8 - Stuck: How Our Imagination Was Stifled by the Enlightenment

Summary

Many years ago, I was witness to an apparently obscene act that I have only recently come to understand. With this new understanding, I have come to respect and appreciate the person who did it. This is an example of how critique can support us in our understanding of the world, and this understanding is both a manifestation of and an act of Love. Much like our shifting appreciation of Danny Baker, Tom Ravenscroft and Damon Albarn, this is another example of the importance of suspending our judgement. It is only by suspending our judgement, or at least being critical enough of our judgements that they do not become dogmatic, that we remain open to and can imagine different possibilities. Being able to imagine different perspectives and interpretations is what enables us to transcend the granularity of space- time. This is dependent on our recognition of different perspectives and so is ultimately reliant on Love. In this chapter, we will see that this is a communal process that relies on our relationships with one another, both directly and indirectly through books and other media.

In 2004, I was travelling along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. My friend James Rooney and I were being taken upriver by John and Benny, two cousins who we had paid to take us in their boat. One of the largest rivers in the world, the Sepik flows from the snow- capped mountains and lush tropical forests of New Guinea and has been made famous by the early anthropological studies of the region's people in the 1930s by Margaret Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson – it is still somewhere that you are unlikely to run into other tourists. While we were there, an incident occurred that only made sense to me many years later when I came across Bateson's work. On our final day in the area and as we were heading downstream to the only place where the road came near enough to the river for us to hitch a lift on a truck back to the nearest town, we heard a loud and distant drumming over the whine of the boat's outboard motor.