‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ was the title of a pretty grim little text by Samuel Beckett from 1965. Alan Riach asks, in the more than half a century since, are there any signs of revival? And if so, who’s in control? When did the imagination itself become a target for controlling powers? Imagination, poetry, language: what hope do we have?

I’M not talking conspiracy theory here, just recognising that all governments are aware that imagining things can lead to things actually happening. And it’s surely clear to anyone that public engagement, the clear articulation of priorities and preferences, the gaining of information and the exchange of ideas, are components of a healthy living currency, and that currency can be swayed, frustrated, diverted or stilled by various kinds of manipulation.

Acceptance, indifference, and exhaustion are all products of processes. And resistance is always required. So far so familiar: turn on the TV and go to work. But was there a recent moment we could point to and say, look at what happened then, right there?

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (otherwise known as the 9/11 Commission Report) was initiated in November 2002 to gather a comprehensive account of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, the extent or failure of US’s preparedness for the attacks and recommendations about improvements to protect against future attacks.

The Commission was created by the US Congress and signed into law by President George W Bush. The final report concluded the CIA and FBI should have acted more wisely, more aggressively, and if they had done so, the attacks might have been prevented. The Commission closed in August 2004 and its website was archived.

The National:

In the book a little history (2013) by Ammiel Alcalay (b.1956), this sentence from the Commission Report is quoted: “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination; policy; capabilities; and management.”

Section 11.1 is entitled “IMAGINATION” and in it this statement is made: “Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalise imagination … It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinising, even bureaucratising, the exercise of the imagination.”

Alcalay is precise in his exposition of the implications of this – if it was familiar to hear officials of the time use the word “imagination” in particular ways (such as how “we” couldn’t “imagine” terrorists acting like that), the systemic failure lay in the extent of “the restrictions put on ‘imagining’ what our own government might or might not be capable of doing to others and to its own citizens”.

This goes beyond governments: “It permeates imagination, erecting restrictive forms of behaviour to short-circuit and curtail the kinds of knowledge that might lead to changes in political and cultural consciousness.”

He goes on: “While conventional wisdom has it that culture and writing are too marginalised to matter, the opposite holds true – it is through poetry that new relations, disruptions, and interventions can occur, that assumptions can be challenged and the imagination opened up.”

Pause on that.

Let’s say that the word “poetry” there might apply to all the arts, and that our imagination can be “opened up” in ways unlike anything else through studious, careful, attentive reading, listening, looking, seeing.

Let’s entertain for a moment the idea the arts are trivialised, marginalised, devalued, and neglected precisely because of what they might do, and what they might help us to gain. Again, I’m not suggesting a masterminded conspiracy bringing this about, merely that it seems to be a symptom of our present condition.

It was not always thus and is not thus in other societies, in other parts of the world, and at different times. Something is certainly happening, has been happening, and it’s difficult to encompass it and assess its implications, without risking romantic gestures or flamboyant affirmations of commitment.

So, why not? Let’s take the risk.

Alcalay quotes the American poet Muriel Rukeyser’s book The Life of Poetry (1996). There, she identifies the common western practice of exploiting all human and natural resources for use and consumption.

Meanwhile, unacknowledged, infinitely time-resistant, valuable, and passed between generations, the one kind of knowledge that eludes this exhaustion by its most essential nature, is poetry itself.

Rukeyser uses the word “poetry” both literally and metaphorically since her point applies to other arts as well. Alcalay notes this: “The actions and inactions of the US and British military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond confront us with what has been, in no uncertain terms, all along, a culture war, a clash of civilizsations, not in the sense proposed by American think tanks and journalists, but rather as new motivation for military and cultural preparedness.

“Events during the Iraq invasion show how things have advanced since Vietnam. No example is more emblematic than the guarding of Baghdad’s Ministry of Petroleum while allowing Iraqi archaeological sites, museums, and libraries, not to mention hospitals, to be looted and destroyed.

“A message was sent: only the west, especially the Americans and the British, on their own terms, are to preserve and define the world’s heritage and health. In Baghdad, about a million books and 10 million documents were destroyed in the fires of April 14, 2003, alone. The loss in antiquities and artifacts from that period has yet to be fully catalogued.”

Alcalay describes this in terms that have applied elsewhere and at other times: “The destruction of materials enforcing new (or no) versions of the past, present, and future, becomes its own kind of structural adjustment of a nation’s imaginative possession of its history and culture.”

That connection of heritage and health, of libraries and hospitals, “a nation’s imaginative possession of its history and culture” is the essence of the thing. And it applies right now, right here, in Scotland, most acutely.

Who are the world’s most essential workers? Is it fanciful to say, alongside nurses and doctors, teachers and librarians, poets, composers and artists? How essential are they all, compared to ministers of state, whatever state?

The National:

The means of wellbeing are not to be found in the Ministry of Petroleum but in the interconnected practice of material and immaterial reality. Ezra Pound (above), whatever the obscenities of his extremisms, says it best in his essay “The Serious Artist”: “The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature.

“They begin where the science of medicine leaves off or rather they overlap that science. The borders of the two arts overcross.”

He elaborates: “As there are in medicine the arts of diagnosis and the art of cure, so in the arts, so in the particular arts of poetry and literature, there is the art of diagnosis and the art of cure.”

The control of the imagination put forward in the 9/11 Commission, the enactment of the destruction of a nation’s archive of imagination in history, culture and artefacts in Iraq, the distinction between “material” and “immaterial” humanity (we must insist yet again on the inadequacy of the word “man” to stand for humankind) and the analogies between the sciences of medicine and the work of the arts in their diagnostic and curative practices, their methods of maintaining well-being in a world so militarised towards humanity’s self-destruction – all these considerations form the context of our argument. Yet there is one essential human component affecting all these things which is still outwith absolute control. Against the practice of the threats thus described, there is the human phenomenon of languages. We can trace languages in evolution, and how imagination is so closely related to our words and their connectives and their sounds.

And we can confirm the virtues and varieties of translation that continue, whatever the powers that be think they can control. The virtue of this is that language and imagination working together allow us the possibility of thinking of others. Fail to do that and everything ends.

The ecology of the Earth is the ecology of language. Understanding how language changes over time and how languages evolve into their appropriate forms in different parts of the world, in different landscapes, prevailing weather patterns and economies of geography, helps us understand the Earth’s ecology. And in this understanding, translation is always a liability and always essential. The arts are languages. They are the only international diplomacy that really works.

All these considerations have bearing on our reading of poetry, and our understanding of the almost total absence in any public media now of critical engagement with poetry and any of the arts, beyond the immediate frivolities of fashions, bestsellers and celebrity encomia.

So, armed with such knowledge and ready to use it, where do we go from here? Find out next week.