The Generations of Adam

Anyone might ask the question: what is the meaning of my life? How (if at all) may I contemplate my life, as though from outside myself?

Questions of this kind preoccupy people in therapy, in much the same way as they used to preoccupy people in Tolstoy’s novels. I remember a patient who dreamt of travelling by boat down a river. The opening out of the vista in his description invited the feeling that the whole of life was unfolding within the span of a journey. The more you looked, the more you saw, within some expanding conception of the imaginative vision.

But therapeutic uses of the imagination of this kind are infrequent. To use thought in this way, you have to assume a certain kind of literacy, at some distance from the more fundamental processes of development. Many people in therapy sink into a torpidity of the soul, states in which they find themselves confused and lost in a multitude of particulars; they would seem to be remote from any alertness to general contexts, having moved (it would seem) close to the sources of symbol formation, states of mind that are pre-literate, pre-verbal and possibly pre-human.

It is important, since i cannot directly know these states, to have a myth about them — and the myth that occurs to me is one concerning the foetus, as I imagine it, in some intuitive communion with its uterine surroundings. I think of the foetus as having the capacity to be inspired without having to enter into a process of learning. Goodness filters into it; it tunes in and, without any form of mediation, it receives. This is to find a setting in which a belief in wish fulfilments is appropriate.

I was made aware of this likeness to a vegetable growth in my own self when in psychoanalysis, and then more comfortably when I began to observe interactions between infants and mothers, and much later when I had the opportunity to work with a seriously incapacitated child. Previously, I had looked to different norms: an Everyman model, or Adam, who happened to be endowed with the faculties of a bright university graduate; someone who lives off his wits, dissociated from any acknowledgement of the dependent or helpless elements in the self. Such a conception of mind, which tends to think of powers of speech as much superior to other forms of symbolization, is hard to maintain and can lead to breakdown. It is a conception of mind that at one time (I think) was quite widely held.

The eminent American painter, Barnett Newman, once contended that the first man must have been an artist. It is unlikely that Newman thought that the first man had grown into being an artist or had been nurtured into receptivity; since growth of this kind supposes sponsors, like parents or animals, who might have helped the infant Adam grow. For me Newman’s poetic assertion suggests someone isolated, lonely and mature in his acts of receptivity, a new man like Newman himself.

If Newman did in fact follow Genesis and believe the first man to have sprung into being as an artist fully formed, he would have found his idea reflected in Sir Thomas Browne.

Some Divines,’ argued Browne, ‘count Adam 30 years old at his creation because they suppose him created in the perfect age and stature of man’ (Browne, 1643, p. 88). This is a conception of mind in which the power to apprehend the numinous, or to symbolize, are God-givens in human nature rather than achievements acquired through nurture and training. Adam is born an artist; he does not have to grow into the aptitudes and skills that the artist requires. He does not have to pass through states of incoherence to recognize the elements of pre-verbal wisdom in intuition.

In unsettled times, or times when the traditions of nurture seem inappropriate, myths of this kind are important. I need to believe that I can tune into inspirations which my miserable surroundings do not supply me with. Talent (and Newman was hugely talented) requires a precedent for its moments of originality. Why, imitating tribal thought, should talent not look for its precedent to the unknowable and mythic first moment of Creation itself? ‘The primary Imagination,’ wrote Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria, is ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (Coleridge, 1817, p. 167). A creationist myth of this kind is inimical to theories of nurture and symbol development: it is anti-historical, anti-familial and anti-cultural; and it is inclined to value art because it is (as Freud thought) primary process, a kind of sacred magic.

Newman and certain other non-figurative artists of the 1940s sought a tradition in tribal and palaeolithic art, sources largely unknowable in origin, that could be coordinated with the exploration of unknown goals. Against common opinion, they believed that primitive thought represented states of consciousness higher than those in the culture they inhabited.