14th May 2008

LIFE BEFORE WORDS. ‘Well-being is not a a state of mind or disposition of character. If it were, it might belong to a vegetable-man whose whole existence was passed in sleep. ‘ (Aristotle. Ethics.10.6.)

‘But suppose he is unconscious? Some people argue: if he is not conscious of being good, or of being engaged in virtuous activity, how can he be in a state of well-being? There is no reason why we should lose states of well-being in sleep. You can be healthy without knowing you are healthy, handsome without knowing you are handsome...Our minds grow, in one way or another: and sometimes in ways that our senses are unable to register. ‘ (derived from Plotinus. Ennead 1.4.9.)
Coleridge quotes from Paradise Lost at the beginning of the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria - he clearly sees the meaning of the epic as important to his theory concerning ‘the nature and genesis of the Imagination.’ His sensibility, and the sensibility of his contemporaries, owed a great deal to Milton’s theory of creation.

Adam asks the archangel Raphael to tell the story of the creation. He realises that Raphael, as an ambassador from a spiritual realm unrelated to space and time, is able to anticipate future danger - about this enterprise, there is a sense of a futurity or unknowability being violated - a risk being needlessly run.
The creation Raphael describes is far more convincing in its exuberant idealisation than Milton’s Eden, which gives us infancy without infants. The creation of the physical cosmos - of heaven and earth, light and darkness, waters and firmament - is self-sufficient and harmonious in its co-ordination. The universe is all play, from the spouting of waters to the movement of stars. A commitment to the exuberance of natural creation finds its style in idealising acts of verbal play : the realisation of Miltonic reality requires no less a mode.

Everyone has reason to delight in this creation; it turns out to be better than anyone might have hoped for. Even its creator has reason to be awed. Consider the solemnity of - ‘And God created the great whales… ‘ Every element in the animal and vegetable kingdoms fulfils its natural powers. There is no need to name functions, or to label creatures with attributes: everything just is. Flowers blossom without some divine edict which insists that they should blossom. There is no fall from grace if they fail.

The catalogue falters with the climactic pomp of Man’s creation. Loaded with solemn imperial tasks, in a way that underlines his essential superfluity, Man is singularily ill-equipped to take on the functions which MIlton’s God assigns to him - one could hardly conceive of a species less well-equipped. Instead of a useful ability, he is given praise: he is ‘the master work, ‘ made in the image of God, and ‘endued/ With the sanctity of reason. ‘ He is expected to rule over and subdue the animal and vegetable kingdom and (with all this) to be ‘magnanimous to correspond with Heaven. ‘ He is also, of course, not allowed to eat from the Tree of Knowledge - a slight proscription compared to the other demands made on him. Even Milton, the noblest of our kind, seldom manages to fulfil these persecutory demands.

THE BEAUTY OF THE PRE-HUMAN WORLD. Oddly, what Milton’s God does not ask of man, at least in the first moment of creation, is something that turns out to be his most engaging aptitude: his capacity to appreciate and enjoy the non-human world. In exceptional hands (Milton, the Haydn who wrote ‘The Creation ‘), the capacity to appreciate becomes imaginatively god-like.

The beauty of the pre-human world appears to be largely one of anticipation - a waiting for Man. Or so we would like to believe, perhaps because the thought of a beautiful world in which mankind has no being is too desolating for human beings to bear. Yet there is one hopeful way of considering the world without mankind. When we think about such a world we may in part be trying to retrieve pre-verbal sensations - such as infants experience before they can reason through words. When Thomas Gray, in a quotation that catches an intellectual climate, asserts that ‘Full many a Flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air, ‘ he referred among other things to the potentialities unrealised within us if we do not have an adequate notation (usually language) to help us realise it. And flowers blush unseen in another sense: in all of us there may be potentialities which adult symbolisations and means of education, however imaginative, fail to encompass. Literacy, in all its splendour, seldom allows for unconscious being or unexplored places in the mind which we may think of as awaiting discovery by non-literate means.

‘O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t. ‘ Shakespeare’s Miranda emerges from an island world which, imaginatively, precedes the creation of man. The island she lives on is all animal and vegetable kingdom. Its air breathes music. It suggests brave new worlds that no eye has seen, pre-verbal potentialities that await their means of symbolisation, Americas of the mind that precede the coming into being of reasoning man.

Or possible symbols that remain denied. Some of Coleridge’s first-recorded intuitions about the Imagination occur in an essay on the brutality of the slave-trade ‘...we may form some idea of the hot & pestilent vapours arising from their confinement between the decks by the fact that the very timbers of the vessel are rotted by them...slaves who have been thrust down at night have been brought up dead in the morning… negroes have been known to choak themselves by throwing back their tongues...They have been heard to sing in their captivity, and this has been mentioned as a proof that they cared little for slavery - but a witness who knew their language heard them sing, & their songs were songs of lamentation.

‘Tongue-choking, the retreat into pre-verbal frustration, was later to have a more familiar reference, in Coleridge’s dealings with his son.
(N.1.1400) ‘Derwent (July 6th/1803) to whom I was explaining what his senses were for - he had never once thought of connecting sight with his eyes, &c - I asked him what his Tongue was for & I told him/ & to convince, held his Tongue/ he was not at all affected - having been used to have his voluntary power controlled by others. Sometime after I asked him again/ he had forgotten - I bade him hold his Tongue and try to say Papa - he did,& finding that he could not speak, he turned pale as death and in the reaction from fear flushed red, & gave me a blow in the face/ 2 years & 10 months old, within 8 days.’

This is to take literally the injunction: Hold your tongue. Usually the most considerate of fathers, Coleridge was presumably driven into cruelty by a wish to project into his child the fear, as a highly verbal person, of being struck dumb. He had had been desolated by the death of his beloved father - and being struck dumb on that occasion was related to an an incapacity to speak to one’s father. (’In a minute my mother heard a noise in his throat - and spoke to him - but he did not answer - and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her SHRIEK awakened me - & I said, Papa is dead - I did not know of my Father’s return, but I knew that he was expected. How I came to think of his Death, I cannot tell.’ letter to Poole, 16 October 1797.)

