ON A SATURDAY evening at an Esalen week end in New York recently, a panel discussion on the human prospect was held. The panel consisted of such insightful and stimulating persons as Joyce Carol Oates, Gregory Bate-son, and William Irwin Thompson. The audience was made up of seven or eight hundred eager individuals, expectantly set for an interesting discussion at the very least. In his opening remarks, the chairman emphasized the theme that “the possibilities of the human being are unlimited.”
But strange to say, there seemed, as the meeting went on, to be no problems to discuss. The vast vacuum filling the room was felt by both the panel and the audience alike. All the exciting issues that the participants on the panel had approached so eagerly had mysteriously vanished. As the discussion limped along to the end of an almost fruitless evening, the common question seemed to be: What had gone wrong?
I propose that the statement, “human possibilities are unlimited” is de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. You can only stand up and sing hallelujah and then go home. Every problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only temporary difficulties that will go away of their own accord when the time comes. Contrary to the chairman’s intention, statements like his actually terrorize the listener: it is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky’s the limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean.
In these notes I shall explore the hypothesis that limits are not only unavoidable in human life, they are also valuable. I shall also discuss the phenomenon that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
To begin with, there is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknown to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When we overwork we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes, a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our physical and emotional environment.
There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting. Each of us was born into a certain family in a certain country at a certain historical moment, all with no choice on our part. If we try to deny these facts—like Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—we blind ourselves to reality and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our family backgrounds or our historical situation, but such transcendence can occur only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with.
Consciousness itself is born out of the awareness of these limits. Human consciousness is the distinguishing feature of our existence; without limitations we would never have developed it. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations. Infants begin to be aware of limits when they experience the ball as different from themselves; mother is a limiting factor for them in that she does not feed them every time they cry for food. Through a multitude of such limiting experiences they learn to develop the capacity to differentiate themselves from others and from objects and to delay gratification. If there had been no limits, there would be no consciousness.
Our discussion so far may seem, at first glance, to be discouraging, but not when we probe more deeply. It is not by accident that the Hebrew myth that marks the beginning of human consciousness, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, is portrayed in the context of a rebellion. Consciousness is born in the struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition. Going beyond the limit set by Yahweh is then punished by the acquiring of other limits which operate inwardly in the human being—anxiety, the feeling of alienation and guilt. But valuable qualities also come out of this experience of rebellion—the sense of personal responsibility and ultimately the possibility, born out of loneliness, of human love. Confronting limits for the human personality actually turns out to be expansive. Limiting and expanding thus go together.
Alfred Adler proposed that civilization arose out of our physical limitations, or what Adler called inferiority. Tooth for tooth and claw for claw, men and women were inferior to the wild animals. In the struggle against these limitations for their survival, human beings evolved their intelligence.
Heraclitus said, “Conflict is both king of all and father of all.” 1 He was referring to the theme I am here stating: conflict presupposes limits, and the struggle with limits is actually the source of creative productions. The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of a river, without which the water would be dispersed on the earth and there would be no river—that is, the river is constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth.
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. Again listen to Heraclitus: unwise people “do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.” 2 In a discussion of how he composed his music, Duke Ellington explained that since his trumpet player could reach certain notes beautifully but not other notes, and the same with his trombonist, he had to write his music within those limits. “It’s good to have limits,” he remarked.
True, in our age there is occurring a new valuation of spontaneity and a strong reaction against rigidity. This goes along with a rediscovery of the values of the childlike capacity to play. In modern art, as we all know, there has evolved a new interest in children’s painting as well as in peasant and primitive art, and these kinds of spontaneity often are used as models for adult art work. This is especially true in psychotherapy. The great majority of patients experience themselves as stifled and inhibited by the excessive and rigid limits insisted on by their parents. One of their reasons for coming for therapy in the first place is this conviction that all of this needs to be thrown overboard. Even if it is simplistic, this urge toward spontaneity obviously should be valued by the therapist. People must recover the “lost” aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions, if they are to become integrated in any effective sense.
But we must not forget that these stages in therapy, like children’s art, are interim stages. Children’s art is characterized by an unfinished quality. Despite the apparent similarity with nonobjective art, it still lacks the tension necessary for authentic mature art. It is a promise but not yet an achievement. Sooner or later the growing person’s art must relate itself to the dialectic tension that comes out of confronting limits and is present in all forms of mature art. Michelangelo’s writhing slaves; Van Gogh’s fiercely twisting cypress trees; Cézanne’s lovely yellow-green landscapes of southern France, reminding us of the freshness of eternal spring—these works have that spontaneity, but they also have the mature quality that comes from the absorption of tension. This makes them much more than “interesting”; it makes them great. The controlled and transcended tension present in the work of art is the result of the artists’ successful struggle with and against limits.
The significance of limits in art is seen most clearly when we consider the question of form. Form provides the essential boundaries and structure for the creative act. It is no accident that the art critic Clive Bell, in his books about Cézanne, cites “significant form” as the key to understanding the great painter’s work.
