Imagination
Illustrator Grahame Baker Smith
muses on the often hidden force that
is found in every part of our lives.
I was not great at school. At first I thought it was all my fault, there was
something wrong with me, some deficiency in the way the neurons and
synapses in my brain were wired.
My peers all seemed to have a handle on things, they knew stuff
such as the capital city of Tajikistan is Dushanbe, and how to spell
‘discombobulating.’ They got picked for teams that won honours on
the rugby, hockey or cricket grounds of our county and its neighbours.
And as for maths…well…let’s just draw a Pythagorean line under
maths. I spent most of my school life gazing out of the windows of
indistinguishable and interminably grey classrooms, wondering how the
universe actually worked, pondering on the fact that in any solid object
there is actually more space than matter, and watching the light play
through the leaves of the trees at the far corners of the rugby pitch.
Gemini by Grahame Baker Smith
For a long time I was filled with things I could not express in a world of
teachers and timetables that were indifferent to all but facts and figures,
quantities and spreadsheets. The division and sub-division, the naming
and measuring and quantifying of the world according to the carefullywrought man-made weights and scales and rules frankly depressed me.
What I needed then is what I have access to now; a key to the world
of the imagination. I remember one brief shining hour in school when
we listened to a BBC schools broadcast about the Greek Myths.
That helped; it loosened something in the psyche. The Cyclopes, the
Gorgons, Sirens and the truly terrifying Medusa were awe-inspiring
creatures sprung from an ancient but powerfully resonant, imagination.
The adventures of Odysseus, the character of Apollo, god of divination,
prophecy, music and a shepherd, the labours of Hercules, these stories
seemed to have more to say to me, more to teach me, than a hundred
years of school.
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