Hellerstein, Deborah

Institute for Clinical Social Work

THE IMPACT OF INTERNAL DIALOGUES ON THE ARTIST’S CREATIVE PROCESS

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Institute for Clinical Social Work in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

By DEBORAH HELLERSTEIN

Chicago, Illinois September, 2008

ABSTRACT

Guided by object relations and relational theory this study explores the phenomenon of the use of internal dialogues during the creative process. Twenty-five artists were interviewed who used a variety of different media (e.g. painters, writers, filmmakers, photographers). The study used an interpretive interactionist perspective. This entailed capturing through thick description the lived experience of the artists and using the artists’ self-definitions of what constituted an internal dialogue. The responses of the artists covered a surprising range of internal experiences that they considered dialogic.

For example, artists described carrying on internal dialogues with music, movement, their objects of art, their muse and parts of themselves. Four different types of findings were documented. These were: (a) the artists who experienced their inner dialogue as being in conversation with someone or something; (b) the artists who experienced their inner dialogue as being with aspects of themselves; (c) the external conditions that affected the artists’ access to their inner dialogues; and (d) the internal dialogue that emerged, for several of the artists, after their conversations with me and how this internal dialogue had an impact on their creative process. This study supports the thesis “that everything exists in a relational matrix,” even in what appears to be the private enterprise of one’s inner mind.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I speak from my heart.

A number of people helped me produce this paper. Some of them read and commented on the text, others recommended books for me to read or artists for me to interview. Many engaged in a healthy dialogue with me about the ideas I was working on. Others encouraged and rewarded me for the “thrifting” I engaged in when I wanted to avoid working on the dissertation.

I would like to thank: Ellen Dokton, Seth Hellerstein, Kate O’Neill, Lynn Borenstein, Dan Gustin, Nancy Deal, Dr. Sandy Weissblatt, Irwin Hoffman, E.H., and of course Starry Pezda.

I would not be writing an acknowledgment to a finished dissertation if it wasn’t for Cynthia Stone and Marcia Adler who both helped me get through a very difficult time earlier in my education. In addition, they gave me their time and intellectual insights by serving on my dissertation committee.

This dissertation would never have been completed without the guidance and persistent patience of my committee chair Thayer Lindner. I cannot describe how important the external dialogue with him was to this project. He engaged with me and encouraged me despite my bickering and moodiness, my feelings of being overwhelmed, my avoidance of working, my veering off onto obscure unrelated topics and my crankiness about tea. He can now make a perfect cup of hot ginger tea.

My typists David Childs and Kateri Morton really saved me and offered me their insightful impressions concerning this project.

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The artists, who besides being intellectually and creatively inspiring, were great fun to talk with. I plan on keeping in touch with them and their careers.

My mother died before I was finished. Her absence was painfully striking, particularly during the period when I was writing. She was a writer and throughout my life I was accustomed to asking her for editorial advice. I wish she had lived to see me complete my Ph.D. My father was worried that I wouldn’t finish my dissertation before I was eligible for Medicare (I did it!), and in the midst of his own health problems he has supported me and remained interested in this project.

DH

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................. 1 II. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM........................................................... 6 Statement of Purpose ............................................................................................. 6 Significance of the Study to Social Work.............................................................. 6 Statement of the Problem to be Studied and Specific Objectives to Be Achieved........................................................................................................... 8 Theoretical and Conceptual Framework of the Study ........................................... 8 Literature Review .................................................................................................. 9 Theoretical and Operational Definitions of Major Concepts................................. 9 Assumptions......................................................................................................... 10 III. LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................................. 11 Overview of Psychoanalytic Theories ................................................................. 12 Freud ........................................................................................................ 12 Jung.......................................................................................................... 14 Rank and Kris .......................................................................................... 16 Object Relations....................................................................................... 17 Klein............................................................................................. 17 Segal............................................................................................. 20 Milner........................................................................................... 21 Ehrenzweig .................................................................................. 22 Summary of Kleinian Theory ...................................................... 22 Winnicott ..................................................................................... 23 Rose ............................................................................................. 30 Fauteaux....................................................................................... 31 Kohut ........................................................................................... 31

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TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued

Relational Theory .................................................................................... 35 Neutrality ..................................................................................... 35 Self ............................................................................................... 37 Two-person Psychology .............................................................. 40 Internal Relations......................................................................... 41 Nondrive Unconscious Structures ............................................... 42 Framing the Internal Dialogue through Different Perspectives........................... 43 Literary and Cultural Criticism................................................................ 44 Philosophy and Religion.......................................................................... 46 Anthropology and Religion ..................................................................... 49 Developmental Psychology ..................................................................... 50 Piaget ........................................................................................... 51 Goffman ....................................................................................... 52 Vygotsky...................................................................................... 52 Taylor........................................................................................... 53 Positive Views of Imaginary Dialogue.................................................... 54 Singer ........................................................................................... 54 Schaefer ....................................................................................... 55 Goffman ....................................................................................... 56 Walton.......................................................................................... 56 Watkins ........................................................................................ 57 Mead ............................................................................................ 58 Hermans and Gregg ..................................................................... 58 Synthesis................................................................................................. 59 The Myth of the Artist ......................................................................................... 61 IV. RESEARCH STRATEGY ........................................................................................ 71 Type of Study and Design ................................................................................... 71 Scope of Study ..................................................................................................... 71 Setting .................................................................................................................. 71 Population and Sampling ..................................................................................... 72 Sources and Nature of Data ................................................................................. 73 Data Collection Methods and Instruments........................................................... 74 Data Analysis Procedure...................................................................................... 75 Protection of Human Subjects ............................................................................. 84 Limitations of the Research Plan ......................................................................... 85

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TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued

V. THE STORIES OF ELEVEN OF THE ARTISTS..................................................... 87 Introduction to the Results................................................................................... 87 Eva ....................................................................................................................... 89 Prince Icarus ...................................................................................................... 108 J.......................................................................................................................... 113 Theseus K .......................................................................................................... 134 Harryette ............................................................................................................ 147 Gretchen............................................................................................................. 165 Seth .................................................................................................................... 177 Babe ................................................................................................................... 185 Francesca ........................................................................................................... 202 Dorothy .............................................................................................................. 218 Magpie ............................................................................................................... 231 VI. EMERGENT THEMES .......................................................................................... 249 The First Dialogic Arena ................................................................................... 251 The Second Dialogic Arena............................................................................... 273 The Third Dialogic Arena.................................................................................. 283 The Fourth Dialogic Arena ................................................................................ 292 VII. SUMMARY, DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS & CONCLUSIONS.......... 296 Summary of the Findings................................................................................... 296 Discussion of the Findings................................................................................. 297 Implications & Conclusions................................................................... 304 Theory.................................................................................................... 306 Findings Unrelated to Internal Dialogues .............................................. 314 Future Research ..................................................................................... 318 Last Words......................................................................................................... 319 APPENDIXES A. IRB APPROVAL FORM ......................................................................................... 320 B. CONSENT TO BEINTERVIEWED.......................................................................324 C. PROFILES OF ARTISTS ......................................................................................... 327 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 330

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION My interest in how internal dialogues function for an artist can be traced to my own experiences trying to be an artist. It all began when I was working at Cook County Hospital, conducting short-term counseling in the outpatient Family Planning Clinic. I found the work tedious and unfulfilling. One night I had an unusual and vivid dream.

Upon waking, I said to myself, I am going to write a play about women’s feelings and fantasies about the inside of their bodies. I had never written a play and I had not acted in years, yet I knew I would write and perform in the piece. And I did. Soon afterward I decided to leave social work to get a degree in art and performance art. I applied to and was accepted at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But as a student I found myself stuck. No stories—or even images—came to my mind. I had all this free time to create, but I was barren. My intellectual nature and psychological training led me to decide that if I could not be creative, at least I could learn more about this problematic phenomenon. I arranged to take an independent study in which I asked artists to describe their creative process and what they did when they were unable to create. Most of the artists I spoke with were quite willing to describe their creative process, yet very few discussed their experiences of being blocked and how—or if—they were able to overcome these blocks. Because these discussions were not for a formal research paper, but were for an independent study at an art college, I did not feel compelled or comfortable enough to push them to reveal their thoughts on a subject they seemed

2 reluctant to discuss. Originally, I had intended, with their consent, to write a performance piece using the material I had collected in the interviews. I never did. I have always felt guilty and irresponsible, as if I had made a covenant with those artists and I had failed them.

When I entered the Ph.D. program at the Institute for Clinical Social Work, it occurred to me that I could “make good” on my promise to myself and the artists I had spoken with years ago: in my dissertation I could revisit the issue of what causes artistic inhibitions. Unfortunately, I found the topic large and cumbersome. Once again, given the opportunity to express myself, albeit intellectually, I was stuck. However, as I spoke with colleagues, advisors, and artist friends, new ideas slowly emerged. In discussions with Dr. Sandy Weissblatt, a psychoanalyst who was my consultant, and with several artist friends, I became interested in learning more about those artists who conducted an internal dialogue while they were making their art. One day I was out for coffee with a friend who is a painter and I asked him if he ever carried on a conversation in his head with anyone as he painted. Initially he said, “No, I don’t do things like that,” but then as he reflected upon his answer memories arose that made his story become more inspiring and relevant to my dissertation.

His initial revision was to broaden my definition of what a dialogue could be.

Although he didn’t talk to any person as he painted, he noticed that if things were going well he often found himself conjuring up memories of how the light fell on the landscape when he was a child back home in Texas. This was fascinating to me because he paints portraits, not landscapes. Although he wasn’t eager to surmise reasons as to why he invoked these images, he did say that they provided him with a certain

3 calmness and sense of well-being. My speculation is that these memories of the light and panorama of Texas represent something psychically important to him and may serve as a metaphoric representation of significant relationships in his life.

As we became more engaged in our conversation he suggested that we follow the process he had gone through when he painted his last painting and see what we could discover. His last painting had been a portrait of General George Armstrong Custer. As a child growing up in the 1950s he, like many young boys, enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians. One of the heroes that he and his friends had was General Custer.

At that time he considered it normal to imagine being a soldier or frontier man defending himself against the savage enemy Indians. As an adult, he was aware of the racist and national chauvinistic worldview that this child’s play had reinforced. Now, as an adult, he wanted to uncover the “truth” about Custer. His ultimate goal was to paint a portrait of the general. To execute this project he delved into history books about the Civil War, examined Custer’s role in it and his subsequent role in the late 1800s in trying to contain the American Indians.

My friend’s mother had for a long time been interested in the history of the American West; therefore, while he was working on the project they began having frequent and lively conversations, something that rarely happened between the two of them. He remembered, looking at me sheepishly, that while he read and thought about Custer, he had imagined, with pleasure, discussing his new insights with his mother. As his investigation progressed, my friend told me, he was intrigued to discover that Custer, unlike most of the American military at the time, had deep respect for the Indians’ customs and way of life. In fact, he had studied many of their practices when

4 he lived in the West. This was in contradiction to his role as a military commander whose job was often to destroy and remove the Indians from the disputed territory. To reach further into Custer’s personality, in the hope that it would help him illustrate the conflicting urges within Custer, my friend recalled that he carried on animated conversations with the general as he painted. When he remembered doing this, we both got excited and surprised that he had forgotten it. We laughed as we recalled how adamant he had been when I asked him if he carried on internal dialogues and he first said no. I could barely contain my excitement. We wondered if he did this all the time without noticing it. This is a question that I hoped to explore with my respondents. The final gift he gave me came when I was about to leave. He mentioned, “Oh, yeah, I don’t know if you know this, but my wife is half American Indian.” I thought, as I left, that if I were his therapist we could have made much of how so many of his relationships with significant people were being worked on in his process of painting this portrait.

After this conversation I was thrilled. The idea of exploring the phenomenon of internal dialogues had real potential. First, it concerned the subject of creativity; to prepare for writing a dissertation on creative inhibitions I had already read and thought about the current theories about the creative process. Second, I was interested in the subject. Third, it allowed me to explore a phenomenon that contained elements of both the conscious and unconscious. (Obviously, in only two to three interviews with an unknown respondent a researcher is unlikely to gain access to his unconscious ideas and motivations.) I believe this topic lives in a liminal space between being a conscious process and a preconscious or nonverbal process, a space that is rarely investigated.

Fourth, I find it important to encourage differing views, internal and external, to

5 intermingle and influence one another and hope that this examination supports this belief.

In sum, when I began this examination I was interested in studying those artists, (painters, photographers, writers, musicians etc.), who carried on an internal dialogue as part of their creative process. I wanted to discover the nature of this internal dialogue and how this dialogue differed when they were working creatively and when they were unable to work. An internal dialogue need not be only an internal conversation. It can be with a real person in one’s life, dead or alive, a fictional character, a famous person one has learned about, or a metaphoric representation reflected in an inanimate object.

The next chapter, Chapter II, presents the formulation for this dissertation.

Chapter III presents a review of the literature. Chapter IV presents the research strategy. Chapter V is an introduction to the conclusion using case examples of eleven of the participants. Chapter VI is a summation of the themes found in all the interviews.

Chapter VII is a summary of the conclusions.