SILENT POTENTIALITY. Eighteenth century theories of perception are closely related to beliefs in the importance of memory, or the securing of optic and auditory phenomena in time. The initially blank mind is expected to act as some sort of register. Theories of this kind are bound up with a certain conception of literacy - mnemonics about how we should teach children to read. Misguided views concerning mind often derived from the experience of being taught by rote. Coleridge with his metaphoric use of reflections and echoes has trouble shaking off this false legacy. But he does shake it off. In part, his achievement is to show us how we can be literate without losing touch with pre-verbal potentiality.

The experience of becoming a father was all-important to him. The arrival of Hartley, his firstborn, was like a visitation of the muse. Consider the opening to the poem ‘Frost at Midnight.’ The silent infant sleeping in a cot by its father’s side lightly links in the poet’s mind with the silent ministry of the frost outside. As Coleridge elsewhere says,the potentiality works within us as the actuality works upon us! A silent ministry works unseen outside the poet’s room, in nature, and also within the sleeping infant, evolving traceries and shapes that words cannot capture. It is like the Plotinian good which works within us though we may not be aware of it. We are far now from the Newtonian deism in which a watchmaker deity leaves the world to tick out its automatic destiny. A warm and kindly and modest goodness is always working within us, even at moments of pain. As a father, Coleridge keeps watch over his son; while his own father, a dead and much loved minister, continues to work within Coleridge himself. The silent ministry of the frost anticipates the play that the infant will enter into as toddler. Already the modalities of a later symbolism are being foreshadowed, as though traced on a window. We can lose our intuition of a pre-verbal activity through misuses of verbal skill.

For Coleridge, acts of imaginative identification are always monistic. He notices, as his son plays, how the animal and vegetable universe also plays, and sometimes universe and infant play together, leaving the adult out. The first moments of creation are ceaselessly relived as the Miltonic deity communes (outside adult consciousness) with the non verbal elements of our universe: with animals and with vegetables and with the powers that the physicist and chemist would wish to describe. The pre-verbal realm implies relationships which people locked in reasoning and words will find strange. It supposes theories of incorporation (or introjection) and inspiration much richer and more feeling than any theory of memory as mental register allows for.It has no need for the memory- fetishism that reasoning people sometimes make of the past.

It is sometimes argued that the present-day agnostic distrust of hierarchies of being has undermined any belief in Coleridge’s Imagination. The psychoanalytic belief in the importance of pre-verbal states, allows it to come alive again. A capacity to experience pre-verbal states is important to our well being. A drowning sailor clutches at a spar. An ability to tolerate the nature of pre-verbal states (the dissolution attendant on coming-to-be) is bound up with the need to discover ‘good objects ‘. In this context, language can be used as a false good object, leading to delusions of independence. We need a theory of language which values the importance of pre-verbal states.

Descartes thought that animals had no souls because they could not speak: dumb brutes! But why should the soul necessarily be related to one form of conscious thinking? God communicates with the animals and vegetables and the physical order, and by non verbal means. The ancients thought of this communication as music - the various parts of the universe sing to each other like dolphins.

The world that is to come and the world that we have lost are two sides of the same coin. We are absent from both. Here, the insight of a poet like Milton can be echoed in observing children at play - as in an observation of my own. A Bach cantata plays on a gramophone. Three children spontaneously begin to dance to the music. Their movements have a circular quality: they turn about themselves or dance in such a way as to move in a circle. An eight year old girl in a pink ankle-length dressing-gown puts out her arms straight and turns round and round. She seems to want to have the sensation of being a sphere. The music is full of circularity, as if striving to encompass that sensation. The dancers respond in ways that we can see.

And, of course, the ancients thought of music as derived from the celestial bodies: the music of the spheres. Plato and Aristotle were bemused by the sphere’s beauty. ‘The sphere is the most uniform of all solid figures, and the only one which, by rotating on its axis, can move within its own limits without change of place. This axial rotation symbolises the movement of Reason and is superior to all rectilinear motions. ‘ (F.M.Cornford. Plato’s Cosmology. p.54.)

This is the monism essential to Coleridge’s Imagination: certain actions or states of mind seem able to bring the universe together in one harmonious orchestration. Coleridge writes to William Sotheby about the Psalms. For the Hebrew poets - ‘Each Thing has a Life of its own,& yet they are all one Life. In God they move & Live and HAVE their Being - not HAD as the cold System of Newtonian Theology represents/ but HAVE.(10 September 1802).

One of Coleridge’s many sources was William Bartram’s superb Travels in North Carolina. Bartram moved through primordial landscapes in which there were few men. He carefully noted the variety and nature of plants and animals. The notion of a Miltonic creation is close - ‘...the luminous appearance of the seas at night, when all the waters seem transmuted into liquid silver; the prodigous bands of porpoises foreboding tempest, that appear to cover the ocean; the mighty whale, sovereign of the watery realms, who cleaves the seas in his course; the sudden appearance of land from the sea....capes and promontories emerging from the watery expanse like mighty giants, elevating their crests towards the skies...the amplitude and magnificence of these scenes are great indeed, and may present to the imagination, an idea of the first appearance of the earth to man at the creation.

‘Bartram observes a hunter slaughter a bear. He conveys his intense dismay at being unable to stop the man. The powerful scene at first had me recall Hemingway’s persistent slaughter of birds and beasts. I then remembered with a slight shock, that Bartram was a primary source book for the writer of The Ancient Mariner. Fallen man becomes a predator on the sacred creatures of the pre-verbal world - sacred in part because they speak without the gift of tongues.

& HIS EYES & THE TEARS IN THEM, HOW THEY GLITTERED IN THE MOONLIGHT! Coleridge quotes Bartram at length in his Gutch Notebook. Fortuituously or not, the quotations are placed next to observations made of children. In one of his letters to Thomas Poole, Coleridge suggests that an experience of fiction deepens our capacity for perception. It is as though the emotional and spatial dimensions - and extravagance - of certain fictions were a postulate for perception. He had read the Arabian Nights and fairy tales and acquired from them a sense of vastness,and of the wholeness of things, so that when his father (who disapproved of reading of this kind and burnt the books) had shown him the night sky ‘& told me the names of the stars - and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world - and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had world rolling round them… I heard him with a profound delight and admiration; but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity.

‘Those without experience of fiction - the Experimentalists, let us say - could observe the world with ‘microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became blank & they saw nothing - and denied (very illogically) that any thing could be seen; and uniformly put the negation of a power for the possession of a power - & called the want of imagination Judgment, & the never being moved to rapture Philosophy!

