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I feel, sometimes, as if I were a 'barker" in this forum, calling out to all of you, "Come see! Come see!" ...
Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves,
or
Ava Blitz's photographs
or
Philadelphia's Magic Gardens,
or
The Village of Arts and Humanities,
or
the Cantor Fitzgerald exhibit on Running the Numbers.

So here we go again.

This weekend I saw two movies: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas and Creation (based on the book about Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution). Seeing them back to back provoked a few thoughts about the evolution of stories, which seem to me relevant to our shared exploration here....

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus opens by laying out a wide range of possibilities; I was especially captivated by an early scene in which the Dr. claims that "storytelling sustains the world"; when his own storytelling, and that of his adepts, is silenced, he is sure that the world has been kept going by stories told elsewhere, by others. So he accepts a wager with the devil, to see who can collect the most souls. The battle is between those who choose one sort of story over another, though I could never quite figure out why a character might make one choice rather than another, or even which "side" it represented. Did their choices lie between stories that were light vs. those that were dark, those that were life-giving vs. death-dealing, imaginative vs. addictive? But the imaginative stories just seemed to be materialized addictions....I couldn't figure this out, and

... actually? I left the theater wondering which path I'd chosen myself. I do desire stories, deeply, and seek them out, continually--is this an addiction? An obsession? A danger (as Nassim Taleb has argued so cogently)? The film didn't clarify this quandary, or give me any guidance in how to navigate it. It operated mostly as a series of sleights of hand--great visuals, drawn from the work of a range of artists, but not much of a tale. No story. No resolution.

Creation involved a very different sort of storytelling: a clear arc, and a very clear resolution. When the cinematic Darwin, like the figures in the Imaginarium, allows himself to delve into his own imagination--particularly into the tortured memories of his dead daughter Annie--he loses himself in self-recrimination. Only when he leaves the world of his solitary imagination, confronts his wife with the stories they have been keeping to themselves, and re-makes their marriage, can he write and publish his findings. In contrast to the Imaginarium, which can only handle one imagination @ a time (two or more are disastrous: too powerful!), Darwin finds relief when he emerges from  the solitary, the a-social, the atomic self, into community.

In his post about blogging and self-creation, Bharath said  that "to have access to concepts is to have the ability to create new" ones. I think we are helped in that process by one another; and I'm hoping this group can move more in that direction, working on more shared stories, that draw on our individual imaginations, but also lead us out of and beyond them....