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CHAPTER II

FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM

Statement of Purpose This study examined the subjective experience of artists who reported using an internal dialogue as they created art. Through in-depth, richly detailed interviews, I captured this experience through the eyes of the artists themselves. I asked each artist to describe how his or her inner dialogue functioned and I tracked the themes that were common to many of them and noted important variations. This dissertation examined a previously unstudied phenomenon in the creative process.

Significance of the Study to Social Work My study contributes to the social work field in three different ways: First, in our practices we see artists. They, like all clients, are struggling with a wide range of concerns. Often a compelling problem they raise in therapy is their difficulty creating art. By exploring the experience of those artists who used an internal dialogue, I discovered common internal processes that appeared among these artists. The hope is that this knowledge will help to facilitate the artists in our practices to elicit “more inner freedom to move toward and in imaginal spaces thereby allowing an abundance of ideas and images to flourish.� (Watkins, 1976/1984, p. vii) In addition, it is possible

7 that the insights gathered about this population of artists can be applied to understand and to help clients engaged in other creative endeavors, such as scientists or academicians.

Second, this study enriched the body of knowledge concerning creativity. I was interested in knowing more about this internal practice not only to achieve the practical purpose of helping therapists who work with artists but also out of an intellectual interest in exploring and underscoring how relationships, both real and internal, are an integral part of human life. In addition, because the concept of an internal dialogic process is in keeping with both object relations and relational theory—as Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) stated, “everything exists in a relational matrix”—I was hopeful that the dialogues I would have with the artists about their experiences would contribute to these theoretical paradigms. I believe this is the case.

Third, a derivative concern of the study was to question the myth of the isolated artist. He—and I use the male pronoun advisedly—is imagined in movies, novels, biographies of artists, and in art school culture to be an amalgam of a genius/hero working alone against all odds, yet eventually triumphant. This myth presents artists as being self-involved, rebellious, tortured, and oblivious to other people. My position was that was only one of many types of artists. I presumed that many artists seek out and appreciate attention from others. This premise was richly demonstrated. I was also correct in proposing that some of the artists who appeared lonely or isolated actually had an internal world in which their creative process was dependent upon internal dialogic ruminations. Because myths can appear as truths and can influence how people attempt to live their lives, it is important to challenge fictitious ideas that describe the

8 artist as inherently antisocial. By verifying and legitimizing the relational aspects of creativity, I hoped to substantiate within the culture of artists the importance of relationships external and internal.

Statement of the Problem to Be Studied and Specific Objectives to Be Achieved I explored the subjective experience of artists who reported that they used an internal dialogue as they made their art. The goal of this project was to describe the artists’ experience of how their dialogic process worked and to note important commonalties and variances in their responses. As I examined this process in artists, I was mindful of psychoanalytic theories in general but paid closer attention to object relations theory and relational theory.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework of the Study My psychoanalytic world view has been enriched by many of the prevailing psychoanalytic theories from drive theory to self psychology to relational theories; however, the main psychoanalytic explanations that were used in this study were based on concepts from object relations and relational theories. One could explain internal dialogues using the language of any of the psychoanalytic theories described in my literature review. No one psychoanalytic theory can claim to have the objective or best position concerning truth. The images and metaphors used in object relations and relational theory corresponded more organically to the ways in which I understood the world of the artist, therefore I used these theories. This had an impact on the nature of what I discovered. As Irwin Hoffman (1998) said, “life experiences are ambiguous,

9 which allows them to be understood from multiple angles. The angle from which one chooses to look at a phenomenon determines what type of discoveries will be made.� (pp. 18-26) This, he asserted, was a constructivist rather than positivist position toward truth. Hoffman’s views were congruent with those of Donald Spence and Norman Denzin, whose views also informed this research project.

Literature Review Section 1 consists of an overview of the seminal psychoanalytic theories concerning the origin and nature of artistic creativity. This overview provides the historical and theoretical context from which my views about inner dialogues emerged.

Section 2 explores the ways various disciplines consider the use of imaginary companions, and Section 3 addresses the myth of the artist as a genius loner.

Theoretical and Operational Definitions of Major Concepts For the purposes of this dissertation, to be included in this study an artist had to meet at least three of the following criteria: (a) had to work in a studio; (b) exhibited in public sites, commercial galleries, or be published; (c) relied on the sale of his or her art as a main source of income; (d) worked at least 20 hours a week as an artist (including teaching as well as creating); and (e) had been a practicing artist for at least 10 years.

The definitions of an inner dialogue included, but were not limited to, internal discussions with people who were alive and part of the artist’s day-to-day life, real people whom the artist did not know, dead people, and fictional characters. Many of the

10 artists declared an internal dialogue often did not take the form of a verbal dialogue but included such experiences as their sensual interactions with music or feelings.

Assumptions This dissertation started with the well-established psychoanalytic premise that as people we conjure up internal images and memories of other people and these internalizations have an impact on how we live our day-to-day lives. In light of this, my speculation was that there are artists who transform these internalizations into the form of an internal dialogic process. I further postulated that this process had an impact on their creative process and I resolved to find out what it was.

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CHAPTER III

LITERATURE REVIEW In the following three sections I will describe the scholarship that illustrates and explains how and why an artist would use an internal dialogue to inform his or her artistic process. I will do this by integrating three different components.

First, I will explore psychoanalytic theory. In this section I will gather together and summarize the views held by prominent theorists concerning artistic creativity, object relations and self-objects. All of these theories have contributed to my understanding of creativity in general and internal dialogue in particular. This review will provide a foundation for this study. It will contextualize my views within psychoanalytic scholarship as well as establish how my views differ from, and add to, the discussion.

Second, I will explore the ways in which different disciplines have explained the phenomenon of imaginary companions. This section will review the relevant material outside the boundaries of psychoanalytic thought that affirms and informs the study of the existence and importance of an inner life.

Third, I will show how the concept of internal dialogue argues against the popular myth that has defined the artist as a troubled but brilliant loner. I believe that those artists who play the role of the self-destructive artist behave in this way as much out of a natural tendency towards this behavior as out of pressure from the culture to assure that they will act in this stereotypic manner. I hope that by deconstructing and

12 building a different picture of the artist that I can convincingly argue two points. First, encourage artists who thrive because of their connection to others (both in concrete action and in internal preoccupation) to be proud of this trait and second, to dispel the image of the artist as a self-destructive misfit.

In no way do I believe that this overview can do intellectual justice to each component; to do so would have demanded a thorough knowledge of philosophy, religion, anthropology and developmental psychology. My goal is to give some perspectives on how these disciplines inform my dissertation topic.

Overview of Psychoanalytic Theories Each theoretician’s explanation of the psychological function of art making and the psychodynamics that mediate an artist’s creative process flows naturally from his or her conception of motivation. In the following outline, I will give a brief description of the critical psychoanalytic theories that guide the field of clinical social work and how each theoretician’s position concerning art and his or her general psychoanalytic beliefs are interrelated and how these theories do and do not add to the discussion of the artists’ internal dialogic process while working on their art.

Freud The progenitor of psychoanalytic thought, Sigmund Freud, posited that drives were the primary motivator in directing human behavior. Because of the primitive unbridled nature of the drives, Freud described the three elements of the personality— the id, the ego, and superego—as working either in opposition to or in conjunction with

13 each other to encourage or deter a person’s pursuit of uncivilized urges. In keeping with his emphasis on the critical role of the libido and its primitive urges, in 1910 in his observations about Hamlet and in his monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud described creativity as transformed sexual energy. He also conceptualized art as serving the defensive purpose of sublimating forbidden fantasies and impulses. “Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden from himself, by means of the work that he creates” (Freud, 1953-1974, Volume 11, p. 107) According to Freud, these wishes, like dreams, are represented in the art object in a disguised form, making the artist’s wishful fantasies and forbidden impulses acceptable. He believed that although artists used art as a means to disguise their taboo thoughts and dreams, in general, artists as a group were more capable of accessing and expressing that which the general population would repress. The artist “directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind. He listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism.”

(Freud, 1953-1974, Volume 9, p. 92) He believed that memorable incidents from an artist’s life, usually of a traumatic nature, were worked out through the art making process.

While it is accurate that artists often tackle subjects in their art that confuse and upset them, the notion that traumatic experiences and forbidden impulses are the only sources for artistic inspiration does not ring true. As I interviewed the artists, I found that while many of the artists did address traumatic events in their art work just as many addressed subjects that were life affirming. I was also mindful of the possibility that calling attention to their internal dialogues might indirectly recreate or address toxic

14 experiences. None of the respondents complained of adverse reactions after our meetings.

Many of Freud’s other thoughts on creativity are interesting, but with regard to my dissertation topic the most applicable concept I came across was in his text, “Delusion and Dream: An Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva a novel by Wilhelm Jensen.” (1956) In this text Freud wrote that each of us contains an entire cast of characters like those in a novel or play. He observed that in his view novelists and playwrights externalized and made characters out of what he called their internal cast. The concept I am exploring, concerning the existence and nature of internal dialogue, is consistent with this view.

Jung Other psychoanalytic pioneers, such as Carl Jung and Otto Rank, thought and wrote extensively about creativity. Jung believed that the unconscious housed a freestanding personality distinct from the conscious. He did not believe that dreams were latent obscured messages from an unconscious sector of the self to the conscious self. Rather he understood dreams to be manifest messages from an independent and unconscious self. Dream analysis, in Jung’s estimation, facilitated a dialogue between one’s conscious self and one’s unconscious separate self. “The dream does not provide for direct dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. It is the act of recalling, recording and associating to the dream that provides the points of meeting.” (Watkins, 1976, p. 46)

15 Jung, like Freud, believed artists had easier access to the unconscious than most people. He argued that an artist’s ability to conduct a dialogic process between her or his two independent (one conscious, the other unconscious) personalities allowed the artist “the ability to access and obey independent creative forces that are out of [their] control.” (Zachary Leader, 1991, p. 68) However, Jung, unlike Freud, did not associate art making with neurotic pathology. He believed that creativity often originated in healthy components of the psyche and in fact was evidence of an artist’s superiority over other people.

A specifically artistic psychology is more collective than personal in character.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him . . . . As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. (Carl Jung, 1922, p. 104) Jung’s belief in bringing forth, through dream analysis, the dialogic nature of a person’s internal life and his sense that one’s creative capacities were not pathological blend well with my assumptions. However, his belief in the existence of a timeless universal collective unconscious and the artist’s inherent capacity to tap into this universal energy is in contradiction to my belief that an artist’s specific culture and personality influence his psyche and aesthetics.

Rank and Kris Otto Rank thought the essential dilemma motivating human life was the simultaneous fear of and desire for separateness. He thought that the artist’s impulse was to immortalize his mortal life. “The artist experiences the initial or inaugurating

16 impulse as a wish for separation or emergence . . . the irony in all this effort is that the individuating impulse is itself ultimately a longing for community or merger.” (Rank, 1932, p. 40) When psychoanalysis speaks of sublimated sexual impulse in creative art . . . I, for my part, am of the opinion that . . . positively willed control takes the place of negative inhibition and that it is the masterful use of the sexual impulse in the service of this individual which produces the sublimation. (p. 40) Rank’s declaration anticipated Ernst Kris’s important contributions pertaining to a healthy ego’s capacity to be creative. In the early 1950s theories of ego psychology suggested that the ego was ill cast in the role of being passively dependent on the id and superego. Instead, it was argued, the ego was capable of independent action and was responsible for much of what was masterful in a person. Ernst Kris, a leading ego psychologist, in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952) disagreed with the common position that regression was the antithesis of adaptive behavior. He argued that for the artist it is “a state in which the ego controls the primary process and puts it into service.” (Kris, 1952, p. 60) For Kris an artist was not neurotic but, to the contrary, had a muscular ego that was able to withstand and utilize the flow of id energy. His famous statement, “regression in service of the ego,” was meant to express this positive role.

Otto Rank and Ernst Kris championed the position that an artist’s creative ability was evidence of his strength rather than a result of his deficiencies or conflicts.

My presumption is that a person’s creativity flows in response to many different capacities and that to determine categorically that the source is a priori assuredly either healthy or pathological is a weakness in many of these theories.

