I’ll tell you what a figment is.
First though. The only place I ever hear about a figment is in my imagination. Now. Let me stop all of this again. My imagination is a very peculiar place to be. It is like some big open vacuous place, and all of sudden, something comes whirling through, like a big blazing meteor, and it is liable to bump into anything. Anything at all. I don’t imagine the figments are having a very good time up there at all. What with all the ducking and dodging.
At some point though, those figments had to settle in — there in my imagination. They had to build a little figment town, with little figment houses, driving their little figment cars to figment work every day. I know this, because, for my entire life, they have resided there. People have often told me, time and again,
“Polly. It is just a figment of your imagination.”
Of course, in my younger days, I was really sideways on this. I thought the imagination was like some sort of rainbow, or maybe the ice cream cooler at 31 Flavors. In those earlier years, I thought they were saying “pigment.” Hence, the color swirls. Then I got my hearing checked when I was four and things cleared up.
God was no longer Howard, be thy name.
I also quit biting my time, and getting nipped in the butt.
Most of all. I was no longer a legume.
A human bean.
Anyway. Back to my head.
I’ve had lots of figments there. The first was a Troll, a rather large Troll, who resided on the other side of a wooden wall behind our garage on Bruce Avenue. Maybe one of my siblings told me he was there, I don’t know. But sometimes, when I looked through a tiny slat in the fence, I could see his figure on the other side. It scared the holy heck out of me. And I’d run into the house, letting the screen door slam, and tell my Mom. Only to find out Trolls were Figments.
Great. Now it is really getting crowded up there.
By the time I was 13, I was a mess, and in therapy. Four different shrinks. They all confirmed what I already knew. Figments were ghosts, trolls, faeries, vampires, tree nymphs, and werewolves. Mummies. Did I mention ghosts? Yeah, standing room only. Up there. In my imagination.
Even the dictionary names the location. It says that figments appear in the imagination, and nowhere else. But why do people talk about them like they are bad things? Those figments, mostly minding their own business.
The imagination is the action of forming new ideas. Or concepts, or images. All of which are not present to our senses, or at least, not the five senses. Humans have around 20 different senses, at last count. So perhaps the imagination overlaps into these. Along with the figments.
Maybe instead of the figments just showing up when they want to, we should start actively seeking out those figments.
We might be surprised by what we find.
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“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso
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“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein
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“Children see magic because they look for it.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff
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