With Rebecca - 31 July 2020

 Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (RAE)

 Del lat. imaginatio, -ōnis.

1. f. Facultad del alma que representa las imágenes de las cosas reales o ideales.

The Spanish dictionary definition of imagination is lovely. I translate that to:  A potential of the soul that represents real or ideal things.

I had a thought while walking with Niño today. It was a lovely sunny day. I always think of Rosemary as I take the same route around the block that she did with him.

This thought was inspired by a CBC Ideas program I heard last year about St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, who is one of two Roman Catholic philosophers (the other is St. Thomas Aquinas).

It seems that St. Augustine wrote a startling opinion about music (obviously he was not aware of atonal music) in which he said that you listen to a note in a piece of music in the past, you then hear it in the present but then (important) you can predict the next note in the future.

For me this is an interesting modification of that linear 1, 2, 3.

In the back alley as I sensed the presence of Rosemary ( I do not believe in ghosts) I had what seemed to me a startling thought.

All day I remember Rosemary in my memory and these remembrances are all in the past. I cannot make them go away so I am in a permanent state of melancholy.

But what if my sensing Rosemary in that back alley is something from my imagination? 

In my magazine photography and writer past I remember imagining an idea and then going to pitch the story to the editor, and month later my imagination was rewarded with the reality of a printed cover article.

Imagination is not all a memory of the past. I am imagining the presence of Rosemary now. Can somehow that vision in my mind, while lacking a material presence, be still a real presence?

What would St. Augustine say?