17 Object Relations Theorists in the British based object relations school of thought wrote prolifically about creativity. Melanie Klein, the matriarch of the object relations school of thought, paved the way for such theoreticians as Marion Milner, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Hanna Segal, John Bowlby, and Donald Winnicott. Although all of these theoreticians are housed together under the roof of object relations theory, there are many distinctions between them. A discussion of these distinctions would go beyond the scope of this project. The general definition of object relations that I am using is: “any systematic effort to account for personality development and pathology on the basis of the internalization of relationships with others, contrasted with the drive ego modes according to which the drives and their vicissitudes account for personality development.� (Summers, 1994, p. 1)

Klein Melanie Klein argued that the mobilizing thrust of human preoccupation did not stem from libidinal Oedipal stage concerns, as Freud asserted, but instead revolved around the needs and expectations a child experienced in response to his early parenting. Her approach towards the drives was unlike Freud’s. He emphasized the power of the libidinal drive, whereas Klein believed that the aggressive drive was potentially more pathogenic. Developing children, she theorized, became overwhelmed with anxiety when they felt enraged and feared the possibility of acting out their destructive desires. Their anxiety housed both the power of the rage and the fear of the anticipated retaliation from the injured party. Not only were these powerful emotions

18 burdensome and oppressive for a child but also, to hold two opposing emotions simultaneously, such as love and rage at a parent, was over stimulating and overwhelming. In order to gain mastery amid this internal chaos, Klein concluded, a child shut out her awareness that she had two opposing ideas, emotions, or memories about the same person. This was called splitting. Splitting was initially a developmental achievement because it allowed children to maintain the illusion of a consistent and stable world which helped them feel safe. Klein viewed this experience as a predictable phase in human development and she named it the “paranoid position.” As a person matures, Klein explained, she realizes that people can be both good and bad and she can both love and hate the same person at the same time. Klein called this stage of development the “depressive position.” What is critical to notice is that consistently Melanie Klein recognized and described people as being motivated by their relationship with other people (object relations). From the very beginning of life, she was convinced, “object” relationships were an innate and essential aspect of human experience. This point of view was distinctly different from Freud’s position. He thought that the object “exists as a consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible” (Freud, 1915, pp. 122-123), “the drive itself determines the nature of the object . . . the wish is endogenously determined and has no necessary connection to an object at all.” (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 39) Klein believed that the infant searched as much for “the object that gives the food as the food itself.” (1952, p. 96) This critical premise defines object relations and relational theoreticians and practitioners. Defense mechanisms, such as projection, projective identification, splitting, and denial, (1975, pp. 1-24) served the purpose of mollifying or disrupting

19 one’s relationship to others, whereas, according to classical theory, since a person is originally motivated by intense “unmodulated sexual and aggressive impulses which are a major part of his biological inheritance and which shape his psychological destiny,” (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 340) defense mechanisms served the function of helping a person keep unconscious “a feeling of unpleasure, the incompatibility between the single idea that is to be repressed and the dominant mass of ideas constituting the ego.” (p. 116) Klein’s general theoretical positions evolved naturally into her specific ideas about the function of creativity. In “Infantile Anxiety-situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929), Klein illustrated her ideas. In one case the daughter’s unconscious aggressive wishes to destroy her mother were neutralized by the daughter’s choosing to paint a portrait of her mother. The art object, Klein explained, symbolically restored the mother back to life, pacifying the daughter’s anxiety. Works of art, Klein maintained, acted like a womb in that they received fragmented projections of the artist’s self and integrated and contained them. In this way she thought art was reparative.

In “The Importance of Symbol-formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930), Klein reconfirmed her view that the ego was consistently managing anxiety born from fears of its own aggressiveness. The artist’s genius is that instead of using splitting to manage his anxiety, he employs the defense of using symbols. “Symbolism is the foundation of all phantasy, sublimation, and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things, activities, and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies.” (p. 97) Symbols are like a Russian doll: within each representation lies

20 another and then another. A symbol (a painting) may be a stand-in for an object (a friend). This object (the friend) may be a stand-in for another object (one’s mother or father). To manipulate or destroy something symbolically, especially if the link between the original and the symbolic is unconscious, makes the act less vile, therefore more tolerable. This mitigates against any guilt the artist would feel if they were to recognize how the art piece was related to their passionate uncivilized feelings towards the original object. In sum, Klein postulated that an art object could symbolically and unconsciously either destroy or restore an object in a disguised form.

Segal Hanna Segal, a follower of Klein, wrote in a related yet distinctly different manner about art. In “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics” (1955), she proposed “the task of the artist lies in the creation of a world of his own.” (p. 388) She believed that even when an artist’s intention was to represent external reality, the underlying motive of artistic creativity was the desire to recover a lost past. Unlike Klein’s notion that art acted as reparative for past sins committed against people, Segal suggested that art not only ameliorated bad memories and thoughts but also enlivened positive memories and fantasies. She also recognized that, unlike the young child who experiences herself as merged with her caretakers, an artist is more likely to have the maturity of mind to understand that people cannot read her mind and that she must communicate through symbols such as words, paint, or other media. Symbols are in themselves proof of our separateness from one another; to know to use them to communicate represents a developmental accomplishment.

21

Milner In Marion Milner’s well-known book about art and art making, On Not Being Able to Paint (1957), she emphasized and reinterpreted Klein’s premise that the painter painted to restore and immortalize someone the painter had destroyed in fantasy. Like Segal and Klein, she concentrated on the artist’s inner battle between, on the one hand, the desire to feel an omnipotent merger with the parent figure and, on the other hand, the desire to be a separate and independent—but therefore vulnerable—human being.

Unlike Klein, Milner emphasized the human impulse to merge with others rather then to destroy them.

The impulse to merge, Milner (1957) explained, is explored in art making and art objects by the ways in which distinctions between such phenomena as thought and sensation, the outside and the inside world, what’s me and not me (1957, p. 119) are blurred. Additionally, in “The Role of Illusion in Symbol-Formation” (1955), Milner pointed out that the manner in which adults used symbols functioned in the same way as children’s play. Symbols, like play, allow a problem to be approached and solved not by real world means but in an illusory manner. The artist “allowed himself to experience, within the enclosed space-time of the drama or the picture or the story . . . a transcending of that common sense perception which would see a picture as only an attempt at photography.” (1955, p. 85) A photo or picture can depict a solution to a problem.

22 Ehrenzweig In the spirit of Melanie Klein, starting in the 1950s and continuing until his death in the mid-1960s, the psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig wrote prolifically about art. In his highly regarded book, The Hidden Order of Art, first published posthumously in 1967, he emphasized that the artistic process demanded that artists be able to tolerate feeling primary process phenomena. These included enduring such sensations as feeling overstimulated, self-destructive, and perceiving opposites as being blurred.

Similar to Milner, he noted that art blurred: what is me/not me; what is foreground/what is background; and what is reality/what is fantasy. According to Ehrenzweig, a piece of art was initially an externalization of unwanted split off parts of the self or of an internal experience. However, Ehrenzweig wisely noted that despite these origins, which were often unconscious, ultimately an artist needed to allow the art object to become something different from him. As he very simply put it, “an artist must be able to tolerate the otherness of his work of art.” (1971, p. 89) His language implies that artists anthropomorphize their relationships with the art objects that they create. This is another example of the omnipresence of relational thinking in artists.

Summary of Kleinian Theory Melanie Klein, Hanna Segal, Marion Milner, and Anton Ehrenzweig all described, from their own perspectives, how an artist is engaged symbolically and often unconsciously in an interaction with significant people in the artist’s life. Significant people in the artist’s life are symbolically present. First, from an artist’s conscious and unconscious motivation to make art, to second, the process the artist goes through to

23 create art and third, the art object/experience itself. This premise is the bedrock idea for my dissertation. Further, I propose that for some artists, another realm in which the artistic process is relationally saturated is through the internal discourse they conduct with others throughout the creative process.

Despite the Kleinians’ realization that internal imaginary figures could play an important role in helping a young child cope with the world, their underlying assumption was that these illusory presences were primitive forms of object representation. “People who are predisposed to create introjects and other presences and to experience them repeatedly are seen as dominated by infantile fixations . . . turning away from external object relations to fantasy.” (Klein, Heimann & MoneyKyrle, 1955, p. 131) I am of the opinion that having a relationship with internal objects, which Klein et al. chose to call “introjects” or “presences,” is not a priori a primitive form of object representation. In fact, I hope I demonstrated how such a relationship can play a vital role in helping a person create.

Winnicott One of the most influential psychoanalytic contributors to the study of creativity in the 20th century was Donald Winnicott. He claimed a theoretical allegiance to both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), among others, believed he accomplished this by drastically distorting and molding Freud’s thoughts so that they would appear to accommodate his own unique concepts. Winnicott, like Klein, believed that pre-oedipal concerns were the breeding ground for both pathology

24 and adaptation. In his writings he eloquently described a child’s developmental process from infancy to adulthood. Winnicott felt that young vulnerable children ascribed omnipotent, all-seeing, all-knowing attributes to their parents. Winnicott surmised that if a child’s mothering parent were adequately attuned to her child’s thoughts and needs, her child would be taught how to recognize what was going on inside himself. In contrast, if the parent were ill-matched to the developing child, his parent’s assumptions as to what was going on inside the child would therefore be inaccurate.

Such a child, in his naiveté and desire to please his parent, would very likely develop a “false self” that responded as the parent dictated, thus becoming unaware of “his own spontaneous needs and gestures as these bear no relation to the way his mother experiences him.” (Mitchell, 1988, p. 194) Winnicott (1988) described a child’s worldview as being immersed in illusion and magic. He thought that children had unconscious fantasies of being a part of and in fact creating what they considered their all-knowing mothers. This illusion allowed children to believe themselves to be omnipotent. He believed that infants needed the illusion that they created “the breast” (the outer world) so as to avoid feeling how completely powerless they were in reality. For a child the inevitable disillusionment process involves both gaining awareness of being separate from his godlike mother, while simultaneously abandoning the fantasy of being all-powerful. Donald Winnicott, like Marion Milner, emphasized how daunting and odious a child finds the prospect of giving up the fantasy that because of his merger with his mother he controls the world.

A child whose parent has cannibalized his identity by criticizing and stifling the child’s spontaneous expressions of self, often unconsciously finds giving up the illusion of

25 being merged with his omnipotent parent almost unspeakably difficult. For this young child, whose authentic self has been in hiding and as a result is poorly articulated, expressing an independent self that is separate from his parents is impossible and akin to asking him to self-annihilate. Because his identity has been taken over by his parents’ desires, there is barely anything internally authentic that is available with which to replace his puppet identity.

Even the child who has been allowed to voice and discover his “true self” finds this journey painful and resists it. However, as Winnicott (1988) explained in Human Nature, if a child has an attuned mothering parent his experiences with her have taught him that what he needs or desires can be found. This child internalizes the belief that he has agency in the world. The ability to maintain the idea (sometimes realistic and sometimes an illusion) of being in control is useful. It encourages both adults and children to pursue their goals.

For both the child going through a normal developmental disillusionment with his mothering parent and the more traumatized child, the process of making peace with the idea of living in the world, that as a mere human we can not control, unfolds more gracefully when “transitional objects” or phenomena are utilized. This concept is one of Winnicott’s many critical contributions to the field and plays a role in my thoughts about this dissertation.

In his writings Winnicott explained the psychological significance of the mother-child bond and how this relationship metamorphoses into transitional objects, transitional phenomena, or play. He poetically described how many children develop intense relationships with a toy or a blanket. He interpreted that these objects

26 symbolically represent some aspect of the child’s mothering parent. “It is true that the piece of blanket (or whatever it is) is symbolical of some part object, such as the breast.” (Winnicott, 1971, p.6) These toys, by virtue of their having been chosen by the child and their dependability and acquiescence to the child, give the youngster comfort, a feeling of being in control, and a sense of predictability. All of these qualities are ones that a live person could never provide. To the non-discerning eye a transitional object would appear to be a simple object, but the child’s emotional relationship to it goes well beyond that reality. Winnicott assumed that children simultaneously knew that the object’s soothing power was an illusion, while at the same time they endowed it with great significance. Over time, he observed, children slowly internalize the functions of this transitional object until eventually it loses its meaning. It must be underscored that because the toy symbolically represents aspects of the care taking parent, a youngster’s ability to forgo the company of the toy is a declaration that he has discovered other methods to carry out the important functions previously performed by his parents and the toy on his behalf. Winnicott named methods such as, “the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living and to creative scientific work,” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 14) as common replacements for the transitional object.

By the same token Winnicott asserted that play itself had a similar function.

While not an object, it was a transitional phenomenon—meaning “a temporary state in which the infant is allowed to claim magical control over external reality.” (1988, p.

106) In play a child delightedly assumes a sense of magical control: There is something about playing that has not yet found a place in the psychoanalytic literature . . . it is not inside . . . nor is it outside . . . it is not part of the not me that the individual has decided to recognize (with whatever

27 difficulty and pain) as truly external, when it is outside magical control. (1971, p. 41) Winnicott described this intermediate position as “potential space” or “transitional space.” Mistakes can be made. The absurd can be voiced. One need not censor. This is a time to discover and practice methods and feelings that may eventually facilitate one’s integration into the real world. The play arena is not inner psychic reality; it takes place in time with people and objects. It is also not of the real world.

Play, like a transitional object, combines objects from one’s external world with one’s imagination. This complex overlapping of the real with fantasy allows a child to dream, to place herself in the bones of another, to practice potentially dangerous experiences in safety, and to experience a respite from the strain of reality. It is a form of transitional space because it is an intermediate arena of experience somewhere between inner and outer reality during which time potential actions and thoughts are practiced and worked out.

I believe that the process of art making is akin to play. As Winnicott proclaimed, “There is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this to cultural experience.” (1971, p. 51) Like play, art making allows the creator to feel in control of the illusory world he has created. At the same time an artist must respond to the real demands of the society in which she lives. From understanding and responding to the expectations of the art world, to understanding the real formal limitations (the viscosity of oil paint, the sounds in musical scales) within the art medium, to deciding how close to reality one wishes to and is capable of depicting an image, an artist must live in the real world. This overlapping of the outer world and the inner world hopefully facilitates the integration

28 of the parts of the self that respond to both worlds. For those artists whose experiences in youth left them feeling at the mercy of others, the miniature world that they create in their artwork can at times perform the important reparative psychic function of creating the comforting illusion that they are in control of their world.

