'Imagination' excerpted from the book 'On Equilibrium', Penguin Canada. 2002
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A few years ago in a hill village in Corsica I attempted to help a friend rebuild his old dry stone wall – that is, a wall without anything except the placement of the stones holding it together. In Corsica these are particularly wide and therefore complicated. My friend is a well-known professor of law, highly intelligent, open to culture and different ideas. We worked at it for some time on a hot day and got nowhere. Every five minutes we had to take down what we had put up. The stones have to fit – all of them, all the way through the thickness – like a tight balanced jigsaw puzzle – or the whole thing collapses.

Then his neighbour came by, returning from the hill above with his donkey. In the proverbial manner he began offering advice. He touched nothing. He didn’t even approach. He simply pointed at a stone in the pile and pointed where it should go on the wall. With minimalist finger gestures, hardly moving the wrist, he indicated exactly which way up, which edge forward, which way in. Each instruction was given before the stone was near the wall. He never had to adjust his directions. Each stone slipped precisely into place. My friend and I were reduced to semi-automated machines.

What was this? Memory in the form of experience? The neighbour had certainly done it many times, but that is an insufficient explanation. This was not merely a learnt skill. There was no fixed set of variables. The stones were whatever shape they happened to be.

Was it reason? Instrumental or other. Not at all. We were the ones attempting to apply reason and failing badly.

Intuition? Not really. He was too certain, too rapid. He knew.

Common sense, then? Perhaps to some extent. There was a shared knowledge of shapes – a spatial sense of shapes –without any artificial need for understanding.

But above all it was an exercise in imagination. He was placing the rocks the way a poet places words or phrases, word by word, yet in an uncontrolled flow, like floating atoms. He imagined the wall, then the stones tumbled out of his imagination into place. No doubt he was helped by a lifetime of using his imagination in this manner, just as a writer’s imagination is helped by his experience manipulating language.

But do I mean that he imagined an image of the wall? No. He didn’t have an abstract, analytic, linear view of what a wall is, he had a spatial view, exactly as a good novelist or poet does. Perhaps that acceptance or capacity for the spatial is the central characteristic of imagination. Perhaps that is what Merleau-Ponty meant by the “pre-objective realm” within us.

Submitted by and with permission of the author, John Ralston Saul