Culture, Symbols and Make-believe Fire Trucks

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

--C. S. Lewis

Imagination is more important than knowledge

--Albert Einstein

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception...

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Imagination. Exercise. Green leafy vegetables. Flossing after every meal. Four things that everyone agrees are good things but few regularly practice. Despite the encouragement of artists, poets and scientists, many of us fail to take the imagination very seriously. The word “imagination” seems at odds with “seriousness,” as if they don't belong in the same sentence. I know I never thought much about the power of play in shaping our core beliefs. That is, until playing became part of my job description.

In my day job, I work with children with various interrelated reading, speech and language pathologies. When working with uncommunicative clients, a foundational step of the program is “Imaginative Play,” in which we try to encourage to the client to transform a bundle of rags into a baby doll or a hunk of stamped metal into a firetruck.  Later, one hopes to turn an organized pattern of lines and colors on a flat piece of paper into a tiger or a boy throwing a ball.

This work, along with an interview with Monty Python member Terry Gilliam (archived here), has got me to thinking about play's relationship to culture and language. Words, toys and cultural edifices are all arbitrary symbols. It may be no more easy or difficult to make the sequence of sounds [kʰæt˺] represent a real cat than a vaguely feline shaped, stuffed pillow.

If a stick can be a magic wand and then a sword and then a passing space ship, then it takes no greater amount of imagination to make “crane” mean both a bird and a piece of construction equipment. Or, for that matter, for the color red to signify communism, the U.S. Republican party and an instruction to stop at traffic lights.

In kinship, similar flights of fancy are required to imagine a different relationship between you and your father's brother's daughter and your mother's brother's daughter. Or for two perfectly digestible meals to be both edible and non-edible in two different parts of the world.

Some objects are imagined to be clean by one person, and unclean by another. Arguments about such meanings quickly disintegrate into the sort of discussion siblings have over whether an empty cardboard box is a space station or a medieval castle. We learn to avoid taboos like children hopping over a floor made of hot lava.

With this in mind, I'll close with a last quote about imagination that is attributed to the twentieth century Chinese writer Lin Yutang:

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.