Portrait of an Artist

This post is dedicated to my friend, Perry Rubenstein.

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.