Let us say I draw a rabbit on a blackboard. You say, “There’s a rabbit.” In reality there is nothing at all on the blackboard except the simple line I have made: no protrusion, nothing three dimensional, no indentation. It is the same blackboard as it was, and there can be no rabbit “on” it. You see only my chalk line, which may be infinitesimally narrow. This line limits the content. It says what space is within the picture and what is outside—it is a pure limiting to that particular form. The rabbit appears because you have accepted my communication that this space within the line is that which I wish to demarcate.
There is in this limiting a nonmaterial character, a spiritual character if you will, that is necessary in all creativity. Hence, form and, similarly, design, plan, and pattern all refer to a nonmaterial meaning present in the limits.
Our discussion of form demonstrates something else—that the object you see is a product both of your subjectivity and external reality. The form is born out of a dialectical relation between my brain (which is subjective, in me) and the object that I see external to me (which is objective). As Immanuel Kant insisted, we not only know the world, but the world at the same time conforms to our ways of knowing. Incidentally, note the word conform— the world forms itself “with,” it takes on our forms.
The trouble begins whenever anyone dogmatically sets himself or herself up to defend either extreme. On the one hand, when an individual insists on his or her own subjectivity and follows exclusively his or her own imagination, we have a person whose flights of fancy may be interesting but who never really relates to the objective world. When, on the other hand, an individual insists that there is nothing “there” except empirical reality, we have a technologically minded person who would impoverish and oversimplify his or her and our lives. Our perception is determined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside world.
Speaking of poetry, Coleridge distinguished between two kinds of form. One is external to the poet—the mechanical form, let us say, of the sonnet. This consists of an arbitrary agreement that the sonnet will consist of fourteen lines in a certain pattern. The other kind of form is organic. This is inner form. It comes from the poet, and consists of the passion he or she puts into the poem. The organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through the ages revealing new meaning to each generation. Centuries later we may find meaning in it that even the author did not know was there.
When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don’t have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express. How much meaning Shakespeare could put into his plays because they were written in blank verse rather than prose, or his sonnets because they were fourteen lines!
In our day the concept of form is often attacked because of its relation to “formality” and “formalism,” both of which—so we are told—are to be avoided like the plague. I agree that in transitional times like our own, when honesty of style is difficult to come by, formalism and formality should be required to demonstrate their authenticity. But in the attack on these often bastardized kinds of formalism, it is not form itself that is being accused, but special kinds of form—generally the conformist, dead kinds, which actually do lack an inner, organic vitality.
We should remember, moreover, that all spontaneity carries with it its own form. Anything expressed in language, for example, carries the forms given to it by that language. How different a poem originally written in English sounds when translated into the exquisite music of the French language or into the profound and powerful sentiments of the German language! Another example is the rebellion in the name of spontaneity against picture frames, as shown in those paintings that reach out over their frames, dramatically breaking the latter’s too limiting boundaries. This act borrows its spontaneous power from the assumption of a frame to start with.
The juxtaposition of spontaneity and form are, of course, present all through human history. It is the ancient but ever-modern struggle of the Dionysian versus the Apollonian. In transitional periods this dichotomy comes completely out in the open since old forms do have to be transcended. I can, therefore, understand the rebellion in our day against form and limits as expressed in the cry “We have unlimited potentialities.” But when these movements try to throw form or limits out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity would vanish with it.
Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to “dream dreams and see visions,” to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s chances that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead.
In creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form. When these endeavors are successful, it is because imagination infuses form with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose? Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthinkable? Dare to conceive of, and move among, new visions?
At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared world? Will we lose the boundaries that enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality? This, again, is the problem of form or, stated differently, the awareness of limits.
Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis. Hence some psychotics walk close to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to the edges, always preserving their localization in the external environment. Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain whatever outward localization is available.
As director of a large mental hospital in Germany which received many brain-injured soldiers during the war, Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these patients suffered radical limitation of their capacities for imagination. He observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the patient became panicky. He could not orient himself to the new arrangement, could not imagine a new “form” that would bring order out of the chaos. The patient was then thrown into what Goldstein called the “catastrophic situation.” Or when asked to write his name on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person would write the name in some corner close to the boundaries. He could not tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—what I call, in this context, imagination—were severely curtailed. He felt powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs.
Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their world radically truncated. Any ‘limitless” existence was experienced by them as being highly dangerous.
Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The boundaries of our world shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order.
As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. They are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore the future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncracies. For we will be better prepared for the future if we can listen seriously to them.
There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy—that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of proportion to what actually has happened.
I may have worked at my desk morning after morning trying to find a way to express some important idea. When my “insight” suddenly breaks through—which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders, a sense of joy on a deeper level that continues without any relation whatever to the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief. What is the source of this curious pleasure?
I propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. If only for that moment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the universe. The sense of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The paradox is that at that moment we also experience more vividly our own limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche writes about—the love of one’s fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasy!