Significant Moments: Part 17

"It's quite simple! The first element of the story, its actual beginning, was the mark. Here was a man with something in his face that frightened the others. They didn't dare lay hands on him; he impressed them, he and his children.

We can guess—no, we can be quite certain—that it was not a mark on his forehead like a postmark—life is hardly ever as clear and straightforward as that. It is much more likely that he struck people as faintly sinister, perhaps a little more intellect and boldness in his look than people were used to. This man was powerful: you would approach him only with awe. He had a 'sign.' You could explain this any way you wished. And people always want what is agreeable to them and puts them in the right. They were afraid of Cain's children: they bore a 'sign.' So they did not interpret the sign for what it was—a mark of distinction—but as its opposite. They said: 'Those fellows with the sign, they're a strange lot'—and indeed they were. People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran about freely, so they attached a nickname and myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid—do you get it?"

"Yes—that is—in that case Cain wouldn't have been evil at all? And the whole story in the Bible is actually not authentic?"

"Yes and no. Such age-old stories are always true but they aren't always properly recorded and aren't always given correct interpretations. In short, I mean Cain was a fine fellow and this story was pinned upon him only because people were afraid . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . afraid he might . . .
Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle.
. . . infect them with the same . . .
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
. . . unorthodox . . .
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
. . . outlook on life . . ."
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
The story was simply a rumor, something that people gab about, and it was true in so far as Cain and his children really bore a kind of a mark and were different from most people."

I was astounded.

"And do you believe that the business about killing his brother isn't true either?" I asked, entranced.

"Oh, that's certainly true. The strong man slew a weaker one. It's doubtful whether it was really his brother. But it isn't important. Ultimately all men are brothers. So, a strong man slew a weaker one: perhaps it was a truly valiant act, perhaps it wasn't. At any rate, all the other weaker ones were afraid of him from then on, they complained bitterly and if you asked them: 'Why don't you turn around and slay him, too?' they did not reply 'Because we're cowards,' but rather 'You can't, he has a sign. God has marked him.' The fraud must have originated some way like that. . . ."
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
____________________________________________________________

[I]t is not always easy, indeed it is perhaps impossible, to assign an absolute value to right and wrong: it is in the nature of crime to create situations of moral conflict, dead ends of which bargaining or compromise are the only conditions of exit; conditions which inflict yet another wound on justice and on oneself.

When an act of violence or an offense has been committed it is forever irreparable: it is quite probable that public opinion will cry out for a sanction, a punishment, a "price" for pain; it is also possible that the price be useful inasmuch as it makes amends or discourages a fresh offense, but the initial offense remains and the "price" is always (even if it is "just") a new offense and a new source of pain.
Primo Levi, Symposium, in: Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On The Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness.
____________________________________________________________

"Hermann's theft of figs discovered."