In addition, an artist’s practice of conducting an inner dialogue with another person as she makes her art is similar to play in that it too creates a form of transitional space. Such dialogues allow one to be absorbed in an arena of the imagination that allows differing ideas to exist without repercussions in the outer world. Furthermore, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited that people often allowed sounds to stand in for the real thing; therefore the words themselves can be transitional objects (Davoine & Gaudilliere, 2004; Jameson, 1982, p. 352). This idea supports my thesis that an internal dialogue can be a form of a transitional object.

Winnicott’s theoretical views are based on his belief in the positive power that illusion plays in the human psyche. This belief is consistent philosophically with Romanticism as first formulated by Kant. Kant was critical of the claims of the supremacy of “reason” as the only tool to use in investigating the world. He depended upon both religious faith and the intuition born of sense perception of the world.

Winnicott’s comfort with allowing people their illusions was consistent with Romanticism and was in direct conflict with Freud, who preferred belief in reason and science.

Winnicott’s famous assertion, “There is no such thing as a baby but only a nursing couple,” (1975, p. 99) is another essential concept that echoes throughout my dissertation. This statement implies that there is a dyadic component that is part of the

29 construction of one’s sense of self. One of the most punishing realities of art making is that it demands hours spent in solitude. Winnicott’s musings on solitude produced the lovely paradoxical statement, “The capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being alone in the presence of someone, and that without a sufficiency of this experience the capacity to be alone can not develop.” (1958, p. 32) This matrix of sensation made up of the parent child unity allows a young infant to become unintegrated, to flounder, to be in a state in which there is no orientation, to be able to exist for a time without being either a reactor to an external impingement or an active person with a direction of interest or movement. Enveloped within this sensation impulses will feel real and be truly a personal experience . . . the personal experience is not wasted because the state of being alone is something which (although paradoxically) always implies that someone else is there. (1958, pp. 33-34) From Winnicott’s perspective, even the capacity for an artist to enjoy being in the studio alone and to trust her own impulses is based on the success she has had in internalizing significant others.

In conclusion, the practice of conducting an internal dialogue with a significant other can be explained using a Winnicottian perspective. First, an internal dialogue is a manifestation of a dyadically formed self. Second, internal dialogues also create a form of transitional space where differing realities can be contemplated in the safety of one’s imagination. These premises of Winnicott’s support my position that relationships are implicit in the creative process.

Rose More recently, in keeping with the ideas of Winnicott, Gilbert Rose (1996) in Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness maintained that for both the artist and the viewer the aesthetic experience was valued because it allowed affective states to reemerge that

30 reflect emotions based in early childhood. Sentiments, such as the infantile illusion that one is omnipotent and merged with one’s mothering parent, resurface. Rose concluded that this happened because viewing and making art heightens emotions and stimulates the imagination. He believed that art evoked our memories of the early infantile emotional experience of feeling omnipotent and fused with our mothering parent. In this manner, he claimed, art can have the positive effect, like psychoanalysis, of arousing and remobilizing early states of optimistic agency. This positive emotional state creates an affective environment that is conducive for psychological development to resume.

Rose described this process as that of art acting as a “witness” (1996, p. 114) because it allows one to remember and internalize long forgotten affect states and ideas.

He believed that the practice of witnessing memories is curative. Rose’s beliefs are consistent with the thesis critical to this dissertation, that the interaction of an artist with the art object is a type of witnessing and dialogue. One of the important aspects of dialogue is that it consists of two or more subjectivities witnessing their own and another’s reality. This interaction offers added credibility to each subject’s reality.

Fauteux Kevin Fauteux (1995), like Rose, also envisioned the artistic process as supporting the illusion that one is not alone. Fauteux believed that artists, while in a creative mode, felt a unity with God. He described this unity as consisting of “an

31 oceanic sensation.” Fauteux believed this oceanic sensation could very well be a reference to memory traces of the interplay between a mother and her infant child.

Winnicott, Rose, and Fauteux all believed that the quality of one’s early bond to the mothering figure is the animating force in one’s life. They propose that the moments of aliveness an artist feels while creating art rests on a foundation of internalized mothering moments.

Kohut In the 1970s and 1980s Heinz Kohut developed the theory of self-psychology.

His theory focused on the development of the self. He emphasized that for a robust self to develop, one’s care-taking environment needed to perform three interconnected essential selfobject functions. The term selfobject should not be confused with the psychoanalytic term “object,” which normally refers to a person. In Kohut’s language the term selfobject denotes a functional process. The function is one in which a person responds to another person as if this other person is a needed extension of oneself (Tolpin & Kohut, 1980). Self-cohesion is built, according to Kohut, when a person successfully experiences and internalizes three essential selfobject functions/experiences: (a) the need to be mirrored, (b) the need to idealize, and (c) the need to experience a twinship with someone. Kohut defined mirroring as the experience a child has when a parental figure is responsive to and admiring of the child.

Kohut maintained that the consequence of receiving such attention made a child feel known and appreciated. Kohut assumed that a person’s mother usually performed this function. Twinship needs are a subset of mirroring needs and refers to how invigorating

32 a child finds it when he experiences himself as being the same as another person.

Idealization is the experience a child has when he is allowed to perceive himself as a part of the magnificence of the parent, usually the father. The consequence of this allows the person to feel safe and to pursue goals. From Kohut’s perspective, a healthy developmental process proceeds when a child believes that these selfobject functions are emanating from himself. Over time, Kohut reasoned, the child gradually internalizes these three functions until she has a sense of self that allows the child to believe she is capable of handling the vagaries of life. Unfortunately, if the parents of a young child were unable or unwilling to perform these functions, this child would not have developed the inner resources necessary to conjure up these states on her own. As a result such a child would develop deficits in her self-structure.

In “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism” Kohut (1966) linked the development of creativity to one’s narcissistic development rather than the development of the capacity for object love. According to Kohut, in their art making, artists revisited early childhood narcissistic developmental yearnings (i.e., the wish to merge, to idealize, and to be mirrored) that had been derailed. (This corresponds to Gilbert Rose’s ideas.) Through the “creative gifts” Kohut proposed artists strove towards the realization of an authentic core self. (1977, 1984) In How Does Analysis Cure? Kohut (1984) stated, “It is my impression that the most productive and creative lives are lived by those who, despite high degrees of traumatization in childhood, are able to acquire new structure by finding new routes (compensatory structures) toward inner completeness,” (p. 44) such as art-making. This statement resonates with Winnicott’s belief in the reparative potential of art making. It

33 also echoes Freud because he implied that to be a creative artist it helped if one had endured early relational traumas. In The Restoration of the Self (1977), Kohut remarked: [The artist] . . . is the modern beholder, listener and reader—the eye and ear and the reflective thought of the child of the era of the endangered self that lifts the creations out of the matrix of individual meaning from which they arose, and in so doing, transforms them into modern art. (1977, p. 290) A few pages later he said: Vicissitudes of the cohesion and disintegration of the self . . . [have] entered into the work of the pioneering artists of the day long before they became targets for the investigative efforts of the scientific psychologists . . . Freud’s rejection of modern art goes hand in hand with his reluctance to immerse himself in archaic narcissistic states. (1977, p. 296) As quoted above, Kohut believed that artists of the 20th century documented and mirrored modern man’s struggle to escape feelings of disintegration and to seek affirmation, thereby forging an identity. He also noted the paradox that while archaic defenses such as merger and idealization may corrupt one’s day to day life, they supply fertile grounds in which great art can grow.

Heinz Kohut associated the yearnings for and the capacity to have ideals with the essential traits of an artist. Since Kohut assumed—but never explicitly stated—that the father was usually the original source of idealization, it would flow from this idea that he believed creative inhibitions resulted if the artist were disconnected from an idealization of her father. Kohut devoted the first section of The Restoration of the Self to illustrate this point. In that text he described Mr. M as a man suffering from creative inhibitions. In Kohut’s opinion Mr. M had a defect in the sector related to mirroring that was never addressed in the analysis. Kohut’s interpretation was that Mr. M was able to compensate for this defect when he accomplished the task of “integration of

34 idealized goals that stand for my father whom I had wanted to idealize as a child.”

(1977, p. 18) Once he accomplished this integration he was able to reestablish creative vitality.

Regardless of the sex of the parental figure who failed the young child, Kohut believed that “compensatory” structures could be built to heal deficits in the self.

Therapy, Kohut pronounced, was one means to build these compensatory structures.

More important to my work, Kohut also implied that art making could facilitate the strengthening of selfobject functions.

Even a person’s greater freedom to create substitute selfobjects through visual imagery when external reality is devoid of tangible self objects must be counted among newly acquired assets when the success and failures of an analysis are being evaluated . . . leading to a positive assessment of the role and significance of art. (1977, p. 76) Kohut proposed that both art making and art itself can function to shore up one’s self-esteem because art can serve the role of a self-object. This idea has something in common with the underlying assumption of my thesis, that one’s relationships vis-à-vis an inner dialogue, affect one’s creativity. However we must keep in mind that Kohut described these inner “relationships” as performing narcissistic selfobject functions, rather then being a relational engagement. This corrupts the comparison.

Relational Theory In the past 20 years a new group of theories, which I will refer to as relational (the terms intersubjective and constructivist have also been used to refer to this perspective), has emerged in the psychoanalytic community. Historically, the relational perspective gestated in the teachings of theoreticians, such as Theodore Racker, Harry

35 Stack Sullivan, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, and Heinz Kohut. The term “relational” was first used by Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), as a means of uniting the traditions of interpersonal psychology and object relations. In their classic text, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, they used the term to separate those who adhered to drive theory from those who placed relationships at the center of human motivation.

In the intervening 22 years the relational perspective has attempted to cross-fertilize the disciplines of psychoanalytic psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, science, postmodern theories and feminist theory. While each theoretician associated with the relational perspective is unique, they share certain beliefs that converge with my thinking and inform this dissertation topic. These are discussed in the following five subsections.

Neutrality First, the concept of neutrality as Freud originally conceived of it suggested that the task of the therapist was to be a “blank screen,” a “reflecting mirror,” and to adopt the air of “surgical detachment.” (Freud, quoted in Greenberg, 1999, p. 136) In keeping with the popular stance of his day that a scientist was capable of being impartial, Freud and his followers proposed that it was also possible and necessary for a psychoanalyst to be impartial. This was to be achieved by the analyst who adopted an inactive and non-expressive presence in the analytic sessions. Traditional theory stressed that the process of therapy involved recreating old object relations in the therapeutic relationship. The therapist’s impartiality was believed to encourage this transference to unfold. In contrast, relational theory stressed that therapy should encourage both the

36 emergence of past templates as well as the creation of new templates. In fact, the past, according to the relational thinking, is brought alive by enactments. These enactments play a key role in the therapeutic healing process. Enactments demand that a therapist, despite himself, get swept up in acting out old roles from the client’s past. The task of the therapist is to straddle the fence between being part of the enactment while simultaneously observing it. For a therapist to help a client imagine and practice new possibilities for interactions and expectations in the world, relational theory suggests the therapist also behave in a different manner than the original bad objects did. To achieve this end, relational theory supposes, depending upon the character of the client, that some element of emotional openness, self-revelation, and expression of judgments may need to occur on the therapist’s part. Neutrality must be sacrificed.

Irwin Hoffman, one of the theoreticians associated with relational psychoanalysis, argued that the whole notion of neutrality is folly. No behavior on the part of a therapist can be perceived as being impartial or inactive. The client is always making meaning out of whatever her therapist does or does not do, whatever comment of the client the therapist chooses to remark on or question. As Merton Gill said, “Whatever the analyst does is invariably saturated with suggestion.” (Hoffman, 1998, p. 72) In fact, Hoffman argued, to attempt to aspire to strive for perfect neutrality is harmful.

I do not think it is good to set up intrinsically irrational ideals that do violence to human nature . . . . [It] encourages the development of inappropriate ego ideals, which in turn promote defensive illusions about what we have been able to accomplish . . . . Aspiring to walk on water and striving to be able to do that are bound to interfere with learning to swim. (p. 86)

37 Hoffman’s position concerning neutrality corresponds and gives credence to the research methodology of Denzin’s interpretive interactionism that I used to analyze my interviews with the artists. A key feature of Denzin’s methodology is that it assumes that people make meaning through their conversations and their personal reflections (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986). The interplay of the dialogue between the artist/respondent and me—the interviewer/researcher— in fact did create a subjectively co-constructed truth that I suspect will expand even further once the readers add their associations. “Interpretive interactionism attempts to make the world of lived experience directly accessible to the reader. It endeavors to capture the voices, emotions and actions of those studied.” (Denzin, 1989, p.10) Both interpretive interactionism and relational psychoanalytic theory consider dialogue, and the sharing of each person’s affects, valid and vital sources for information or “truth.”

