“Imagination is the eye of the soul.”

Of which possess you, encased in chambers of brain matter and bestowed to us, the cut teeth of keys to unbolt the portals of surrogate orbs, cosmos, oceans of mammoth proportions. We are time travelers, star gazers, raconteurs, and romantics, anointed in an avant-garde baptism of immortal imagination.



Though they crouch to catch you in a killing jar, imprisoned and pinned like insect specimens. These butchers of souls, cleavers and scalpels to dissect and scrutinize in stained aprons, skin the tender nucleus of your peculiar introspectiveness. Then fold it in flaxen parchments, tied up in twine, addressed and dispatched to museums hosting an exhibition of oddities. At which, engraved in gold plates, the names of assumed superficial diseases: “nonconformist”, “imaginative”, “unrealistic”, “eccentric”, “loser”, “reclusive”, “impulsive”, “timid”, tacked to their cylinder cases, and buckled by brass clasps, for an audience of attendees, ignorant.



They seek to snuff out the fire deep-seated in our spirit like flames in a cookhouse blaze, hopping and hotly and thwacking a damp dishrag, or as if a pastry maker pounding the lumps from pudgy, pillowy dough.“Out! Out!”. Oh, our howling souls cobbled in by the cold stones of monotone.



At birth, one is coaxed to discourage and discard the mysterious misunderstood, to coddle cowardice, the cold sweats, the unfortunately swallowed peach pit sitting in your stomach. Tucked up to their chins, and sleeping on pillows of fluffed-up propaganda, damnant quodnon intelligunt*! Forgive them.



Bearing garlic and spaghetti stuffed stomachs, we slumber, hunched in half-unbuttoned cotton pajamas, as the breathing blackish-raspberry shadows sigh and unfurl at the hearth fire, embers roasting the raked beds of pulpous white ash.



Alas, within the simplest pleasures is paradise: brushing your hair behind your ear, waking up well-rested and warm with lucid hallucinations or laying to sleep when you are frail with fatigue; a heart beating. The descent of snow, softest of sounds, and ethereal Christmas hymns, sung from choirs in candlelit cathedrals. To see the garnished fir trees, and luminaries, and fingers glazed in the fragrance of clementines, cloves, cinnamon.



You have strange habits and a strange life. You are yourself, and after all, it is strange to be yourself in the throes of this undying dictatorship for standardization. And if I am outcast into the skirts of snow-fringed wilderness for refusing to succumb to high society and its superficial rigors, imagination will metamorphose into the map to guide me, vanguard.

Thoughts? Observations?

* “Damnant quodnon intelligunt” is a Latin proverb translating to “they condemn what they do not understand”.

P.S. Please excuse my tendencies for flimsy transitions and sporadic, abrupt subject shifting. My thoughts go in dozens of directions and then I can’t reign them in. Furthermore, I write and rewrite and rewrite in fragments, and then attempt to mend them together like a matchmaker.

Sincerest thanks to the spectacular Samuel Pritzker and K, for sending me their photographs in special format for this entry. Please see below for a full list of credits.

Title Quote: Joseph Joubert
Photo & Art Credits: (1, 7) Samuel Pritzker, (2) Lukasz Wierzbowski, (3, 5) K, (4, 8) Penny Davenport, (6) Logan Jack.