A Room Without A View

On Imagination — Or the Lack Thereof

Dear Republic,

The contest prompt on ‘imagination’ brought in a lot of interesting responses. Among the most interesting — and imaginative — is Kim Zarins’ tale of having no imagination at all.

-ROL

A ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

Imagination. I used to think I had one. I even thought it was an important part of who I was. But I have no imagination, never did. My kindergarten report card complained I daydreamed, and I never understood what that meant exactly. Until recently, I thought ‘picturing things’ meant thinking about them. I thought no one actually saw pictures in their heads besides a few savants out there. I considered myself normal. During Covid, when everyone was on the internet too much, I learned about my aphantasia, which made me question what it is that I do when my mind wanders.

Aphantasia is the inability to visualize. When asked to imagine an apple, I am stumped. It’s not just a matter of visualization being impossible. It’s unclear what kind of apple is being asked for. Granny Smith? Pink Lady? On a table, a branch, or the head of William Tell’s son? I make associations without settling on one. I recall the horribly mealy red delicious apples packed in my lunches with the Roman Meal bread and bologna and the apple juice box; the ugly but delicious apples of Latvia I’ve only heard about from my husband but have never seen; the field trip with my child’s class to Apple Hill, and I came home with a apple pie that my husband still celebrates. I see nothing—I go here in memory, I go there, and the fabled apples of Latvia I’ve never seen are no more visualized than the apples from my school lunches. There is one difference though, which is those childhood apples awaken my tactile and gustatory and spatial memories: the crinkle of the brown bag, the monotony of the same lunch, the soft brown ooze of the apple’s bruises I’d eat around or bite off to remove them. The apples of Latvia never had such history with me and don’t have those extra bits of language to build upon. Their ugliness appeals to me as apples that would be interesting to handle for their texture and asymmetry. I never thought to ask what color they were.

J. R. R. Tolkien praised language as a vehicle for the imagination. His famous ‘green sun’ coinage propels the imagination, for him, into a different reality than our own; he could ‘see’ another possible world. However, I process that green sun pairing conceptually, just like a yellow sun. In other words, if I’m talking about Latvian apples or apples of Olympus, green or red or turquoise, it’s about the same leap. In a way, this gives me a mind amenable to mythic thinking. This sounds great, but there are obvious drawbacks.

About ten years ago, when I thought I had an imagination, I read a student’s first chapter of a novel. It was about a very bored but attractive boy with striking blue eyes and a mop of hair, clothes a certain way, and so on. The boy woke up but was not interested in seeing family or friends or playing with toys. Instead he lay around imagining he was a knight in armor galloping on his horse and was enthralled by what he imagined. That was the story.

At the time, I encouraged my student to have the child do something rather than sit alone in his room. To skip the emphasis on eye and hair color, and maybe get him on a real horse, maybe have a friend over so he’d have something to interact with. But in the final draft the boy persisted in doing nothing except imagining himself a knight on a horse. At the time I was bored with the boy and unsure how to help my student. Now, I’d be tempted to trade places, either with the student or the boy, just to know what an imagination is like.

You don’t need an imagination to write. It might even make it harder to write a story, because the details seem to be disproportional like in dreams. But I think you need an imagination to get closer to your past and future. Other people seem to look back on things or look forward to things. For example, my husband remembers every meal he’s ever eaten. He can see the plates of food and re-experience them. If I remember, I simply remember the facts at a greater remove. We both finally understood why he was loaded with anticipation to go to Hawaii, while I just didn’t care very much and even dreaded all the travel and stress. My lack of interest used to hurt him; he could visualize us having fun there and assumed I didn’t care to have such anticipatory visualizations, when in fact I couldn’t. Once in Hawaii, I loved where I found myself and had a great time, and he was reassured. Then I went home to California, and Hawaii was utterly gone, not as if the trip had never happened, but still, no vivid memories like his. That’s how it’s always been for me. Everything is constantly gone once I turn my back, nothing is for keeps.

So what was I doing when my elementary teachers assumed I daydreamed? Probably something similar to what I do now, following a chain of associations from ideas and senses: my reading, the garden, a smell (in second grade I was so convinced my arm smelled like peanut butter that I finally licked it to make sure—alas, it tasted like arm). Instead of visualizations, I have a sense of movement, similar to the buzz I get from driving on a curved freeway onramp.

As a child, maybe eleven, my favorite verse in the Bible was Genesis 1:2: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Even before I understood my own darkened mind’s eye, this verse moved me more than the verses describing making light, land, or people. Partly it’s because I was obsessed with the ocean from a young age. But partly it’s because I got a sense of two expansive forces mirroring one another. I didn’t stretch my arms out literally, but the words gave me a feeling of great scale and a chiasmus that my body responded to with palms out and down to hover like the oceanic Spirit of God over the spiritual waters. It’s a Superman verse; you soar when you read it. That the waters were dark and the earth without form never bothered me when there was so much else to be awed by.

