Tag Archives: Imagination

Review of the Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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Five Star Book Review

Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

Erin Morgenstern is the author for two of my top ten all time books: The Night Circus and The Starless Sea. I read the Starless Sea when it came out in 2019, and this was my second journey through this incredible world. She writes in a way that is as beautiful as the magical worlds she describes in her two novels. The Starless Sea is not a book that everyone will love because it is like a nesting doll: stories within stories and worlds within worlds. If you can hold these multiple stories which all allude to the central storyline within your imagination and you want a journey to a fragile but magical world then this is the story to take you into a world where acolytes record the stories they hear buzzing in the air around them, keepers maintain and care for the world of stories on the harbor of the starless sea, and guardians attempt to guard the world. It is a world where fate falls in love with time, where the moon arrives in a great storm and interrupts the world of a lonely innkeeper, where a pirate in prison tells stories of sweet sorrows to a young woman who brings his food. The parliament of owls, bees, key collectors, swords of prophecy, a story sculptor, two lovers lost in time, and more surround the story of Zachery Ezra Rollins, the son of the fortune teller, and Dorian the former member of the Collectors Club as they are brought by doors painted by fate to the magical world of stories.

“To seeking” is the greeting of this world and the proper response is, “to finding.” This sentiment is appropriate for a book that invites you deeper and deeper into this magical world as you are invited into the experience of Zachery as he discovers the mysteries of the world at the end of its life and the dangers of those that attempt to defend it at all cost. It is a multi-tiered world of harbors along the sea full of stories and myths where lovers are torn apart and reunited. Is the book occasionally confusing as the characters attempt to muddle through the broken magic all around them, yes, but I also found myself content to linger as the strings of the plot from the various stories converge into the ending of a world and the beginning of a new possibility.

As one of the stories in the book tells us, this is a book, “For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.” There is something spiritual in the Zachery’s quest into this world, and it is a world I want to continue to explore. Reactions to the Starless Sea seem to be polarized-some find it confusing and hard to finish and it is very different than most fantasy. It is a love story to stories and imagination and it is not your traditional linear story, but as a lover of stories and magic it was a beautiful journey into a place that I didn’t know I was homesick for. The harbor on the starless sea could be at times troubling, at times incredibly comfortable, but always with an edge of the unexplained and magic. The book is a door that opens into a magical world and if you choose to open it may what you are seeking find you.

Reverie

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There are songs to be sung whose words I don’t yet know
There are novels to be written and stories to be told
Journeys to be made, battles to be won,
Hearts broken and mended in these ballads left unsung.
Perhaps, one day, they’ll find their way from my mind onto a page
Until that day they grow in my thoughts and in my dreams they rage
Most will be lost and forgotten never seen
Except in their brilliant flashes upon my mind’s own screen
So many times I wish that there was a way that I could share
The ones who dance beyond my reach and vanish in thin air
So if someday you see me and you ask what’s on my mind
And I simply tell you nothing, I don’t mean to be unkind
Perhaps there simply aren’t the words to describe the things I see
Or maybe, I fear, the magic that I invest them with won’t translate unto thee
So there are novels that may never be written and stories left untold
And songs whose words and melodies the world will never know.

Paul Cesar Helleu, Daydream (1901)

Paul Cesar Helleu, Daydream (1901)

Symphony of a Life

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cello-image-620x413

I would prefer to write a love song, but it helps to be in love
So I write from what I know, these little verses of life
Sometimes content, sometimes sad, sometimes dwelling in my imagination
The lives I’ve lived or dreamed or feared or missed
A life lived in the words on a page are but a glimpse
A window into one introspective soul opening itself
Perhaps someone might see their own reflection
Staring back at themselves from within the frame
Others might just find some meaningless string of sounds
Yet, they are the notes that emerge from my instrument
My memory or fantasy, my psychic world in narrative
And you my reader, the imagined audience
Are there as my orchestra begins to play its parts
 
Neil White, 2014

Opening a Galaxy-A Poem

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magrathea

In a universe where 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything
Resides the world of Magrathea where planets are custom made to order
On the factory floor is every world conceivable
Any customer can request a tailor made environment
So long as they have the funds to support the massive building project
Yet, Magrathea itself is contained within the unimaginable expanses
Of a universe which the story allows us to hitch a ride into
And we find worlds taking form in the factory floor of our own minds
Countless imaginations there for the taking from the stories
Contained in books, stories, movies, and some which are our own creations
Even when the words are shared, though the worlds are our own
For such is the elastic nature of words to evoke images in the eye of the mind
And we don’t panic as we hitchhike through galaxies as improbable
As a planet where planets are created and restaurants where that universe ends
And yet once we pick up another story it begins anew

