The Imaginal Gate

On getting "unstuck"

One of the effects of writing personal stuff quite often in my essays here is that it serves as a kind of self-reflective process. Much like a journal, which I also keep but lately less regularly, things I write here tend to act as unconscious mirrors back into my mind, often leading me to ask questions of myself I might not otherwise ask.

I mentioned last month that I tend to lose myself in work every September, despite it being my favorite month. That’s true, absolutely, but losing myself in work is not limited to any particular month.

On account of my really poor and extremely insecure childhood, and especially the effects such a life had upon my sense of self and body, “losing” myself into something—or more accurately “hiding”—became my go-to escape mechanism for all the terror of my material conditions. Books were especially where I hid; in them, I could live other lives when my life felt unlivable.

Few would ever suggest that this was truly a bad habit, at least compared to all the other habits I could have turned to like drugs or alcohol. I did those too for a little bit, but much later, in my early 20’s, and never to the extent I did with reading. Instead, work became the other escape, working too much, keeping myself too busy, and making work for myself when there was none otherwise available.

This, I know, came directly from fear of more poverty. Though none of the jobs I ever held actually pulled me out of the lowest economic tier or ended my actual position of precarity, working felt like something I could at least do.

Especially when I was a social worker at a homeless shelter agency, I’d often pick up at least one overtime shift each week. Often this meant overnight shifts, which were really deeply unpleasant ways to spend the night. Working throughout the night under garish fluorescent lights makes you lose the earth a bit, feel not just out of sync with time but even with gravity. I remember once thinking, after months of nights like these, that the earth might one day soon forget to pull me towards it like it did all others, leaving me instead to be flung violently from its spinning form into the endless abyss of space.

Unfortunately, despite now doing work I really enjoy, I’ve not fully unlearned all these habits. Writing and developmental editing is infinitely more satisfying than social work or any of the other jobs I’ve had, but I notice I still lose or hide myself in those things. The problem is of course that writing is really a horrible place to hide. To write well you have to write from what’s true and honest about you, which means people read what’s true and honest about you. In other words, not only are you not hiding well, you’re hiding in the one place everyone can easily see you.

Editing the essays which will appear in The Secret of Crossings inevitably required reading through my writing for the last three years. This was like reading my own history, or at least the official narrative of it, my official narrative anyway. All the while I also had that other history as witness, the me who lived through these years comparing the public account to what was not written nor could be.

I’ve certainly woven glimpses of that other history into my essays, occasional conscious and unconscious references to life as I actually lived it rather than life as I narrated it. I imagine for those who’ve been reading me in the years previous, these bits told them much more than anything I could have even directly said.

Three years ago, almost to the day, I got on a train to visit my sister. It was my first trip to Luxembourg, a journey I didn’t realize at the time would later lead to me living here and completely changing my way of seeing the world.

I’ve told the story in bits and pieces elsewhere, but I’ll tell it again. When I was 36, now 9 years ago, I had what I thought was a schizophrenic break. I thought it was schizophrenia because my mother is schizophrenic, but it didn’t match anything else I knew about schizophrenia. I was hearing voices like she did, except those voices weren’t anywhere near as destructive as the voices she heard. In fact, they were incredibly, eerily helpful, always insightful despite me not knowing immediately what they meant.

At the same time, I started having really intense dreams that “spilled out” into the waking world. I’d wake up either utterly exhausted or unusually refreshed and feel like the foreign landscapes of my dreaming never faded throughout the rest of my day. Then, always to my surprise but decreasingly to my alarm I’d sometimes feel myself to be “somewhere else” while also where I was.

I remember one such moment. I was walking through a university campus as a shortcut to my job. Some strange slant of light across the trees and a certain quality of the wind made me look around myself suddenly, and then I was walking across low grass growing in sandy soil. I smelled salt, heard waves, and saw that I was in a place I didn’t know yet but would later recognize.

Such things happened frequently, but they were never disruptive. Not only did I manage to keep working, but going to that job seemed more purposeful and less burdensome. It was a means to an end, I suddenly realized, but it took me a little while to understand what that end was.

I remember the moment I figured out what I was about to do. It was an afternoon, and I was outside writing in my journal. I wrote the words, “I’m moving to Europe” before I even realized what I’d just written. I stared dumbly at the ink, unclear why I’d inscribed them, not even feeling as if it had been me. They felt more like a prophecy than an idea scrawled on paper.

I stared, read the words again, and then decided to do what they said I would do.