‘A father points up to the sky; his son secretly aligns himself to something else, a prohibited romance, his mother perhaps, and claims a key to knowledge. Similarily, a little boy looks up at the moon: Bartram gazes, amazed, at the alligators - as exotic as anything in the Arabian Nights. The alligators make a terrible roaring; the whole earth seems to tremble. Another Coleridge quotation from Bartram (after the description of the boy looking at the moon) tells us that the roaring and the sonorous throat-rattling of the male alligators is a form of courtship. The female lays her egg ‘between a compost of mud, grass and herbage - ‘ ...when she is basking on the warm banks, with her brood around, you may hear the young ones whining & a-barking, like young Puppies.

‘Among the alligator quotations - and another Bartram reference which anticipates Kublai Khan, ‘Some wilderness-plot, green and fountainous & unviolated by Man ‘ - we have the boy looking up at the moon. ‘ - Hartley fell down & hurt himself - I caught him up crying & screaming - & ran out of doors with him. - The Moon caught his eye - he ceased crying immediately - & his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight!’

MEETINGS OF EYES OF THE MIND. The syntax of imagination is unconstrained by the exigencies of space and time. In a dream, the view from a window may be of events long past or of events still to come. The window frame separates inside from outside: it need not be a space-time frame; it may indicate some other demarcation, between levels of meaning. In the Gutch Notebook, I find that the alligators bear powerfully (as an atmosphere) on the experience of the little boy. It is as though the alligators were allusions in the mind of the boy’s observer, Coleridge, thinking of his own aged parents - he was the tenth son, his father’s favourite: allusions to wrinkled skin, well-used dugs on which ten infants had sucked, the presumed darkened skin of genitals - the alligators parentally court and snort and messily procreate, amazing the fastidious child.

They crawl. The child precociously walks, attempts to run, and falls. He looks up at the chaste pale moon as though in discourse with it. The moon and the tears are pellucid, unlike alligators or a thousand, thousand slimy things. The observer of the scene, a pensive father, appears to be on the outside, as though his place as last-beloved had been supplanted. The tear-glitter in the child’s eye reflects the light of the moon; it might be some transparency yielding an inner light which binds the child to the moon. In a similar fashion, the infant feeds from its mother and in some way - eye catching eye - reciprocally nourishes her. The tear and the moon are like the image of Ice that increases and decreases with the waxing and waning of the moon - in a Cashmere that anticipates the Xanadu of Coleridge’s future dream.

Pre-verbal exchanges, the meetings of eyes of the mind, the furthering of imagination itself, are things that a poet-father might sense and yet find hard to articulate - as he reaches out for words to define the pre-verbal. A little later in the Gutch Notebook, Coleridge has three sequences that follow each other like the stanzas of a poem.

226. The Infant playing with its mother’s Shadow - Rocking its little sister’s cradle & singing to her with inarticulate voice.
227. The flat pink-colour’d stone painted over in jagged circles & strange parallelograms with the greenish black-spotted lichens.
228. The Life of the Siminole playful from infancy to Death compared to the Snow, which on a calm day falling scarce seems to fall & plays & dances in & out, to the very moment that it reaches the ground
Coleridge would have read about the Seminole Indians in Bartram. It was he, though, who felt impelled to relate their lives to the playful dance of falling snow - a comparison recalling the frost’s silent ministry. As against the speech and actions and general business of men, we have another largely silent, unobserved and intensely creative world, represented by the complex dance of falling snow.

The infant playing with its mother’s shadow is of the same order: the falling snow and the shadow are elements in the pre-verbal, reflections of unknowability, that we come to be aware of in order to be able to speak. The infant cannot articulate its song - but it is probably close in age to the time of speech since it has a younger sister cradled beside it. Playing with its mother’s shadow would be an imaginative way of describing how the infant stretches out to articulate words, as though the shadow - like insubstantial language itself,a mother both present and yet absent - were something that one has to take into one’s mouth in order to speak.

Between the infant and the Indians comes the beautiful description of the flat, pink- colour’d stone. (Kathleen Coburn, who edited the Notebooks, thinks the stone was probably encountered on the Quantocks.) With its jagged circles and strange parallelograms,the stone is like writing in an unfamiliar script, or writing as it might appear to someone who cannot read. Nature is clearly there to be read - Coleridge would have had that idea from Jacob Boehme. But how can we puzzle out its meanings? Presumably the frustration at being unable to read stirs up once more the fury we had felt at being unable to speak. Elsewhere Coleridge writes of Luther as an heroic poet struggling with the meanings and script of a Hebrew text and finding himself thwarted by a demonic shadow that seems to come between himself and it - a persecutory variant, perhaps, on the child’s desire to play with its mother’s elusive shadow. The stone, with its rune-like marks, is like some primary alphabet book that baffles and draws on the child: the feeding object appears to have become as unyielding as a stone!

Coleridge at this time was taking notes for an intended study of infancy.He gives us a list of observations at Gutch 330. Child’s play usually has no ulterior end; child’s play is logos; both revealing of Reason and Reason in action. ‘The first smile - what kind of REASON it displays - the first smile after sickness. ‘ Reason for Coleridge is to use the eye of the mind, or the Imagination, to puzzle out spiritual meanings. Child’s play is both itself and yet something other than itself: it reflects the first creation of the world, a self-sufficient and silent colloquy between God and his creatures - a text that does not need to be translated or tortured over because its meaning shines forth. Gutch. 330.14. The wisdom & graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species...Children in the wind - hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated Trees, below which they play’d - the elder whirling for joy, the one in petticoats, a fat Baby, eddying half willingly, half by the force of the Gust - driven backward, struggling forward - both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of Joy.

If we look to the Letters, where this passage is quoted almost verbatim, we discover that Coleridge is writing about his two sons. Their dance, and the dance of the trees, seem to exist within the ambience of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. Mircea Eliade,in The Sacred and the Profane, has written of an ‘unquenchable ontological thirst. ‘ Religious man thirsts for for a fullness of being that he finds by identifying himself with some primordial act of creation. According to Eliade, such a man desires ‘to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands. ‘ Coleridge’s Notebooks often enact the moment when thoughts enter the mind,words enter the mouth, inspiration articulates itself as Reason through landscapes, dream images, private murmurings with the self. The primary moments of pre-verbal creation are re-lived as a basis for verbal creation.

