Milner wrote two articles focused on Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. According to Dragstedt, Blake's poetry stimulated her interest in the relationship between mysticism and madness as well as the origins of joyfulness in living. His Book of Job served as a template for her explorations of blocks in creativity in her patients and herself (Dragstedt 1998). In her article, "The Sense in Nonsense (Freud and Blake's Job)" (Milner 1956b/1987b), Milner prefaces the discussion by commenting that Blake's illustrations deal with the sorts of issues she encountered when studying schools and their educational systems. She also refers to Blake's illustrations in her work with her patient Susan in The Hands of the Living God and other writings. In discussing her perspective on Blake's illustrations, it is helpful to sort out the layers of interpretation involved: the plot of the biblical story of Job, Blake's spin on this ancient Hebrew tale, and Milner's own perspective on Blake's Job.
22 Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health
Like most of the stories in the Hebrew Bible, the biblical story of Job underwent several revisions before it became canonized in its present form. An early version, for example, did not contain an account of God's restoration of prosperity to Job. The canonized version was written sometime after the Israelites returned from exile in Babylon in 537 B.C.E. and prior to the intertestamental period. The story is generally thought to be a critique of traditional wisdom literature, such as Proverbs and Song of Solomon, that give prescriptions for God's granting of blessings of prosperity and numerous offspring. Those familiar with the story will know that it begins in a bet: Satan cajoles God into allowing Satan to destroy Job's children, health, and prosperity in the hope that Job will lose his faith and curse God. Job, however, does not curse God, only his own life, and instead demands a hearing before his creator. In the biblical account, Satan disappears from the story after bringing ruin upon Job. Job's friends turn against him, accusing Job from the whirlwind. Job realizes his own ignorance and insignificance and takes back his plea for his "day in court." God, in turn, restores Job's fortune and children to him as well as his good name.
As stated, while the book of Job was most likely meant to dissuade the Israelites from the notion that they were the proximate cause of any and every evil that befell them, it has been one of the most controversial biblical texts regarding explanations of theodicy. Why would a good and all-powerful God let Job suffer so? Blake was not satisfied with the view that Job's disasters were brought on by a bet in order to test Job's fidelity, so he reworked the story so that Satan became an "internal Accuser," and Job's sufferings a "disease of his soul." This was not the only aspect of the story that Blake reinterpreted, however. Instead of the story being about Job's quite correct persistence in his innocence, Blake puts Job in error. While Blake's Job has not broken any law, his faith is misplaced. He believes in the letter of the law (symbolized by open law books), but not in its spirit (symbolized by musical instruments). His sin is his secret pride. For Blake, Job must recognize and humble his secret pride before his humanity can be awakened. In addition to altering the plot by finding fault with Job instead of God, Blake's eighteenth-century rendition of the Job story is "Christianized." For Blake, Christ, or Divine Imagination, embodies the spirit of the law. Blake's typological interpretation of Job bears a striking resemblance to the New Testament writer Paul's understanding of Jesus' teaching and mission: we are not made righteous by works of the law, but by faith.
Milner spent considerable time studying Blake's illustrations (she mentions twelve years) and even made her own rough copies of several of the pictures in order to better understand their "feeling" dimensions (Milner 1956a/1987). In "Psychoanalysis and Art" (1956a/1987b), she writes that she was not able to fully face the significance of the terror of the "Christ figure" as shown by Job's friends (in Blake's illustrations this is God, depicted in glory up above when Job's friends are accusing him of sin) prior to writing the article. Milner states: "Now I can link it with the fears roused in the logical argumentative mind by the impact of the creative depths, and see that the anxiety is not something to be retreated
Marion Milner on Mysticism and Creativity 23
from, but that it is inherent in the creative process itself (Milner 1956a/1987b, p. 212). Milner felt that Blake's Job is the story of what goes on in all of us when we have become sterile and doubt our creative capacities: in essence, it is about the emergence of Imagination. In her psychological interpretation of Blake's illustrations, Milner largely agrees with Blake on two central points: 1) Job, not God, is in error, and 2) Christ is the redemptive answer to Job's troubles. On a biographical note, it is important to know that while Milner distrusted organized religion, she was very attracted to the teachings of Jesus in the gospels. In her book An Experiment in Leisure, for example, Milner conjectures that perhaps the gospel stories are concerned not with what one ought to do, but with practical rules for creative thinking, a "handbook for the process of perceiving the facts of one's experience" (Field 1937, p. 35).