I was later in many of the places I saw during those odd moments of walking vision. That shoreline turned out to be near a place I had once visited in Morbihan, while another landscape revealed itself just over a low mountain in Finistère. This sense of recognition and familiarity was even more profound and occasionally quite disorienting through scent more than vision. I’d smelled each place before and knew them by their smell, the same way I knew my grandparents’ home by the scent of the particular coffee they drank and the smell of pine and oak of the forests around their home.

They were places I’d never been, but I knew them already. Everything felt burningly correct. I’d arrived to the place I knew from the scent in dreams and visions. I’d come to where I thought I would finally rest, and for a little while all seemed perfect.

It wasn’t, though. I felt somehow I wasn’t actually where I was going to be later, but I didn’t like this feeling. I’d dismantled an entire life in order to arrive elsewhere, and though it didn’t feel like the future I’d actually seen, I didn’t want to go somewhere else again.

I got stuck. Really, really stuck. I used to have this fear, inspired by a deeply depressing stop on a cross-country train trip in the United States, of getting off at a station and forgetting to get back on before the train left. What would happen to you in such a moment? What if you could never get back on and somehow forgot you had been on your way somewhere else? You’d be trapped in a living purgatory, constantly visiting the train station. You’d watch the passengers get on and leave, and wonder where they were going and never remember that you had meant to go there, too.

Getting “stuck” meant something specific in this case. I’d overstayed a visa because of a relationship with a man I’d not yet understood was an abusive terror. I had become enchanted, or rather enthralled, and the next two years of my life seemed to make all those helpful voices and mystic visions seem suddenly diabolic.

Everything of those two years blurs together into one terrible knot. There were occasional threads I could loosen out from it sometimes, but almost the entire experience was one of increasing misery, isolation, and degradation of self. Abuse does that, leads you to forget who you were, what you are capable of, and especially to doubt everything and everyone.

When I was able to work out my visa situation, to become “legal” again in Europe, this accelerated the abuse. The day I received my regularization papers, he hit me and shouted at me for hours, and then again many times that week. Before that day, leaving him meant leaving Europe. On that day and after, I could leave him without going back to the United States.

I hadn’t even thought of leaving him, so degraded my soul had become. His certainty that I planned to leave made him more abusive, but such an idea still hadn’t occurred to me until visiting my sister three years ago. She’d moved her family to Luxembourg for work, and I could finally visit her now that I didn’t have to worry about being caught as an illegal immigrant, so I did.

I didn’t tell her what he’d done or what he’d really been like, but she’s my sister. She could see it on my face, the sorrow shaping into someone who resembled only a shadow of me. She asked and I finally told her, but even still I didn’t think of leaving him.

When I returned, everything got worse, and worse. More screaming, more violence. He started breaking things of mine, often by throwing them at me. He’d wake me in the middle of the night to yell at me like a living nightmare. He’d demand literal receipts of where I’d been while he was at work, timestamped grocery tickets and bus transfers. He’d steal through my phone, reading texts and deleting contacts, never finding anything incriminating and so conjuring conspiracies.

Finally I did think of leaving. Just for a little while, I told myself. Just to give him time to calm down and maybe get therapy or something. I even left quite a few important things in the place I lived to trick myself into leaving, assuring myself that I’d come back soon and I wasn’t doing anything permanent.

I didn’t go back. I’d actually finally left, by which I mean I got back on the train to where I had intended to go.

It seems so obvious now, yet it could never have been obvious then. I needed to live through all that, because I needed to experience the inevitable conclusion of all my former ideas about myself and the world. I needed to know their consequences, how they create prisons for the self from which even escape seems an unthinkable idea.

The result of finally understanding all this has been the last three years of my writing. Seeing how the very same ideas, patterns, and beliefs which trapped me fuel the political frameworks I criticize has been a particularly difficult truth for me, since so much of my former life was devoted to those frameworks. Even harder than that has been watching so many people I knew and cared about entrench further into them the worse their personal lives get, becoming fundamentalists of identity because they don’t know who they are any longer.

It all still haunts me and my writing. Reading through all these essays, it’s impossible not to see this reflected back. I’m still trying to understand how I got there so I can understand how they got there, trying to comprehend how it was that I finally escaped so I can comprehend how they might be able to, as well.

That’s part of the problem, I’m afraid. As I mentioned, I’ve tried to think and to work my way out of problems as a means of escape, of hiding from really hard truths about my life and the world around me rather than looking at them directly.