ASPIRATION. The nine-year old blind boy, already referred to, in part brought me to these views. He speaks a foreign language which I speak with some difficulty. He is blind and I - if not exactly dumb - am unaccustomedly inarticulate. Yet we seem to communicate. One day he was distressed, I think because we had only one more meeting before the long holidays. With all his heart, he was loudly wailing and weeping and shaking his fists in the air. In the work room he wanted to be led to the bed sofa. When I suggested he was in this state because I was going away, he laid his head down on the pillow, held the pillow and rocked back and forth, making an agitated humming noise, incantatory, like the chanting of a Buddhist monk, as though his mouth noise and his circular sphere movement were attempts to communicate with something outside himself, a kind of tuning in with the universe.

At the same time, the sound and the movement had the quality of someone shaping something good for themselves. I suggested he was trying to make something good in his mouth to make up for my going away, and he was pleased. The sound grew softer, more private, as though he was regulating its distance. Sometimes he changed the sound to a more broken, throat-rattling sound, as though untempering his act of tuning in. Or the tempered notes would modulate into three notes, as though he were allowing a tune to form out of them. (He rejected this view.)

The sounds faded away. He began to laugh, rather malignly, and to hold on to his teeth. I indicated to him that he was behaving as though something bad had entered into him and he associated the badness with his teeth. He repeated with approval the words that something bad had entered into him.The feeding object (the sound) had become a weapon (teeth) and the weapon become his whole body. He started to throw himself back onto the pillow, banging his head violently, shuddering his hands and stiffening his body as though in paroxysm. The session continued to unfold with oscillatory movements into coherence or destructiveness. He seemed to be using his body to work out pre-verbal conflicts.

On days less determined by holiday thoughts, he may rock back and forth, holding my hands, and then put his fists tenderly into his eye sockets, as though he were trying to take me into him by a weaving action, so that I can fill his sockets with some apparatus for seeing. He touches his ears, as though wondering whether sight might be like hearing. He stretches out,seeking for some missing sense or unrealised potentiality.

THE PLAYFUL DANCE OF SNOW. ‘ My playmate when we both were clothed alike! ‘ (FROST AT MIDNIGHT.) Coleridge’s division of the Imagination into two agencies is puzzling. Both reflect natura naturans. How do they differ? Coleridge’s formulation is ambiguous. Primary Imagination identifies the self with the deity’s absolute re-creation of the universe moment by moment. Receptive to an act of making, the self discovers itself to be an element in the making. Secondary Imagination, as defined, seems to be about man as actor - as someone who does things. In fact, secondary Imagination describes not acting but modes of action. The dissolving, diffusing, dissipating of the chemist, as he conducts an experiment, or of the Prospero actor-manager, as he conjures up a masque, are natural processes, like the prolonged effect of sea on pebble. The self enters into the processes, as agent rather than actor. (Coleridge describes the Imagination as agency, not as activity: the human use of it is reflective, not purposeful.)

Scientist and artist find their model in the impersonal, all-encompassing nature of the Shakespearean mind, which bears witness to the mysteries of nature as God or God as nature; not least by being natural in its creativity. The Shakespearean scientist and artist do not oppose nature by their artifice; they use artifice to recreate nature under unusual circumstances. We can learn about their conception of the creative if we look to nature itself and to the ways in which it is similar to the childlike, so-called primitive, creative element in all of us.

Snow on a calm day plays and dances in and out - to the very moment that it reaches the ground. It is, for Coleridge, like the life-long playfulness of the Seminole Indians. In Frost at Midnight, he dreams of his infant’s son’s future and wishes him a freedom of this playful, dancing kind. His son sleeps beside him; Coleridge might be a pregnant mother, meditating in reverie over a sleeping foetus. He imagines an alternative self, undamaged by a misconceived system of education or the prison-like nature of urban life. Liberated from malnurture, the alternative self finds its fulfilment as an ‘idling spirit. ‘ It discovers echoes and reflections for its feelings in nature. It manages to make ‘a toy of thought. ‘ Thinking is creative play, like a child in free play with toys. Coleridge believes that in order to read God’s eternal language, the nameless silent forms of nature, we must first develop a capacity for play. He does not say how this Platonist recreation comes about. Learning to read the nameless entails divesting the self of much that it might acquire in conventional schools or city streets.
NEVER REALLY BORN. ‘The trouble with her was she had never been really born! ‘ Samuel Beckett. All That Fall. Her mother gave birth to two elder sisters, twins, one of whom died after two days. She appears to be chronically involved with the one who did not live, but there is more to it than that. At the time of her birth her mother had been depressed. Her mother hungered to feed a baby who was no longer there. In the light of our experience together, it seems possible that her mother projected the depression over the death and the need to feed the dead baby into her as a newborn infant.

She exists without seeming to be there. You can be in a room with her and think you are on your own. Most people make their presence known, even in silence. They have an atmosphere or characteristic odour. They rustle; they even seem to displace air. Or if they are the Seminole, you may want to think they have the atmosphere of dancing snow. Not so with her. She seems to have the power to blank out all image associations or metaphors. There is nothing to concentrate on - it is possible that she doesn’t want you to have anything to concentrate on. I point this out to her. She says that she fears that if she talks she will talk rubbish and it will be more than anyone can be hoped to cope with. She finds herself retreating into sleep. She would like to vanish into ‘thin air. ‘ She thinks of herself as disintegrating into bits. She might disintegrate into nothing. Or alternatively, she thinks of herself as vanishing - her body alone being left behind.
Perhaps I am the one she thinks will not live. She fears she can only put rubbish into me. If she becomes ‘thin air, ‘ she will in a sense feed me, as I need air to breathe. She will be universally there and universally useful and universally undemanding. If she remains as a body she will also be useful, as something to be eaten or orgiastically to be used. She would feed me during the times when we are supposed to be separated, when otherwise she might be thinking of me as her dead baby. Continuously feeding me would reassure her that I am still alive.

