Last Saturday, I had the great fortune to attend Mission: Mobtown in Federal Hill. Taking my afternoon, I traveled to Federal Hill, near the Inner Harbor, and was given a mission. My specific mission was to find out how color is defined within the area. Through talking to residents, taking photos, and having team discussions, my group successfully completed our mission. Along with multiple other teams, each with different missions, the twenty-five of us learned about Federal Hill from the inside out.
Federal Hill’s definition of color is not in its most literal sense of the term, but rather, in the variations found in the neighborhood. Upon questioning many residents, the answer was that it was the people and not actual presence of color that were the most colorful aspect. Residents from all different ways of life congregate in this one area with many differences between them. They are people of different ages, races, and style all living within a few blocks of each other.
At one point in the afternoon, I entered the Cross Street Market; inside I found hundreds of people and an overwhelming number of things to absorb. There were fruit vendors, flower stalls, cases of Italian pastries, mixing essences of food, and a bar at the very end. Through experiencing all of this, I realized that many of the things that I surround myself with were created through the human imagination. All of the luxuries in my life—clothing, electricity, running water—are all inventions of the mind. The mind is a very powerful thing and can lead to great human pleasure or suffering, depending on how one uses it.
Within Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s piece, The Yellow Wallpaper, the negative side of human imagination is avidly portrayed. A young, married woman is severely afflicted by an imbalance in her mind. Living in an unfamiliar, new house, she is forced by her husband to live in her least favorite room. This room, being on the top floor of the house, has bright yellow and orange wallpaper. Once used as a nursery and playroom, there are bars on the windows and ripped wallpaper from the walls. Over the three months that the wife lives in the room, she personifies the paper within her mind. Her imagination leads her to believe that first-off she is very ill, then secondly that there are two layers to the hideous paper: the first layer being the physical paper itself and the second being a woman who is trapped beneath it. This woman frees herself during the day to “creep” around outside in broad daylight, yet spends her nights attempting to shake off the first layer of paper. Throughout the main characters time that she spends in the room, she starts comparing herself to the woman. At the end of the three months, she herself is the woman trapped behind the paper, but, ironically, it’s in her own mind that she is trapped. Her imagination is so lively that it has gotten the best of her. She falls into a serious state of delusion and it seems that she would never recover from it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, vividly describes the relationship of a man and woman. The man, begin a well-proclaimed scientist, has an obsession with a mark on the face of his wife, a natural beauty. Upon their meeting, the mark was something that Aylmer, the scientist, could over look but, day-by-day, as their relationship deepened; it became the thorn between the couple. Once again, as shown in The Yellow Wallpaper, Aylmer’s imagination drove him to madness. Though his love for his wife should have overlooked her imperfection, he saw it as something that he could not love. His imagination led him to nightmares about the red spot reaching all the way down into her heart and being. He finally reached the point that he could not longer take the sight of the mark, so, in turn; he created a potion to rid his wife of its hideousness. The wife did as she was told and affectively lost the mark, but with it went her life. Had Aylmer been able to look beyond what was on the surface, he would have grown old with his wife, but instead, lost both her and the cause for his insanity.
The human imagination is a very powerful element that can lead to many various events in one’s life. In the case of the presence of Federal Hill, the imagination lead to the creation of a great neighborhood; a neighborhood that varies in culture and people. Conversely, the human imagination can lead an individual person to insanity. Within a lot of prose, the imagination is personified into an aspect that causes great pain and suffering; it’s something that makes life and art much more interesting.