Milner finds Job to be at fault in three ways: 1) he does not recognize his own internal rage and destructiveness, 2) he does not recognize unconscious processes (i.e., he does not look inward), and 3) he has not accepted "femaleness" within himself. Regarding this last point, Milner believed Blake wished to point out that Job's "one-sidedly male outlook" is mistaken and that we all need a balance of maleness and femaleness. As Milner states, "Thus Job is shown not only as obeying the letter of the law and thinking that is all there is, but also as a successful patriarch, a man of power ..." (Milner 1956a/1987b, p. 201). While Blake's "protofeminism" is a point of debate among literary critics, true to the biblical account in the illustrations he does have God restoring Job with daughters instead of sons (and even giving them a share of the inheritance). According to Milner, because Job believes only in the conscious life, he consistently denies there could be any destructiveness in himself. Not surprisingly for her, the turning point of the story is Job's recognition that the cause of his troubles lies within rather than without: his own internal "Father-God" (which he constructs in his image) contains destructiveness. It is only when he begins to look inward that the omnipotence of the conscious intellect (i.e., Satan) can be cast out and Job begins to recognize his own denied rage. As Milner puts it, when the violence of his inner whirlwind is no longer denied, he can channel its energy for creative ends.
We now are at a point to discuss how Milner describes the relationship between creativity and transcendence in Blake's illustrations. Similar to Blake, in Milner's view, Jesus signifies Imagination. In "Psychoanalysis and Art" (1956a/1987b), Milner explains that Blake brings the figure of Christ into the Job story because he believes the teachings of Christ have something to do with the creative process: in poetic terms, Christ was really talking about creative contact with the unsplit depth mind (Milner 1956a/1987b). Job's "sin" has cut him off from both Jesus and his own creative power. It is significant for Milner that the appearance of Jesus occurs only after Job begins to discover the existence of unconscious processes (Plate 12 of Blake's illustrations). Plate 14 of Blake's illustrations, which has been titled both "Morning Stars" and "Job's Senses are Opened," represents a kind of "transfiguration" in Milner's view. In the picture we see God in the middle, in cruciform position, with the sun, stars, and angelic beings above; Job, his wife and
24 Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health
friends are below. To God's right and left are the Greek moon-goddess Selene and sun-god Helios, representing day and night. Sequentially, this illustration is placed after God has appeared to Job in a whirlwind, and depicts Job 38:4-7, God's account of creation. Milner explains: "When anyone discovers how to stop seeing the world with the narrow focused attention of expedience, stops interfering and trying to use it for his own purposes, then says Blake, something like a miracle can happen, the whole world can become transfigured" (Milner 1956b/1987, p. 178). She proceeds to discuss "Morning Stars" as depicting a particular kind of imaginative concentration - a "widespread contemplative attention." This state, she observes, is sometimes spoken of in Freudian language as "cosmic bliss." Milner interprets Blake as conveying the notion that "perception of the external world itself is a creative act, an act of imagination..." (Milner 1956Ы1987, p. 179). She adds that this state is surely known at moments to all of us in childhood but is often lost in adulthood because of our purpose-driven lives.
In sum, it seems Milner believes the teachings of Jesus have the power to open one to creativity in a way that adherence to a prescribed morality does not. Creative capacity, in turn, is made possible by the recognition of one's unconscious processes. The capacity to create may also be about something more, since Milner states that moments of "cosmic bliss" are known by everyone at some time during childhood. Jesus represents Imagination, because Imagination allows one to be aware of the world in a different way, one which could be described as transcendent or mystical. As well, for Milner experiences of creativity come after recognition of one's own destructiveness, or, in theological terms, one's potential to sin. Milner's reading of Job thus infers that transcendent moments are not experienced until one has fully acknowledged one's humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment