 20 Nov 2010 @ 18:40, by Jeffrey Trenton Crace
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” said the Queen in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” ~ Alice In Wonderland
I taught music class the other day and for my Kindergarten class (6-7 yrs old),
we learned a nursery rhyme of sorts. One line in the nursery rhyme was "The pig
flew up in the air." Every single time we sang that line, there was immense
laughter and carrying on. Some of them would jump out of their seats they were
so excited by the image.
But why? They felt liberated by the impossibility of the idea. They knew the
nature of a pig. They knew that pigs possessed the innate inability to fly.
So, imagining an impossible thing shot them straight out the top of the Tone
Scale. They exteriorized from mind!
The name of the game here would seem to be literality. And the literality has everything to do with other-determinism. With the advent of literalism, everything has been already created, and a human's only power resides in listlessly re-arranging objects, like dead trinkets on a dusty shelf.
Many children do not suffer from this limitation. If one watches them play, it becomes obvious that their games are not pure imagination, but their games also do not involve pure physicality. They are a beautiful and exhilarating combination of the two. They LINK their imagination to the the physical world. Both are real to them. Interestingly, it seems easier for them to as-is their games when they are finished. There's no mess of MEST to push aside when they are done. Game over, game disappears.
There is one short but powerful process, more like an assist, that aims to dismantle literality. "Pick an object in the room. Tell me something that object could be."
Or just practice this koan: pigs can fly.
Oh Lord, from the mouths of babes.
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