Imagination is the last refuge... our own inner democracy...
When we read or hear stories, we create imaginary worlds of augmented reality in our mind. Words are able to evoke our moods, and sensations. Our reactions are influenced by our cultural context, memories and experience, and through our learnt responses to them. Stories are being told across all mediated platforms, but people are still reading text. Why is creative writing and spoken word still engaging us?

Perhaps it's because the imagination is the last refuge of freedom. Our own inner democracy where we are free to construct every detail of the world of the story from the author's text. The palate is borrowed from the landscape around us, urban, natural, and all the darkness and light it has to offer. There is no escaping the influences of the outer world, and intertextuality, but we are free to assemble and deconstruct those symbols and meanings into any configuration in the menagerie of the mind and spirit.

There has been a parade of cultural and literary theorists; Achebe, Althusser, Anzaldua, Barthes, de Beauvior, Bhabha, Brecht, Derrida, Eco, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Marx, Propp, Jean Paul Satre, Saussure, Wittig, Woolf; are just a few of those who have contributed their ideas. (Sorry if I left our your favourite). Each offering a lens into their microcosms of reasoning of linguistics, signs, and signifiers, and the process and the politics of living in this world of diverse interpretation. Like surgeons, they slice their reasoning into our text.; the prodding of Satre's, What is Literature? 1948, through to the killing of the patient, (Barthes's structuralism essay; Death of the Author, 1967). We authors jump off the table and continue to scribe. We write from our condition, and our stories and their characters connect us to you through your reflective interpretation. Or is this just another theory?

"In reading, one foresees; one waits. The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely probable future which partly collapses and partly comes together in proportion as they progress which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of the literary object.” (29 - 30 Sartre, 1948)

In reading there is quietness and simplicity in reading. The only voice in the room is the our own, gently narrating the story. The characters in every story we read or hear, become as real as the people around us. We listen to their voices, watch them move, admire their grace, and lament their failings. They live in each chapter, unhindered by the time and space of our measured world. We are are free to roam with them, in the realm of the imagination, only gated by the telling of the story. These journeys are taken with the turning of the page, or in the whispers of the spoken word. An endless freedom, a dreaming creating vast landscapes and places, all created through an intimate connection between writer and reader.

P.D. Casely-Hayford.© 2010

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