From this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520038452
Actually, I had already written down a note (before I read this book) exactly to the effect that for an artist such as Marechera, one's "art" becomes "the other" which restores the missing parts of one's self to the sense of the whole.
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"Good art teaching (and creativity itself) is dependent on a greater than usual tolerance of anxiety because of the need to work through one's total personality. This requires a more than average strength of the ego. It is wrongly thought that creative people thrive on neurotic illness. This is not so. The philistine can ignore his illness by living with only a part of his personality and can keep his illness from showing. The creative person faces his illness and its attending anxieties so that they noisily dominate his behaviour. But he is not more neurotic for this reason; rather the reverse is true. If satisfactory human relationships are proof of mental health, as is universally accepted, then the creative mind is healthy through establishing at least one good object relationship: with his own work acting as an independent being. He is able to accept what Adrian Stokes has called the "otherness" of the work of art. This acceptance requires the entire apparatus of projection, integration, and introjection, which is part of any good relationship." p 108--emphasis mine.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520038452
Actually, I had already written down a note (before I read this book) exactly to the effect that for an artist such as Marechera, one's "art" becomes "the other" which restores the missing parts of one's self to the sense of the whole.
-----
"Good art teaching (and creativity itself) is dependent on a greater than usual tolerance of anxiety because of the need to work through one's total personality. This requires a more than average strength of the ego. It is wrongly thought that creative people thrive on neurotic illness. This is not so. The philistine can ignore his illness by living with only a part of his personality and can keep his illness from showing. The creative person faces his illness and its attending anxieties so that they noisily dominate his behaviour. But he is not more neurotic for this reason; rather the reverse is true. If satisfactory human relationships are proof of mental health, as is universally accepted, then the creative mind is healthy through establishing at least one good object relationship: with his own work acting as an independent being. He is able to accept what Adrian Stokes has called the "otherness" of the work of art. This acceptance requires the entire apparatus of projection, integration, and introjection, which is part of any good relationship." p 108--emphasis mine.
1 comment:
Very interesting? I wonder why exactly Marechera was interested in Plath and the confessional school of poetry. It is taken as read that he absorbed Plath into his work, as if he was adolescently soaking up influence. I doubt this. Great insights.
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