The uninhabited imagination

My parents love to tell the story of how, as a toddler, I was angry until I could speak. I desperately wanted to communicate with the complex world around me. Apparently, the tantrums eased once I learned to talk, and I started to talk my way through life. Reading was my next hurdle. I remember the headaches that the A-Z readers left me with, but I powered through and accelerated towards literature by the time I entered the second grade. My life was no longer confined to the suburbs of Buenos Aires; instead, I was bound by the limits of my school’s library.

As members of the University, I am sure that you or someone you know has a profound love of words. We see them every day, we use them to communicate, and some of us are lucky enough to learn about Derrida’s distaste for them. When you read something descriptive, odds are that you can visualize the image. Some of us take these prompts and create vast, colourful scenes in our heads; others will simply see shadows. Nevertheless, the images you paint and play with are creations of your mind’s eye.

A small percentage of us are not so lucky. I have aphantasia, which means that my mind’s eye is blind. When you tell me to visualize a red apple, I would be able to describe one to you, but my list of characteristics does not come from an image I pull out of a mental bank; rather, they are just things I know from enough interactions with apples.

I was not born with this blindness, although many people are. I have a difficult time trying to identify specifically when I lost my ability to visualize, but I am certain that it has been blank for over five years. My hypothesis is that I lost my imaginative vision at some point during early puberty, most likely around the time that my interest in reading began to diminish.

In middle school, I found it increasingly difficult to read. Although I desperately wanted to pick up a book, there was something about my experience of reading that shifted, making it unenjoyable. When I read for school, my teachers or peers would allude to images or uses of colour that should have stood out to me, yet I would have no recollection of those segments of the story. What I would remember included general plot points, striking dialogue that gave me cause to like or dislike a character, and the overall emotions that the text would prompt me to feel.

I began to notice that texts took me less time to read than they used to, even when I consciously increased my effort to notice the fine details. I was not skimming these texts; I just could not withdraw the same points my peers did. As I did not construct the scenes in my mind, I felt like I read empty words, so my brain would not take as long to process their meanings. Was I doing something wrong? I had some teachers tell me that I did not work hard enough; others would be confused at my ability to draw analysis without being able to discuss the use of blue in chapter twelve.

It was not until a bus ride, with a peer of mine, who described her realization that people saw the world in images that she had never seen, that I realized what was wrong­­. After way too much research, I determined that she and I had the same condition, only she was born with it and I was not. How I did not notice my mind’s eye going blank, I am not too sure. I probably thought that, as I grew up, my imagination simply matured; I had no clue that it is not meant to disappear entirely. Now that I understood why I had difficulties no one else could seem to understand, I started to find ways to cope: colour-marking dense passages, skimming a work once before actually reading it, always keeping a pencil and Google open to pull up images and ideas when I catch myself missing details. All of these techniques helped me find my way back to appreciating literature and, through the process, I recognized that perhaps literature would be a worthwhile academic pursuit.

And then COVID-19 hit. My English teacher at the time sent me home with nearly three dozen books from her classroom library; an older English teacher sent me home with poetry anthologies; and I finally had no excuse for ignoring my household library. In 2020, I read 130 new books without my mind’s eye. I do not think that this is an easy task for anyone to pursue, but my goal kept increasing the more I read. Originally, I planned to read 25, 50, 100 books, but as the year drew to a close and I had read 124, I decided I would round up to 130.

In June, my last high school project was an essay on the role that literature plays in my life. I began the piece with the line, “I am an escape artist.” This is true of anyone who loves to read, and I believe that this notion is exactly why literature is so important to us. We need things to escape into, whether we want to ground ourselves in our current reality or put it to rest for a while to recover from our present ills. Although I can no longer see the illustrious detail in fiction, I use literature to flee into the landscape of emotion.

As a child, I used to read anything and everything that I could get my hands on; I enjoyed diving into worlds and allowing my imagination to go wild. The problem I currently have with the fluff literature that so many avid readers enjoy is that it is typically meant for exactly this purpose: visualization. These texts are frequently rich in detail for the sake of beautiful images rather than beautiful ideas. I do not mean to say this is inherently bad; I just cannot receive the same pleasures from them that most people can.

