THOUGHTS IN INCUBATION
I have recently come across this concept overwhelmed by the impact of the outside world central to Meltzer's The Apprehension of Beauty which I am reading for the first time. In the chapter on Aesthetic Conflict he sets out to illustrate what is meant by being dazzled by a vision of beauty which causes the beholder 'wildly [to] recoil from the impact of the aesthetic of the object'. (p.29). As he has this in quotation marks I wonder where the phrase comes from. I can't help feeling that Rilke understod this, while I am told that Meltzer hated Rilke. Although this idea is fascinating for me and although I have a presentiment as to its importance, I don't pretend to understand it.
What confronts this need of mine to try and understand is that Meltzer's is a poetic expression, and the real possibility that as such it is not subject to being decoded but only experienced as a dynamic element that challenges me by virtue of what may never have been able to be thought (by me) before. This would also apply to the understanding that is a fundamental aim of the psychoanalytic project. It cannot be arrived at rationally or fixed in the way an attitude or a piece of theory is.
For me, certain lines from Wordsworth's 1798 poem Tintern Abbey which I learned by heart as a youth shortly after leaving school not because I understood them; on the contrary, I felt I had to have them in me until I could make sense of them and have them join up with something inchoate in me that might someday be realised. And perhaps I still wait to be able to grasp their meaning for myself:
...For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.
These lines seem to symbolise that true learning (as opposed to learning about is through difficulty, disillusionment and by facing resistances and that it cannot be short-circuited (without creating a fuse) by the easier process of having a position. But also the dynamism of such lines is just that they cannot be pinned down or finally decyphered.
For me this is certainly applies also to Rilke's lines at the start of the Elegies and is the reason why his work seems to hold a key by which I may somehow be able to cross into a fuller realisation of myself with others:
...Beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.
My somewhat frustrated, contentious striving to know seems to me to be my refusal of the daunting fact of the unknowable, my puniness in the face of the potentially transforming (shaming?)'the blow of awe and wonder' (Meltzer,
On Remembrance Sunday 2009 I went to the Royal Academy arriving on that cold sombre morning just before noon. Anish Kapoor's show was on. I decided to reserve the experience for another weekend. But in a showcase a t-shirt was on sale, inscribed in a cursive hand with what I took to be a saying of his: 'beauty causes shame'. That gave me enough to think about over the Americano.
[to be continued]
the need for a fantasy of something
Amongst a shortlist of 'basic agonies' Donald Winnicott (1974) proposes 'falling forever'. It certainly is the stuff of nightmares. A young man recalled as a child shouting out in terror as he awoke from such a dream he’d had more than once. He remembered how it alarmed his mother who came running to find out what was the matter and took him into her bed. He recalled the comfort he derived in extremis from the feel of her body through her flannel nightgown. The dream was heralded by a menacing rhythmic throb which, although suggestive of a heartbeat, was impossible to replicate in a waking state, but in sleep, was instantly recognizable as the sign that he was beginning to fall. In the dream he saw himself as a tiny speck at the inside rim of a vast industrial cooling tower and experienced being completely unsupported, falling slowly into the wide open black depths. The scream thrust him awake. I will attempt to identify the universality of a 'basic agony' which this reported dream would seem to be one representation of.
My paper takes its name from an analogy used by Danilo Kiš to refer to the dropping out of consciousness of some nightmarish perception or, as may be, the reversal of a vital conception. The great Serbian writer, who died in 1989, and most of whose family were murdered in Auschwitz, makes the comparison with the occlusion of an image where it coincides with the blindspot on the retina. Kiš goes on to express with his particular poetic genius how the excluded unbearable thought remains in another compartment of the mind - the province of dreams. It is its absence from consciousness that constitutes the nightmare. To put it another way, dream-life (so often ignored) preserves a representation of the fate of what had been or would have been the most cherished. It should not be taken to be its obverse: a bad dream. I will try to argue how, in the experience of such lack, the urgent need is for a substitute - a soterial (saving) something or other - and will endeavour to show, with reference to mental disturbance and the history of collective brutality, reflected, for example, in the literary works of Kiš, how the great universal dread may be that of nothingness. In reflecting on this notion of occlusion I will consider the therapeutic value of Freud’s concept of splitting.
But turning back to the young man's dream, this dropping or falling through which is also a falling out of the bottom into space, has the same sense as the phrase, translated from the Serbo-Croat above as 'deformed and dispersed' to refer to 'images' leaving the conscious mind. Freud's notion of repression was of a defensive mechanism driven by anxiety and resulting in a lacuna (a gap) which in turn is not known about. Something may be lost stolen or strayed but is not missed because repression acts in a way that covers its tracks.
This word 'falling' to index the 'basic agony' represented in the young man's dream can be associated with the descriptive phrase 'that sinking-feeling' or by the expression 'the ground opened up and swallowed me'. But we are still left with the possibility that this was 'only a dream', albeit a recurring 'bad' one. Yet if it is taken a representing an obliterated experience of a sinking-feeling of falling out (of love), of the loss of a prized other, vital for the sense of wellbeing, an experience to which a blind eye has been turned, how are its traces, apart from speculating about the function of a recurrence of the nightmare, to be detected?
[Paper in preparation see 'Papers' page for details]
One or Two Reflections on Photography
I’ve been thinking a little about the role of the camera as a way of seeing... seeing what? Recently I was in a group of analysts who seemed to be agreeing that the use of the camera could be, and very often was, a means of distancing from direct contact with the object. I found I had two opposing ideas about this, springing from an in initial resistance to the suggestion.
There are times when I don’t identify what I'm looking at and this can happen when I am looking through/into the viewfinder/lens/screen, and am confronted with something that takes my attention in a special way, but don’t seem to know what I’m looking at. In hindsight it strikes me that I couldn’t believe my eyes. If 'distancing' were the operative word it would, would it not, indicate that my unconscious state was that of seeing external reality like a picture over which I have a control, despite the fact that I might seem to interact with the subject (object) in the business of getting the shot, that I am acting not on a level of inter-dependence with other persons or objects, but rather like a magician who evades his relationships by sleight of hand or trickery. This is more than a matter of composing a picture within the limits of a frame.
My opposing view comes from the understanding that it may be the case that we don’t in fact see the external world as utterly over against ourselves, but rather as part of us, a projection of unconscious fantasy. This would be in line with what one analyst refers to as his 'First Law of Psychic Reality: experience of object-relations in the outside world is limited by the structure of internal relations' (Meltzer D. 1965, p. 147). In that case we might be understood to be using the camera in a way analogous to dreaming, in the sense that dreaming may well be an attempt of the unconscious to bring the dreamer to a fuller realisation of his self. To think this way is to consider that there are no ‘bad’ dreams. Thus the creative photographer is at some level recognising the symbolic value of so-called external objects. And as the dreamer needs to be asleep to dream and then, in order for realisation to take place, needs to bring to bear on his dream a special kind of thinking, so the cameraman requires the process of picture taking/picture making to be able to arrive at his realisations. The dream is a glimpse just as a potential picture is seen out of the corner of the eye. Rather than grabbing the shot the photographer is grabbed by it. For this, with his skill in the capture of light he remains in a receptive state of readiness. But his essential faculty is what is said of the truly creative photographer: that 'he's got an eye'.
[to be continued]
