 Tanata, I want to speak to you about the imagination and hold the thesis that the visionary imagination and its revelations is actually real. It's a real faculty. It's a faculty that we share amongst each other and with other things and beings of reality, of the universe. Now, in order to make these audacious claims, I have to make a move or a couple of moves which are going to take us away from the way that we're used to talking about the imagination. I think it's a really interesting time for us because it's a time when we seem to be so thirsty for imaginative thinking and original thinking and yet, less and less, we seem to know what these words mean. I think oftentimes I notice when people say, oh, that's a very imaginative move, a very imaginative thinking. Usually what it's meant is it's a nice association of ideas. I hadn't thought about that before, so there's a little bit of creativity there in how you put things together. That's really fine as far as it goes, but that's not the kind of imagination that we're talking about today. I'm going to try and talk about the relationship between the creative arts, the creative imagination, and attempt to say really that the function of the creative imagination is to reveal an extraordinary surplus to reality that in a way only artists can reveal. I gather some of you are artists in this room, so you are in a very privileged position. In fact, you're more or less responsible for the welfare of the world from now on. Just letting you know, just cards on the table, just so that you know that's where we're going tonight. Just a little bit of responsibility there. One of the reasons why the imagination gets such a bad press nowadays, apart from the fact that we no longer really understand what it is, aside from this kind of internal mental association of ideas, is because there's a tacit understanding among many of us in our culture, or I think across cultures now really, that only the brute material is the truth. There's a sense in which when you get down to it, truth is something that isn't very vibrant and visionary, but it's something that is probably quite ugly and discordant and maybe cruel and violent. Quick look at the news would seem to vindicate that view very clearly. So in a sense, the problem with that, it's already an attitude towards the truth of things, to assume that something true and something real must be something quite basic, quite demonstrably not good, perhaps more ugly than it is beautiful. See, these are all kind of tacit moves that we make before we realize it. So this is sometimes called realism, right? People say, yes, okay, that's all very well with your creative art and your imagination, but I'm a realist and this is what happens in the world. And at the end of the day, you've got to do this and you've got to earn a living and you've got to try and survive and all this sort of stuff. So again, there's some truth to that. I'm not going to deny it, but I'm going to argue that that's just one plane of the real. And in order to make that argument, I'm going to go back into the past a little bit and look at some pre-modern cosmologies, pre-modern ways of thinking about art. And by pre-modern, I mean really mostly before the 17th century. But I'm going to also discuss some art that was made after the 17th century. I understand that maybe a little bit. How can I put it? Maybe that's not quite the right place to do that tonight, but I'm going to be scandalous. Exactly, never mind the 17th century, you don't even go beyond 1400. But anyway, okay, so my argument today is going to be that imagination is the middle voice of the universe. Imagination is the middle voice of the universe. And we're going to think about the number three a lot. We're going to think about threefold realities. We're going to think about threefold ways of thinking and of being. So there are three parts to this story and there are three realms to reality. Okay, since the 17th century, we have really subsided with two realms to reality. One is the sensory realm, the material realm, the realm of time and space and change and also decay and eventually death. I hate to break it to you. That's the sensory realm, right, the realm of becoming. And the other realm that we're familiar with is the mental realm, right, which is thought. But as I'm sure you know better than I do, since the 17th century, the connection between the two has been really complex to reestablish, right. There's been this really strange break in that we are aware that there is an intelligible plane in which we think, right. There are things of the mind, things perhaps of the spirit. And on the other hand, we're aware that we seem to be embodied, right. So we're on this physical plane as well. But the connection between the two is very tenuous and quite difficult and believe it or not, philosophers at universities are still working on that one to the extent that some of us have worked on it so much that we've decided to just pass on to other things because that problem seems to have absolutely no solution. So the argument that I'm making and I'm really going back to these pre-modern traditions to make it is that imagination is the middle voice between the two, right. It moves between the sensory and the mindful or the mental. It's just that in a pre-modern sense, what is mindful, the intelligible plane is not in our heads, but it's actually the deep structure of existence itself, right. It's the deep material of the real. Before the 17th century, what was intelligible, what was mind or intelligence was as real as the tangible world that we know, but it was real in a totally different way. It was really in a mind way, okay. But it was held to be a plane of reality, right. So not just