Self Second, relational theories have transformed the concept of the self. Classical theories of self envisioned the self as being made up of instincts and “the satisfaction of innate core needs.” (Mitchell, 1992, p. 1) A relational definition of self is quite different. Stephen Mitchell (1992) defined it as consisting of the meanings a person creates as he lives and experiences new and old stimuli. Each experience a person encounters invites different selves to emerge. “Selves are what people do and experience over time rather than something that exists someplace.” (Mitchell, 1992, p.

101) A critical component of what constitutes a robust self is the fluidity with which one can go between, be cognizant of and respond to the needs of one’s different self-

38 states. An unhealthy multiplicity of self-states is one in which the different states are dissociated from one another and demand contradictory behavior.

Instead of searching for the core self, Mitchell scrutinized self-expressions to see if they were either “authentic” or “inauthentic.” He recognized the ineffable complexity of knowing what is authentic. A person’s capacity to discern what emanates from inside himself from one that is external is entangled with many factors.

Part of the trickiness of distinguishing “true” from “false” experience is that both the distinction between internality and externality and the distinction between self and other becomes more complex the more closely one considers them . . . . All personal motives have a long relational history. (1992, p. 13) Philip Bromberg (1999), a noted contributor to relational theory, also viewed the mind as comprising multiple selves and self-states. Bromberg’s definition of the concept of dissociation is that for some people many of their self states are unrecognized because “data that are incompatible with the ongoing self-state are denied simultaneous access to consciousness.” (p. 398) Bromberg believed, Part of our work as analysts facilitates the restoration of links between dissociated aspects of self so that the conditions for intrapsychic conflict and its resolution can develop. By being attuned to shifts in his own self-states as well as those of the patients, and using this awareness relationally, an analyst furthers the capacity of the patient to hear in a single interpersonal context the echo of his other selves voicing alternative realities that have been previously incompatible. (p. 13) Jody Messler Davies (1998), another widely respected relational theoretician and practicing psychoanalyst, has also written about dissociation. In discussing work with clients who have been the survivors of trauma, she explained that dissociation functions to create “independent, functionally autonomous subsystems; unique representations of others and part others.” (p. 64) Davies implied that people’s failure

39 to acknowledge their self-states leaves them feeling unintegrated and often in the throes of behavior (enactments) that do them harm. Clinically, the task is to get these dissociated internal selves to interact with one another, which will build the capacity for a coherent life. Davies and Bromberg both used their observations from working with severely traumatized people as bridges to working on issues of multiplicity within people with more integrated personalities.

In Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Steven Stern argued that: Relational, intersubjectivist and postmodern theories have abandoned a Freudian, Kohutian, linear, hierarchical, and essentialist model of the mind and have replaced it with the concept that a person’s subjective experience consists of a constant state of flux between self-states. The self is not a separate center of initiative but intersubjectively constituted. (p. 694) S. Stern paid close attention to “the self’s relation to itself” (p. 695; italics in the original). His premise was that a major organizer of the self, or, as he called it, the intersubjectively constructed self, is a person’s early identifications with other important people’s (mother, father) response to the self.

Mitchell’s, Davies’, Bromberg’s, and S. Stern’s conceptualizations of the self(s) are useful constructions that help explain the origins of the different points of view that exist in an internal dialogue. Bromberg’s explanation that the analyst functions to help build a bridge between the different selves also points to the potential bridge building benefits an artist might gain by paying attention to his or her internal dialogues.

40 Two-person Psychology Third, the relationalists believe in a two-person psychology and expand upon Winnicott’s famous explanation that the intermingling of the mother and child creates a dyad that transcends each separate person. Stephen Mitchell concurred, The very capacity to have experiences necessarily develops in and requires an interpersonal matrix . . . the patterning of all experiences is an extremely complex product of the interactions between the baby (with its temperamental sensitivities and thresholds) and the semiotics and interactive style of the caregivers” (1992, p. 20) Jessica Benjamin’s writings amplify this train of thought. Benjamin recognized that the normal developmental trajectory for a young child did not lead exclusively toward separation and individuation with the caregiver doing all the giving, as classical theory would have one believe. She recognized the movement between a caregiver and infant as being toward both parties giving and taking from one another. Both the child and the caregiver’s capacity to experience the other as having his or her own legitimate needs and volition was a process she called mutual recognition and attachment (1995).

She recognized that a degree of mutuality between the therapist and client is also indicated in the therapeutic encounter. The traditional role a therapist plays of being a blank screen upon which clients can project their fantasies, Benjamin purports is not sufficient. Wrestling with the awareness and experience of learning how to interact with one’s therapist as a subject with her or his own inner life relational theorists surmise is essential to foster a client’s ability to relate to other people. In keeping with the philosophy that mutuality encourages relations between people to develop, I decided that since I would only meet with the respondents 2 to 3 times, if I approached the interviews as conversations I would have an easier time earning their trust and thus

41 gaining access to their inner thoughts. Additionally, as Relational theoreticians, such as Jessica Benjamin also note, I speculated that a dialogic interview process had the capacity to enable the artists to tease out their thoughts more articulately then if I was a silent observer.

Internal Relations Fourth, relational theories recognize the role internal relations play in informing one about the world (in contrast to classical theory that emphasizes drives). Emmanuel Ghent (1992) spoke to this role: Relational theorists have in common an interest in the intrapsychic as well as interpersonal, but the intrapsychic is seen as constituted largely by the internalization of interpersonal experience mediated by the constraints imposed by biologically organized templates and delimiters. Relational theorists tend to share a view in which reality and fantasy, outer world and inner world, both the interpersonal and intrapsychic, play immensely important and interactive roles in human life. (p. xviii) In the same text Ghent went on to say, “The more profound significance of the term relational is that it stresses relations not only between and among external people and things but also between and among internal personifications and representations.”

(Ghent, 1992, p. xviii) These statements loosely suggest that internal relationships and the ensuing internal dialogic process is an ordinary expectable occurrence and has the capacity to vitalize one’s creativity. This internal dialogue, similar to Winnicott’s mother/child dyad, produces a new and different entity imbued with new possibilities. It also anticipated that the dialogues that I had with the artists who participated in this study would inspire new and useful ideas.

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Nondrive Unconscious Structures Fifth, Donnel B. Stern’s (1999) theories about “nondrive unconscious structures” (p. 78) have implications that inform this dissertation. As early as 1940 Harry Stack Sullivan said, One has information about one’s experience only to the extent that one has tended to communicate it to another or thought about it in the manner of communicative speech. Much of that which is ordinarily said to be repressed is merely unformulated. (D. B. Stern, p. 83) D. B. Stern named this phenomenon “unformulated experience . . . Thoughts can exist in an inchoate form.” (1999, p. 81) Based in developmental and cognitive psychology, his writings explained the ways in which information is processed in the human mind and becomes memory. Once stimuli advance to secondary process, that is, once they are symbolized into language, information is knowable, and prior to language it is not.

The right words once found, pull the figure out of the background that until a moment before was homogeneous. Alternatively, if the meaning remains implicit or felt, as in the case of many dreams, the moment may pass with only the awareness of the presence of a vague something. (p. 98) D. B. Stern agrees, from a psychoanalytic perspective, with the hermeneutic position (used in this dissertation) that truth consists of a constructed narrative.

In the spirit of the paradigm of unformulated experience, I hypothesized that many artists are only vaguely aware of their practice of conducting internal dialogues.

It seems paradoxical that what is often a word-based activity—internal dialogue—could be described as unformulated thought. However, it was presumed that these conversations were often preconscious; therefore, the artists were not aware that they were engaging in them, or at best, they were not paying attention to how these internal

43 dialogues functioned in their creative process. I thought that by making this practice visible, its dialogic properties could become more useful for the artists.

The debunking of the conceit of neutrality, the transformation of the concept of the self, the belief in a two person psychology, the internalization of relationships, the concept of a nondrive unconscious structure are all part of the lexicon of relational ideas. They are important concepts that inform this dissertation. In addition, I hope that in writing this dissertation I proved to have internalized the stance of such writers as Jessica Benjamin and Irwin Hoffman who are able to illustrate complexity and discover the “both/and nature of much of life rather than either/or.� (Benjamin, 1999, p. 182) This dissertation asserts that the need to connect with other people is addressed throughout the artistic process. All of the psychoanalytic theories I have discussed present views about how relationships animate the creative process; however, as stated before, I will describe my findings predominantly through the lens of object relations theory and relational theory. I will do so because I believe they more closely clarify and support my propositions and because intellectually I am more comfortable thinking in the languages of these two theories.

Framing the Internal Dialogue through Different Perspectives A divergent but equally relevant scholarly investigation that informed this project is the topic of the existence and function of the imaginary or unseen on human life. Literary, philosophical, religious, and anthropological studies often confront and try to explain this phenomenon. Psychologists who investigate child development and cognitive development also ponder these issues. In the following review I will briefly

44 describe themes and concepts of intangible relationships from each discipline that I found useful.

Literary and Cultural Criticism The fields of literary and cultural criticism abound with ideas concerning the nature of an artist’s inner world. In The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) M. H. Abrams articulated the position that a major shift took place in literature during the Romantic period (between the late 1780s into the 1830s). Writers during this time argued against the presumption that the imagination merely replicated preexisting external reality.

Instead they said, “It has its own internal source of motion: it does not merely represent scenes but creates them.” (Abrams, 1953, p. 22) In addition, Abrams argued that during this time authors realized that not only did a writer’s imagination have an independent voice but so, too, did the reader. Gone was the assumption that predominated until and throughout most of the 19th century that an author’s readers were of the same mind as the author. In addition, in Romantic literature the stylistic trope of using an omnipotent narrator was often replaced with each character speaking for him or herself. Suddenly there existed a cacophony of voices implicit in the writing and reading of a text. Since then many writers have celebrated the multiple internal voices and images that inhabit their creative process.

In fact, writers have often described “their” characters as having minds of their own. (Taylor, 1999, p. 148) In discussing her novel The Color Purple Alice Walker (1983) expanded upon the notion of multiple voices, Just as summer was ending, one or more of my characters—Celie, Shug, Albert, Sofia, or Harpo—would come for a visit. We would sit wherever I was, and

45 talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were of course, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the beginning. Things that made me sad often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say. Or you think Reagan’s bad you ought’ve seen some of the rednecks us come up under. (p. 359) George Bernard Shaw once said that after he created the characters of his plays “they took over and made their own lives.” (Watkins, 2000, p. 118) Eudora Welty described in One Writer’s Beginnings, “Ever since I was first read to then started reading to myself there has never been a line that I didn’t hear spoken to me.” (p. 19) Czeslaw Milosz (1978) wrote in his poem, “Ars Poetica,” The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

And Walt Whitman wrote in his 1847 journal, “I cannot understand the mystery but/I am always conscious of myself as two—as my soul and I.” Later, in “Song of Myself,” he wrote Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large I contain multitudes.) (Whitman, 1996, p. 246) James Thurber’s famous character Walter Mitty made daydreaming a recognized part of our culture. While the image of Walter Mitty is often invoked to ridicule a person for his grandiosity, it can also be a testimony to the capacity for dreams to allow one to escape and take a “psychic vacation.” (Morgan & Skovholt, 1977, p. 186) Inner dialogues are not always encouraging. In fact they often make a person feel badly about himself. In Understanding Writing Blocks Keith Hjortshoj (2001) explored the role of a more pernicious inner dialogue:

46 Paul had to recover from a writer’s worst nightmare: a critical reader he admired, trusted and wanted very much to please who was actually looking over his shoulder . . . speaking . . . reminding him of his incompetence . . . thus in adulthood when this person wasn’t there . . . he was still there . . . he had so successfully imbibed of his father’s presence. (p. 17) My assumption is that an internal dialogic process is used as ubiquitously by artists involved in the plastic arts as it is by artists who use the written word.

Philosophy and Religion Throughout history, leaders in philosophy and religion deeply believed in and wrote about spirit and internal relationships. For example, Martin Buber (1947/1961) said that Plato called thinking the “voiceless colloquy of the soul with itself.” (p. 45) Nietzsche (1886/1966) claimed that the self was best described as “a commonwealth . . . a social structure composed of many souls.” (p. 26) He used the analogy that people are no more singular selves than Great Britain is a singular people. The self, he argued, is an ensemble, propelled by habits and desires that inhabit the same body but lack an overall integrating function. He emphatically rejected the Cartesian concept “‘I think, therefore I Am’ because there is no I that summons thoughts. Instead a thought comes when ‘it wishes, not when ‘I’ wish.” (p. 24) He believed that internal dialogue developed as a result of dialogues with other people. In other words, one’s internal dialogue is richer the more one internalizes many social interactions.

