What this current generation of children lacked, due to the enormous amounts of videos on YouTube, and the explosion of the information that we are receiving, due to the advances of modern day technologies, translated…
The writer of Le Petit Prince, St. Exupery once said, “As a person stares at a pile of rock, and imagined the grand cathedrals, then, the pile of rocks is no longer, just a pile of rocks.” I kept believing, that the biggest difference between man and other lower order of animals is that we have imagination, we can use our own imaginations, to fulfill many of the dreams that realities wouldn’t allow us to, and we can also use our imaginations, to weave up the dreams that others may not understand.
Over two years ago, I was in Edinburgh, England, when I saw a very interesting performance at the arts festival called “Fh8ills Monkey, with only two performers, they’d incorporated the jazz drums into comedy, and beaten the drums back and forth repeatedly, like they were, doing an oral show with words, in the process of their performance, it gave the audience a ton of surprises, and endless imaginations of what was happening, but these two performers never even spoken a single word on stage, there wasn’t any extravagant décor on the stage, but, everybody in the audience believed, what was happening on stage. At that very moment, I was, shocked by their performances, and after I’d come back to Taiwan, I’d recalled how my good buddy, Money was very good with the tricks using his mouth, and mentioned up a concept of using the tricks of the mouth and the dialogue performances, to do a stage play on “the Imagination of Voices” with the C.E.O. of our performance troupe, Feng, and, we’d, developed the act of “the Voice-Changing Detective” as a result.
When I was younger, the very first vocal imitation I’d ever done was making the sound of horses’ hooves, marching; the very first imitative sound I’d ever made, was putting the mung beans inside a plastic bottle, to shake it to make the sound of the rain. Although it wasn’t, any high-end techniques, but to me as a young child, it’d brought me, great joy, without the cell phones. Back then, we’d not have the cell phone game to play, nor the iPad to watch the videos or footages with, other than the larger sized street arcades, the red-and-white Nintendo machines, there was the cartoon time of four and five in the afternoons every single day, there wasn’t, too much entertainment which we had, using the electronic devices. Back when we were children, we’d needed to invent our own toys, set up the scenes ourselves, and sometimes, we’d, banged on the cookie tins, to make the sound of thunder; sometimes, we’d taken the branches off of trees, used it as guns, then, chased around on the empty lots close to home, with our lips making the “bang, bang, bang” sounds, to do a mock scene of gun fight.
Back then, we held a ton of unknowns for the world, and all we had, were our imaginations to help us fill in the blanks. As we got older, after we started receiving a ton of messages from all around us, sought out an assortment of stimulations for our varied senses, seeing became, believing, without the images, there’s no truth to be known. And so, our imagination started, getting taken over by the extravagant images around us, our mind became used to receive the images that others produced, and we’d, started, slacking off on our own making of images, besides, what you imagined, only you can see, nobody else sees.
And still, “being unseen”, is probably the most precious part of imagination, because what you see, you don’t need to believe, the cars are cars, are cars, the raindrops, are what they are, whether or not you believe them to be, they’re all, right there before our eyes, if through the making of the various sounds, we are, led to believe, that there was a car, speeding by before us, or that, it’s pouring down right now, isn’t that something interesting? Because we believe, and so, these things came, into existences, what else can be more exciting than that?
The imagination of one person is called imagination, the imagination of a group of people is called vision, in this era of exploded information, can we give ourselves, some space that are blanks, and try to imagine what others are, imagining, to add more possibilities to our own lives, to see what these limitless things, can intertwine, into what kinds of possibilities of futures we may come to have?
And so, this, is on the importance, of exercising one’s own imaginations, but, in this world right now, everything is fed to us visually, we’d become, too visually inclined, gotten used to, being bottle fed the information by media like Youtube and what nots, and that reduces our abilities to imagine the various possibilities, and if this keeps on going, then, the next generations will be, totally without, that active imagination that many of us already, come to lack…