The Supremacy of Imagination

I watched Fellini's 8 1/2 with friends today. Fellini is the reason I moved to Italy in the '80's.

8 1/2 is the story of a film director experiencing creative blockage until he decides to make an autobiographical film. The film he chooses to make is a surrealistic collage of personal history, Italian popular culture, and esoteric/metaphysical, and religious references.

The protagonist Guido is a serial adulterer. He is physically, psychologically and emotionally exhausted. He is experiencing mid-life regret, but his imagination, and his sub-conscious are fierce. They keep serving up memories, and concepts for future creation.

I watched this film with a strong desire to root Guido on. The artist in me wished him to succeed. His unfaithfulness to his wife caused my friends, and I to have a philosophical conversation about long term committed relationships/marriage. Is it ever acceptable to cheat? Do artists deserve a special dispensation from monogamy? What would we allow our partners, or demand for ourselves?

The life of the imagination grants us so much freedom. Is there a correlate responsibility that accompanies this freedom? Or does the imagination grant us exemption? Does this exemption only exist if all sins are committed imaginarily? In a conversation that Guido has with a Cardinal

he is told that we live in the city of god, or of the devil. In which city does the imagination reside?

Do you believe?

I've always been a believer, in magic, in faeries, in improbable happy endings. I am a romantic to the point of feeling it is a disease. The down side of all this optimism is that sometimes I tumble down a hole, and cease to believe in anything, even in my own ability to be a positive force in my own life. When I am going down, down, down it seems like I will never be able to get up out of that darkness. Somehow miraculously there always is a light at the end of the tunnel, and a rebound that allows me to bounce up from the dark back into the light. It is a never ending miracle to me that when the darkness recedes, and I have re-entered the land of the living that happiness, and the light are stronger than ever.

I know that there clinical terms for personalities like mine, but that seems irrelevant to me because I will never go on anti-depressants. I seek to live a life that fully expresses my soul, that allows me to feel that I am living outwards from my core.

Peter Pan asks children " do you believe?" when Tinker Bell has swallowed poison intended for Peter. He then says " if you believe, clap your hands don't let Tink die." Children all over the world respond by clapping so strongly that Tinker Bell ,the fairy lives.

Sometimes/always I think we have to have that voice inside our head exhorting us to believe. Clap your hands for whatever it is that you believe in so it may live.

The snow

I haven't really written anything since I created this blog prior to going to Europe this summer. This landscape of whiteness makes me feel that I should create like nature creates without preciousness, but with a fierce wildness that transforms everything, and everyone around it.

One can understand the impulse, the desire to walk off into the whiteness, but what happens once one walks into it? Oblivion, atonement, forgiveness, does one genuflect in the snow, making snow angels with a purified heart?

The sun can have this same purifying effect when one is at the beach. The light reflecting on the water blinds us, and causes us to retreat inwards to dreams and fantasies of a different life, a life lived without pretensions, lived outward from the soul, from the core.

Sitting in my living room I look out my window looking at the ethereally beautiful tree that shields me from my neighbor's curiosity, and they from mine, and dream my dreams of both oblivion, and connection.