musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The powers that be


When, if infrequently, I stop to think about things, it is apparent to me that most of us possess rather special powers: we can often predict how things might affect each other before they actually do. I mean how do I know that I may fall prey to the same virus as my friend if he coughs on me, that I need to be careful of the wind when I open my umbrella when it starts to rain, or that if I smile at myself in the mirror, my reflection makes me feel -or think I feel- good about myself? Do we all have that same power? I mean do others feel the same need to smile at themselves in a mirror? Are the results the same for them?

I often wonder about causal understanding. Why is mine sometimes hit and miss? For every effect there should be a cause, eh? Or am I putting the cart before the horse -are there effects without causes?

Take, for example, imagination. Why is it not subject to the same rules, the same constraints of cause and effect? Is imagination actually an alternate Magisterium, or just a time when random thoughts somehow escape through cracks in the walls that were built to guard my brain?

Sometimes dreams are also like that I suppose; in them, something (I’m not sure it is actually me at the time) often seems unbothered about causes as well -things that a wide awake me might question. And yet dreams aren’t always good examples of imagination, though; perhaps dreams have second-order causes: neuronal cleaning circuits, a persistent worry from the day, or, as Dickens’ Scrooge decided when he saw the ghost of Marley, ‘an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.’ I don’t know whether imagination has to follow in dream footsteps.

Of course things in the real world are constantly in a state of flux so maybe imagination is important for recalibration -or at least, not getting mired in stuff that has since moved on. Brains, too, need to adapt, explore new roads… Maybe imagination is our biological GPS.

Or maybe imagination is a kind of interregnum – a space between stimulus and response; between cause and effect. Perhaps imagination is a space which offers a safer, more considered time for choice -or at least more time to consider the what-ifs… After all, there is usually a space between most things -in Japanese thought, it is called the ma; it can be an uninhabited place, or even the  interval, the pause, between thoughts. It allows things to settle perhaps; to mature, to diverge…

I like that idea, but I have to admit that it emerged, unbidden, from the space between my own, otherwise ordered thoughts. I can no more explain it than I can my imaginative ruminations about, say, unbuilt roads, or unexplored places. So, should I call that imagination: an inability to maintain a consistent pathway or, more kindly, a tendency to wander off it…?

I am reminded of the way I tend to meander off trails in the woods out of curiosity. It’s not so much a conscious deviation as a surrender to other stimuli that are always present, but often hidden: still unexplored mas, if you will. There are always untended spaces outside the well-trodden paths, I think. But welcoming what we have traditionally considered inappropriate can be fragile, tenuous at times. Fleeting…

Once again however, my thoughts have gone off-leash: in an attempt to make sense of the ineffable, I can’t help but wonder about Plato’s idea of the Forms -although perhaps not as he intended, but more what I have thought about them over the years. What is a chair, for example? If it is merely an object to sit on, then it is a name diluted beyond constraints: depending on where you are, it could be anything -a log, a boulder, someone’s lap… It is, in other words, notional, rather than specific. It is the idea of chairness that I have always thought was what Plato intended to convey about about Forms. Much like a triangle which can have an infinite variety of three-sided shapes, the idea of triangleness encapsulates the concept of a universal triangle: its Form. A concept like that cannot be imprisoned in a particular thing; much like a God cannot be captured in a name…

What am I getting at? Well, that imagination is the ability to appreciate the variety of effects without the necessity of confining them to particular things; rather, it’s the ability to appreciate the boundless unity which underlies them all: their Forms.

Language can get in the way, of course -it craves definitions, conventions- but in the real world, it’s often our best approximation of the underlying intangibles. For writers, words perhaps evolved as tools to describe something already bubbling imaginatively inside their heads; for musicians, perhaps musical notes, for mathematicians, numbers. It’s only when we try to translate what we’ve imagined in our minds, that we need to resort to more confining  symbols. Structures…

So in the ascent of humans, what was the chicken and what the egg? I don’t know what came first; I don’t know what evolved from what, but the wonderful thing is that we still have both: imagination, and symbols to translate it.

I have neither the intention nor the knowledge to risk venturing into Semiotics, Saussure, or especially Chomsky, et al. I’ve just been wondering, about Cause and Effect -and about the interregnum, the ma, and yes the Forms, that might lie hidden between the two kingdoms.

If we feel inclined to search for a heuristic to knit all of it together, though, I suspect it’s simply imagination. After all, as the late American planetary scientist and astronomer, Carl Sagan once wrote: ‘Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.’

Maybe imagination is more than his famous ‘pale blue dot’… Much more.

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gozzter

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