Instead, I find myself drawn to the circular and rambling works that say hardly anything but a singular idea. Under layers upon layers of thought, their key, central ideas can tell us a lot about ourselves as anxious beings in the world. One immediate example I think of is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. This classic book is one of my favourites of those that I read this year, but most of my literature-major friends find it underwhelming. In chapter six, the text reads, “When I really worry about something, I don’t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don’t go. I’m too worried to go. I don’t want to interrupt my worrying to go.” Here, we have an anxious narrator who tells us he is worried. And instead of demonstrating his anxiety through his actions or speech, Salinger presents us with a stream of consciousness where it is almost as though our protagonist feels the need to justify his anxiety to us and to himself.

I have no problem with this part of the text, for there is no real need to visualize anything. Depending on your imagination, you may have pictured a dorm room and a washroom that this character is definitely not going to; however, you do not inherently need to see these images in order to understand his torment. All we need to understand this passage is the emotional intelligence to sympathize with how anxiety can impact us.

This past year, I realized that I read to uncover the soul of a text. Layers of intricate description and detail only act as barriers over which I must climb to discover emotional and ideological messages. However, since I read works to uncover some of their most intense elements, I have become more aware of the toll that literature can take on our mental health when we use it as a routine mode of escapism.

The world’s beauty and horrors impact our wellbeing, and this past year I frequently found myself reading works that reflected my mental state. Needless to say, I was often drawn to texts with negative outlooks. As a result, I created a pessimistic echo chamber within myself. Although I am partial to unhappy endings (as I find them more realistic), this fixation can be dangerous in tumultuous times. I had to learn to find a balance.

Alongside rediscovering my love for fiction, I developed a new love for other forms of literature. I found that plays can be easier narratives for me to digest. They have simple and blunt descriptions that read similarly to how I try to convey images in conversations with my friends who do not have aphantasia. I started to read everything from the nonfiction works from Massey Lectures to collections of essays to far too many books from Northrop Frye’s catalogue. I discovered my love for free verse poetry and my distaste toward the structured work from my grandparents’ generation that is so heavily praised.

Similar to when I first learned to read, I was exposed to criticisms, mockeries, and hypotheses about the world at large within my explorations of literature this past year. I learned to read the works of people I disagree with and discovered new and more comfortable seats to take in my opinions. I delved into classics, such as The Odyssey and Don Quixote; I learned about the physical world through The Origin of Species and The Wayfinders; I learned about the two countries that I spent most of my life in through In Patagonia and The Bush Garden. Most importantly, I learned that there is always something to be learned from a book, even if we think we will not enjoy it—sometimes especially when this hunch is right.

This year, most of the books I read were picked for me, whether they were from teachers, parents, or friends. Through them, I found literary genres and movements that fill me with hope. In December, at the end of my first semester as a student at the University of Toronto, I wrote another reflective paper on the role of literature in my life. This time, I focused on a particular poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and what five of his books had taught me.

In Little Boy, Ferlinghetti taught me that we are great dreamers and that “Life goes on, and us with it.” Through his words, and the words of other members of the Beat movement, I learned that I want to pursue authenticity in my life, and also that I do not know what that means for me just yet. I am young, barely an adult, and at the edge of the rest of my life. Regardless of where you are in yours, you are at the forefront of the rest of your reality.

We love the things we love for profound reasons, which we rarely take the time to consider. We tend to fall out of love for equally unexplored reasons. As we grow into our lives and the world becomes ever busier, the things we enjoy often transform into the past tense. And although evolution is healthy and important, rediscovery can be equally so.

I stopped reading because I could no longer understand the works in the ways in which they were meant to be understood. Once I learned what deterred me, I sought out new stories that did not require a mind’s eye in order for me to respond emotionally. I found authors who wrote in just the right way to make me feel like I was not broken and who led with literary techniques beyond imagery to move me to tears, laughter, and thought.

Close your eyes and picture something you used to love to do dearly. Why do you no longer pursue joy through it? What would it look like to open that door again, even if only to peek inside? What stops you?

My New Year’s resolution is to maintain my relationship with literature through reading an average of one book per week. I also resolved to be patient with myself. This is the best I can do. Regardless of the outlet, you also deserve the chance to escape every once in a while. Therefore, I urge you to seek a greater, more colourful reality; there is no time to waste.