private thoughts in the head. The head is a receptor and a co-creator of that mindful plane, but it's not just in the head. It's sort of everywhere. So you have to imagine the world as kind of saturated with intelligence, right. And so when you think in a good way, in a healthy way, in a wholesome way, you are in some way connecting to this wider reality, which is deeper than our own thinking, bigger than our own thinking and goes on well beyond our own thinking, if that makes sense. This is William Blake's Jacob's dream. If you're familiar with your stories in the Bible, Jacob falls asleep on a pillar of stone and then he dreams this imaginary staircase that goes all the way up to heaven with angels going up and down it. Okay. And I think that's an excellent picture for the kind of imagination I'm talking about as the middle voice of the universe, as this partly active, partly passive capability that we have in ourselves, which connects the two realm, the sensory and the intelligent, the heavenly and the earthly. Okay. So imagination is in the middle. How does that all connect to art? I hear you ask. So I'm going to go, I'm going to go through a few things and hopefully some of it will make sense. Okay. So this, so now for the briefest lesson of art history that you've ever heard. I'm going to, I'm going to try and do the last three centuries in less than two minutes. But I think it's really interesting. Here's another law of three for you. There's a little three-fold movement that occurs from the 17th century into the 20th, into the end of 19th and beginning of the 20th century. And this is really when art starts to do something very, very different than it had traditionally done. Okay. Traditionally, in pre-modern times, art had been thought to imitate, right, to create a likeness of nature. Now the word nature is going to be a key word here and I'm going to come back to what actually that means. But let's just think about reality. Now maybe reality is a better word than nature and it's interchangeable in the ancient sense. Okay. So the pre-modern theory of art is that art imitates reality, creates a likeness of reality. Now after this, this kind of immemorial traditional setup where there was this connection between the art and reality and the artists were just creating likenesses of the real, there was a moment in which that really ceased to be so obvious for artists and art moved into a different phase where the focus, the emphasis was really on expression. Now I don't mean expressionism, but I mean a kind of expressivism where the focus really began to be about the inner life of the artist, right. The inner life of the artist, i.e. no longer what the artist sees in reality, but what the artist feels in themselves, in their heart, in their mind, in their soul, right. So that the inner vision of the artist became more important than a fateful representation of the whole of reality. Okay. So that is, if you think about romantic arts, I don't know if any of you are familiar, if I think of a visual artist I have, Casper David Friedrich, do you know that painter, that ring of bell, right. And so you've got these incredible vistas of something that seems like it's nature, but it's actually more than nature. It's this, because it's the inner modes of the human being that are expressing themselves. So art finds this new focus from looking at the real and kind of creating an enticing visionary likeness of it. It goes into the sort of the inner life, okay. And by the late 19th, 20th century, that setup also falls apart. Okay. So we've gone from the outside to the inside. And there's a third phase of art, which can be called formalism, when really that begins to be about art and its internal logic, really about the object for itself, with no longer an external referent, either to reality or to the inside of the artist. So you've had three moves, you've had from the outside to the inside to something a little bit more conceptual or intellectual in a modern sense, all right. So that you've got that three-fold movement. Remember that, because that's going to mean something at some point. Okay. Now, how come? Why does art do that? How does it move from the phase when the real is the focus to the phase when the interior is the focus to the phase where the concept is the focus? Well, this occurs because reality itself is no longer the vehicle of artistic creative and ultimately spiritual meaning. Okay. That's the big crisis that the artists are facing. If reality in all its planes is no longer seen to be the vehicle of meaning, the locus of meaning, then it just, it is no longer a reality illuminated by creative and spiritual principles. It just becomes mere reality, right. So in pre-modern times, nature was seen to be a visible expression that ultimately leads you all the way back to God. When that synthesis between the divine and the earthly between the spiritual and the natural begins to break down, reality or nature is no longer, no longer has the same meaning. So representing nature, you know, painting likenesses of reality no longer has a spiritual meaning at all, because reality is divorced from its spiritual ground. This is really what has happened over the last 300 years. So if you notice what I've just told you in my extraordinarily quick version of art history, when that happened, the first move was where then do we find meaning? And the answer is in the feeling, in the genius, in the kind of prophetic vision of the artist. That's where the energy is. If it's no longer the cosmos itself, where else do we feel it, you see? So there's something in us humans, whatever we are, that is currently seeking to find the locus of meaning and of truth and beauty. So it keeps on moving, it