Sunny went home, so the Pearl goes mad

Another day of celebration in Island Paradise. The whole land rejoices as the Sun traveled from one mythical dimension to another. I hope Sun feels at home. I certainly do, and so layed back doing what I do best to relax, I read. I haven't been this fascinated with something I read for awhile and to post it was almost another Avurudu craving. So here goes.

Professor Gilbert J. Rose, a clinical psychiatrist at Yale, has a therory about the artistically creative mind. I came across an account of this specualtion in an essay by John Fowles, who describe it as follows;

'In simple terms, his proposition was that some children retain a particularly rich memory of the passage from extreme infancy; when the identity of the baby is merged with that of the mother; to the arrival of the first awarenss of seperate identity and the simultaneous first dawn of what will become the adult sense of reality - that is, they are deeply marked by the passage from a unified magical world to a discrete 'realist' one. What seemingly stamps itself indelibly on this kind of infant psyche is a pleasure in the fluid, polymorphic nature of the sensuous impression, visual, tactile, auditory, and the rest, that he receives; and so profoundly that he cannot, even when the detail of this intensely auto - erotic experience has retreated into the unconcious, refrain from tampering with reality - from trying to recover, in other words, the early oneness with his mother that granted this ability to make the world mysteriously and deliciously change meaning and appearance. He was once a magician with a wand; and given the right other predisposing and environmental factors, he will one day devote his life trying to regain the unity and the power by recreating adult versions of the experiance: he will be an artist. Moreover, since every child goes through some variation of the same experiance, this also explains one major attraction of art for the audience. The artist is simply someone who does the journey back on behalf of the less conditioned and less technically endowed.

John Fowles added a footnote to this piece: 'Sensitive female readers may not be too happy about the pronoun used in this, but the theory helps to explain why all through more recent human history, men have seen better adapted - or more driven - to individual artistic expression than women. Professor Rose points out that the chances of being conditioned by this primal erotic experiance are (if one accepts Freudian theory) massively loaded towards the son...' Actually I don't see why girls would have differing memories than the boys as described by Professor Rose, but I thought it sufficiently controversial to merit an airing.

- John Fowles, Wormholes, Vintage (London 1999) -

Bloody fascinating don't you think?

Oh well, happy New Year buggers...Go mad till we meet again at another sunny side.