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• W279561322 abstract "After a climbing accident on a remote Japanese island some years ago, in which I broke three ribs and my temperature soared like an oboe solo, I found myself hallucinating angels and albatrosses. If they didn't lower my fever, they at least quelled my terror. Imagery can be gripped by the mind, used as a railing to rest upon. Extreme feelings that stay abstract frighten me more, because they lead to a dizzying lack of control. E. M. Forster's Only connect takes on new meaning at such times, when connecting with the familiar matters most. For the likes of me, albatrosses are familiars. I'd just spent half a year obsessively studying them, and several days observing their rituals at first hand. Angels less so. But it was nearly Christmas, and angels were appearing everywhere in the West, an annual migration as predictable as that of Capistrano swallows. When I first saw the Japanese woman who saved my life-by packing me in ice and helping me to the closest island with a hospital-- she appeared as one more of those festive angels, who then metamorphosed into an albatross. Both have white feathery wings. She was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse. Flying from fever, my brain at times seemed to be stationary while the world around me flew. I knew I might be fatally injured. The angel, the albatross-both calmed me with their familiarity. This is one example of the imagination as a jetty stretching out into chaos, a plank to the shore. I'm not thinking of chaotic waves in the sense, say, of schizophrenia, when to stop hearing the devil speaking from the drapes one might try to focus on the reality of one's chair or shoe. I mean when the mind accepts the terror of imminent death, with its paralyzing loss of the familiar. Then fear rouses the senses, and the imagination tends to do two things, sometimes alternately: magnify and elaborate the fear until it becomes hugely frightening; or mine the arousal for the opportunity it provides to focus on certain sensations while other awarenesses are blocked out. One avenue of philosophy, phenomonology, us this natural skill to tease a thing away from its background, allowing it to float luminously in mental space. Of course, the fearful body does this faster than purposeful thought, and often without conscious awareness, but not always. Sometimes one becomes starkly aware of sensory details, for example the sun sizzling on the waves beside a nearly-capsizing sailboat. The mind pays attention, a costly currency. In this scenario, terror is temporarily relieved by attending to a sensation, gripping it for a moment, however brief, while the rest of the body goes about its urgent chores. Also, in times of danger, every detail counts, because it might provide a key to salvation. Frisking the event with all of one's senses renews the overly familiar, long relegated to the attic of conscious awareness, and dusts it off, rediscovers it, looks at it in new, potentially life-saving ways. Another strategy of the imagination, one favored by artists, is to invent alternate worlds in which the elements of terror don't exist, and either completely escape into those worlds or make spa-like forays into them for relief. Such imaginary worlds may contain their own terrors, but they're controlled, scripted, carefully dosed, and ultimately resolved. During escape fantasies, the brain doesn't distinguish much between an imagined and a real event (hence the success of athletes visualizing perfect performances). In classic MRI experiments, it doesn't matter if one sees a picture of an apple or imagines an apple-the same parts of the brain light up. Sometimes imagination reworks or redefines a terror by explaining it as necessary and bearable-in Bible stories, for example, when violence leads to salvation, canonization, resurrection. Or patriotically in wartime. Of course, imagination doesn't only function as survival's valet. Sometimes the servant becomes saboteur. It can take a terrifying instance and turn it into an everywhere. …" @default.
• W279561322 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W279561322 date "2002-01-01" @default.
• W279561322 modified "2023-09-28" @default.
• W279561322 title "Of Albatrosses and Angels" @default.
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