keeps on searching. Good. All right, so how to mend this? I'm going to talk about a threefold way of thinking about art and then I'm going to suggest how the imagination moves between these three realms. And in order to do that, I think for a second about music. By the way, I'm going to use the term nature in its old sense. So one of my big influences is an Irish philosopher and wise guy called John Scottus Irugina. I don't know if you've heard of him before. And his definition of nature is not flowers and butterflies, but it's all the things that are and all the things that are not. Nature is all the things that are and all the things that are not. So already that's a very daring definition of what nature means, much, much bigger than what we think about when we think about nature. All the things that are and all the things that are not. If you think about it, even from a very simple everyday, in a very simple everyday sense, imagination works like that, right? Imagination sees things that are in things that are not or things that are not in things that are. Imagination is constant. It's a kind of double vision. It's adding something to your, even your everyday sense of reality. Let me give you a very, very simple example. If you're on a train, say you're on the train to, it's funny, isn't it? The things that come up in your own imagination, the train ride that I'm thinking about is the journey from Cambridge to Ely. Has anybody ever done that journey? Okay, so when you arrive towards Ely, there's the cathedral. You see the cathedral in the distance and as the train kind of moves closer and closer, the cathedral reveals more and more of itself. Well, the point I want to make is when you see the cathedral very far away in the distance, your imagination is already at work seeing things that are not, right? Because you can't actually see the whole cathedral, but your imagination is participating with you already completing the sense of the cathedral, right? So you can see it afar and your imagination is already telling you, yes, but there is more than that. There is more than my vision. There's this immense cathedral that's coming and there's the back of the cathedral and these amazing parts of the architecture. I know they're there, yeah? So you see, it's a double vision. It's what there is and what there isn't and it's always kind of already is always involved in this double seeing. So Eryugina says nature is the things that are and the things that are not. So it's massive, massive, massive idea of nature, right? It's the cosmos. It's reality. You could use those, you could use those words to indicate the same thing. Okay, now Boethius, another good guy. Have you ever heard of Boethius? Okay, that's pretty small. Am I doing it right? Hey, hey, there we go. Wow, mildly digitally literate. Excellent, okay. So Boethius wrote this very famous work called The Consolation of Philosophy, but before he wrote that, he also wrote some very interesting works that you could, who knows, you might even want to have a look at one day. And one was an unfinished work on music. And Boethius talks about these three, there's a lot of number threes today, right? So stay with me. These three, the three kinds of music, right? Instrumental music, human music, and cosmic music. So he's talking about music at this kind of threefold level. At the level of the human, human music is very simply the music that we create with our bodies. So it's the voice. It's the harmony that comes out of the relationship between the body and the soul, right? So it's everything that comes out of us. When we sing, when we sing poetry in his day, poetry was sung, right? So when we sing verses of poetry, the meter of the poem, or the simple song, or even just the rhythms of everyday life, right? So that comes from the body. Then instrumental music is very simply music made with instruments, plucking a string, blowing air into an instrument, that sort of thing, right? So there's instruments. So here's what's interesting here is that we've made things to make music, right? We have made tools to make music. So on top of our body, there's an additional, there's an additional dimension, there's an additional realm. So think about that. Human music, instrumental music, and then cosmic music. You might have heard of the music of the spheres. Is that ring a bell? So the music of the spheres is the silent music, or rather the music that we cannot quite hear because it's so refined that the stars, the celestial bodies make, okay? And ultimately, the movement of the whole universe makes, right? So that's the biggest, the biggest part, the biggest frame of music, this kind of cosmic universal frame. So look up to the skies tonight. If it's a clear night, I think it is a clear night. Actually in London, you're not going to see anything. Let's face it. But if you're going back just a little bit outside, you might see some of that music, which is funny that you can see music, but there we are. So the cosmic movement is the highest form of music. The point is that the three are related and each of the three is part of the other one. Okay? So we've got this threefold thing from the body all the way to the universe. So if I go back to my friend Eryugina and his wide, wide definition of nature, I'm going to talk about these three nature, these three natures, the nature of the body, the nature of making instruments to make art, and the universal nature. And really what I want to suggest to you, and then I'm going to get to the imagination in a minute, I promise, but really what I want to suggest to you is that healthy, nourishing, nurturing, wholesome art has a relationship with all three. Okay? All three from the bodily to the cosmic, from the smallest