It was not all plain sailing; with such an outgoing character, arguments were always springing up. I had made some remark in praise of Tom Jefferies, whereupon Paula said, cuttingly, ‘You should stay away from that creep.’
When I protested that Tom was a courageous and altruistic man, Paula gave this reply.
‘Not at all. He’s a creep. Of course he loves his plan. He wants us all to conform to it. He wants us all to be better people. That’s because he doesn’t like us much. Maybe he’s scared of us – no, not of you, Cang Hai, but you’re another sexless little thing, aren’t you?’
‘I’m certainly not sexless. Nor is Tom.’
‘But you don’t have sex, do you?’ She laughed. ‘You need awakening. Come to bed with me and I’ll show you what you’re missing.’
Although I did not take up her offer, it was from lack of courage rather than from virtue. I saw why her two current men lusted for her.
I saw how her interest, as expressed in her plays, was in people rather than theories of behaviour. She liked chaos. It answered a dangerous element in her make-up.
At the time of which I am speaking, Paula Gallin was working on Mine? Theirs? She spent her days cutting, editing, morphing, swearing. I was witness to her outbreaks of anger against her male friends, whom she found necessary even as they broke her concentration. Creativity was by now better understood and better respected, but I went to the Ambient stand to look at the words of an old savant, Doctor Storr, whose work on the dynamics of creation remained of value.
Doctor Storr says that a child who has a parent who ill treats him but on whom he is nevertheless dependent will regularly deny the ‘bad’ aspects of the parent and repress his own hatred, perhaps by developing some symptom such as nail-biting or hair-pulling. These activities show the displacement of repressed aggression and its turning against the self.
‘It seems likely, however,’ the doctor continues, ‘that there is another way of dealing with incompatibles and opposites within the mind, provided one is sufficiently robust to stand the tension; and this is the way adopted by creative people. One characteristic of creative people is just this ability to tolerate dissonance. They see problems that others do not see; and do not attempt to deny their existence. Ultimately the problem may be solved, and a new whole made out of what was previously incompatible, but it is the creative person’s tolerance of the discomfort of dissonance that makes the new solution possible.
‘The process is easy to see in the case of scientific discovery. Something very similar may be going on in the case of the production of works of art. I have discussed the quest for identity characteristic of at least some creative artists, and suggested that, if this is a particular need for such people, as it seems to be, it is connected with an attempt to reconcile incompatibles or opposites in the mind. This is, of course, intimately connected with the problem of identity; for identity, or rather the sense of one’s own identity, is a sense of unity, consistency and wholeness.
‘One cannot have a sense of one’s continuous being if one is always conscious of two or more souls warring within one breast. In the case of Tolstoy, the ascetic and the sensualist were never reconciled; but one aspect of his creative existence was certainly an attempt to bring this about.’
I was surprised. For the first time I saw that the doctor’s statement, true as far as it went, did not encompass the contrasts and conflicts built into the mind by blind evolutionary development – the phylogenetic, as opposed to the ontogenetic, brain.
To employ the doctor’s rather poetic phraseology, there would always be the two souls warring within one breast; this was what gave to Homo sapiens our restless drive to develop further; it was part of the general creativity we were attempting to harness. We were now developing into a phylogenetic-conscious society, accepting and coming to terms with our inbuilt contradictions, revealing the ‘natural’ human.
Paula’s drama on which she was working, Mine? Theirs?, was precisely about the interplay between the two kinds of conflict, the ancient generic and the personal.