By Ananya S Guha
There is a lot in human nature to complain. In school we read a poem : “ The Plaint Of The Camel“, But that was an imaginary “ complaint“ it was facetious as well. In some way I think the alter ego of humans are animals. Humans write stories about them, compose poetry right from Enid Blyton`s mythic rabbits and animals, to the Orwellian myth of animals viewing men and women not only warily but with insouciance and a kind of contemptuous nonchalance. Then there are the rollicking ` animal ` stories of Gerard Durell. Again we have in the novels of William Golding a mythic vision of man, the thralldom he has created for himself, the warring in him between flesh and body – in fact the shearing away of ` innocence. And, what is its polarity, experience of course in the terms of William Blake. Aldous Huxley once said caustically that if William Wordsworth lived in the Tropics, he would not have established his credo of Pantheism in a scale of euphoria. But cynics will always say something, the need to create a world which is fabulous as opposed to the ` real ` is an upsurge of creativity and radical thinking. The dream world and the real world become as tenuous as can be, the blurring insignificance of what is and what can be! Who cares? The creative impulse is motivated by a kind of subversion and even iconoclasm.
Carl Jung`s “ Memories, Dreams And Reflections“ is a brilliant exposition on the myth of dreams, but to him it was real, so real that he began to interpret every single dream of his- from dark nebulous to that of light, a fugitive resplendence. Is the the lit darkness which William Golding spoke of with coherence, the kind of coherence which made to see life not in wholes, but in complex shades of light and darkness.
Yet what is creativity? Jung was not writing fiction or poetry, but in trying to grapple with his undying dreams, he was trying to make the fleeting and the evanescence= permanent. Temporally and spatially creative artists transcend a blurring world of black and white. Freud`s interpretation of the child as artist with an inherent wish fulfillment gave to psychology a new dawn of truth. Where does the the line end and begin- for example when a child becomes an adult what happens to the child-likeness and when the superannuated faces death is there a regressive childhood?
Against this creative writing, painting, performing, the thespian`s world, philosophy we still dream of a superman. Nietzche did it, but I am not sure he was very confident as he was enslaved into abject decrepitude.
So the moral is: give free fictive imagination to your dreams. They will sustain you one day, and the day after, and the day after…Human civilization draws all its sustenance from them. And the Hegelian forces of antithesis will find themselves in the eternity of conflagration. Remember Hitler? The dreams of a megalomaniac and the dreams of the ordinary, aspiring to transform dreams into the extraordinary are substantively and qualitatively different. Some dreamers are myth makers, some are writers, some painters and some are social workers, troubled by a torn humanity. Dreamers question, the megalomaniac thinks he has all the answers, then he demolishes what he thinks are untruths. The other builds edifices, the megalomaniac destroys them. Often the word power is wrongly understood. Mother Teresa possessed indomitable power, the fount of which was inspired love. The power used by people who matter, is a power used to destroy not create. The sub continent should be euphoric that two dreamers were awarded the Nobel Prize for transforming dreams into veritable reality.
Freud`s essay on the artist, the child and the day dreamer makes valid generalizations on the day dreamer and the incipient artist. All social changers are dreamers, but the the rabid iconoclast is the destructive force. Dreams are born out of ruminations and are inherently prescient.