More recently, the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1985, 1990) proposed that human beings create an understanding of themselves through dialogue. In his examination of the works of Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin (1929/1985) formulated the premise that human consciousness is best described as an ongoing series of dialogues

47 between distinct voices or internal positions. These dialogues are between opposing and separate perspectives that cannot be nicely synthesized into one viewpoint. In The Dialogic Imagination (1981) Bakhtin described how voices interanimate each other. He also observed that dialogues were conducted not only between two or more real or internal people, but, because language is an inheritance given to us by our culture, once a person learns a language each word he utters automatically places him into the sphere of social dialogue. If we accept the notion that language is inherently social in its origin, monologues must be recognized as being dialogic. In addition, Bakhtin explained, inner monologues are often cast in the form of a dialogue between an internal addressor and an internal addressee. The Russian poet Mandelstam (1979) echoed this with his claim that poems are inherently dialogic in that they are always addressed to a secret listener. What was uncanny to Bakhtin was not the existence of inner dialogue but what made one inner voice privileged over another. (Wertsch, 1991, p. 13) The writings of Plato, Bakhtin, Nietzsche, and Mandelstam all support my premise that the inner life of artists is packed with social dialogic elements.

Religious discourse has also addressed the role of internal dialogues. In early Islam it was common practice for people to conduct conversations with their soul.

Henry Corbin (1969), in Creative Imagination and the Sufism of Ibn ′Arabi, studied the Persian mystics of the 10th and 11th centuries. “Imaginal dialogues” between the mystics and their angels formed the organizing method they used to come to know the Lord. Prayer was experienced as “a dialogue in which the two parties continually exchange roles.” (p. 269) In Ibn ′Arabi’s system, man and God co-created one another, and angels acted as the messenger between the two. Corbin asserted that to question the

48 verisimilitude of this dialogue created a false distinction between the real and imaginary.

It is thought that through the imaginal the truer nature of the real is manifested . . . reverie and creative imagination . . . are creative of alternate realities, of symbolic and metaphorical realities there can develop a metaphorical way of thinking, a reflection between mundane and imaginal realities that enrich them both. (pp. 77-79) In many religions visions have been the means by which a person gained access to the supernatural. Both because a vision is a form of communication and because visions often take the form of an angel or Deity speaking or appearing to a person, I consider them to often be a form of an inner dialogue. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and St. Ignatius (1491-1556) both grappled with the question of how to distinguish the source of visions. “Were they the effect of an infirm mind, an alliance with the devil or a valuable means of access to God and His angels?” (Watkins, 2000, p. 137) Despite their questions both theologians were in agreement that visions could be real. As recently as 1977 Father Andrew Greeley reported that 20% of the American public reported having “quasi mystical visions.” (Morgan & Skovholt, 1977, p. 39) In the 20th century the theologian Martin Buber discussed the transformation of relationships from I-It to I-Thou. For those in the psychoanalytic community it is interesting to note that the differentiations he cited between these two relationships closely parallel Donald Winnicott’s distinctions between object relating and object usage. According to Buber’s definition the I-It relationship involves a subject relating to the other solely on the basis of whether the other can be of use to him. In contrast, the I-Thou relationship embraces the independent I of the other. The subject is respectful of the other’s capacity for autonomous thought and behavior and enjoys the

49 other because of a reciprocal sense of connection. These two forms of relating, Buber explained, are not limited to one’s relationship to God but affect how a person relates to other people and to nature and ideas. In his writings he even used the concept of “dialogic thought” (Watkins, 2000, p. 129) in reference to the nature of I-Thou relationships. From this brief sketch it is clear that for many centuries the traditions of religion and philosophy have intellectually pondered the importance of inner dialogue.

Anthropology and Religion Anthropological studies of non-Judeo-Christian societies confirm the widespread acceptance of inner voices. “A study of non western social organizations that excludes spirit relationships must be regarded as incomplete.” (Caughey, 1984, p.

21) For example, on the islands of Micronesia and for Pakistani Sufis, supernatural spirits are part of normal conversations and directly influence daily and social decisions. (p. 38) Melford Spiro’s (1952) study of the island of Ifaluk led him to conclude that the population on the island projected their hostility and aggressiveness onto spirits. He contended that using these spirits to contain disturbing sentiments that rightfully emanated from the population itself, functioned to keep the social system intact. The belief system of the Ogalala Sioux celebrates the potency of one’s inner life.

In 1932 the teachings of Black Elk, as transcribed by John G. Neihardt (Flaming Arrow), were published as Black Elk Speaks. Black Elk described how visions of wise men were sought after, respected, and used as a means to guide daily life in the Sioux culture. It is probable that some of these visions included verbal messages and conversations between the wise men and the vision.

50 In our culture, outside many people’s belief in God, authority is given to that which is considered logical, factual, or scientific. This position presupposes a dialectical opposition between what is real and what is imagined, an opposition that other societies never manufactured and one that recently some Western thinkers have begun to renounce, The highly abstract abstrusely mathematical nature of the key concepts of modern physics, impossible to grasp in any direct, intuitive fashion—concepts such as curved space/time continua, antimatter, and hyper dimensionality— removes science from the direct, experiential grasp of the average person, making it more like the religion than the science of Freud’s day. . .. In Freud’s time it “was easy to contrast the religious worldview, embracing and enshrining the mysterious and the unknown, with the scientific worldview, illuminating dark corners and relentlessly sweeping away the cobwebs of primitive ignorance.” (Mitchell, 1993, p. 20)

Developmental Psychology We all know children who sit with their toys by themselves or with friends and make up stories with imaginary characters. We say they are “playing” and consider it to be normal behavior. Developmental psychologists and cognitive researchers who write and think about children often speculate that fantasy play performs the function of helping the child practice the skills she will need as an adult. (Gross, 1901; Mead, 1936; Slama-Cazacu, 1976)

Piaget The renowned child psychologist Jean Piaget believed that a young child imitated the sounds and bodily movements of his or her parents in an attempt to “accommodate” to external life. By this playful action, Piaget maintained, the child

51 slowly integrated the complex mechanisms of the external world. Implicit in his view was the notion that this playful imitation, while useful, was a deformed and subordinate form of reality. (1962, p. 339) In his investigation of the development of language and formal operational thought, Piaget noted that the developmental trajectory of a person’s capacity to use language went from being egocentric to developing the ability to “decenter.” He defined egocentric speech as being that in which a person does not take into account to whom he is talking or if that person is even listening.

He talks either for himself or for the pleasure of associating anyone who happens to be there with the activity of the moment. This talk is egocentric partly because the child speaks only about himself but chiefly because he does not attempt to place himself at the point of view of his hearer. (p. 32) Piaget considered self-talk or monologues as a form of egocentric talk. He conceded that there is pleasure in self-talking and that inner monologues can help give a child the confidence to eventually speak his mind. However, in Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (1962), he warned that encouraging a child to talk to imaginary people could foreclose the child’s chance to learn how to make concessions and accommodations when dealing with real people. Piaget feared the practice of self-talk would extend a person’s illusion that she could control the world. To his mind inner monologues were “a primitive and infantile function of language . . . . We shall naturally see the gradual disappearance as we pass from early childhood to the adult stage.” (p. 40) Adults who persisted in engaging in such “imaginal dialogues” were “of a puerile disposition certain hysterical subjects, if hysterical can be described as the survival of infantile characteristics.” (p. 40) In Piaget’s world-view, egocentric speech was primitive behavior that one discarded as an adult.

52 Goffman The sociologist Erving Goffman, who in many ways championed the existence of an inner life, also worried that speaking to an imaginary other was a threat to interpersonal relations. Initially, he contended, it was normal for a young child to use imaginal figures, however “it was developmentally normative that as a person becomes better equipped to handle reality, the imaginal person is in the end experienced and treated merely as thought, ideas, or information.” (1981, p. 29) The problem he feared was that those who retained a connection to their inner imaginal figures would do so in lieu of relating to real people. Roy Schafer (1965) duplicated this fear when he wrote, “People who are predisposed to create introjects and other presences and to experience them repeatedly are seen as dominated by infantile fixations . . . and as turning away from external object relations to fantasy.” (p. 65)

Vygotsky L. S. Vygotsky, the famous Russian cognitive theorist, believed that play helped a child satisfy needs that reality could not gratify. He proposed that it performed a selfregulating function. (Wertsch, 1981, p. 40) He went on to note “even when we turn to mental internal processes their nature remains quasi social. In their own private sphere, human beings retain the function of social interaction.” (Wertsch, 1981, p. 164) This position affirms my thesis. However, despite Vygotsky’s evaluation that monologues were social in content and “complex formulations; [because] the linguistic elaboration can be attended to leisurely and consciously,” (1962, p. 144) he was also negatively ambivalent about monologues. He worried that because internal monologues

53 were rehearsed, they were an inferior method in helping a person learn how to cope with the quotidian of an everyday spontaneous social life.

Taylor Many parents also express mixed feelings about their children’s inner life.

Initially many parents delight in their children’s make believe play with dolls and trucks, yet if this form of play continues past their children’s early years they become anxious. They may fret that this means their child can’t distinguish reality from fiction.

Some parents worry that if their children talk to a pretend friend this is equivalent to lying. Taylor (1999) described several fundamentalist Christians who worried that “imaginary companions” were the anti-Christ. Taylor quoted one extremely religious person as saying “Play is a potential threat to the cohesion of the group because of its association with individual freedom.” (p. 50) Ironically, this fundamentalist’s observations might have been close to the truth. Studies confirm that children whose parents support fantasy are more apt to develop an inquisitive imaginary life than those children whose parents eschew such behavior. (p. 30) To try out new and different activities one must have the capacity to imagine them.

Despite these fears it is curious that, as Marjorie Taylor said, “Imaginary companions often get bad press.” (1999, p. 3) Why do so many parents, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists believe that the imaginary is a pursuit that almost necessarily excludes the real world and must be outgrown? What do they think happens to a child’s inner fantasy world as he grows older? Is Peter Pan the only one allowed to keep Tinker Bell and his magical world? Erving Goffman and Marjorie Taylor

54 separately concurred that the disappearance of a child’s tendency to talk out loud to himself was not evidence that developmentally he no longer wanted or needed imaginary relationships. Instead it was the developmental result of becoming socially aware that such behavior is considered odd. In actuality, they claimed a child chooses to dialogue internally or to repress or disguise this form of playfulness. “Our imagination is not discarded after we toss away our last teddy bear; it makes up our worries and dreams.” (Watkins, 1976, p. 57) It is important to note that the imagination is not a static capacity. A preschooler’s imagination differs greatly from that of an adolescent or an adult. An adult’s imagination transcends the logical world and allows the fantastical whereas the child’s imagination has not reached the capacity to be rational. This dissertation focuses on studying the imagination of adults.

Positive Views of Imaginary Dialogue There is another side of the dialectical debate on the role of the imaginary that respects and lauds the existence of a person’s inner world.

Singer Starting in the 1960s Jerome Singer began studying daydreams. In The Inner World of Daydreaming (1975), he reported, “up to one half of all children report an imaginary playmate with whom they talk and play.” (p. 135) He found that all of the subjects in his studies indicated that they daydreamed. Interestingly, many of the respondents had not been aware that they did it until it was pointed out and named.

55 Singer identified a type of daydream in which the daydreamer and a real or fictional character pursue a goal. For children, in particular, some of these stories are acted out with toys or drawings. For most others these daydreams take the shape of an inner dialogue.

When I am alone in a new city or traveling in a place where I have never been to before, I will sometimes find myself carrying on an internal communication to my wife or a friend, describing various aspects of the scenery or interpreting sights, sounds, or customs . . . . Many people in psychoanalysis . . . carry on a kind of dialogue with their analyst in the interim between sessions as a means of identifying with him, looking at things through his eyes, or perhaps training themselves to be more sensitive in the psychological nuances of social interaction. (1975, pp. 33-34)

Schaefer Charles Schaefer (1975) conducted a study in which he contrasted 400 adolescents who had been categorized by their schools as being creative with 400 students who were categorized as being less creative. Out of these 800 students, 140 reported having an imaginary companion; 90 of the 140 students who had an imaginary companion were the creative adolescents. Marjorie Taylor (1999) studied 152 children aged 3 and 4 years old. She found that “28% of preschool children create imaginary companions.” (p. 32)

Goffman Erving Goffman (1981), argued in Forms of Talk that “people . . . rehearse or relive a run-in with someone, speak to ourselves judgmentally about our own doings . . . . We address a remark to someone who isn’t present to receive it.” (p. 79) Goffman provided an example of such self-talk: “You are giving a talk and your notes are

56 disorganized. In front of the audience you begin self-talk, ‘Oh, my, they were here just a minute ago . . . now why can’t you find them. . . Just a minute . . . be calm.’” (p. 92) Behavior like this is ubiquitous, it happens all the time, yet we rarely notice it. “Most people vaguely recognize that they daydream a lot but few pay attention.” (1963, p.

122)

Walton Kendall Walton (1990) reasoned that there existed a direct line between children’s play with toys and adults’ immersion in movies and novels. In addition, roleplaying games and video games are acceptable forms in which adolescents and adults can admit to having an imaginary companion. Judeo-Christian religions recognize and accept the importance of the dialogue people conduct between God or Jesus and themselves. For an atheist, such a dialogue, be it in the form of a prayer or thought, must be perceived as a stellar example of a dialogue with an invisible imaginary companion.

Watkins In Invisible Guests, first published in 1986, Mary Watkins exquisitely predicted and described the nuances of this phenomenon that I wish to explore. Her optimistic poetic belief in the richness of “imaginal dialogues” has informed this dissertation. She named this phenomenon “imaginal dialogues” and lauded the imagination’s ability to allow a person to situate himself within a social construct even when to the

57 undiscerning eye he seems isolated. She went on to state that the capacity to use one’s empathic capacities to invent and imagine other people’s point of view allows any person, most certainly an artist, the opportunity to expand and dream past the narrow confines of already known patterns of behavior and thought. In her books (1976, 2000), Watkins collapsed the hierarchical division between the real and the imaginary.

“Through the imaginal the truer nature of the real is manifested.” (2000, p. 77) She refused to oppose the two, and steadfastly would not pathologize what she called imaginal guests. She directly refuted Sigmund Freud’s assertion that all imaginary others are distorted or cleaned up versions of parental figures. She declared such thinking reductionistic. She asserted that imaginal figures often possessed their own unique qualities because the imagination has its own sources of motivation and realities. It is not sworn only to duplicate the past: our ability to create alternative realities, Watkins believed, is “a triumph of freedom.” (2000, p. 53) She reminded us, “If we open up reality to include the poetic, the dramatic, and the spiritual, the development of our relations with imaginal figures can no longer be confined to our customary notions.” (2000, p. 78)

Mead In keeping with this position, the sociologist George Herbert Mead (1934) believed that internal to each person there exist many distinct selves who function to accommodate the numerous social roles each person plays. He did not describe these multiple roles as being pathological; rather he considered them to be healthy components of one’s identity.

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Hermans and Gregg In the 1990s H. K. Hermans began to systematically research the notion of the self as being the interaction of internal voices. He concluded that an individual creates a sense of coherency in this internal dialogue by adhering to a dialectical worldview. He observed when he analyzed his research interviews, that when a person spoke over time self positions spontaneously changed so that a dominant opinion a person voiced would take a back seat and a previously neglected non dominant point of view would become prominent and articulated. He concluded that this finding demonstrated the self is constantly in flux, without a singular core or “circus master.” (1996) G. S. Gregg in The Journal of Personality (1995) analyzed semi-structured interviews, and he too noticed that people constantly shifted their points of view. Both Hermans and Gregg extrapolated that a healthy internal dialogue allowed for a process in which initially one position captures authority, becomes more thoroughly represented until eventually, as the process proceeds, other points of view shift into one’s consciousness and ascend to center stage. A sense of unity within oneself, they contended, was based on an awareness and capacity to conduct an ongoing internal conversation with one’s different internal self-positions.

Synthesis If we accept the notion that self-coherence is built, in part, through an ongoing internal dialogue, it is probable that many artists use an internal dialogue as part of their process of creating a coherent multifaceted identity for each object of art. The idea of

59 self-talk within artists, while not widely circulated, is not just my own and Gregg’s and Hermans’s invention. In The Lives of Muses Francine Prose (2002) presumed that muses, mentors, and collaborators are not only real but “often is the person with whom the artist has the animated and imaginary conversations, the interior dialogues we all conduct, most commonly with someone we can not get out of our mind.” (p. 17) In a documentary following Fellini’s life, recently released to video, Fellini referred to how a regular part of his film making process included having imaginary conversations with Picasso at times in which he felt overwhelmed.

Hermans and Gregg concluded that the biggest obstacle to a person was when she experienced disruptions in her inner dialogue. They described the ways in which these inner dialogues can be inhibited. For example, one may be unable to allow certain self-positions a chance to be voiced because the ideas are antithetical to idealistic notions one holds onto about oneself or the world. Omitting these thoughts inhibits the artist from considering art topics or images that might infer such ideas. This inhibition could very likely contribute to stifling the scope of one’s creative endeavors. Using Hermans’ logic, it is likely that art making is facilitated if an artist has the capacity to interact with a variety of views and considerations concerning the art object. Having the capacity to use an internal conversation that is fluid and democratic (i.e., about formal considerations such as what colors, styles, or images to use, along with more substantive concerns such as choosing what issues to explore) helps creativity.

It is immensely unfortunate that adults’ imaginations are stigmatized and pathologized. Our imagination’s ability to conjure up the memory of the calming influence of someone from our past provides us with the tools necessary to learn how to

60 self-soothe. As William James, the psychologist, suggested, “Enjoyment of one’s thought processes may indeed serve as a useful buffer against periods of reduced sensory input, confinement or social isolation.” (Singer, 1966, p. 42) Our imaginations are also critical because they teach us how to put ourselves in other people’s shoes which is necessary if we want to understand their ways of acting in the world. This is an essential capacity to have if one wishes to create and sustain intimate relationships.

Establishing and maintaining intimate relationships is hardly a primitive capability.

Donald Winnicott tackled the idea of the primitive in his usual paradoxical manner. He proposed that a person’s emotional integrity came from his ability to engage with his more primitive parts, “through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive. We are poor indeed if we are only sane.” (Winnicott, 1975, p. 151) We constantly slide back and forth between the “imaginal” and the real. It is clear that for most people our days are full of an inner life made up of unrecognized encounters with imaginary others: When we sleep our dreams are peppered with people. During the day we regularly drift off and our minds wander to images, plans for the future, conversations we have had or plan to have, sexual fantasies, and so on. We identify with or argue about characters on television. We teach our children to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. It is not uncommon for preadolescent boys and girls to imagine playing professional baseball, basketball, or football games as they throw basketballs at hoops or play computer games by themselves. Men and women often imagine romantic trysts, complete with conversations and lovemaking. Our inner life is fertile with other people, often unbeknownst to us.

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The Myth of the Artist In this last section I would like to engage with the popular image of the artist as being an isolated, bizarre genius removed from the “common throng.” This myth has long enjoyed popularity in the media and in the art world. The idea of genius originated in early Roman times. This notion was embellished and expanded to include the notion of the heroic but alienated artist. Plato believed certain artists (poets) were endowed like prophets and priestesses with the capacity to be possessed by divine ecstasy. His student Aristotle added to this portrait when he spoke of “the inner voice of the artist, the inspiration of the divine.” (Rank, 1959, p. 126) In Problemata, Aristotle promoted the idea that “All extraordinary men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts are evidently melancholic . . . melancholic meaning ‘brooding, solitary, creative.’”(Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963, p. 102) In Born under Saturn, a text about artists, the Wittkowers quoted Leon Battista Alberti, who in 1436 declared in On Painting that “the artist should be divorced from the rank and file of normal people.”

(1956, p.115) Vasari’s famous biography of artists, written during the Renaissance in 1550, repeatedly revisited the topic of how the different artists he described were melancholic and solitary by nature. In fact, in the 1500s, “Terminal qualities associated with melancholy . . . acquired a certain snob value. Even moderately gifted men were categorized as saturnine and conversely, no outstanding intellectual or artistic achievement was believed possible unless its author was melancholic.” (Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963, p. 104) According to Otto Rank (1919), in his classic text, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, during the Renaissance, along with being melancholic, the artist was endowed

62 with supernatural qualities. It was during the Renaissance that the practice of putting the name of the artist on the piece of art they created began. This practice allowed individual artists to be known as the creators of their art, which since during the Renaissance art depicted stories from the Bible, created the conditions, according to Otto Rank, for “a time when the artist did play the part of the religious hero on earth being the creative representative of a humanized God.” (1919, p. 122) Not only were individual artists named and venerated but also Vasari’s flowery biography about the artists of the Renaissance was widely circulated and helped create and promulgate the notion that artists were magnificent. Kris and Kurz (1979), in Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, elaborated upon the stereotypes of the artist that multiplied during the Renaissance. Such notions as “the artist is dead to the world when he is engaged in his art . . . . The inner voice of the artist is the inspiration of the divine” (p. 127) were accepted as truth. The idea of the artist as being a genius, “as being elevated above the rest of mankind,” (Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963, p. 95) was nourished.

Renaissance texts described artists as being unschooled in the ways of culture, yet possessing raw genius. This narrative mirrors formulaic stories of how other heroes, such as Oedipus and Moses, were discovered living humble peasant lives. The predominant similarity being a repetition of the cliché that talent and heroic qualities are born within an individual and are not the product of hard work. (Kris & Kris, 1979, p. 26) In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant stated that, “the metaphor of God as an artist possessed an inherent cogency.” (Kant, 1929, p.522)

63 Modernity also embraced this myth. As quoted earlier, Jung voiced the paradoxical view of the artist as being the lone person capable of capturing the essence of the general population. So that “as an artist he is ‘man’ that is—he is ‘collective man’ a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.” (Jung, 1922, p.104) In The Wound and the Bow Edmund Wilson (1954) invoked this stereotype using the concept of the genius as being the modern equivalent of God. Wilson concluded that the artist was a mad genius, “genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may often be inextricably bound up together.” (p. 43) As Joan Acocella (2004) pointed out, in 1947, the Partisan Review ran a now much quoted essay, “Writers and Madness,” by William Barrett. In this essay Barrett claimed that the modern writer was by nature estranged from the falseness of the world he lived in. To immunize himself against this falseness, the artist immersed himself in his unconscious, which Barrett claimed pushed the artist toward insanity. The challenge, he said, was to go as close as possible without crossing over.

These stereotypes were not just pushed onto artists; many artists embraced these descriptions. Margaret Brenman-Gibson (1976) argued that artists believed they could immortalize themselves as mini-gods capable of creating and destroying the world.

In contradiction to this romantic myth of the morose yet godlike artist, there simultaneously exists another less romanticized description of artists that positions artists as needing the support of others. Feminism has established a tradition of biographies whose goal is to show how many great artists were influenced by women: Carole Seymour-Jones’s (2002) Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius;

64 Brenda Maddox’s (1988) Nora (Nora Barnacle Joyce was the prime inspiration for James Joyce’s work); and Ann Saddlemyer’s (2002) Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats (Yeats’s wife regularly served as the medium through whom he reached into the spirit world that he mined for material for his work). Francine Prose’s (2002) The Lives of the Muses contemplated the relationship between such artists as Lewis Carroll and the child Alice Liddell, and Lou Andreas-Salome’s relationships with Rilke, Nietzsche, and Freud. All these books propose that women were behind the successes of these great artists. While the number of women who served as muses for men far outnumbers the reverse, it can also be noted that famous female writers such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf depended upon their husbands to edit, nurse, and attend to them. This is described in Phyllis Rose’s (1983) Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. More sarcastic but notable are books that point to artists’ relationship with stimulants. Tom Dardis’s (1989) The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer is a fine example.

Psychoanalytic literature often tends to write ambivalently about the artist’s use of mentors. Throughout their careers the psychoanalyst John Gedo and his wife, the art historian Mary Gedo, have written psychological studies concerning artists. They have held varied positions about the quality of relationships artists conduct with other people. At first they voiced a benign and benevolent stance toward an artist’s relationships with others. In 1992 they wrote of the need many artists had for what they described as “a secret sharer,” (pp. 191-192) a term they borrowed from the writer Joseph Conrad. They extrapolated the idea from Conrad that there existed “The requirement of certain individuals for a silent double whose availability enables them to

65 function at their best.” (p. 10) This position, in line with self-psychology, looked upon the need for a “secret sharer” as a healthy need.

However, in 1995 John Gedo challenged the purity of the role of “the secret sharer” when he posited, “Creative persons often exploit their friends.” (p. 122) Before Gedo, Laurence Hatterer (1965) also had this ambivalent position, pointing out that many artists, being unable to make a living wage, depend on the economic kindness of others. In addition, Hatterer asserted, they needed at least one emotionally supportive person in their lives. Without this person’s approval, he claimed, an artist would become completely blocked. (p. 128) This economic and psychological dependency he worried, rather than producing heroes, tended to keep many artists in a perpetual childlike state, enhancing the possibility of establishing a sadomasochistic bond with their benefactors. The relationship between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo is often used to illustrate this point. Biographers Lubin (1972) and Nagera (1967) argued that Vincent Van Gogh had a symbiotic dependence upon the emotional and financial largesse of his brother. When it was suspended, Van Gogh could not go on living. John Gedo differed with that conclusion: “Theo’s mental collapse after Vincent’s death . . . the timing of his collapse raises the likelihood that Vincent had secured his brother’s integration throughout their relationship.” (1995, p. 135) In either case the authors believed that the relationship between the two was essential for both to survive.

Otto Rank suggested a similar idea when he stated for an artist, “actual production is only possible with the aid of a concrete muse.” (1953, p. 152) He also argued the paradoxical point that an artist may “believe himself to be an individual raised above the crowd . . . and have rooted himself in self-sufficient isolation but this

66 same artist is dependent upon ‘the community’ for recognition.” (1953, p. 151) Heinz Kohut (1976) reasoned that the development of psychoanalysis was made possible because of Freud’s psychological merger with his associate William Fleiss, whose assurances provided Freud with the mental stamina to persevere with his controversial investigations.

Artists themselves often speak of their need for mentors. Picasso acknowledged that he could never have developed Cubism alone, that it was an achievement made possible by “experiencing a psychological twinship with Braque.” (Gedo & Gedo, 1992, p. 119) Joseph Conrad himself, according to Bernard Meyer’s biography, maintained that Conrad’s portrayal of the need for a “silent double” in his novella The Secret Sharer was written when Conrad’s close relationship with the writer Ford Maddox Ford was disintegrating.