From the entries in his mother's diary and from the extensive exchange of letters between both parents and various members of the family, which have been available since 1966, it is possible to guess at the small boy's painful path.
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Today, . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn.
. . . at the hotel, . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . the boy . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn.
. . . decides to make fireworks for himself and sets fire to the curtain! Great alarm. He speechless, draws attention to the fire by rattling the door, and disappears through the back door; . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Sunday, June 13, 1875).
. . . the boy’s father . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . changing his clothes, puts out the fire in a state of complete nudity; as he is doing so, something happens which he has so often experienced in dreams: the entire Kurhaus sees the fire from outside and storms in to put it out; . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Sunday, June 13, 1875).
. . . the father . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn.
. . . has trouble withdrawing in his ridiculous state. In good spirits afterward, . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Sunday, June 13, 1875).
. . . the little fellow . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn.
. . . surely cured forever of playing with matches, I almost ill with shock.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Sunday, June 13, 1875).
The boy . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn.
. . .does not want to sleep in his room anymore, thinks it is still burning!
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Sunday, June 13, 1875).
The next morning, . . .
Peter J. Boyer, The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession.
. . . my mother asked . . .
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
. . . father . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . not to read the newspaper until he had had his coffee.
Peter J. Boyer, The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession.
The newspaper had quite an account of the affair, and, even . . .
Victor Appleton, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.
. . . described me as . . .
Stephen Leacock, My Discovery of England.
. . . “an unwholesomely willful child playing with matches. The immediate temptation . . . ”
Peter J. Boyer, The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession.
. . . continued the reporter, . . .
Gaston Leroux, The Secret of the Night.
“ . . . may be to let the little brat learn the lesson that burnt fingers will teach.”
Peter J. Boyer, The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession.
To my father, who was . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . simply concerned with appearances . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the newspaper account . . .
Victor Appleton, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.
. . . had been a personal embarrassment to him as a . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . respectable member of the community
Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Breaking Point.
My father, furious as he was at finding himself dragged into complicity with . . .
Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited.
. . . my antics . . .
Zane Grey, The Young Forester.
. . . said what first came into his mind.
Fergus Hume, The Green Mummy.
“The boy will come to nothing!”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Those were his words; aye, they are his very words!
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.
I became so fervent and headstrong that I was too much for . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . father and . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . I was thrown . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . into such a rage that I became horrible, did and said things so awful they seared my heart even as I said them.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear, not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child's very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness—and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay with rules and regulations.
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment and fear.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
And the rules alone would break your head[!]
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
My father never discussed his rules: he gave orders and I had to obey. Afraid of being beaten, for he was a very strong man, I pretended to agree with him, cultivated an internal life of dissent that I hid from him and the adult world.
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
Within the family it was accepted . . .
Jack London, Martin Eden.
. . . that the child would be . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . ruthlessly punished, both by beatings and by enforced isolation. . . . He was also bullied at the local day-school to which he was sent, and at which he . . .
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
. . . was beaten by the masters
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
Ha, these Masters!
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
A child, under exactly similar conditions as far as its knowledge goes, cannot very well curse God and die. It howls till its nose is red, its eyes are sore, and its head aches.
Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep.
" . . . A boy who has never learned obedience is lost. I grew up in the wildest of anarchy; it had to be, for then as later no known method ever fitted me, but how much should I have been spared if I had been accustomed to obeying! To my sister I was just a wild and forsaken being . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, July 5, 1871).
. . . 'a Pariah' . . .
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
. . . who never conformed."
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, July 5, 1871).
When he was very small—it became possible to establish the date more exactly owing to its having coincided with the fatal illness of an elder sister—he had done something naughty, for which his father had given him a beating. The little boy had flown into a terrible rage and had hurled abuse at his father even while he was under his blows. But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp! You towel! You plate!" and so on. His father, shaken by such an outburst of elemental fury, had stopped beating him, and had declared: "The child will be either a great man or a great criminal!"
Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis.
"Here, you grown-up people, listen to me. If you want to know something! . . ."
Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis for Teachers and Parents.
Child-rearing is used in a great many cases to prevent those qualities that were once scorned and eradicated in oneself from coming to life in one's children.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
Listen!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
The wish . . .
L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz.
. . . of grown-ups . . .
Jack London, The People of the Abyss.
. . . for "true nobility of soul" justifies every form of cruelty toward the fallible child, and woe to the child who sees through the hypocrisy.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
—But listen!
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
Wait!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
More important—indeed, quite decisive for the future—is . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . the road that leads . . .
Anna Freud, Beating Fantasies and Daydreams.
. . . to the apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and who even admire him are forced by their own distress to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in the child.
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Alice Miller, Masson explained, was his only remaining supporter. "I am persona non grata in the analytic world, a pariah," he said, with the air of one stating a mildly irksome and yet somehow not unamusing fact. He continued, with a rush of words, "Analysts won't speak to me anymore. They avoid me on the street. They are afraid to be seen with me. . . . ”
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
Wherever I turn I am shunned, condemned;
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
“ . . . A year ago, they were fawning on me—they were giving me huge grants, they were inviting me to speak at their institutes. But when Anna Freud and Eissler dropped me no analyst would touch me. . . ."
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
Word was spread that I was "difficult, verbose, and dangerous."
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
" . . . When I was fired from the [Freud] Archives, Alice Miller, who shares my ideas and therefore can no longer call herself a Freudian analyst either, was the only person who had the guts to come out for me."
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
She helped me through this and subsequent crises and soon became my second mother. Since then she has taken an interest in all the essential professional and private events of my life.
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
Alice Miller presently appeared—a small, worried looking woman in her early sixties. Masson embraced her warmly, introduced me, and asked her what he could do for her during her stay in Berkeley. Alice Miller said that she wanted to know more about psychotherapy in America. . . .