I only escaped by means utterly unrelated to thinking or to work.

It wasn’t just the voices and the visions. If we know anything from myth and religious histories, oracles and prophecies are always ignored until the conditions they warn of finally manifest. By then, it’s most often too late, and all we really learn is that we refused to learn and will refuse next time, too.

How I actually escaped was that I finally stopped trying to think and work my way out of things. I had to sabotage those mechanistic parts of myself to let something fully irrational guide me, something that couldn’t be explained, defined, or ever reasoned with.

Citing the medieval Christian and Orthodox framework, Paul Kingsnorth links this “irrational” to the Greek concept of nous, which is a good way to think of it:

Medieval Christianity placed a high value on the intellect, but it was an intellect that was to operate within certain bounds. There could be said to be two types of knowledge: that known by the ratio and that known by the nous. The ratio is the deductive, logical, reasoning mind. The nous is what Orthodox Christianity still refers to as the ‘heart-mind’: it is a deeper level of thinking than mere reason, and it looks to attain wisdom: knowledge of the deeper truth of reality.

That same concept has quite a few names in other frameworks. For instance, in some occult traditions it’s often called “the god-self,” and it aligns somewhat to the knowledge spheres of the higher chakras in Hindu thought.

Most fascinating for me is the way esoteric Islam conceived of this irrational realm of knowledge: the “imaginal.” The imaginal is quite difficult for us to understand since we now think of imagination as something that is false or the opposite of the “real.” This wasn’t originally the case in English: it wasn’t until “real” took on extra connotations through its use in economic thought (“real estate,” “realizing the value of your assets”) that imagination became an antonym for the real.

Before this point, imagining something was the first step to bringing something into existence. In some ways, it was what people mean now by “intention” as a core ingredient in magical change. However, the imaginal is also insight, intuition, and inspiration as well, and the more developed the imagination, the more actively a person could interact with those concepts.

Again, it’s very hard for us to think of imagination as anything other than something “made up” or false. What helped for me comes from a trick I learned from one of John Michael Greer’s books, a ritualistic meditative process where you try to hold all the meanings of a phrase at once.

Applying that process to the phrase “play make-believe” gets you two immediate meanings. The obvious meaning refers to something children do, “pretending” or engaging in fantasy. A second meaning takes a little while to unfold but changes everything, leading to many, many more meanings afterwards. (I can’t guide you through this—you have to do this yourself—but start by teasing apart “make” and “believe,” and remember that “play” is both a noun and a verb.)

What’s particularly fascinating about the esoteric Islamic concept of the imaginal is that it still retained a minor degree of polytheism that Christianity and Judaism scoured from their thinking. That’s primarily because it didn’t fully agree with Plato and Aristotle, who really laid down the foundation for monotheism. That is, the imaginal isn’t the realm of ideal forms, but rather the realm of potential forms. All the possibilities of what a human can be start in the imaginal, all the many worlds that can be manifested exist there. There is no “true” self in such a framework, but rather an infinite number of selves, each of which can become true. In other words, it’s a bit like the modern “many worlds” theory proposed by some theorists of quantum physics.

The imaginal is irrational just as the nous is irrational, but unlike the nous it is an active realm of being in which we are created over and over again by our actions and our interactions. It’s where the gods are met, because they dwell both there and elsewhere, just as we do. It’s also where ideas are met, but it isn’t their realm, isn’t the “ideal.” They just live there, too, and get picked up sometimes like treasures to be manifested and sometimes like parasites to be spread.

The imaginal is the only way to escape one way of being into another: you cannot become someone else until you can imagine yourself otherwise. I’ve always liked the phrase (often attributed alternately to Mark Fisher, Frederick Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek) “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” because it unfolds in many ways under the same meditative trick I mentioned earlier.

A second meaning especially relates to the imaginal. That is, capitalism is itself a world that needs to end, and it’s much easier to imagine the end than to try to imagine how we get to that end.

Therein’s the gate and the path. You look to the end and not at all the stations along the way. Even if you get out at a station, you remember that’s not your destination, not where you imagined yourself to be, not where the imaginal was leading you. Maybe you needed to stop for a bit, drop off some things you didn’t need any more, wrestle with a few bits of a world you’re leaving behind so that you can actually arrive to the next one.

That’s all okay, and even more than okay. The imaginal requires agency because the imaginal is agency, but it also teaches agency, and so you don’t need to learn this by yourself.

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