Another Thought on Fascination

 I was writing about fascination recently. I wrote:

This whole business of fascination is, inevitably, fascinating in itself. Human beings are remarkable creatures. One would assume we have the same basic bundle of desires and objectives, each of which would ultimately boil down to some animalistic imperative. But in fact, as C.S. Lewis once wrote, "we are inveterate poets". It seems to me that what draws us to any activity, pursuit, or allegiance is usually that our imagination has been seized in some way. And everybody's imagination seems to react in a very individual way. So perhaps it's rather futile to attempt to communicate a fascination.

I've been reading the first volume of a multi-volume biography of John F. Kennedy by Nigel Hamilton, Reckless Youth. The passage below caught my attention. It's a quotation from a friend of Kennedy, who wrote an article about the sinking of Kennedy's boat during WWII, an event which won Kennedy hero status: "What appealed to me about the Kennedy story was his night in the water, his account of floating in the current, being brought back to the same point from which he'd drifted off. It was the same kind of theme that fascinated me always about human survival... It was really that aspect that interested me, rather than his heroics. The aspect of fate that threw him back into a current and brought him back again. His account of it is very strange. A nightmarish thing altogether."

I once wrote a whole blog post on the genesis of artistic works (read it here), where I wrote:

I've often suspected that the real motivation for any work of art is a burning desire to share some image, atmosphere or moment which is intensely personal and specific. Let me put it this way; a woman might write an eight-hundred page novel which contains all sorts of deep observations on human nature, on memory, on language, on any number of other universal themes-- but the real essence of the novel is not any of these, but a short description of a mother brushing her daughter's hair before a mirror, while snow falls outside. This is what the lady yearned to express, to give life to; everything else was really just to keep the readers and the critics happy. All the philosophising can be analysed to death; this is irreducible and living.

This suspicion, in fact, is given support by many of the accounts I've read of the origin of creative works. Dracula grew out of the image of Jonathan Harker being surrounded by the three female vampires in Castle Dracula, until they are beaten back by Dracula himself. The Chronicles of Narnia all grew out of the image of a faun carrying parcels in a snowy wood. The Stand by Stephen King (a book of 1424 pages in its uncut version) grew out of a phrase King heard in a sermon on the radio: "Once in every generation the plague will fall among them." 

Even the way in which an author (or anybody else) is fascinated by something is incredibly specific. Take this often-quoted excerpt from an interview Samuel Becket gave: "I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I would remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English. ‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.’ That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters." Beckett insisted his interest in the phrase (which he used in his work) was not theological, although it's well-known that he liked to be enigmatic.

My own experience is that even supposedly simple tastes, such as eating, can be affected by the imagination. Apparently Winston Churchill once told a waiter: "Take away this pudding. It has no theme." I can understand that.

I'm interested in this phenomenon for its own sake. But I also think it has a relevance for politics, society, history, religion, and pretty much every other field of life.