Creativity includes ruthlessness. It drives to develop, unfold, multiply outward. When our ruthlessness transforms into the imaginative life that operates unconsciously to wipe the slate of our perception clean so that we now and always perceive freshly… we enter a new zone of living. Objects become objective, not under our control but able to offer us real resources for living. Objects appear as durable and resilient, and they reassure us that our destructiveness does not totally destroy. The other person displays for us the secrets of a unique, independent selfhood. In long-range, committed, passionate relationships, one lover addresses the mysterious core of the other. The mystery of the beloved’s creative self opens to the lover the mystery of being…
The love between lovers protects them from attack on their creative selves, and thus they contribute to the social welfare of all of us. For creative living does evoke attack, which rears up to blunt vitality and repel original perception. We feel the threat ourselves, says Winnicott, in moments of integration. We expect attack to follow from all the elements that we repudiate as not-me while we collect together all those experiences of aliveness that integrate into me…
The anxiety of integration helps one face an interpretation of Judeo-Christian tradition that has always troubled many, myself among them. Simone Weil, for example, joined the heretic Marcion in rejecting the Old Testament entirely because of Yahweh’s bloodthirstiness. God’s command to wipe out every one of the Amalekites strikes horror in our hearts… When Saul spares the king of the Amalekites and keeps the best of the sheep and oxen, Yahweh does not spare Saul. Samuel, Yahweh’s prophet, announces Saul’s punishment: “you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” If we read these texts through the lens of the anxiety of integration, we see that the gathering of elements of I-am-ness into a unit requires that we must repudiate whatever lies outside.
I am not reducing the text and its savagery to a psychological perception. Life and the probity with which we face it do not allow that. But depth psychology does give us access to a truth as valuable as it is ruthless: to become one, we must unite elements of aliveness at the expense of all else. We make the same harsh decision when we choose someone for a mate and renounce all others, when we embrace an actual child we have parented and destroy the fantasy children we wished for, when we pursue one idea and reject all others, at least for the moment. Such definition is the cost of finitude and its fulfillment.
(Ann Belford Ulanov, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.
Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.
Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.
Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
(Philip Larkin, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
(Ezra Pound, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by…
I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are, —
The only worth all granting.
It is to be learned—
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.
Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.
Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,—
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.
(Hart Crane, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
(Philip Larkin, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
