Why Do We Need To Make Stuff Up?

Caspar Henderson's delightful 'modern bestiary', The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, is a different sort of book from the one he modelled it on, Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings. Both delight with their sumptuous descriptions and dizzying taxonomies, but Henderson's sets out to establish his conviction that we have no need of imaginary beings when the natural world provides us with such extraordinary beasts. These include jumping spiders, whose hunting methods become the source of a reflection on the nature of the human mind, with its tendency to see more than is there in front of our eyes. Henderson sees an almost moral dimension to his task. He hints that there is almost something dishonest, or at least impoverished, about our fascination with unreal things when we should be concerning ourselves with reality.

One one level, I see what he is getting at, and I think his book is a very persuasive example of how a careful examination of what can be observed sensibly (ie with the use of our senses) can lead to a more profound consideration of our human nature and human responsibilities. Henderson is a wise and widely read commentator and his range of allusion is stunning. However, I also want to put up a bit of a defence for Borges and his imaginary beings. I don't see why both approaches cannot exist side by side and there is surely a good reason why human creativity looks to the realm of the imagination as well as to the realm of the sensible.

So why is it that we seem to long to talk of things we have not seen? I wonder if it is not that, when faced with the enormity of the mysteries of life and death, we need something more than what we can observe to express that enormity. There are things we can know and observe, and yet they remain too much for us to take in, so we find ways of expressing that 'infinity' of possibilities by categorising, listing, collecting, arranging, in way that indicates that hugeness without suggesting that the elements on this impossibly long list are beyond our reach. And then there are realities which we do not feel able to control in this way, emotional and existential realities that need symbols rather than lists to indicate their nature. Imaginary beings have this symbolic role, standing for our partial apprehensions of such things as love, fear, despair, hope, absurdity, extinction, existence itself. Of course, real creatures can function in this way to some extent as well, and Henderson gets close to this at times in his book. But there may be limits to the extent to which the natural world can surprise, appal and transform us sufficiently to approach life's greatest mysteries. That is where the creativity of artists and writers can help out, populating our imaginations with unknown worlds that have enough familiarity to prompt recognition and enough oddity to engage our sense that life has more to say than can be expressed in sensible terms.