nature up to the second level, which is when we make things. So that's the realm of culture, right? Up to the cosmic realm. Okay? So nature in a small sense, the physical, up to the realm of culture, up to the cosmic realm. And art functions as a kind of revelation of all three and the relationship between all three. That's what I want to suggest to you. And in the second part we'll see how the imagination kind of adds to that. But you know what? I even thought of some examples because I can see some confused faces, but don't worry. I'm going to about to dispel all your doubts. You're going to get it in just a second. All right. So scandalous 19th century art. Look away now. So this is beautiful. This is a Cezanne still life. Okay? A Cezanne still life. Now, what I'm selling you here, I'm not selling you anything, but what I'm suggesting is a kind of heuristic way into these things, right? It's just it's not a cast iron theory of art. If anyone is trying to convince you with a cast iron theory, avoid them. The proof that the theory is no good is that it's cast iron. Okay? All I'm saying is here's a threshold, here's a doorway, walk in it and see what you find for yourself. But these are just some traveling notes that I've found and I'm sharing with you. All right? So if we look at this beautiful still life, scandalously modern still life, we notice those three realms that I've just been talking about. So the very simple realm, which is the natural or the physical realm, we have in the shape of the fruit. Okay? So there's that relationship with the physical. Then there's a relationship with things that are made. So I'm talking about the level of culture. So that could be as simple as tools that we use for everyday living or that we use for ritual or for celebration or clothes or more complex things that have to do with more complex social interactions. Okay? That's the realm of culture. And there we have it. If we look at the glass and the bottle or the vase. Okay? So that's all straightforward enough if you think about it. Now the third level, which is the cosmic level, which has to do with a more metaphysical thing, something more difficult to grasp, something that has to do with an ultimate ground of being that some people might call God. Right? I'm going to call it the divine or perhaps for the sake of the talk today being itself. How does Cezanne engage with this? That's more difficult. My suggestion to you is that it's simply the silent and embracing act of existence. Okay? So the magic of that particular still life is that it speaks about this cosmic realm as well. Right? Through the simple fact of the poise of the beings that he has represented just as they are. Right? So God is not represented and yet God is there as part of the picture. Yeah? Right? So there's an involvement with the three levels of existence here. Does that make sense? It's just an idea. I'm not saying that it works every time. Okay? But it's just something to think about. Those three aspects of nature, those three levels are at play. More difficult. Van Gogh's peasant shoes. Have you seen this one before? It's fairly famous. And here I'm relying. This is not my analysis. This is Martin Heidegger's analysis. But I think he makes the point very well. He says furiously checking his notes to make sure that it actually does make sense. Yeah. So here there's something different that is implicit. We no longer have the natural as explicitly portrayed, but we have it as implicit. Right? In the fact that these shoes have been for a walk. They've been for a walk most probably in the field or on a path near a field. So there's a relationship with the earth, with the seasons, with the seasons for growing, with the seasons for harvesting. There's a kind of rich, this is kind of implicit, that relationship with the earth and these feats that have trodden the earth. So that's the very simple natural level. On the cultural level, this speaks of the life of a peasant, the kind of lifestyle that a peasant would have, which is hard. Right? Daily work. These are shoes that I've seen a lot of wear. So there's that cultural level as well. And then you've got that wider level, similarly to the Cezanne, which has this sense of the kind of the faithfulness of existence. There's something kind of metaphysical that is being signified here as well. I'm taking weird examples a little bit on purpose. Because if I look at 12th century religious art, it's easy. You do that every day here, right? So I'm just taking some different examples, really in order to show that in a sense, those three planes of reality are at play when we make art. They're calling us to be in some kind of relationship with them. And as an artist, our concern is those three planes, and somehow always those three planes. It goes from the very material that you work with right up to the ultimate, or right up to the ground of being itself. And if one of them is missing, that's when it starts to get difficult. Okay? So one last example. You'll be surprised. Oh, I haven't got it. I haven't got it. I haven't got it. That's okay. It's probably time for me to move on. That's all right. The last example was going to be Blake's Newton. But don't worry. I think you're getting the idea. I'm hoping that you're getting the idea anyway. Okay. So matter, soul, body as compound in the human level, right? So nature, culture, spirit. Okay? Those are the three realms. And each realm, what I want to say to you is each realm spills over in the other. Okay? So we're not talking about three compartments of being. We're talking about three aspects of reality that slightly spill over into each other. So each of the realms is saying something about the other realms. This is what makes those