Booklife Sliver: The Imagination (Draped with Venus in Furs)

(DeVotchka covers the Velvet Underground, transforming the song by re-envisioning it through their own musical imagination.)The imagination moves beyond passion: it is a life-long relationship with the world that transforms both the world and the writer. All of the best fiction hums and purrs and sighs with the imagination, and in this way fiction mirrors the best of life. But no imagination can long survive without recourse to curiosity and receptivity and discipline as well. It needs all of this as fuel for both its serious and deeply un-serious aspects. On the one hand, it is the most visible manifestation of a “soul” and on the other a quality that allows us to express the most absurd and silly aspects of play. During Medieval times, the imagination was often associated with the senses and thus thought to be one of the links between human beings and the animals. Only with the Renaissance was the imagination firmly linked to creativity and thus the intellect. The imagination defies easy measurement, even though we “know it when we see it.” It brings yet another level of uncertainty to an endeavor already supersaturated with the subjective — and yet that uncertainty is a kind of blessing. (Is it true that imagination cannot be taught? Yes. It is a brutal truth, too. But one with an escape clause. A latent imagination can be drawn out of its shell. A change of topic, focus, or even setting can also reveal in a writer an imagination not previously in evidence.)(The Velvet Underground had a different kind of musical imagination, a different fundamental vision of the world. Sometimes texture and pacing and cadence are a form of imagination)