POST-FEST REPORT       It must have been sometime Monday night, the Monday before the festival. I wandered into the empty Imaginarium tent to see how set-up was going and saw that sometime during the day a momentous corner had been turned: what had been just another tent in the morning had become by the evening The Imaginarium. It was no longer an anonymous space, but a particular place. In fact, even though the tent decorations were new this year, everything seemed to be in the same exact place it had been last year, had always been. It was freaky, like it always is for me. Going into the Imaginarium each year is like having a time machine that takes me back to some of the best memories of my life. And it had happened again: I was back in the past, or, at least, out of the present, out of time, into an eternal space: Narnia, Oz, Wonderland, Brigadoon, the Cornerstone Festival Imaginarium. "You'd have to be there." It was funny how this phrase kept popping up this year as I listened to a few regulars rattle off their usual explanation of the Imaginarium they gave to their non-comprehending friends back home in answer to the question, "Where exactly are you going?" One long-time attendee went through a description that sounded like he'd gone through many times before, and even though it sounded practiced, it still tailed off into sputtering ("we watch movies and discuss them… though it's not just about movies…" and eventually fell apart, again, at "You'd have to be there." And here I was again - miraculously. The conversation in this oasis of eternity seems to pick up exactly where we left off last time - literally. Sven and Sloan bumped into each other Tuesday morning and instantly sat down in the front of the Imaginarium tent while the last bit of set-up was going on all around them, and immediately fell back into their never-ending debate along the frontier that both guard so valiently between Reason (Sloan) and Emotion (Sven). Not so very far, in fact, from where our old friend the cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock stood watching. Way cool. I walked past and caught snatches of conversation, key phrases: "ontological argument," "existential," "syllogistic," "Klingonese". Yep, I thought. We're back. It was like Christmas, in more ways than one. Sloan brought his dissertation in progress, Charles Beach gave me some of his poems, somebody else passed along a VHS of an old documentary on Tolkien and a recording of a speaker he thought I should invite. I filled pages in my yearly "Cornerstone Recommendations Book" I keep - lists of movies, books, websites people I talk to during the fest tell me I need to check out immediately. Cornerstone can tend to eclipse the whole summer - you can hardly think about anything else beforehand, and it takes weeks to recover afterward: but it's just as well, because it seems to pack three or four months of learning and experience into four days. It'll take me hours to translate the chickenscratch of this year's recommendations into English, and months to track everything down. And that's just the stuff I scribble down between everything else that happens. I scribbled down Sven's attempted description of the Imaginarium: "For me, the Imaginarium is about identifying the spirit of God or truth in everything around us." Not bad. But where do the rubber chickens come in? As for myself, I've tended to describe the place to prospective speakers as "a combination of science fiction convention and culture studies class," with maybe a Sherlockian Society meeting and Saturday Afternoon Matinee thrown in, too. But as I told one this year as the days grew close to the fest, "There's no way I can say anything that will fully prepare you for what you're getting into here. Just strap in." And what a ride we all took this year! We've had some sharp cookies deliver the seminars in the Imaginarium over the years, but I'd always wanted to expose our crowd to some serious "Culture Studies" as it is practiced in the rarified atmosphere of the Academy. Something right up there with the "Elvis Studies" institute described in Don DeLillo's hilarious take on culture studies, White Noise. So this year, we dove into "Buffy Studies," led by the continent's foremost practitioner, David Lavery, the guy NPR went to for a comment on this season's final episode. The fact that David is also the foremost authority on that lesser-known Inkling, Owen Barfield, meant that he could do Buffy in the morning and Barfield in the afternoon, and anybody capable of that ambidexterity, I figured, deserves a shot at the Imaginarium. The funny thing is that once David was there, he got it right away. Talking about one of Barfield's books, Worlds Away, he described the story as a group of very different thinkers getting together to argue with each other for an entire weekend - "Something that may not sound like much fun except to people who love the Imaginarium," he most correctly noted early on. Owen Barfield showed up in several of the seminars this year. Verlyn Flieger introduced his name into the conversation early as she unpacked the languages of Middle Earth for us in Barfeldian style. Verlyn was amazing. She sat in that hot Imaginarium tent for three or four hours each day listening to speakers BEFORE her own hour-long seminar, then after she spoke stuck around answering questions and talking to people for at least an hour afterward. This year the program was incredibly rich and meaty, and Verlyn - who teaches comparative mythology at the University of Maryland - was a big reason why. Another new voice who brought a delightful breadth of learning (not to mention