Cézanne still lies magnificent. It's not just apple. It's also the ultimate mystery of being. It's not just a wine glass and a wine bottle. It's also the fact that there were friends around the table that shared this bottle of wine, that spoke together, maybe celebrated something important. You see what I mean? So each of these realms kind of spills on the other and implicitly, tacitly, silently suggests each of these realms. Okay. All right. Okay. So this three-fold thing can also be related to the three natures or the three activities proper to the soul. And here I rely a little bit on Aristotle. I know another bad name not to pronounce around here, but he's occasionally okay. And he talks about the three activities proper to the soul. I'm going to give you the Greek words. Try not to fall asleep. And I'm going to explain what they mean very quickly. So tecne, phronesis, and theoria. Okay. Tecne, from which we get our word technology, simply means arts in the sense of any crafting, any making. Okay. So the first activity of the soul is making. Then phronesis means doing in the sense of right action in the sense of that's okay. You missed all the good bits though. Don't worry. So phronesis, the second level of the soul is about where my action comes from, what the ground of my action is, what is good, right, nourishing action. Okay. So we've got making, we've got doing, and theoria, from which we get our theory, means contemplating or knowing, but knowing in the good sense. Okay. So making, doing, contemplating, nature, culture, God. These are the threefold levels of reality over and over again. Now with making, doing, contemplating, the same rhythm happens again. And I want to suggest to you that if art is working well in society, art speaks to those three levels of our soul, to the making, to the doing, to the action, right, and to the contemplating, which has to do ultimately with the divine. Okay. And again, each of the realms speak to each other because our contemplating informs our making. Our making rouses the faculties to action, as William Blake says. So the making feeds into the doing. The doing leads to the contemplating, right. So there's a lovely kind of musicality, a lovely going back and forth. It's very circular, that kind of threefold thing. One interesting thing I think about our culture is that one of them has overtaken the other two. The technique has overtaken the phronesis and the teoria, right. The making has overtaken the doing and the contemplating. And now we think of doing and we think of contemplating as though there were forms of making or producing. Everything's about production, right. So we think about moral action as a kind of calculation. And we think about knowledge as just data to analyze, to control, to quantify, to parcel out. So every, our obsession with technology is a cancelling out of two aspects of the soul and a cancelling out, sorry, forgive me, a cancelling out of two realms of reality, right. So these things are deeply connected. I'm just suggesting some of the ways in which why arts are in a trifle of confusion, right. Because our consideration of these realms is severely lacking. And I'm going to tell you right now, the philosophers, the scientists, the politicians, I belong to at least one of those, they haven't got clue, right. We're all running around trying to act, trying to sort things out. Nobody knows how to reconnect those three realms. Everybody kind of feels that that is quite important. But nobody knows how to. It's up to the artists. It's only the artists that are going to take us there. So the challenge is big, okay. So this is where the imagination comes in. This is where the imagination comes in. So I'm going to take my three-fold structure, one last to jump. I know I'm putting a lot of things past you and hopefully not past you, hopefully within you as the beginning of a discussion or a contemplation. But now this three-fold structure, all right. So I spoke about reality in a traditional sense, so before the 17th century as having these three planes. I spoke about the imagination as being the middle voice of the universe. And if you think about the sensory plane and the mental plane, now let's think about those three activities of the soul. Sensory plane, making, mental plane, contemplation. The middle plane, which is phronesis, action, and which also corresponds to the soul. That's where the imagination lives, okay, in the middle, in the heart, right. So the imagination mediates as it were up and down. I'm going to use this metaphor of up and down because pre-modern cosmology tends to be vertical, okay. So there's this idea of ascending up to the intelligence or going down into the world of matter. But this does not mean I don't want this to be a hierarchy. It's just a way of picturing the cosmos. You can rephrase that or you can reframe it from a more modern perspective. You still with me? Excellent. I'm not sure I'm with myself, but we're getting there. Okay, so a bit of Shakespeare. There's a play that's all about the imagination. And it's all about characters who don't believe the imagination, right. And because they don't believe the imagination, the fairy world, the other world, the world of spirits and all sorts of really interesting things, play with them, right, over and over again. So, exactly. Is that Shakespeare? Is that Shakespeare outside? Sounds Italian. Hey, I can do that. I grew up in Italy. It's not culturally insensitive. So Shakespeare. So Shakespeare has the most rationalistic, the most hard-nosed, the most realist character in this play, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Duke of Athens, Theseus, say the most marvelous things about the imagination, reveal the hidden mysteries