In separation we both think about each other and make something of each other in our minds. A general occurrence, probably. Two agents, thinking about a shared experience, perhaps some future meeting, transform it in differing ways in their minds. Some attack it like pirhana fish, others elaborate on it, like a frost pattern on a window pane, transforming its meaning in this way or that. The two agents are like twins inhabiting the same womb, or two parts of the same mind, each part transforming an experience in its own way and then leaving it for the other part to find and further transform. The two agents are separated from each other, as though by the birth act. They have only one means of communication, through the found object; but they do not know this; they cannot be sure the shared object is a communication, it is something they find there, a stranger, an alien thing that has the power to reverberate in the mind; they do not know why. People in the tenth century, living among the ruins of ancient Rome, were so cut off from the past that they thought the place had been once inhabited by a race of giants.
HEART OF DARKNESS. At the Museum of Mankind, the artist Eduardo Paolozzi arranged an exhibition of his favourite sculptures from the ethnological department in the British Museum. A number of these sculptures were so-called ‘primitive ‘ works of art; their immense power was immediately available to the spectator; presumably,because long digested into the conventions of Western art. Others invoked distrust; they might have been junk food, doubtful in nourishment, even harmful - examples of bricolage, bits of white man debris which the native artist had reworked to his own ends. The native artist had looked to the white man’s junk as though it were an object in nature which he could dissolve, diffuse and dissipate in order to recreate.

Place together two seemingly incompatible, almost unbridgeable zones: the civilised versus the primitive,the discursive versus the mythical, ego versus id, adult versus infantile, waking knowledge versus dream knowledge, alpha function versus beta function, & etc,. Or imagine a missionary station. On the one side, a tapering frontier of Western civilisation: discarded radio sets, an abandoned aeroplane. On the other side, a forest and its unknown inhabitants. R.H.Codrington, visiting Melanesia for the first time in the 1860s, met Mr Fison the missionary, who told him, ‘When a European has been living for two or three years among savages he is sure to be fully convinced that he knows all about them; when he has been ten years or so amongst them, if he be an observant man, he finds that he knows very little about them, and so begins to learn. ‘ (Codrington. The Melanesians. Preface p.vii. Oxford 1891.) The same could be said of the so-called savages that inhabit the other side of the frontier in our own mind. It takes years to know something, if anything, about them. As Coleridge saw with the Seminole, a native alternative to the reflective self is essential to the understanding of creative play in the mind.

The natives come out into the clearing. They see the aeroplane crashed among the trees. They have never seen an aeroplane before. They do not understand its function. Awed by the unnamed, they think they have encountered an alien God, a God who defines himself through the exact shapings of this piece of damaged metal. They dismember the wreckage, and remake its bits into many often powerful sculptures of the God. If they dissolve, diffuse, dissipate to re-create they do so because the deity atmosphere provides an emotional ground to their working. Their re-making is as natural as nature itself, which would have woven tendrils into the aeroplane, and rusted it into something other than itself - in time, it would have looked as natural as tree or rock. One part of the self has a powerful experience, loses it, forgets about it; another part finds it, cannot make sense of it, and puzzlingly reworks it into something remote from its former being. Agencies in the mind, dissociated from each other, communicate in this way; communicate with a nameless object that they do not know that they share, and seemingly without a shared language.

A number of the aeroplane sculptures reach western collectors who think about them in ways quite different from the ways of the native artist. An African mask inspires a Matisse or Picasso into uses that the native artist knows nothing of. The civilised mind frequently comes across suggestions in itself of primitive workings, as in certain unwelcome thoughts or dreams. Disabled in its capacity for play, it cannot see these thoughts as inspirations, somethings to be made into something. It seeks to convert the found object to virtue, or inappropriately to fit it into this or that institutionalised context, or to idealise it (ah,the primitive!), or to reject it as rubbish (as when it considers dreams to be meaningless).

ARIEL. The woman who would prefer to be ‘thin air ‘ or a discarded body, finds her likeness in Prospero’s two unwilling servants, Caliban and Ariel. Both wish to be freed from Prospero’s tyranny. (Someone - perhaps Shakespeare - wants to die. Body and soul wish to be released from their duties. They await release from some manipulative Prospero element in the self.) Body, as Caliban, suffers aches and cramps and yet has wonderous dreams. (The visionary wonder of the dreams indicates Caliban’s goodness.) Soul, as anima, air or Ariel, is less persecuted than body. Ariel has universal access and power to work universal transformations. Such prowess diminishes envy. Ariel can disinterestedly celebrate the diffusing, dissolving, dissipating properties of other elements in nature, in the same way as the sea breeze seems to take delight in the scud of the waves.

A key moment: Ariel sing to Ferdinand about an imaginary and non existent corpse, Prospero’s brother, Ferdinand’s father. The corpse is so sea-changed that its bones become coral and its eyes pearls. In this context, the transformation sounds like magic, or institutionalised hallucination. But in fact, the power of deep water to transform debris is nature at its most natural; this is what deep water always does; it transfigures wrecks, or if you like, racks - a triple pun that relates the transfigured wreck to the clouds of Caliban’s dreaming, or the cloud-racks of a masque.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters ‘ - the transfiguring of music and water is both natural and godlike. They are grounds out of which the transforming elements of the self, whether primitive or civilised, unconscious or conscious, work their changes. There is something about them that reveals gods or daemons.
THE BLIGHTING OF INFERENCE. On days when she is silent, she listens to the noises upstairs, or she talks about the unknown and possibly non existent patients who might come before or after her. She allows herself to wonder about the unknown, although she does not allow it to be unknown to her. She is unable to make inferences. Practising a jealous rigidity, she hears a sound and she is sure she knows what it means. From the sounds upstairs, she imagines a woman. Then two children. During the time of her session she thinks that the woman takes the children to school, leaves one child there and then returns with a single child. This story occurs to her many times. Once she dreams that a woman has strangled a child and is about to kill another.

The stories are striking less for their content, or for the way they reflect a death in her own family, as the quality of the imagining. There is no resonance about it. She talks about the events upstairs in a manner hard to describe. Is she describing them in order to control them - or in order to keep them alive? She reminds me of certain characters in the writings of Samuel Beckett, most notably the central figure in the play ‘Embers, ‘ who seems to invest his being in the re-tellings of a slight and even comical tale: bad fiction given all the emotional intensity of a convincing tragedy. Threadbare symbolism, intensity of feeling; a play is made by underlining the inadequacy of the relationship between them. 