Since imagination for me is more spatial than visual, the internal exploration is verbal and mapped to my body. If the characters in a story I’m writing are standing close together, I feel like someone is close to me. It feels intimate—someone is right there. With spatial imagination, many strange intimacies and unexpected juxtapositions occur. I was writing a story when I realized I’d need a cherub like Madeleine L’Engle’s spherical cherub with lots of wings and eyes. As I was writing the story, and describing the mass of wings and flames and eyes, after a few iterations it occurred to me that these wings wouldn’t be rooted to the surface of a sphere, like crops in the soil, but would be more Dantean, with tiers of wings and flames and eyes all the way down to its hot center. The wing orientation would be the same, shoulders toward the center of gravity, wingtips up, but you might see wings open on the surface and glimpse an eye further down, with chasms opening and shutting like the wings themselves. I didn’t see any of this, but as I made the connection, I sank below the creature’s surface and got lower down in the tiers. Like Le Petit Prince with his planet, but I’m floating inside a world made of wings. I perceived the creature’s eyes above and below and around, but invisibly. If I had shut my eyes and concentrated, I would have seen nothing, and their presence would have fled. But if I looked around my kitchen or out the window unfocused, the sense of presence was there.

This kind of thing begins in a timeless state and then ends or is disrupted when I’ll notice movement, say, beyond the kitchen window, and it might be a butterfly migrating on thin wings, or a scrub jay perching on the chair; when it’s the latter, I go outside and toss a peanut from my pocket on the table outside. If it’s one of the more cautious jays, it wants me to back well off. It does not want me to see it come near, so I look away and listen to the scrabble of its reptilian feet on the teak table as it risks a lunge for the peanut. Then wings rip through the air in fast, victorious flight. I go back to the kitchen and think about the looking away, yet being allowed some perception. I don’t see the bird get the peanut, don’t visualize it, but I feel a shift of intensity from its fear to victory. Sometimes I hear or perceive nothing, and then I look and see a sad peanut on the table; other times, the peanut is gone, taken without my sensing it. Still, it means that the bird was there and got it.

Whether I am thinking about a couple or a canyon or a bird on a branch, it comes to me as a shape in relation to me, compacted or spread out according to scale. These are places I can navigate, like I navigate my bedroom with the lights out; I don’t run into furniture. I know what takes up space in that dark. Similarly, in a small room, two characters speak with inaudible voices that I process as voices I hear, voices that take up space in real time, short bursts for short sentences, long inaudible listening for longer sentences. In a larger space, the bird is on the other side of the yard, considering a location to cache the peanut: the eaves, a flower pot, the lawn. Larger still, the ocean churns, the Spirit hovers. I hover too, small but somehow a part of all this.

When I consider my workarounds to imagination working at their best, it can feel like a peanut transfer took place.

How much is our identity tied up with our interiority? I am trying to deemphasize high expectations for my mental faculties to avoid frustration with myself. With memory, I want to remember the whole and its parts, but for anything to stick, I have to get out the words as it’s unfolding, and then immediately write that memory while it’s still fresh. I then cling to that script. But am I remembering the event or just my narration? Hard to tell. Other times, I might read my journal and feel like someone else wrote this piece, all the emotion on that page seems like someone else’s. At times it feels like there’s no mental furniture in the imagined room, just empty darkness.

I don’t visualize because my brain’s inner projector is broken, but sometimes it flips on for a split second to transmit an image for the length of a heartbeat. The image flows to the brain’s movie theater, but the movie screen is missing, so the image is simply lost with nothing to attach to. If I try to see, say, my dad who has passed on, most of the time nothing happens, but occasionally, I can feel my brain attempting to deliver an image. I feel like the projector in my mind is firing up, sort of, though without a screen the image will not hold still for inspection. Dad blips past me and is gone again at 186,000 mph per second. I need to have my eyes open, otherwise I’ll see nothing—I am borrowing light from the real world to approximate seeing something within my head, some glimpse out of the corner of the corner of my eye.

People comfort me with the fact that I can’t see any bad memories or random freaky things. I guess that is true. It is very dark and quiet in my head, and nothing sticks, whether it’s a flower, a face, a lake in the mountains. Someone told me that at the moment of death your brain unloads your entire set of memories. I’m wondering if people with aphantasia have this experience or not. I suspect not. It would be bewildering for someone without visualization to suddenly see a stream of moving pictures, all those memories never before accessed. Would I even process that life as mine, or would it be like those journal entries written seemingly by someone else?

Or maybe it would be wonderful. Once when I was very ill and sleep deprived, I heard my husband coming through the front door downstairs with the dog, and my brain supplied me quite effortlessly with a little movie of my dog coming in. I watched our yellow lab’s characteristically stumpy, sturdy walk, with her sides oscillating and her tail thumping side to side. It was a delight and an astonishment during a sleepless, rough time. It would be a comfort to see her again, to see everyone and everything again, even once.

Kim Zarins is the author of Sometimes We Tell the Truth. She teaches medieval literature at Sacramento State University.

Painting by René Magritte.