of the imagination, whilst completely not believing a word he says. This is very Shakespeare. He does that all the time. It's kind of a very paradoxical imagination that Shakespeare has. And so the Duke of Athens, Theseus says in the Midsummer Night's Dream, he talks about the poet. Now, he talks about poets, but the Greek word for poet is, or for poetry is poiesis, and poiesis just means making. So even though Shakespeare is talking about poets, I mean all makers, so all of you, whatever craft you have, whatever art you have, you're all makers in that sense. So he says the poets, he's talking about imagination and how it's such a deceitful, it's a conceit of the mind, it's fantasy, it takes you away from reality. And then he especially singles out of the poet as being a particular master of this. And he says, the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth, the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to every nothing, a local habitation and a name. As imagination bodies forth, the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes. So poets, makers make shapes for what Theseus calls airy nothings and give them a local habitation, so beautiful, a local habitation and a name. So for Theseus, he's a hard-nosed rationalist, he's your Richesunak, right? So he doesn't believe in the intelligible realm, he doesn't believe that the world is shot through with intelligence, that it's actually teeming with mindful reality, just waiting to be contemplated. He doesn't believe that, he just believes that, right? So he talks about this but he says they just make it up out of nothing, it's out of thin air and then suddenly they come up with stuff and it's the business of imagination to kind of come up with this nonsense. But he puts it so beautifully as imagination bodies forth, right? The forms of things unknown. So, and here I'm going to refer, how are we doing for time? I'm going to refer to the scholar Henri Corbin, which I'm sure some of you have heard of, and his idea of the Mundus imaginalis, the imaginal. Henri Corbin was, I think he was writing in the 50s and 60s and his whole study was really Sufi philosophy and Sufi mysticism, Persian, but also figures like Ibn Arabi and extraordinary, an extraordinarily rich tradition of literature that in his day very few people were really looking at. And he made this incredible discoveries, he saw that the Sufis had understood and were speaking very clearly about this middle realm between the material and the intelligible, which does body things forth. So, when you use your imagination or rather when imagination uses you, things that appear are bodies. They are objects, they are beings that come before you. This could be when you're creating, when you're working, you're thinking through something that you're making or you're having a dream or a moment of revelation. I don't know if you've ever had any of those, but I'm told that they happen. So, you see something but not with the eyes, you see something with your being, but it is a mode of seeing. So, the Sufis are saying, of course it's a mode of seeing. We know this, what we're seeing are subtle bodies, it's a subtle realm which is between the intelligible world and the sensible. It is sensible, you cannot see it with your sensible eyes, you're seeing it with your internal eyes, but it is also intelligible because they're immaterial. Does that make sense? So, they're both. I'm talking about the imagination as this middle voice of the universe. It's that mediating faculty that is between intelligence itself and material reality. So, if you look at very crude apologies, I'm in a room of people who spend their life trying to make beautiful things and I'll show you this horrible schematic diagram. This is from a representation of the cosmology of Dante's divine comedy, which is also about the imagination and it's also about threefold reality. What we've got here, I'm not going to trouble you about inferno and purgatory. So, you're safe, we're going to heaven today, so that's good. This is something in which the Sufi tradition and Dante and the sort of medieval western world were really in accord and in fact they were, as I'm sure you all know, there were so many crossovers between those cultures. Because we do history in a completely wrong way, we just think about wars and dates and this stuff that really takes us away from what things are actually, the things that are actually going on. Not that those things aren't going on, I know that they are, but I'm just saying there's other things as well. So, it was a time of incredible cross-pollinisation, is that a word? I'm going to commit to that, cross-pollinisation. I'm going with that. So, many similarities and one of them is that cosmological map. So, if you see, this is the map of the material world, if you've ever wondered what it looks like, this is what it looks like. So, what telescopes show you is not this. If you look at a telescope, you're not going in this direction, you're going in that direction, so you actually never see any of that. To see that, you've got to use the imagination. So, the way that Dante forms it is that at this level, there are different skies, he divides the sky up there into different astral planes, and I'm not going to go into that today. I just want to get here. I just want to get here because this, at the very, very top, number 10, that's where the imagination lives. So, next time you're in the lift, 10th floor, that's where you want to go. So, here the imagination lives, and here is where space and time end. And Corbin's realization is that the Sufis were talking about this all the time, that there's this kind of 10th level up here where time and space get totally reversed, where there are