gave Verlyn and everyone else a run for their money in some heroic extracurricular gabfesting) was Louis Markos. Louis styles himself a "Christian humanist" and puntuated his lectures with references across the ages and spectrum of culture high and low. ("Finally, somebody is talking about George Herbert in the Imaginarium," said Imaginarium-lifer Sharon A., no slouch at spanning cultures herself.) Rod Bennett's seminar was classic, a reclaiming of C. S. Lewis from what sometimes seems rather stuffy "C. S. Lewis Studies" back down to earth for those of us who shared his own culture-spanning tastes, from Medieval literature to pulpy American Scientifiction magazines. A classic Rod bit was his discovery that Lewis, during the year immediately following his conversion, seemed to have rediscovered science fiction, reading it more even than the devotional materials one might have expected during that time. The facts of his life and evolution of Lewis's thinking suggest the theory that for Lewis, the arrogant scientism of much SF had become less inspiring to him than depressing, since he'd never been able to make his peace with space as an empty void. His own re-enchantment of the Universe as a Christian helped him to recover the Medieval concept of "the Heavens," teeming with life and meaning, and much more pleasant to explore than the silent, empty spaces. Louis Markos picked up on this theme in his seminar on the Medieval Model, titled after Lewis's own scholarly work on the subject, The Discarded Image. The idea is not to throw out what has been learned about the universe in the ages after the Middle Ages, but to find a way to reoccupy the universe as it has been seen since Galileo with Dante's (and St. Francis's) eyes of the heart. The subthemes running through the seminar program, especially those touching on Word and Image, and reaquiring a more wholistic vision, continued our own Imaginarium quest in this direction. Our panel discussion Saturday featuring Louis Markos, John Morehead, Brian Walsh and William Dyrness, and led by Terry Wandtke, was a great opportunity to listen to the discussion of these issues as it has been going on in various places and disciplines. William Dyrness spoke at Art Rageous on his book Visual Faith, and joined the seminar as a theologian arguing for a re-evaluation of Evangelicalism's longtime resistance to the image. Brian Walsh, who has written and spoken on postmodernity, was sympathetic to this re-evaluation, though he offered a couple cautionary "Neil Postman" moments in defense of the word, noting that one of the most positive cultural developments he'd seen in recent years was the Harry Potter phenomenon, which, he pointed out, "has gotten kids everywhere reading." Ironic, since the non-magical Muggles in the books seem so much to embody a Modern world in which logic and the word has crowded out intuition and the image, and a perfect example that some battles are not best won, but fought out perpetually to a close aproximity of balance: like Sloan and Sven. Meanwhile, we were the lucky benificiaries of Paul Leggett's lifetime of pondering the mysteries of human duality in the myth of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in both his seminar and introduction to the classic film treatment. Paul has really found a home at the Imaginarium. Just like certain baseball players don't need permission from the manager to steal a base or swing on Ball Three, we have superstars at the Imaginarium who just tell us what they want to talk on the next year and we dutifully write it into the schedule. (Hint: Paul says he wants to do Sherlock Holmes in 2004, so this would be a good winter to bone up on the complete adventures.) Dave's evening film program "Asian Spirits" was another hit, full of unannounced treats and unexpected pleasures. Studio Ghilbi films have long been our personal Wonder Lists and what a delight it was to see Totoro himself big as life in the Imaginarium. Then there was the Asian Horror Dave brought screaming into our lives: it may take some therapy to recover from several mind-bending episodes we were put through together this year. And this isn't necessarily an allusion to the spectre of Kathy and Jim lip-syncing at our bizarre non-Karaoke Karaoke extravaganza Saturday night. That last-noted item is the kind of stuff people have a hard time describing or making fit in with discussion of the Medieval Model and the Ontological Argument. There's no way around it: "You'd have had to have been there." And maybe next time you will. If God wills, and we who have been so blessed with undeserved magical moments are somehow, beyond all hope and expectation, granted entrance to this magical land once again, we'll pick up the conversation right where we left off in 2004. Next year will be our 10th year at the Imaginarium. Between then and now, we'll have to figure out some special (and very Imaginarium) way to commemorate that landmark moment together. Maybe we'll give Drew the chance to do that seminar on pro-wrestling he's been threatening to do for the last couple years. (Try to fit THAT into your description of the Imaginarium for your friends.) And didn't Drew do a terrific job of hosting the Imaginarium in 2003?!! Yea, Drew! And thanks from all of us! Thanks also to everyone who came together to make the Imaginarium happen once again. Your contribution — your existential, ontological presence — is part of the indescribable part we need to make the magic happen. See you next year. — mike h for Imaginarium Central Cornerstone Festival Imaginarium Index © 2003 Cornerstone Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.