Brain Food #438
Imagination as a weapon
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Wartime language has penetrated our daily lives, a war we are fighting against an invisible enemy with very visible consequences.
Continuing with the theme of escaping through the imagination, what Lewis Carroll described as our “only weapon in the war against reality,” we consider how the act of creating can also be an act of exacting some kind of control over events that seemingly are uncontrollable.
When the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, a historically significant and catastrophic moment, British artist J.M.W. Turner happened to be one of the many bystanders who witnessed it. The horror of what he was seeing sparked his imagination: he allegedly captured the scene in quick sketches, and then went on to develop a series of watercolour paintings, using the sketches as a reference, his imagination and creativity as a weapon.
Through this, he took the cruelty of life and turned it into art.
The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, c.1834–5