things that you can see, visions that you can have, but they are in no place. They are in no place. Rather, they contain every place. Okay, so at this level, it's no longer space-time, and yet it's real. You can see them. You can see angels and spirits, right? Can't you? No? I thought everyone knows that. So, that little realm is a really extraordinary realm because it is able to reveal to you what the next realm might be like. And at the same time, it is able to reveal to you what your own realm might be like. Okay, so it can take you up as well as down, right? It really, it mediates. It goes between the two. So, one of the wonderful ways that it does that, because it's a power that is sensible and intelligent, right? Sensible and in the intelligible world. It responds to where you are, because part of your soul is in contact with your body. And I hate to break it to you, but to live a bodily life is to live a life of passions and emotions and contradictions, and sometimes sorrows and difficulties, okay? And the imagination does not take you away from that. It meets you there. It meets you there. And it provides you the kinds of visions. That's, this is the idea, right? Of this ancient world that I'm, I'm portraying. It provides you the kinds of visions that can lead you up to the intelligence itself. When I'm talking about the intelligence itself, I'm talking about that third level that I was talking about at the beginning, universal music, the ultimate metaphysical ground of art, okay? So, by meeting you in your place where you are and providing, showing the appropriate visions, it can surprise you, it can catch you, it can claim you, it can lead you in that direction. And in the same way, because the further up you go, the more, the more the world that is down here makes sense, it can also provide you with the appropriate visions, symbols, ideas, motifs, tropes to actually make sense of the world in which we are here and now, okay? So it really mediates between the sensible and the intellectual. It goes up and down. So, to conclude that really, is to think about a reality in which vision, creative imagination, and the exploration of reality in that kind of artistic and poetic way, is, has a cognitive value. It reveals the real as it is in itself. It is not, as the moderns think, an escape from the real into the fabulous. That's the modern problem, right? And in fact, after Dante, the big writer after Dante in Italian literature is Boccaccio, and Boccaccio approaches Dante exactly like that. He thinks it's a move from the real to the fantastic, and all of, all of the arts and literature become about that, become about fantasy. What is reality? What is fantasy? Right? Now that's not what Dante had in mind. That's not what the Sufi fellows had in mind either, right? The move of the imagination is not from the real to the fake. It's from the real to the more real. So what we don't have today, to conclude, is the kind of cosmology that can accommodate that, right? We need that three-tiered cosmology that I am talking about with nature, culture, God, with making, doing, and contemplating, and with the material, the imaginal, and the spiritual. Yeah, I've made all these connections for you, and I've really generalized and kind of exaggerated. But you really is to, is to kind of show you that art really depends on that visionary cosmology. Yeah, that visionary cosmology, that art ultimately has this cosmic or metaphysical ground. It doesn't matter what you believe. It's not about believing in the God of Dante or believing in the God of the Sufis. That's irrelevant. The challenge really today, I think, from an artistic perspective, is to become open to the possibility of that age-old cosmology revealing itself, revealing itself in new ways. So that cosmology, we can't blow up Dante, or just simply sentimentalize the past. That's not going to work. But we can learn from the past and we can let it sit with us and see what new doorways it can open. Today, we have a broken cosmology. And in a sense, it's worth staying with the broken pieces. There's this beautiful, traditional Japanese art about tea making, right? When a tea vessel breaks, we keep, you know, yeah, I can see a lot of nods. So you know what I'm talking about. The family to which this happens, they keep the broken bits of the vessel and then eventually a master puts it back together again after having stayed with the broken bits and contemplated them. And the broken vessel put together back again is helped to be of more worth and value than how it originally was. I think there's something really powerful in that tradition. So we're at the level in which the cosmology is broken. But it's broken, as Lenko and would say. And that's how the light gets in, right? So this moment of brokenness is a good moment. It's a good moment for us to contemplate and to see what kind of creative, visionary insights are going to come to us. What cosmology is going to claim us. I think the imagination is alive and real and waiting to be summoned. And we've got to imagine our way out of this mess, right? We can't think our way out of this mess. And no matter how much technology we make, we're not going to get out of this mess. So the imagination is, I'm afraid, our way forward here. And this is why artists play such an important part, okay? So hopefully tonight, I've shared a little bit of that sense. I've put it in a very, very general way so that we can ask some questions together and continue the conversation. It's going to take some time. We're going to disagree sometimes. We're going to agree some other times. But hopefully you've seen something of that vision and hopefully some of it has been helpful to you. So thank you very much for listening.