Imagination, Reason, and Memory

:

“In a split second a touch of smell                                                wine

transports you to a place where you                                                  ice                   bitter

have neither been nor have not been….                                                   der krad

A weird feeling where the taste of    

dreams-never-realised, completely                                                                       cold                                      

forgotten, but suddenly reanimated,                                                  the  M   o   o   n      

gets back on the menu in all its crisp                                      the round table   

vagueness.”[1]                                                                                   the wind[2]

In this essay, I discuss the faculty of imagination. I present the two types of imagination that I have conceived of: simple imagination and complex imagination. On the one hand, what I called simple imagination allows us to connect the chaotic arrays of sensory inputs into orderly structured meanings in order for us to perceive things that all make sense. This connecting is what I call “reasoning.” The reasoning itself is a retroactive registering of the sensory information into preexisting symbolic orders. On the other hand, the complex imagination disconnects and rearranges multiple mental frameworks, independently of initial sensory inputs. It entails memories and complex connections of various parts of the brain. This operates in the service of creativity.

[1] Raimundas Malašauskas, Ask Salad Amass Uranium, Peper Exhibition, Selected Writings by Raimundas Malašauskas, Sternberg Press, Kunstverein, 2012, p 183

[2] This is my right brain’s response to Raimundas Malašauskas.

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