Last week, in a rather heated debate with a cherished friend and a friend of her's, I suddenly realised how one tend's to feel they are part of the world they inhabit, and know it too, but with it came a risk that this knowledge, imagination, and reality are based on somewhat precarious ideologies.
I consider myself, in my own world, to be perfectly "normal". Many of my friends remark that they perhaps feel I don't quite fit that descriptor, but like me, they might feel that nobody is normal. I secretly think that none of my friends and family are anything approaching normality, and I hope they would receive that as a compliment. What is the gauge of normality? Even embracing the miasma of neuroses, which most of us possess, yet many hide, or the rainbow of psychiatric disorders, the cast chosen as normal, by a massive trial, stood before us on a stage would, probably look and behave, well, as un-normal as you or I.
The most unprepossessing, ordinary, urbane, even boring people can be abnormal, simply in their excess of their boringness. I do know one extremely boring person, so fascinatingly, tediously stultifying, that he transcends Mr. Average and becomes instead a human barbiturate. That surely can't be boring? He is a kind-hearted, well intentioned person, but his every motivation becomes an arduous romp through a thick soup of boredom. If he attempts to tell a joke, you know it will it be a found Christmas Cracker affair, circa 1973. If he shows you his holiday photographs, they have all been taken by an unwitting tourist, of our friend, pulling the same bored expression, stood afore a variety of oddly boring backdrops - like a parking meter, or a funeral directors, or perhaps if he's feeling a little bit excited, an Ice Cream Van. In being boring he has actually made himself a curiosity.
Boringness put another way could be caused by a severe lack of imagination. Imagination is not only creative fuel, it's conversational fuel, thought fuel. And having too much can be paralysing if taken to extremes, where imagination rules and realism is reduced to a few neurones in the brain, screaming "For God's Sake You Idiot, What On Earth Are You Thinking?" My school reports always picked up on my fecund mental creativity, but they also picked up on my lack of self-controls, often worded in excoriating terms. I love creativity, but on my terms and my terms only. An extract from a school report: "Recently the children were asked to make clay snakes. Matthew spread his clay all over the floor". Perhaps if they'd asked "the children" to spread the clay all over the floor, I would have made a clay snake, or a clay porcupine, perhaps.
Childhood does so much to inform imagination, and I understand a little better now why my mind was left wander in all manner of directions, to creatively explode outward into to the clouds above, the rolling woodlands, the endless fields and rivers. And my direct surroundings affected my imagination too. We weren't a wealthy family, just comfortable, buy we did have an acre of gardens, with outhouses, old cucumber houses, chicken sheds, and what was once another house, at the bottom of our garden, which became a garage. Along with two green-fingered parents, well tended gardens, and a plum and apple orchard and a garden my brother and I had for our own devices with a gigantic fort-like climbing frame that straddled the stream below it. It remains in my mind a kind of Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie part of my life - deeply whimsical, where my body as well as mind were as free as a bird. A freedom never challenged by my parents - winter or summer, as long as we were "in" by the time darkness came, all was well.
My mental illness, I don't believe is caused by an excess of thinking too much, or creativity - though I recognise the colour and contrast are turned up to max. And there are certainly times where my imagination hinders it. Because now a weird kind of reversal has occurred. My mind is still allowed to run free, but because I don't go out, my brain has to create the imagery itself. And of course in the real world, you can reach out and touch that shadow, and realise it's a shadow. You can not stick your hand into your mind and do the same.
Trying to begin to untangle our perceptions of the world around us is a fundamental question philosophers would ask themselves. But to begin to understand ourselves this can not be separated from the above process, and this is something I learned last week. To begin to understand this seemingly fathomless question, perhaps, for myself at least, I have to observe as much as I dream.
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