C.S. Lewis dedicated his classic children’s fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy with the following words:
My dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be
your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. LEWIS
Children often do outgrow fairy tales, but only some adults become “old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” In his lavishly illustrated children’s fantasy book Dinotopia, James Gurney provided a description of a poetic kind of “vision” that he attributed to certain kinds of people (and creatures):
Dinosaur eyes take in a wider field of view, bending in at the edges like a glass globe filled with water. Nothing is gray or drab or dull; rather they see swimming particles of color, a moving mosaic of dancing colored specks. As we would see a starscape in the night sky, they see a sparkling lifescape in the woods by day, a world teeming with life.
Some humans can see with dinosaur vision, Bix explained: artists, poets, and children.
It is these “artists and poets” who, as C.S. Lewis hints, grow old enough to read fairy tales again, who see the world as infused with meaning and light.
It’s a commonplace that children are more creative than adults, whether because they are less threatened by new ideas or because their brains are still developing. 98 percent of four- and five-year-olds score at the “creative genius” level of creativity, according to a NASA study. But I could have told you that already, having recently spent a lot of time with a five-year-old, who asked me to type out a garden using keyboard symbols (after I’d made a smiley face), persistently offered me “sand hanitizer,” and, in an antique store, made the decisive pronouncement “I don’t like fake hands,” which I realized I agreed with profoundly.
G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, emphasized the wonder that a fairy tale can awaken in its readers: “These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” In his essay “Three Ways of Writing for Children,” Lewis describes the principle of how fairy tales give kids the vision that they need to take on the world with the imagery of good and evil: “Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
Commonly called the “moral imagination,” this way of forming a child’s imagination is not moralizing, but rather opening up the mind to “dinosaur vision,” to a world of drama and light (as well as darkness). In an ideal world, the imaginative vision acquired as a child would never fade.
Julia Cameron, author of the perennial self-help hit The Artist’s Way, certainly thinks this is how things should be:
Artist brain is our inventor, our child, our very own personal absent-minded professor. . . . Artist brain is our creative, holistic brain. It thinks in patterns and shadings. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-king’s-carpet! Artist brain is associative and freewheeling. It makes new connections, yoking together images to invoke meaning: like the Norse myths calling a boat “wave-horse.”
And the artist brain, according to Cameron, needs images. “Art is an image-using system. In order to create, we draw from our inner well.” That inner well is what children’s literature provides (though of course time outdoors, or with beautiful people, or any number of other things, helps fill it too). The child reader of C.S. Lewis can conjure up the image of a brave knight with heroic courage when, as an adult, he faces a manipulative boss or financial ruin. He can only do that because he has practiced imagining a brave knight, perhaps even imagining himself as a brave knight, over and over, thanks to the stories and images that children’s literature provided him.
Adulthood, as Cameron and Lewis both imply, requires more, not less, imagination than childhood. Without imagination, we’d all be run into the ground by the monotony of everyday adult life. Childhood is just a great chance to start filling your mind with the beautiful images you’ll need later, and to practice seeing the world in an imaginative way.
But now we have DALL•E 2. An internet phenomenon for a while now, DALL•E 2 is an AI that generates images from natural-text prompts. Though of course the outcomes can be hilarious (“The Rock hides in the rocks”) or fun in a weird way (“people sitting round the fire in a crowded airplane”), my own experiments with DALL•E 2 frequently have odd and disturbing results. What’s particularly strange about the AI-generated images is the eyes: even when everything else looks normal, it somehow tends to include eyes that are too-large pools of blackness, or worse, no eyes at all, just weird smudges. While some AI is alarmingly accurate, this AI is always alarmingly off.
My issue with DALL•E 2 is not predominantly that it creates ugly images, though it does. I can look at other things to stock my well of artistic imagination. The issue is that we now have a machine meant to imagine things for us.
Whenever I type something into a DALL•E prompt it’s a little moment of creativity, trying to figure out what would be interesting to generate. In order to do so, I come up with something in my mind—what it could look like. And though the AI’s ideas are always interestingly different, they immediately undercut what I was imagining, like watching a bad movie before you read the book. I can’t quite remember, now, what I wanted “Children riding horses in medieval outfits in a realistic painting” to look like. I don’t have to imagine it, and I don’t have to learn to paint. All I had to do was type a few words into the program. But my image, which I’m pretty sure was more beautiful, is in a certain way gone.
Children’s literature is meant to help children’s imaginations along. At its best, it provides images that prompt one’s own imagination—we all know the heartbreak of finding the illustrator or movie adaptor “did it wrong,” because we imagined it differently. But if you watch the movie version of a book before reading it, it’s often very difficult to separate another person’s images from your own. DALL•E 2, a different way of helping your imagination along, is like a spoiler for anything you could imagine yourself.
When children become adults, hopefully their imaginations are up and running enough to confront the problems, and sometimes the aesthetic wasteland, of adulthood. If their imaginations need nurturing with beautiful images or unexpected scenarios, adults can always return to children’s books and indulge themselves with some dreaming about what it would look like to live on Mars or what they would do if they were the king of England. But with DALL•E 2, we no longer need to come up with images from our own minds. Those images can be handed to us, and we become the input to the machine.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only newsletter on how Midwest road signs are like the sacraments (with original photography—see teaser, and palate cleanser, below.)
In honor of: football season, here’s a podcast series about a short-lived nationwide obsession: HQ Trivia.
If you’re looking for a tennis partner: I’d highly recommend checking out the Washington Review of Books Classifieds, soon to feature Dubious Analogies!
This is fantastic! Your piece helped me understand better why the kids I teach respond to poetry (which is an image-making art form) so enthusiastically. Everything is literal for 5th graders. When they recognize that there can be double/hidden meanings and symbolism in poems, something in their mind switches into high gear.