“I’m not imaginative,” says the diehard sports fan who just watched the Tigers of Clemson battle the Tide of Alabama (who have an elephant mascot) in a football game.
The rules of football are arbitrary. You can’t use empirical reasoning to explain why a field is 100 yards, each team can only have eleven men on the field on any play, or a touchdown is worth six points. It’s a game. Those are just the game’s rules.
This does not mean that the effects of the game aren’t real. People tear ligaments in their knee in the game’s middle, show themselves able to throw the ball measurable distances during regulation p;lay, and trade their success at this particular game for lots of money. The imaginative space of the football field reveals real things about the world: most importantly, mental and physical strength. Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco was a laboratory on Monday night where players from Clemson and Alabama worked out a debate about who was national champion, not “in nature” but through a controlled experiment. On this day and at this time, these two teams played and the result was final. In this particular experiment, Clemson was superior.
And oh the joy! There’s a lot of emotional and economic resources tied up in the success of both of these teams. I live about 20 minutes away from Clemson, and it’s a huge deal that they’ve just won their second national championship on Monday night. What strikes me is that the same person who is fanatically devoted to this team and will show up for the parade and wear the t-shirt and generally crow over any other college football team is the same one who will tell me, “I don’t like fiction because it’s made up.”
So is sports. Yet sports isn’t a lie. It’s an experiment in imagination. Literature isn’t a lie either. It’s a laboratory for the heart where we go to find experiments in ways of interpreting the world and how we feel about it. We can use our reason inside this lab, but the experiment begins with us exercising our imagination. Everyone can do that much.