
[168] B...... is not an architect.
[169] We see that the speaker is a visualizer.