Masson then asked Alice Miller how she was enjoying . . .
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
. . . the hotel.
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
Alice Miller said in an aggrieved tone that she had gone swimming in one of the pools and was having trouble with the chlorine in her eyes; the goggles sold at the hotel hadn't worked properly. . . .

As [Masson] and I walked through the lobby, he sighed and said, "Goggles, yet. God, she's kvetchy! She's like my mother. . . ."
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
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In some patients who had turned away from their mother, in dislike or hate, or used other mechanisms to get away from her, I have found that there existed in their minds nevertheless a beautiful picture of the mother, but one who was felt to be a picture of her only, not her real self. The real object was felt to be unattractive—really an injured, incurable and therefore dreaded person. The beautiful picture had been dislocated from the real object but had never been given up, and played a great part in the specific ways of their sublimation.
Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation.
Three nights before his death, . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Almost poetically, . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . he dreamed of meeting . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . his mother . . .
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
. . . looking young and attractive and altogether unlike his early recollections of her.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Yet again the occasion for the dream was a real event. The day before . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . he had received . . .
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.
. . . a photograph of his mother as a young woman. He looked at it, long and closely, remarking in a scarcely audible tone: "Fantastic!" Was this the bond of trust and the sense of "I" connecting mother and newborn, old man and "Ultimate Other"?
Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson.
Everything in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed to me so difficult to grasp in analysis—so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it has succumbed to an especially inexorable repression.
Sigmund Freud, Female Sexuality.
Later in life, it became quite difficult for me to recapture how deeply attached I must have been to . . .
Sophie Freud, My Three Mothers and Other Passions.
. . . my mother, . . .
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
. . . but I have numerous childhood photographs in which I melt into her body, while she, always beautifully dressed, stares into the camera. I continue to feel anguish, puzzlement and guilt about my frozen feelings toward this . . .
Sophie Freud, My Three Mothers and Other Passions.
. . . mother . . .
Gloria Vanderbilt, A Mother’s Story.
. . . who seems to have loved me so much. This relationship has set the stage for my constant yearning to be intensely loved, while I remain terrified of the costs should this ever really happen.
Sophie Freud, My Three Mothers and Other Passions.
Of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs . . . which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . the echo of an original identity . . .
Otto Rank, Art and Artist.
. . . has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . just as lamplight is nullified by the light of day . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Desire is our door into the world. We see shapes there and want them and we go after them into the world. But desire is our door out again also when the shapes we saw leave our desires unsatisfied. What could we ever have wanted? More than a door to enter, the world offers us a prospect to peer into whose shapes suggest a reality which they, themselves, are not. . . . Reality is shapeless and disparate . . .
William Bronk, Vectors and Smoothable Curves.
A certain dream, or fantasy, that kept recurring gained in meaning for me. The dream, the most important and enduringly significant of my life, went something like this: I was returning to my father's house—above the entrance glowed the heraldic bird, yellow on a blue background; in the house itself . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . through the glass door . . .
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers.
. . . my mother was coming toward me—but as I entered and wanted to embrace her, it was not she but a form I had never set eyes on before, tall and strong, resembling Max Demian and the picture I had painted; yet different, for despite its strength it was completely feminine. This form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep, tremulous embrace. I felt a mixture of ecstasy and horror—the embrace was at once an act of divine worship and a crime. Too many associations with my mother and friend commingled with this figure embracing me. Its embrace violated all sense of reverence, yet it was bliss. Sometimes I awoke from this dream with a feeling of profound ecstasy, at others in mortal fear and with a racked conscience as though I had committed some terrible crime.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
To the extent that the maternal image is a derivative of the mother, it too is separated into good and bad.
Sheldon Cashdan, Object Relations Therapy.
Only gradually and unconsciously did this very intimate image become linked with the hint about the God I was to search for, the hint that had come to me from the outside. The link grew closer and more intimate and I began to sense that I was calling on Abraxas particularly in this dreamed presentiment. Delight and horror, man and woman commingled, the holiest and most delicate innocence: that was the appearance of my love-dream image and Abraxas, too. . . . It was the image of an angel and Satan, man and woman in one flesh, man and beast, the highest good and the worst evil. It seemed my preordained fate. I yearned for it but feared it at the same time. It was ever-present, hovering constantly above me.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
It was an apparition that came and went. Sometimes it came up close, looking at me through the glass, smiling before disappearing. Would it ever return? And who was it? Mother—I was told.
Gloria Vanderbilt, A Mother’s Story.
He adored and depended on his mother and yearned to approach her for the satisfaction of his needs, but he could not help fearing, avoiding and defying her. He was torn by his love and hatred of her. This paralyzing conflict of ambivalence forced an early splitting of his mother's image.
Ruth Abraham, Freud's Mother Conflict and the Formulation of the Oedipal Father.
I often saw the beloved apparition of my dream with a clarity greater than life, more distinct than my own hand, spoke with it, wept before it, cursed it. I called it mother and knelt down in front of it in tears. I called it my beloved and had a premonition of its ripe all-fulfilling kiss. I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It enticed me to the gentlest love-dreams and to devastating shamelessness, nothing was too good and precious, nothing was too wicked and low for it.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
In the images of a poet and a painter we find these opposites fused. The lost parent is both dead and alive, absent but enduring, far and near.
Martha Wolfenstein, The Image of the Lost Parent.
"Living" aesthetic forms of responsive creative illusion may supersede actual persons in living form.
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
In my life I had been like a painter climbing a road high above a lake, a view of which is denied him by a curtain of rocks and trees. Suddenly through a gap in the curtain he sees the lake, its whole expanse is before him, he takes up his brushes.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Art saves him, and through art—life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
And as art exactly reconstitutes life, around the truths to which we have attained inside ourselves there will always float an atmosphere of poetry, the soft charm of a mystery which is merely a vestige of the shadow which we have had to traverse, the indication, as precise as the markings of an altimeter, of the depth of a work . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . which constitutes . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the visible reflections of . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . the depths of an individual's inner psyche.
Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson.
What is otherwise contradiction assumes for the artist the aspect of rich ambiguity. The boundness to an ever-living past, which prevents the neurotic from living in the present, provides the artist with the source and substance of his work, which embodies, in Proust's phrase, "the past recaptured."
Martha Wolfenstein, The Image of the Lost Parent.
The poet sees his mother as both the liberator and the confiner of his sexual identity. Her body is the child's bridge to the other worlds, the worlds before birth and after death.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
Life stared at him, filled with secrets, a somber, unfathomable world, a rigid forest bristling with fairy-tale dangers—but these were mother secrets, they came from her, led to her, they were the small dark circle, the tiny abyss in her clear eye.