The sounds upstairs are fixities and definites, evidences of Fancy not Imagination. The stories related to them are also fixities and definites. A putting together of counters, without resonance or reverie, or the kind of playful interchange between within and without the self that Coleridge thinks true of the Seminole. She cannot make a toy of thought, or allow her thought to play on her or through her as though she were an Aeolian harp. It is as though our perceptions have to dissolve, etc., in order to enter into us and become us. The ability to introject does not depend on the exercise of memory as fixed counters. It depends on being able to enjoy the toy aspect of thought; and making a toy of thought supposes an element of the unknown, of the nameless. Acknowledging that the distant sounds upstairs are unknown, something that might be inferred, is a necessary precursor to the ability to introject. It is perhaps relevant that at about this time she began to be worried about not remembering the content of sessions between times. She is unable to hold me inside her. On the last session of one term, she generously brings an important dream. She is brooding over some chicks. She thinks she has given birth to them and she is looking after them. The nature of her lying on them is open to speculation - she had, some time previously, dreamt of a rabbit crushed on the road. She thinks all the chicks look alike and she thinks them disgusting.

The chicks sound to me like her potential, her talents, as well as her potential as a mother. She is mixed up with me at this point - ‘a rabbit crushed on the road. ‘ She attacks the good elements in herself as though pre-empting the attack of someone else. The dream throws light on the way in which she draws inferences from the sounds upstairs. It is un-individuated and uniform and all that might become reverie is diminished by premature criticism,like one child crushing another child in the playground by calling it stupid and so inhibiting the free range of play. The putting together of the counters is without elasticity; indeed, it is hard to see how or why it might occur. For all we know, the counters might come together in a void.

A PREGNANCY WITHOUT GESTATION. I am not sure her mother was depressed by the dead child or inhibited. Perhaps she was chronically absent-minded with all her babies, switched off from foetuses during pregnancy and from infants during feeding. But working from within the here-and-now, who can be sure? What I do know intuitively goes as follows. I tune in on her at the beginning of a session and I get nothing back. I feel disconcerted by her silence. I feel myself to be the baby who tunes in on its mother and finds nothing there. It is different from tuning in on an empty room: after all, she is there as a physical entity. And the silence with her is void-like, in a way that the silence in the empty room is not. Being on one’s own in an empty room is not usually a disconcerting experience.
I describe to her what I think is happening and she says that she has the same experience with me. She knows that I am there, but she wonders whether I have vanished. She imagines a non existent window next to my chair through which she thinks I disappear. She sees us as reflecting each other.

There is a relationship with two parts to it and both of us have no choice but to accept one of these two parts. In content, they are: the disconcerted scanning baby (or foetus) who picks up no signal which includes its own presence; and the mother who is most present by the fact of her mental absence. The only one of this pair which feels real to me is the one I can feel: the baby who scans and can pick up no self-including signals. As an object in reverie, the nature of the absent-minded mother remains a matter for conjecture. I find myself continuing to raise conjectures about her: that she is depressed, that she is non existent but non existent in a way that is different from the imaginary drowned man in The Tempest, etc.

She allows me other possibilities. She wonders whether I am thinking about the patient who comes before her. And she takes note of the sounds upstairs, which she associates with me. The mother-therapist who feeds the baby is allowed to have thoughts so long as they exclude any relationship with her, as the baby. The mother-therapist is allowed to think about an older child (the previous patient) and she is allowed to think about her housework (the sounds upstairs).

I ask her what would happen if, by chance, I should come to her home to carry out therapy and we heard noises there - would she allow me to associate them with thoughts inside her. No, she says, she would wonder what I was making of the noises: firmly, the noises would be related to my inner world, not hers. She remains excluded. If she is able to hear the sounds upstairs and to raise conjectures about them it must be in some way that avoids acknowledging the processes by which inner and outer existence interact. It is like a use of words that depends on a denial of the existence of a preverbal ground - the whole realm of existence which in human beings precedes the coming into being of speech. The uses of words dissociated from preverbal experience is hard to describe: robot language perhaps, empty cleverness, the universe Newton’s enemies ascribed to Newton, an example of Coleridge’s fancy. But she is not like this. Her speech is lively; it has timbre. She looks sensitive. She is, in other words, something of a mystery. I find myself wishing that she would have some contact with babies, primarily meaning with some baby part of herself. But she puts this baby into me, it would seem. At this stage, the only contact she had with babies is with the baby in me.

There is no shared object, in the sense that the primitive and civilised man have the aeroplane as a shareable transaction. If there is a shared object, it is one from which she is excluded. She has taken on the role of the dead twin so that the twinship can survive elsewhere. She delegates to my mind the sounds upstairs and the experience of the patient who precedes her: my mind is allowed to talk to itself, to be the twinship.

The dancing falling snow which Coleridge likened to the life of the Seminole is a mode of intuition which allowed him to be in touch with the Seminole. It is like the shadow that the infant stretches out to, an object marked by its abstractness of impact, an intimation or daemon perhaps, which is shared and transacted in reverie between feeder and fed. The nameless silent forms of nature appear to be unfulfilled articulations shared by mother and baby in reverie.

They await to be fulfilled by the future. As the future fills them, they give way to other unfulfilled articulations. Like the mind of the therapist, as sensed by the patient in the depressive position, they are generous, discriminated forms of mental space, mind given over to receptivity, Shakespearean in impersonality, all-giving in openness to experience. Mind finds an image for itself in the ideal Platonic library, acommodating every thought, every possible possibility. In such a place, the psossible and the real are one. intimations of such a place begin in an experience of otherness, a receptive mind quite unlike the void mind, into which we think to fall, as though into a hole in the ground.

DISINTEGRATING MEMBRANE. She thinks that between sessions subtle changes occur in the furnishings of the room. A chair will disappear, or the walls be repainted in a different colour. She is not convinced that walls have been repainted - and she does not smell fresh paint. But she is suspicious; and she entertains the half-belief that I might be playing tricks on her.

An infant in contact with its mother, mind in touch with mind, senses an object in which bits disappear or unaccountably change. I surmise that an infant might rationalise this cryptic experience by thinking that its mother had become pregnant; it might resign itself to the belief that what it loses will go to someone else. Objects do not usually disappear into a void; they probably go into another room. A baby,losing its place on its mother’s lap, may come to the view that the lap has been delegated to its successor. My patient does not see it in this way. At this point, she sees the receiving mind not as a void, but as elusive and disconcerting. Her sensations are of a defective object in nowness, a mind with gaps or bits between the gaps that seem graspable and yet turn out to be elusive. As a general principle, the self (like some obstetrician examining the abdomen of a pregnant woman) feels experience to have a surface, and from the membrane infers, as though by touch alone, otherness as a kind of object.