Neil White, 2014

Daydream- A Poem

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New Era by Aeon Lux on deviantart.com

New Era by Aeon Lux on deviantart.com

My mind drifts off to another place
I’m raising anchor to sail away from reality
To go wherever the spirit blows
To another world crafted in the corner of my mind
What possibilities and problems reside in this new world?
What monsters have emerged in the air or land or sea?
Is it a place filled with the hustle and bustle of commerce?
Or is it an isolated wilderness, some undiscovered country?
Will it be filled with technology that staggers the imagination?
Or perhaps some magical land in a time before rationality
Wher’er it may be never fear, I shall return
When the klaxon calls of necessity bid me return
But for now my mind is seeking some new adventure

Neil White, 2014

Re-enchantment-A Poem

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112 CSmith-Full

The demons and angels and magical forces that reigned in the world no longer hold sway
In a world of people governed by rules and laws and discipline, order and civility
In the grave seriousness of the moment where the past is closed off
And fairy tales and ghost stories belong to the world of children
Walled off from the worlds of imagination in our buffered realities
Carefully constructed to ward off the shock of the unknown
Ballasted with the bulwarks of certainty to hold off the devilry of doubt
Where the only monsters left are ourselves
Yet our souls were never created to inhabit a mechanistic world
Nor our spirits excommunicated from our body
For all our science, suffering still calls out for an answer
For some new type of heroism that might call us from the banality of a disenchanted world
Yearning not merely for some romanticized past but a present that is not ultimate
To move us again to the transcendence of our excarnate realities and disembodied feelings
To the incarnate immanence that can somehow re-enchant the cosmos
Allowing the winds of creation to penetrate the armor of our buffered reality
And breathing free the breath of God in the midst of the polluted heavens

Neil White, 2014

The World of Dreams- a poem

Folded Dreams by PORG at Deviantart.com

Folded Dreams by PORG at Deviantart.com

In a world that burns the midnight oil
That blearily blunders through the monotony of the endless day
Do we dare enter the Sabbath of the night
To enter that unruly and unpredictable world of dreams
Dreams that defy the cold mechanistic reality of the day
To close our eyes so our mind might be opened
To the possibilities that dance beyond the edges of perception
Can we drift into the silence of sleep
To that place where the whispers of heaven and the drums of nightmares
Compose the symphony of the imagination
And give birth to the visions of a new reality beyond the breaking dawn

Neil White, 2013

The Playground of the Mind

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suoitien

I wonder and imagine and play
With the past and present and future
Real and imaginary, fantasy and reality
All ready to coexist in the playground of my mind

And like a child entering a room full of toys
Anything is possible to be manipulated and combined
In the service of play and delight
The experimentation of the possible
And the boundaries of the unimaginable
Become the field of play

Sometimes I feel like the master of that universe
Able to manipulate the winds of creation
To serve my own whims and will
Oftentimes I am blown here and there by the winds of curiosity
Distractedly moving from one shiny object to another
And at the end of the day when I am exhausted by the work of the day
When I lay down upon my bed and close my eyes
The child continues to run untiringly in the playground of my mind
Reveling in the mystery of the subconscious
And dancing through my dreams with his muddy footprints

Neil White, 2013

purple rose 01 by picsofflowers.blogspot.com

The Glorious Freedom of Creative Mistakes

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chess

We are limited beings who do attempt to make sense of our world and we have the gifts of perception and communication which help us to do that. Our perception allows us to see and experience the world and communication allows us to learn from the experiences and intuitions of others and our minds are not machines. We cannot, like Descartes wanted to do many years ago, separate our mind from our bodies and senses-they are real, the mind and body are integrated and even if a sense doesn’t work, for example in the case of a person who is unable to see or hear, we find other ways of perceiving and communicating about the world around us. We make a lot of assumptions and inferences about the world around us and we try to set up closed systems to make everything fit, but combined with this comfort that comes from certainty is the joy that comes with discovery. As we encounter the world and interact with others there will be times where we discover new connections and have to expand our system to make sense of the new ideas or images we encounter. Sometimes these new paradigms come from outside us, when we through communication or observation come into contact with another person’s or group’s way of explaining something. So for example a person who encounters Newton’s physics in high school which would explain gravity in terms of the attraction between two objects may later in their life encounter relativity theory where gravity is explained very differently and in a way that makes more sense given what we know about the universe and perhaps sometime later would encounter a completely new explanation. Yet, we don’t magically jump from one explanation to another on our own, the road to discovery is paved with numerous failed attempts and creative mistakes.

