My thoughts on imagination - I imagine you ask - are like ground clouds: the closer I get, the more they thin. Invisible, yet all-encompassing. Wetness on the cheek and cotton opacity before the eyes.

I don't know what imagination looks like, but I know what imagination looks like.

"Intoxicating Euphoria" hand-cut paper collage by artist Charlie Elms. Under his moniker 10 Yrs time, Elms produces resituated images of humans, nature, memory, power, and vulnerability like this embodied volcanic ash. Available as a print.

What does imagination look like?

Imagination is Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet who imagined himself in more than five dozen personas: “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.”

Imagination is Jorge Luis Borges, whose magic realism took firm root in his profoundly personal project, a compendium of imaginary beings (beings as imagined by humans, that is).

Imagination looks like American Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, who flexed her expansive mind to conceive freedom when confronted with poverty and dispossession.

Imagination is Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, the cloud trail of Jackie Morris' pen, and the A-Z (and everything that dash contains) of poet Edward Lear.

"Beyond the Hills (ii)" suggests a haunting, cumulus vision of Elysian fields populated with elephants. Shattering and sublime. Available as a print.

Imagination seems to be a privy of poets, is that right? I imagine so.

In her short meditation on the subject of imagination, American poet Mary Ruefle (April 16, 1952) likens writing about imagination to a fish describing the sea:   Reminds me of Scottish poet Nan Shepard whose sparse poetry written and re-written over her lifetime includes an homage to the wind speaking to us by using the surface of the water. Isn't that unexpected and beautiful? "It is impossible for me to write about the imagination."

It might be elusive, but Ruefle confesses readily imagination is everything. Imagination is thinking there is no difference, "they are one."

I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it. It is my daimon if ever there was one. The daimon is a kind of twin that prowls alongside, is most often vivid when things are tough, that pushes you toward the life you signed up to live before you fell into the amnesia of birth and forgot the whole affair.

I am going to tell you now before I begin, what my conclusion is to my thoughts on the imagination: I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one.

I would push Ruefle's words further or to their logical conclusion: if imagination is thinking, then it is also those subsidiaries of thought: memory and hope. In these elements, imagination often reaches its limits. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska imagined talking to her teenage self, but she could not imagine connecting to that adolescent self. We carry memories of home but cannot reconcile home outside memory.

Ruefle agrees and commands we disband notions of singular positivity of how great imagination is and accept the "full, rounded, complex" nature of imagination instead.

I once sat next to a young woman at dinner who believed that the CIA had bugged her salad, and it terrified her, she was unable to live a normal life because of her imagining this terrible thing, and I think this is a negative aspect of the imagination.

Later thought: well, she had a marvelous point after all, because very often when washing lettuces I find a slug, and my lettuce really is "bugged," and I thought my thought was a positive aspect, because I was using my imagination when I had this thought.

Elms on his creative process: "Sometimes I have an idea and go on the hunt for specific imagery but other times I just browse and let the images find each other ... I love the restrictions of the analog process." "Collage Made in Lockdown" available as a print.

It might be responsible for human invention, pulling something from nothing, but imagination has no morality, no value. It is neither good nor bad. It is, however, intensely powerful.

Ruefle illustrates its strength:

Emily Dickinson had an amazing imagination, but so did her nephew, who came home from school one day in tears, having been berated by his teacher-perhaps even whacked-for having told the class about the white goat who lived in the attic. He was attacked for being a dreamer, a liar, someone who made things up. Upon hearing this, Emily was furious, beside herself with fury, and said that the teacher could come to the house and see for herself the white goat in the attic, Jor indeed it lived there, Emily had seen it, there it was, munching a pile of grass under the beams.

This anecdote is the only thing I remember from reading a five-hundred-plus-page biography of the poet. I am not even vaguely interested in the men, or the women, or any of that other stuff; I am interested in the goat, whom I love as if it were mine own, and though I don't have an attic, I have a place in my head where it can live, and go on living, as I feed it daily with mounds of fresh cut grass. Over the years, it has been given a blue ribbon round its neck, from which dangles a silver bell.

That precious sliver of childlike wonder and bountiful imagination that nurtures Ruefle's goat in the attic   Gaston Bachelard taught us that the more memory and imagination is anchored in space, the more it affects us, so that the goat is not simply a goat but a 'goat in the attic,' is the real strength of this thought. is the same one that imagines a stubborn bear on the stairs and a friendship of moles.

I think (I imagine) that imagination grows in the same mathematical equation that governs nerve cells and tree roots. And somewhere in the imagined ether that governs the wordless space between you and I, I imagine our imaginations entwined.

"I was completely obsessed with volcanos when I first started" Elms uses the most vibrant and overwhelming images of nature, all from vintage books and magazines, to push our sense of vulnerability and invincibility. "Blind Faith" hand-cut paper collage. Available as a print.

Someone asked which is larger, the universe or the mind. The latter, for it, can contemplate the former and itself. Ruefle's On Imagination is a short, slim book that encompasses the universe and, more importantly, the mind that contemplates it.

In On Imagination Ruefle grabs this airy thingness that is imagination, this universe-wide substance, this invisible sea water, and cotton stratus, and gives it form.

So what is this thing I am interested in? My daimon, the imagination, of course. I could give you a long list of things I am not even vaguely interested in, but many of them would insult you for I am sure you are interested in at least some of them. All I can tell you is that at long last I am myself and free, even if isolated, and I am happy when I want to be and sad when I feel like it, and about the only thing that troubles me is knowing how many people on earth do not have that privilege, some for external reasons and some for internal ones, and to these I bow and for these I pray.

And then I hear a little bell and go up to the attic and put my arms around a goat.

Hold these things and expand them in turn. Further ruminations in my study of the physicality of memory, Dorothea Brande on cultivating the artistic temperament, choreographer Twyla Tharp's energizing steps to motivate creative habit, and Jackie Morris' and Robert Macfarlane's collaboration of verse and print to animate the most delicate, inspired and harmonious creative aspects of our self and the world.

All images are ⓒ  Charlie Elms, 10 Years Time, 2022.