So much of his forgotten childhood surged up during these mother dreams, so many small flowers of memory bloomed from the endless depth of forgetfulness, golden-faced premonition-scented memories of childhood emotions, of incidents perhaps, or perhaps of dreams. Occasionally he'd dream of fish, black and silver, swimming toward him, cool and smooth, . . .
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund.
. . . shapes seen through the doorway of desire . . .
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
. . . swimming into him, through him, coming like messengers bearing joyous news of a more gracious, more beautiful reality and vanishing, tails flipping, shadowlike, gone, having brought new enigmas rather than messages. Or he'd dream of swimming fish and flying birds, and each fish or bird was his creature, depended on him, could be guided like a breath, radiated from him like an eye, like a thought, returned to him. Or he'd dream of a garden, a magic
garden . . .
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund.
The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . a supernatural being, . . .
Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
. . . twined with the chant of my soul, . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.
. . . made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Yes, my friends, believe with me . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
The echoes by which . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
. . . the inconceivable mystery of a soul . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . seeks to determine the reach, the logic and authority of its own voice, come from the rear. Evidently, the mechanisms at work are complex and rooted in diffuse but vital needs . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
. . . of continuity and . . .
Jack London, Before Adam.
. . . of self, of security and identity.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
The illusion of a responsive presence in the form of art confirms that I am I . . .
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
—that elusive it . . .
Gloria Vanderbilt, A Mother’s Story.
. . . establishes a sort of identity . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . and, like art, itself, perhaps perfectible in the confident expectation of a future which one knows is also an illusion, while true as far as it goes because in the service of life.
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
This fantasy, if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
And it is true that each genuine recovery of forgotten experience and, with it, something of the person that one was when having the experience carries with it an element of enrichment, adds to the light of consciousness, and thus widens the conscious scope of one's life.
Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis.
So that my personality of today may be compared to an abandoned quarry, which supposes everything it contains to be uniform and monotonous, but from which memory, selecting here and there, can like some Greek sculptor, extract . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . between the temple ruins . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion.
. . . innumerable different statues.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that—one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth—the slime and eggshells of his primeval past—with him to the end of his days. Some never become human remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us—experiments of the depths—strives toward his own destiny.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
This awareness . . .
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
. . . that I am I . . .
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
. . . is also an inheritance.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
And now . . .
A.E. Housman, Excerpt from Oh, When I Was in Love with You.
Let us ask what precisely . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . are these "shapes" the poet insistently refers to—shapes seen through the doorway of desire leading into the world?
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
Beyond any doubt . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
They are shapes of early feeling . . .
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
. . . modeled on memories or fantasies of an Edenic state . . .
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven.
. . . sought in the outside world, to be recaptured in the present, if only through the beneficence of the controlled illusion that is art: an objective realization that witnesses the ongoing interplay between self and other, luring life on beyond itself in the illusion of a future attuned to transformations at higher levels of the same resonating responsiveness that existed in the beginning.
Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness.
And presently it became quiet and secret around; but from the depth the sound of a bell came up slowly.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The hour has come!—
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
It's time! It's late!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Excerpt from From High Mountains: Aftersong.
How it sighs! How it laughs in a dream! Old deep, deep midnight!