She reports a dream in which she finds herself in a waiiting room with another young woman. Her companion studies a sheet of paper on which there are childrens’s drawing and joined-up letters - and invites the dreamer to look at this piece of paper. The dreamer fears the young woman; thinks of her as stupid; keeps her at a distance.

The young woman is the part of her that would make sense of events - it allows her to recognize that there might be gaps in a mother’s concentration. She can join up the letters and understand the picture. The pleasure of immersing herself in the meaning of letters and pictures, of trying to make sense of what she feels are the gaps and unexplained transformations in my mind, will open her to mockery. But why? Because she will come to some unwelcome knowledge? - but that is not given in the dream. The dream enacts an invitation and her rejection of it: that is all. She thinks that being ignorant or unskilled is the same as being deficient in intelligence.

In an association to the dream, she says that a friend has repeatedly invited her to the theatre and she has always declined the invitation. She thinks she will be bored by the theatre. Going to the theatre is a little like studying the drawings and writings on the piece of paper. It might oblige her to exercise an unwelcomed ability to symbolise. Learning new forms of symbolisation provides no built-in guarantee that the learning will increase your comfort or be to your advantage. In learning a new language, she might learn what she would prefer not to know. Opening yourself to symbolisation may open you to unendurable communications, never-ending nightmares.

That this had a uterine significance became clearer some time later when she dreamt of looking into a room in my home, in which she saw upturned furniture of good quality and wall-hangings with geometric and wavy markings on them. The upturning of the furniture was mischievous and made it useless - ie., rubbished it. The wall-hangings, though puzzling, were puzzling in a different way - they were representations possibly of the first conjunction of semen and ovum. Evacuatory and procreative functions within the mother were confused. And yet like the beautiful pink stone, with rune-like markings, that Coleridge probably came across on the Quantocks, they intimate the signs of an unknowable deity.

CHESIL. I walk on Chesil beach near to Abbotsbury in Dorset. I pick up pebbles off the beach, contemplate their sea-worn shapes and different colours. Each pebble seems different; many of them are beautiful. It is beyond my power to discover such a variety within myself. I recognize something given from without that is more various than anything I might have imagined. Objects in nature indicate to me by their fullness the limitations of my imagination. They provide a spur to the imagination that the imagination alone is unable to provide. At the same time, the objects in themselves could not provide the spur. There is a sense of something other than the perceiver and the perceived which, when the two meet, may lead to insight.

The agnostic fancy occurs to me that there is a God who carries in mind each of these infinite number of shapes and colours. In an act of eternal presentness, the God continuously meditates over every aspect of every stone, not on this beach or any other known beach, but over every stone that might conceivably exist - not in any human mind but in the inexhaustible mind of this God. I am moved by this thought. I find myself relating it to the notion that man, proud in his ability to speak and write, may fail to see other networks of communication between creatures and things that do not need human symbolisms. An imaginary entity, God, communes with every detail in an infinite universe. In turn, every particularity communes with God. Only the arrogant belief that I have every possible mode of symbolism available to me allows me to neglect this possibility. I may find spiders obnoxious. But spiders may be holy creatures, in communion with a deity whom I do not know and with a depth to their communion that I do not understand.

This line of thought has no basis in the commonsense perception of the world. It does have a basis in my experience. In order to recall the experience I must first re-find what is so easily lost: the sense of moving through a tunnel of intense anxiety towards a glimmer of light - the experience of being a patient in psychoanalysis. I recall how, when I was a patient in psychoanalysis, I reached a point (relatable to some shift in my awareness of the analyst) where it was important to communicate everything. It became urgent to be able to offer up every fragment of experience, however slight or shameful. The urgency depended on other than a wish to put the record straight, although this played some part; it depended on other than the fear that one of us might die soon. It depended on a changed perception of the object. The analyst had not changed: his ways of working, his manner of thinking, his routines, were (I think) the same. But my sense of his inwardness had changed. My perception had changed because of the analytic work carried out in relation to my internal objects. The analysis had somewhat freed the objects from the slanders I had imposed on them - and I was able to experience them as quite different beings.

At first, I had thought the objects (insofar as I could recognize them) were pliant to my manipulations and attacks. I then saw them as having the power to answer back,even awesomely. Eventually, and quite differently, I came to think that they allowed me privileged access to their inwardness and to the nature of their thought. I had come to the belief that the other mind that I was with was not merely an extension of mine and a repository for slander. It could offer me a better space for thought than the one I presently could find in myself - better because it administered thoughts with a greater sense of justice and discrimination than I could offer to the thoughts in myself. The qualities it exercised were parental. And because the qualities were different, the terrain seemed different. Ways of thinking create different kinds of mental space. Generous thinking nurtures generous spaces. I sensed in the other mind a capacity, that could not be deterred, to relate all my thoughts to some evolving picture of the patient as a being with a capacity to develop. Twenty years after the analysis had ended - powerful experiences can take a long time to become available to thought - I found myself on Chesil beach. The sight of the pebbles made me wish for a centralised consciousness in which the pebbles had always had a place and a being. I wanted the natural world to have the kind of space in consciousness that I had been allowed to enjoy in the immediacy of an analysis long past.

TRUTH AND SPACE. Justice and truth, oddly enough, could be felt in the psychoanalytic transaction as spatial, as architectural presences, as manifestations of an environment in which I wanted to live. (In dreams justice and truth actually can become desirable rooms or covered walks or gardens.) The key to this experience was an intensified form of receptivity - of being listened to - which I had not come across outside a psychoanalytic context. The receptivity impelled growth; it encouraged an unwelcome modesty; it roused one either to attack it or to try and uncover the truth. The nature of this space, when materialized in territorial terms becomes the source of conflict over lebensraum. Dreams in which sibling murders siblings tend to be dreams where there is little space in which to move and breathe.

It was not the interpretations or insight that I acquired in analysis that made structurally the greatest difference. The experience of being attended to became a model for attending. Being listened to encouraged me to listen to others. Once when I felt under the weather and found myself listened desultorily, the mother who was with me remained listless. She was unable to explore her thoughts as well as I imagined she might have done.
Plotinus’s belief in contemplation as a kind of making applied in this case, and it applies to any developing relationship between minds. Relationships depend in the first instance on the partners being receptive to each other. Where the modern mind has difficulty in seeing contemplation as a general principle is in relating it to the belief in biology as an impersonal process. We practise a split between the mental and biological understanding of nature, though uneasily concede that there might be an overlap between them.