Jacob Bronowski uses the example of a chess player when he says:

“Why does one chess player play better than another?”The answer is not that the one who plays better makes fewer mistakes, because in a fundamental way the one who plays better makes more mistakes, by which I mean more imaginative mistakes. He sees more ridiculous alternatives. (Bronowski, 1978, p. 110f)

Yet, as a person who knows the rules of chess but has never studied the strategy of chess, I would not play a challenging game to a chess master because I don’t have enough information to make new imaginative mistakes. There is something to understanding the systems that are already existent and then being able to manipulate them, experiment with them and see where there may be new places to discover. In the process of manipulation and experimentation we come up with possible explanations or visualizations which most of the time are not true. This is not just in the realm of science, but also in the realm of art where it is true that there are more bad works of art than good ones. It takes a lot of attempts to become good at any art, and in the midst of the attempts we learn. Every great imaginative construct, whether it be in science or art, begins as an exploration of past errors. One of our greatest freedoms is the ability to learn from our mistakes rather than being defined by them.

purple rose 01 by picsofflowers.blogspot.com

The Image And The Imagination

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New Era by Aeon Lux on deviantart.com

New Era by Aeon Lux on deviantart.com

Humanity practices both science and art, two incredibly unique and imaginative processes where we attempt to make sense of the world and our relationship to it. Both science and art rely on imagination and vision. Jacob Bronowski highlighted to me something in our language that is very illuminating about imagination when he says, “I want you to think of the following words: visual, vision, and visionary; and image, imagery and imagination….Almost all the words we use about experiences of the kind that go into visions or images are words connected with the sense of sight.” (Bronowski, 1978, p. 10) That somehow there is something to the way we visually interact with our world is an important part of imagination, since the word image is the root of the word. It is a word that comes from crafting and shaping and playing with images in our own mind. The way we interact with our world is, of course, mediated by our senses: vision, sound, touch, taste and smell and certainly for most of our interactions we rely heavily on vision and sound. Bronowski argues that there are essentially two types of art: those dominated by sight (painting and sculpture for example) and those dominated by sound (music for example) and I would argue that there are some that are reliant on the interaction of both senses (drama, movies, etc.). Science on the other hand is dominated by the visual sense, so we can speak of observations, which refers back to the art of seeing. So perhaps one of the most critical things to imagination is the ability to see, or to interpret the senses in a way that allows the person to make sense of their world and to see alternatives and interpret interactions with it.

The visual process itself is a process of decoding, since our eyes on their own apparently don’t just take a picture and project it into the brain like an old style camera projecting onto film, but rather if Bronowski is correct (and I’m now curious since this is an older work) it would be more like the process that goes on in a digital camera where individual rods and cones in our eyes develop a level of stimulation to the light it receives and sends all the signals back to our brain which then interprets all these signals and assembles the picture in a way that is far more accurate than the individual cellular receptors in the eyes are capable of making. The very process of seeing relies upon the visual part of the brain making inferences about the world it is seeing to make up for the shortcomings in the visual organs, and that compared to most other animals we have a phenomenal portion of our brain dedicated to the process of interpreting visual input.

Combined with this process of interpreting the visual input we receive from our eyes, our brains also allow us to imagine differently-to see alternatives and to attempt to predict based what we currently see and what we have seen before. Part of what makes us such curious animals is our ability to take the images we have and to imagine possible futures, alternatives if you will. In one sense the idea of free will goes back to the idea of “visualizing alternatives and making a choice between them.” (Bronowski, 1978, p. 18) There is a lot to unpack with this revelation that imagination is a function of the process of seeing and interpreting our world and imagining other possible worlds, and that will come but perhaps part of learning to imagine is learning to pay close attention to sight (as well as sound and the other senses) and attend to the images and the possibilities.

purple rose 01 by picsofflowers.blogspot.com