Still! Still! Here things are heard that by day may not become loud; but now in the cool air, when all the noise of your hearts too has become still—now it speaks, now it is heard, now it steals into nocturnal, overawake souls. Alas! Alas!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
He sighed deeply, closed his eye, and,
as in a dream, whispered these words:
Richard Wagner, Gotterdammerung.
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds
contribute toward it.
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Song of Myself.
I hear a . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . macabre rhythm . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . that continues . . .
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers.
. . . beyond the grave in the manner of echoes that go on sounding long after the original voice has become silent.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Bereft.
Now I . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Song of Myself.
—I alone . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . Frozen in a moment—
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.
. . . feel the puzzle of puzzles, . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Song of Myself.
. . . the great riddle . . .
Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.
And that . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Song of Myself.
. . . that . . .
Gloria Vanderbilt, A Mother’s Story.
. . . we call Being.
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Song of Myself.
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And if somebody asked, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
What is a "poet"?
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
—couldn't one answer simply:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . the poet creates a new personal ideal for the masses, a creation to which he was driven by his inner conflicts arising from the formation of his own ideal. Dissatisfied with the ideal of the group, he forms . . .
Otto Rank, The Don Juan Legend.
. . . in defiance of tradition, . . .
Isaac Deutscher, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Imagination.
. . . his own individual ideal in order to proffer it to the group, without whose recognition his creation remains very unsatisfactory. The impetus to his formation of an ideal obviously comes from a very strong narcissism, which prevents him from accepting the common ideal and makes it necessary for him to create an individual one.
Otto Rank, The Don Juan Legend.
No doubt . . .
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
. . . the artist . . .
Otto Rank, Art and Artist.
. . . will always defend his claim to individual liberty against the will of the group. A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation—one, that is, that will bring happiness—between the claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group . . .
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
I believe that the artist's personality, however strongly it may express the spirit of the age, must nevertheless bring him into conflict with that age and with his contemporaries.
Otto Rank, Art and Artist.
Wagner put . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . these struggles . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . on stage as Die Meistersinger.