We think to take on a regenerated life through having our thoughts and feelings acknowledged in the mind of another, a mind more generous than ours. In the context of this mind, the whole world takes on kinship. We find ourselves entertaining the belief that nothing is inimical to us. Spiders may be presumed to commune continuously with God - and who is to say that their relationship is not deeper and more interesting than ours might be? Spiders as siblings (the imaginary siblings of our analysis), are as much offspring of the deity as ourselves. What sense does it make to recoil from them or to wish to kill them? Indeed how far am I responsible for their well being? In the depressive position we discover the world to be sacred and many of our inclinations to be profanities. Our good objects are like the moonlight that seems to unify the landscape and yet to reveal each valued detail.

The depressive imaginative experience is lodged in nowness - a nowness of such intensity that it cannot be registered in any system of notation, such as memory. Psychoanalytic experience does not allow for historical verification. The therapist cannot be both ontologist and historian. As Coleridge pointed out, historical allusions deflect us from realising the nature of an object’s fullness of being in the present moment: confusions between ‘now ‘ and ‘then ‘ lead to errors in naming. Words and objects resonate with associations that arise from other spaces and times than the here-and-now. These associations, although interesting, are of little value. Truth, depth of feeling, are to be discovered in nowness - and in the recognition that nowness gradually unfolds meanings that are not to be disclosed to the inattentive: the nameless, silent forms of nature. Within the psychoanalytic setting, we are in no position to enter into historical research. All that is, is here-and-now. All that exists outside the room, and outside the present moment, has fallen away. All residues of the there-and-then have become, in the exchange of patient and therapist, symbolisations - or failures in symbolisation.

The emergence of truth in psychoanalysis is not related to some externalised or communal means of verification. It is related to a change in our understanding of the structure of our objects, and in the different types of symbols we use to describe the changing structures. The changes often have a spatial quality about them. Truth and lying have spatial correlates in how we inwardly conceive of our mother’s body - lying and bodily confusions usually go together. Whether we tell the truth or lie is determined by the kind of places we mentally inhabit. My experience of my analyst’s thought was related to my recognizing the nature and quality of the space in which he, as the agent for my objects, thought. The space was parental and enabling and it allowed for meaning. It was a space in which thoughts could breathe.

The idea is not new. The gospels of Matthew and Luke remind us that in God’s mind ‘the very hairs of your head are all numbered. ‘ Descartes implies a similar idea when he indicates a deity who ‘conserves ‘ us moment by moment. The act of continuously conserving the world entails that the deity recreates the universe in every detail and at every moment. The Primary Imagination, Coleridge thought, reflects ‘...the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. ‘ In order for imagination to be born in us, we must give up the belief in ourselves as a centralised consciousness and come to the belief that the more interesting consciousness exists outside us, arousing wonder. There is some insurmountable gap between it and us - the nature of its imaginative range is beyond our knowledge.

A ladder stretches up to heaven, angels ascend and descend, God speaks to Jacob. A certain dimensionality - disclosed from within, outside space, outside time - transforms the sleeper’s perception of the landscape in which he had fallen asleep. ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. ‘ If the Lord is in this place, then the Lord appears to have the power to recreate our perception of this place. The moment becomes one in which anything and everything happens.
Suddenly, I am aware that everything is happening NOW: the present moment contains everything. The eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM involves the creation of everything - the disagreeable as well as the agreeable. At this moment, some fellow mortal is suffering pains beyond my powers of understanding. But if mind is able to approach the meaning of this pain, then it is also, and concurrently, able to approach conditions of well being. Plotinus thought that if the self were overwhelmed by pain it would still be able to hold onto the belief in well-being as an unconscious process. Perhaps the theory of the unconscious begins to take on depth in the need to assert a true and unworldly belief that flies in the face of commonsense observation: that the world is basically good. Pain and despondency, although true as facts, are rendered trivial by the reality of an unconscious relationship.

Ion collapses when he thinks his objects have left him. Ion collapses, not his objects; there is no evidence that his objects ever collapse. The assumption that they have left him, even at times of distress, is doubtful. Our objects keep the faith in happiness as well as grief. If we attempt to blot out pain or pleasure by telling lies in the nowness, our objects will be obliged to carry the sensations we think to have obliterated. If the truth dies in us, it does not die in our objects. It is we who are lost to our objects.

TRANSFORMING ACCIDENT INTO NECESSITY. Recognising good objects has the power of transforming accident into necessity. We can feel on the pulse the process of transformation at the time when children are born. Before the birth of a firstborn, we find it almost impossible to conceive of its future. The necessity of its existence exists in the imagination only, and then only fitfully. Within a few hours of its birth, the space in our mind, our inner space, appears to have changed. We accept the new family structure as inevitable. A universe without this child becomes conceivable only as a tragic universe in which something essential has been wrenched out. Memories of life before the child was born become as dim as, previously, had been our thoughts about a post natal future.

In the life of the mind, ‘what has been’ has the authority of transforming seeming accident into necessity. The arbitrary coming together of a parental couple retrospectively appears predestined. The lovers look into each others’ eyes and believe that their love had long been written in the stars. The presence of a newborn gives the past an inevitability that no one had realised while the past had been present. In terms of the future, the next moment, every possibility, is contingent. The world is complacent in its completeness: all future births are thought to be illegitimate. After the birth, the world settles into a new complacency. The baby is accepted as a fact in the world: it might always have been there. The concept of bastardy, the projection of unwelcome into younger siblings, has nothing to do with actual births. Similarily, the notion of contingency, of a precarious or doubtful condition of being, is something we project into our inheritors.

Structurally truth and imagination are born in nowness - in our acknowledging the birth of the nowness baby. Our concern with the past has been a defence against our being involved with the future. We begin to aspire to a necessity in the future. Our successors take on the same importance in our minds as formerly our parents had assumed. The future gives focus to the past. Your birth tomorrow will transform the lives of ancestors long dead. The angels ascending and descending the ladder are neither a symbol of a tribal past nor a historical emblem; they are a portent which will make sense of what has been.

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