State of the Art: The secondary imagination and fancy NANCY BAUER Telegraph‐Journal January 16, 2015 I’ m writing this on the first Sunday of 2015. Because of the freezing rain warning, I’m not in church but am sitting in my newly‐arranged living room occasionally looking out at the black, grey and white landscape while reading a chapter titled “God is Beauty.” Why are the needles of evergreen trees nearly black in the winter? I’m like a nun in all this black and white, with my celibacy, the silence, the austere cabbage dish I’m cooking for Sunday dinner. I would get on my knees except I might not be able to get up again. My husband hung several of his colourful paintings on trees in the yard. I must do that. They gradually disappeared when the weather ruined them or the trees fell down. A distinction I’ve found tremendously helpful is the one made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria on the difference between the secondary imagination and fancy. Over the Christmas holidays, I was given a confection that exactly illustrates the difference. It came in a cardboard container fitted out to look like a pizza box, with the familiar red checkerboard “Pizza” in large letters, and “Baked Fresh.” The round “crust” was made of inferior chocolate, the “topping” was of popcorn and pretzels, drizzled with hard white frosting. It didn’t look or taste like a pizza. Only the box indicated it was supposed to emulate a pizza. The whole concept must have come from the fancy. You all probably have had an unusual chocolate confection that was really a work from the imagination. The original concept of a Nanaimo bar comes to mind. Coleridge writes, “The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation…. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The FANCY is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE.” The concept of the faux “Pizza” came from the cook’s memory, particularly of the shape and of the box, and from arbitrary choices – popcorn and pretzels. On the other hand, a line of poetry like “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” came from Robert Frost’s secondary imagination. I was talking to Shakespearean scholar Michael Taylor about words. He had recently learned that “vicissitudes” meant both the ups and downs of life when he had before thought it meant only the downs. He figured that he had thought that because “viciss” sounds like vicious. I, on the other hand, knew the word was used for both ups and downs but wouldn’t use it for a tragic event, the death of a loved one for example, only for a lighter down. I wonder if this is right. Michael had also learned that there was an antonym for esoteric – exoteric. Looking up the word, I found that its definition made the meaning of esoteric clearer. “Exoteric refers to knowledge that is outside of, and independent from, a person’s experience and is capable of being ascertained by anyone (related to common sense...). Exoteric relates to external reality as opposed to a person’s thoughts. It is knowledge that is public as opposed to secret or cabalistic.” I told him that I wish I’d made a clever riposte to a nurse I had come up against. He gave me the term for this: L’esprit de l’escalier – staircase wit. The encyclopedist Denis Diderot used the phrase when he was writing about a dinner party; he wished he had retorted something clever and only thought of the perfect words when he reached the bottom of the stairs as he was departing. I asked Michael about the English verb “invigilate.” My friend Marie kept a vigil over her grandmother as she was dying. Marie didn’t use a French verb, only the noun veillée to describe the event, even though there is a French verb meaning “keeping a vigil” – veiller. “Invigilate” means keeping a vigil, but I don’t think the verb is used in this religious way. I first heard it when my husband said he had to invigilate an exam. I sang the Welsh lullaby “All Through the Night” to my children with its lovely line “I my mother’s vigil keeping.” Nancy Bauer – [email protected] – is a Fredericton writer