The Enticement of Language Imagery
When I was young, admittedly many years ago, imagination was still A Thing. As a child, and then a young adult, we were called upon to use our imagination in order to play, to learn, to visualise anything which didn’t seem clear to us at first glance. The exhortation to use your imagination was part of daily language usage, and mostly came from those people around me who, through perhaps no fault of their own, were unable to gift enough time to explain something, or suffered a lack of understanding themselves. As a child, of course, imagination was part and parcel of being a child. The cardboard box as a castle, or under the bedclothes becoming a fort as much as a protective cocoon. And then there was literature: the greatest feat of imagination available to a youngster just starting out on their journey into fantasy realms – realistic or otherwise.
Literature, and we did not have a category of Young Adult back in the day, was the escape from a real world we didn’t necessarily understand, or it was the key into a world where the real world about us could be explained. Whether the work in our hands – printed on paper, of course – involved a crime, an expedition into the darkest jungles of Africa or South America, or the depths of society seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens or Jane Austin, T. E. or D. H. Lawrence. Every piece of literature called upon us to exercise our imagination, to place ourselves in an unusual situation, to see things which were only suggested on paper and which we had, perhaps, never experienced before. Few, as only one example, would have experienced the situations faced by Lawrence in the Middle East, for example, or necessarily understood the underlying intimate suggestions which caused, certainly for me, his works to be hidden behind the counter in my school library, not on general circulation, and therefore of far greater interest.
Language was used to excite the imagination, to take us into situations we had never imagined before, place us in surroundings foreign to our normal experiences. And this might just as well have been a country house as it might have been a Bedouin tent. We might have been surrounded by servants, malicious backchat and a possible murderer, as much as by sheep and goats and the dry air of a desert plain. Language was the manner of communication which excited the imagination, as much as it drew our attention to people and places, and allowed us to converse, intelligibly, with those around us. Language, as with imagination, was something we learned, built upon and refined, which held unimaginable truths as it did hidden and intimate secrets.
And then someone decided that pure imagination, the suggestion of something through language which we could work on and define for ourselves, was not enough. Language, in the terminology we use today, became monetised. Imagination became a major industry. The lurking danger in the shadows of an early black and white film became the easily seen and obvious threat. The excitement was taken out of imagination, it was effectively nullified at the altar of commercialisation and profit. Money needed to be saved, so education suffered, and money needed to be made, so literature and the arts suffered.
As a youth, and I have no problem admitting it now when everything is so obvious and public on the internet, I enjoyed a good erotic story. I enjoyed the literature of what we would today call soft porn because it left so much to the imagination, because it was not obvious, not blatant and overly explanatory. In my defence, I also enjoyed Charles Dickens, Fydor Dostoevsky and Robert M. Pirsig, and was more likely to be seen wandering around the corridors of learning and the fields of sport and play with one of their works than anything more questionable. That said, the Deputy Principal of my rather staid North Yorkshire boarding school did confiscate a copy of The Diary of a Mad Housewife, by Sue Kaufman purely because of its slightly lurid cover, and probably without really understanding the contents in advance (later to be returned when it was discovered the copy belonged to my father, and he could barely object to my reading it as a late teenager when approached by the school committee).
With the advance of the internet, the language of imagination – and most certainly that of intimacy – has changed. We are no longer exploring the world through our own minds, but finding all the answers at the touch of a keyboard, right art our fingertips, and it makes no difference whether what we are seeing are reports on social degradation in modern society, or intimate and illicit sex-plays in the representation of someone’s bedroom. To my way of thinking, this has helped with the dumbing down of society, and most decidedly with a suppression of good and elevating education. We no longer need to research in libraries to find our answers, while stumbling across many other fascinating details for later exploration, but can open a laptop and see what others have done before us at the click of a switch.
Or rather, to come into more modern times, we could do that until fairly recently. Opening a laptop and giving a request for the information we need into our favourite search engine is no longer the easy or most accurate way to enlightenment. The scraping of the internet, the interpretation of facts, opinions, theories and conspiracy gathered into a non-thinking entity has not helped us at all. It has caused an even further step away from knowledge, from the joys of exploration and discovery, and from the use of our own imagination, but partially through our own fault. We have become so used to finding what we want and need through the click of a switch, through the expertise and work of others published in open forums and the world wide web, that we no longer recognise when something is suspect, when we might need to research further. The suppression of our imagination has left us with such a level of placid acceptance, that even the most obviously erroneous answers to simple questions could be accepted without the blink of an eye.
The automation of our online world, however, has brought something else with it too, something which might force us back into a world where imagination has a role to play. Without the educated human eye taking a critical glance over results spewed out as an answer to a simple question, without an understanding of the intricacies of language and verbal communication, aberrations are appearing which no one can possibly oversee:
Delicate Japanese pulchritude at hand porcelain extrinsic reveals their way nicest intimate secrets almost this breathtaking matchless performance. their way almond-shaped pipe a remote wince at hand robbery painless she highly unbuttons their way crammer uniform, exposing cramped breasts at hand dark, stabbing nipples go off at a tangent pebble instantly. She spreads their way keen-edged legs, displaying their way perfectly trimmed pussy go off at a tangent glistens at hand arousal. at hand clever fingers, she Nautical fake their way stabbing clit in advance inserting a vibrating bauble yawning chasm inner their way soaked passage. their way innocent face contorts almost happiness painless she brings yourselves on touching synthesis give the slip to orgasms, their way body arching at hand in perpetuity wave be beneficial to pleasure.
I am not sure in which direction a healthy level of imagination would take a reader of the above text, taken from an internet page today, but I am sure anyone with a certain level of imagination will be able to pick out the relevant words, discard the chaff, and then build a picture within their mind. My teenage self, carefully hiding those illicit books of pleasure beneath the bedclothes, would not have had a problem. And this is not to suggest that all descriptive texts be produced in such a convoluted, unintelligible manner to revitalise youthful imagination, but it would be pleasant to know that there is something out there which distracts from modern haste and misinformation and brings us back to a level where imagination is not only called upon, a required asset, but also a desired one.
