'Imagination Bodies Forth’: The Banality of Creativity

In Act 5 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus surmises the role of the poet:

‘And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.’

The above appears within a wider passage about love, imagination, madness, and poetry, but I’m most interested in these particular lines because I think they capture the psychological and spiritual aspects of creative practices.

Imagination always ‘bodies forth’

Spiritual and psychological frameworks help explain the poetic imagination Theseus describes.

Try meditating or sitting in silence for as little as thirty seconds and you’ll notice that imagination ‘bodies forth’ spontaneously. Constant springs of thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations bubble up in each moment. Lots of this content is mundane and uninteresting – probably not what we’d normally regard as typically imaginative. But that’s not the point. The point is, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop this upwelling in each second.

Meditation is often misunderstood as a practice of stopping or limiting thought. But even people who’ve amassed thousands of hours over years of practice can’t stop thought for any sustainable length of time. Real meditation is the practice of recognising in the moment that thoughts arise spontaneously, and that even the feeling of being a self – the ‘I’ in the midst of consciousness – is itself a thought that arises within consciousness.

In fact, imagination bodies forth to such an extent that it’s considered the primary source of suffering in some schools. Many spiritual traditions, most notably Buddhism, are founded on the idea that taking thoughts to be real is the ignorance that causes us to suffer.

Jungian psychology gives us another lens to see Theseus’s comment through. Jung taught that the personal and collective unconscious are wellsprings of creativity, with the latter the storehouse of our most transformative myths and symbols. In Jung’s model of the psyche, the conscious ego sits on the surface, and is dwarfed by the depth of personal and collective unconscious. If the total personality were an iceberg, the conscious ego constitutes the tip, with the vast majority hidden below the surface in the unconscious.

The contents of the unconscious are always scratching at the borders of our conscious minds. Consider dreams alone: each night as we sleep, our unconscious minds conjure strange and surreal images and stories that make little sense in the light of day. This all happens spontaneously.

So ‘as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown’ is a fancy way of describing something we all experience.

The banality of creativity

I interpret Theseus’s remark as a florid way of saying something pretty banal. A poet — or, more generally, any type of creative — is just someone who gives the contents of their mind some physical form. While this says nothing of the quality of the creation (quality requires craft), the mundane process I’ve described matches the Theseus’ more poetic process.

As we’ve seen, whether you practice imagination deliberately or just watch your thoughts, ‘forms of things unknown’ will body forth spontaneously. The image-making faculty of mind feels mystical because its contents seem to emerge from somewhere murky and unknown. And while this is true — it is mystical — it’s also mundane, because it’s something we all experience in almost every moment if we care to look.

And you do have to care to look, because to see the forms of the unconscious or imagination clearly, we need to create some space, opening, or quiet. This is more difficult than it sounds: the ubiquity and immersion of technology have created a world where we’re scared to be bored, while sunlight-deprived tech nerds have manufactured addictions in millions of us to the most mindless, vacuous, internet slop. Attention is fundamental, so if you can’t even go for a piss in a pub urinal without checking your phone — an issue I’m sure Shakespeare never had to grapple with — you’re fucked.

The type of seeing Theseus describes is a prerequisite for a visionary creative awareness. Surprise surprise: visionary art requires vision! So unless you opt in for this kind of vision by deliberately dropping distractions and creating an opening between the conscious and unconscious mind you’ll miss the ‘forms of things unknown’ referenced. Seeing these forms is as simple as daydreaming, but you only daydream when nothing else is occupying your attention.

Make it material

Having seen the forms of things unknown, the poet is one who ‘Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name.’

In other words, you perceive the immaterial and make it material, in whatever medium you prefer. Your creation may not be poetry, which requires craft, but will emerge through the process of poetry that Theseus describes.

Sounds simple when you put it like that.