In its final act, Walther, having learned the masters' rules, . . . feels liberated and begins to improvise. What was written in the past no longer constrains. His composition has paid homage to tradition; rule has helped to a point. Suddenly unfettered, he responds to the impulse of the moment.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
To him, history ends as well as starts with him; others must look to their memories, to legends, or to books to find models for the present and the future in what their predecessors have said and done.
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther.
His is a romantic vision, born of feeling, impetuosity, yearning, and reveries. To communicate its loosely but subtly connected images a relaxed, highly personal expression is needed, one answering only to the individual's sensitivity. Walther returns to the dream world that first gave his inspiration birth.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . the artist knows the rules, although an art work cannot be created by following them.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
Walther:
If they now stand in such high repute,
who was it who made the rules?
Sachs:
It was sorely-troubled Masters,
spirits oppressed by the cares of life:
in . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . the desert . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, Moses und Aron.
. . . of their troubles
they formed for themselves an image,
so that to them might remain
of youthful love
a memory, clear and firm,
in which spring can be recognized.
Walther:
But he from whom spring has long since fled,
how can he capture it in an image?
Sachs:
He refreshes it as well as he can:
so, as a troubled man, I should like,
if I am to teach you the rules,
you to explain them to me anew.—
See, here is ink, pen, paper:
I'll write it down for you if you will dictate to me.
Walther:
How I should begin I scarcely know.
Sachs:
Tell me your morning-dream.
Walther:
Through the good precepts of your rules
I feel as if it were effaced.
Sachs:
Then take poetry to your hand now:
many found through it what was lost.
Walther:
So it might not be dream, but poetry?
Sachs:
The two are friends—gladly stand by each other.
Walther:
How do I begin according to the rule?
Sachs:
You make it yourself, and then you follow it.
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nòrnberg. Walther prepares to dictate to Sachs a song, "the morning dream interpretation melody," that came to him in a dream during the night.
So he ignored everything they had learned over the centuries and set out to re-create for himself what the masters had already perfected . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . acting as if . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . mankind were starting all over with his own beginning as an individual, conscious of his singularity as well as his humanity; [while] others hide in the folds of whatever tradition they are part of . . . .

Even in this scheme, the mother remains a counterplayer however shadowy.
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther.
At the risk of displeasing innocent ears I propose . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . that the mother of a creative man who achieves prominence has conveyed to her son a feeling of great "specialness" in herself, which she has passed on to him. It is as if she says, "You have something unique, better than your father, and you get it all from me."
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
Freud recorded an anxiety-ridden dream of his mother's death, from his seventh or eighth year; correspondingly, she too once reported a dream of her son's death. By then she was an old woman, for whom dying was not a distant prospect. In her dream she was at Sigmund's funeral, and around his casket were arrayed the heads of state of the major European nations. For an old mother, even a Jewish one, to experience such a dream is not implausible, but to permit an account of having dreamed of such a catastrophe to cross her lips because it depicted the fame her beloved son had achieved, does reveal something about the nature of her own yearnings which had been satisfied through her son's career.
Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers.
He was eleven or twelve, sitting with his parents in one of the restaurants in the Prater, Vienna's famous park. A strolling poetaster was wandering from table to table, improvising for a few coins little verses on any theme proposed to him. "I was sent off to ask the poet to our table and he showed himself grateful to the messenger. Before inquiring for his topic, he dropped a few verses about me and, inspired, declared it probable that some day I would become a cabinet minister."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Amalie must have cherished the heroic prophesies that were made about Freud in his early years. More personally for her, [her] dream, at least according to her son's theory, may also have expressed a hidden meaning through a thematic polarity. For through the multiplication of father figures she may have been accentuating the opposite of the dream's manifest content—that Freud really belonged to her alone and that he was more her son than his father's. Simultaneously, for dreams can have many levels, this dream may have been an attempt at compensation for the loss of her son; she might no longer have him, but she was assured that the world did.
Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers.
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As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the ways all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoyevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner's Benjy, James's Maisie, Flaubert's Emma, Melville's Pip, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list. I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
How can "the totally Other" act on us, let alone give any signal of its utterly inaccessible existence? The ultimate "particles," the bondings of elements in human consciousness whose orbits generate the quantum jump of faith [that propel one to imagine the "totally Other"], are presumably multiple. They are not unambiguously accountable to even the masters of introspection, of self-decoding, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard. They sink their roots into the finalities of the unconscious. Childhood experiences (according to Freud, this is where the discussion should stop) are seminal. Each atom of time in our life-histories can be causal either way. Belief or non-belief are closely resonant, thought at depths of intricacy that defy analysis, with our immersion and dissatisfactions with language.
George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life.
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of . . .
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
. . . "the totally Other" . . .
George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life.
. . . is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation in the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this. It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green top, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of the project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
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Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child's 'play' from 'phantasying'.
Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.
A man's maturity—consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Ludwig Geyer . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . Father Geyer . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, December 26, 1878).