Seeing double: the deep core of the imagination

Among the innumerable visual images that human beings process, some stick in the mind. These are variously intriguing haunting and enigmatic. Many are encountered in the experience of art; others belong to the more general culture. Either way, they present the most captivating of visual phenomena. What makes them so, it is suggested here, is the act of doubling. What happens in great visual acts of imagination is that creators combine hitherto separated, contrary and divergent elements. The act of melding heterogeneous and opposing ideas generates the energy of creation. It enables the creator to forge new ideas hitherto unimaginable. In doing so, it forges images that are fascinating and entrancing. If we drilled to the deep core of the collective and individual imagination, what would we find? A molten core of metaphor, perhaps. In acts of haunting visual creation, we find that depths and shallows, core and periphery, light and dark exist 'as if' one was the other. This is what we find at the deep core of the imagination, namely that everything is something else. This essay reflects on what it is about the human species that gives it this capacity to treat one thing as something else