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- P e r s o n a l _ C r e a t i v i t y -
John J. Cimino, Jr.
Learning is an affair of the heart as much as the mind, an activity engaging our spirits every bit as much as our digits and little grey cells. We are creatures of emotion and imagery as much as we are creatures of logic who still draw inspiration, as reflexively as we draw breath, from the natural world. Animal skins and angel wings may no longer adorn our physical bodies, but in the blinking of an eye, in that perpetual midnight behind our eyelids, we are revealed instantly to be, as we have always been, creatures of magic, dream-creatures of a piece with Nature which, as William Blake reminds us, is Imagination itself:
To the eye of a Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.
So, perhaps, it may be argued despite our hard-won sophistication and
astonishing technological achieve- ment, that our most promising and practical path to the type of learning potent enough to change our thinking, perceiving and acting may be a path through Nature, i.e., Imagination , alive with sights sounds and stories of that inner world through which we explore and begin to understand our outer one. This is the journey of art, the meaning of art in our lives. No learning is complete without it. Even science is incom- plete without it because we are incomplete without art.
Man is unique not because he does science and because he does art,
but because science and art equally are expressions of his mind.
-- Jacob Bronowski
(excerpted from What I Tell You Two Times Is True by John J. Cimino, Jr.)