Another relationship that exists is when artists use their art objects to speak with one another. The term intertextuality, which became popular in the 1990s, is a term that describes this phenomenon. Culler (1997) defined intertexuality in the following way: Recent theorists have argued that works are made out of other works: made possible by prior works, which they take up, repeat, challenge, transform. This notion sometimes goes by the fancy name of “intertextuality.” A work exists between and among other texts, through its relations to them. To read something as literature is to consider it as a linguistic event that has meaning in relation to other discourses: for example, as a poem that plays on possibilities created by other poems or as a novel that puts on stage and criticizes the political rhetoric of its day. (p. 35) An art object can be looked at as a reflection of the fact that the artist had read and seen a “library” of philosophical and art related treatises and art objects. One could say the artist is in a dialogue with other people’s art. This idea is reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s (1973) thoughts concerning the “anxiety of influence.” In the 1970s Bloom

67 studied the relations between past and present texts and their authors. His premise ran counter to the existing emphasis “that regards literary influence as a benign, even reverential endorsement of humanism: the ongoing project to transform the world into image and likeness of human beings.” (Lentricchia & McLaughlin, 1990, p. 186) Bloom ascribed the appearance in the post-Enlightenment period of a “psychological imperative . . . (to have) named something first, hence, to ‘sin against continuity.’”

(1973, p. 78) He ascribed this need as evolving from the Freudian Oedipal crisis.

The poet locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating “precursor” will seek to disarm (the latter’s) strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursors poem; in this sense, all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as “misreading of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. (Eagleton, 1983, p. 183) Bloom’s Freudian interpretation as to what animates the creative process highlights the possibility that both the desire to follow in reverence and the desire to break from the past are worked on by an artist in the form of a conscious and unconscious internal dialogue with his predecessors.

Other examples of the need for relationships on the part of artists can be seen in the popular press. A New Yorker article about the conceptual artist Cattelan described the artist thus: He is constantly on the phone with one or another of his international band of friends and collaborators . . . who provide counsel, criticism and other unpaid services . . . . Gioni . . . has often acted as Cattelan’s spokesman giving interviews to people who think they are talking to the artist . . . . Cattelan refers to all this interaction as a family business, when discussing his work, he almost always uses the plural pronoun “we” instead of “I” and he often says that, “without the others, ‘I am nothing.’” (Tomkins, 2004, p. 87) When I wrote this in early October of 2004 the Chicago Cultural Center was curating a show that celebrated and discussed the collaborative work process of such

68 groups as the Chou brothers, Temporary Services, and Crystal. At the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago the artists Robert Davis and Michael Langlois were showing their body of work that consists of canvases on which they had both painted.

Even Vogue magazine featured an article that venerated The idea that’s been growing apace in fashion: designers collaborating with other designers—by either selling one another’s clothes or actually creating together. It’s a riposte to the received wisdom that a designer is an auteur-like figure, someone whose individual creativity and vision should never be compared and contrasted with that of his contemporaries. (Holgate, October 2004, pp. 222, 224) If one examines the strength of the role of relationships from a radically different position, psychoanalytically informed theoreticians have often claimed that unconsciously artists relate to their art objects as if they are objects in the psychoanalytic sense of the word. Winnicott (1967) believed that for an artist, artmaking was akin to creating an idealized object (art) somewhat distinct but endowed with magic and parts of one’s self, a cherished possession akin to Winnicott’s transitional object.

Ehrenzweig emphasized how the artist’s capability to tolerate the lack of perfection in himself or herself was projected onto his or her art. (1971, p. 38) He declared that the artist must allow the art object to become something different than what the author intended it to be. In his words, an artist must be able to tolerate the “otherness” (Ehrenzweig, 1971, p. 89) of the art object. Margaret Brenman-Gibson (1976) echoed this idea and added that the manner in which the artist replayed past object relations in his art making process was not just demonstrated in the artist’s feeling about the art object, but was also evident in the way the artist went about the process of creating it. She believed that artists became sterile when they could not

69 tolerate their internal ambivalences and conflicts that accompanied their relationship to the object they were both creating and recreating. Joyce McDougall (1995) agreed with this when she described the creative person as being driven by the desire to both fuse with and destroy the medium of expression (paint, words, steel, iron). She asserted that the violent and adoring relationships artists develop toward their art objects are the result of the internalization of very ambivalent relationships with their early important objects, which is then recreated in their relationship to the art they create. Along these lines, in The Power of Form, Gilbert J. Rose (1980) postulated that contrary to Kris’s position that art making is a regression, art was actually an effort to achieve perfection through one’s work in lieu of attaining it in oneself. Like the “secret sharer” concept as authored by Gedo, the artist and the artist’s activity are fused and can bear on the artist’s capacity to simultaneously employ primary and secondary thinking. G. J. Rose believed that an artist comprehends the object as “an idealized representation of the workings of one’s own mind.” (1980, p. 203) In this dissertation I maintain that the need to connect is evidenced throughout the artistic process. We can find in psychoanalytic literature examinations of the role of real mentors and of the role unconscious object relations play during the creative process. There has also been a healthy discussion in the literature describing how artists unconsciously anthropomorphize the art objects they create. What I am bringing to this exchange is an elaboration of a less discussed phenomenon existing somewhere between real and unconscious relationships: that of internal dialogues. I suspected that those artists who have imaginary internal discussions are often only semiconsciously

70 aware of doing it. By studying this phenomenon I was able to illuminate a new understanding of the experience of many artists.

71

CHAPTER IV

RESEARCH STRATEGY

Type of Study and Design The primary focus of this research was to explore the subjective meaning artists gave to the activity of conducting an internal dialogue while they created their art. I used Denzin’s (2001) interpretive interactionist approach. No prior research existed linking internal dialogue to the creative process, so this study was exploratory and qualitative in nature and potentially theory forming.

Scope of Study This was an exploratory study in which twenty-six artists participated.

Setting In most cases I met with the artists in their studio or home. I met with two artists in a coffee shop. Several artists requested that we meet at my home in Chicago.

Usually I provided a snack or lunch. Many of the participants surprised me and had treats, and in several cases a meal prepared. I audio taped each interview, took extensive field notes, and wrote memos to myself.

72 Population and Sampling In order to secure a sample, I asked several friends who are artists to recommend other subjects for the study. I chose not to include personal friends in the sample. The coordinator of a Chicago based art organization (the Chicago Artists Coalition) was kind enough to refer me to five artists, who eventually participated in the study. Several of these artists, in turn, referred me to other participants. As an alumnus of the School of the Art Institute, I was allowed to send e-mail to the faculty asking for participants. This brought one more participant. I went to a reading of Chicago based published writers at Quimby’s Bookstore and found two writers willing to be interviewed.

I had intended to interview six to ten artists in a series of 1- to 2-hour interviews. I chose, instead, to enhance the verisimilitude of the research by interviewing 26 artists. I intentionally met with artists who used a wide variety of different mediums. I purposely met with more painters, because they use a visual vocabulary, and more writers who use language to see if there would be a sharp difference in the quality of their internal dialogue. Each participant brought his or her own twist to the conceit and I believe I could have continued the investigation indefinitely. I determined that I had interviewed a sufficient number of artists for the study, using an approximation of the grounded theory principle that when I received no significant new information I would stop.

I validated the material by member checking. This entailed giving each participating artist a copy of his or her transcribed interview that they reviewed and reflected upon in preparation for the subsequent interview(s). Each participating artist

73 signed a consent form allowing me to use the data gleaned from their responses, in a disguised form, in my dissertation.

Sources and Nature of Data I audio taped interviews, took thorough field notes, and wrote memos to myself.

In every case, I was able to experience their artwork either by reading their books or going to their studios, concerts, performances or gallery openings. To insure that their work stayed in my mind I took photographs and asked them for postcards of their previous gallery openings. If they were writers, I bought copies of what they had written.

I considered direct experience with the subjects’ art to be important for three primary reasons. First, I was genuinely interested in seeing their work. Second, I believed that there was a higher likelihood that artists would open up to me because I demonstrated that interest. Third, by viewing the subject matter and style of their work in conjunction with a discussion of their use of an inner dialogue in their creative process, issues pertinent to the dissertation surfaced and connections were made that I would not have captured if I depended solely upon our meetings. I did not include or exclude any artist based on whether or not I liked their art. The criteria I used to include an artist were the ones I had established in my proposal.

Data Collection Methods and Instruments The data was narrative in nature and was conducted by interactive, open-ended, audio taped interviews that were subsequently transcribed. I would start off with

74 standard questions, such as: “I am interested in the creative process and I’m guessing that artists often think of images and conversations with people while they are working.

Does anything like that come to mind for you? Does it differ during different phases of the work?”

I found myself using the words “dialogue, discussion, conversation, inner voices, internal relationships, polylogue and imaginary friends” interchangeably, as did the participants. As the interviews proceeded, I modified my questions in order to investigate new issues that emerged. In keeping with my central thesis that an internal dialogic process is often essential to the creative process and in accordance with the premise of narrative theory and relational psychoanalytic theory, that a dialogue between patient and therapist, based on mutual recognition, has a profound impact on the patient, I determined that a dialogic process between the artists and myself would be fruitful in the creation of my dissertation. To down play the role of myself as being an expert, I freely reacted and included my own thoughts and questions in many of the interviews. I anticipated including my reactions, so I preserved them by taking thorough field notes and memos. I met with my advisors to discuss my own thought processes and associations. The end product is a joint construction of the respondents’ thoughts, my own thoughts and those of my advisors. For purposes of confidentiality, I gave each audio-tape and transcript a code name known only to me except in the case of the eleven people I described in detail. I asked them to provide me with their code names. I erased the tapes after comparing the transcription against the tape for errors during transcription.

75 Data Analysis Procedure I used Denzin’s (1989) hermeneutically informed narrative approach of interpretive interactionism to analyze the story driven data I collected. The history and discipline of the investigation of language and storytelling has been a matter of intellectual inquiry beginning as early as Aristotle. My understanding of narrative theory is based on the polylogue—multiple interacting dialogues—that began in the early 1900s when de Saussure initiated a movement of critical inquiry that he named semiotics. According to Perron (1994), semiotics is The domain of investigation that explores the nature and function of signs as well as the systems and processes underlying signification, expression, representation and communication. As can be demonstrated from numerous cultural traces (verbal, pictorial, plastic, spatial artifacts, etc.), the role of signs in human life has been an ongoing concern over the ages. (p. 658) In plain language, semiotic theorists try to understand the underlying significance of the products of semiotics, the ingredients of signs, including such things as speech, texts, artwork, and meaningful action. With the birth of semiotics, the traditional epistemological concern as to how propositions related to the so called real world, was superseded by an investigation that saw language as not simply a tool for communicating or mirroring back what is called reality. Instead, language itself was understood to function as an important formative part of reality. The anthropologist Merleau-Ponty viewed “language as what shapes experience into meaningfulness.”

(Saltzburg, 2004, p. 111) Mark Freeman reiterated (1993) and added to MerleauPonty’s observations, “everything we do everything we are, is bathed in language to begin with, isn’t ‘life’ itself another link in the chain of texts? . . . We ourselves are ultimately fictions.” (p. 8, italics in original) However, as revolutionary as semiotics

76 was, it was limited by its premise that signs point to reality. In reaction to this point of view the disciplines of hermeneutic and linguistic inquiry developed and declared that signs point to other signs. This is called the “linguistic turn.” For example, an incomplete semiotic interpretation might have said that anorexia is a sign that points to bad weaning. A hermeneutic argument would state that declaring that there is a relationship between anorexia and bad weaning is not positing a fact but instead is an interpretation, which is a subjective opinion. A hermeneutic stance is that one cannot get from language/signs to the real world. Signs point to interpretations. What we believe to be true is, in fact, often a language-based interpretation of events. This discovery was essential and most likely the basis of the psychotherapeutic notion that the reality of our pasts can be figured anew through new interpretations. As Peter Brooks (1984) stated, people who engage in narratives demonstrate “an unconscious desire to rework an individual masterpiece.” (p. 321) A hermeneutic stance is the underpinning for a narrative research methodology.

Such a stance is appropriate for my dissertation. By its very nature an “objective” methodology is not designed to clarify the subjective experience of an artist’s creative process. Spence (1982), along with Mishler (1986) and Oakley (1981), concluded that substantive aspects of psychological information are lost when using the traditional positivistic statistical hypothesis testing (cause and effect) methodology. Exploring the complex meanings artists make of their idiosyncratic creative process demands a less simplistic methodology, one that addresses the many intangible subjective components inherent in the creative process, one that tells a story. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984)

77 Feminist and narrative theoreticians played a critical role in legitimizing subjective methodologies. (Denzin, 2001) For more than 20 years feminists have described objective “data” collection methodologies as a misguided, unrealistic “masculine fiction.” (Oakley, 1981) I do not believe that there are gender specific ways of thinking. I do believe in the historical importance of the voices of many women intellectuals who wrote in the 1980s. These women added their voices to the position that subjective research was a vehicle that enabled simultaneously a rich expression of the phenomena performed by the participants and allowed for concern for the participants on the part of the researcher. Narrative theory also asserted that the subjective position expands rather than distorts information. (Mishler, 1986) Because the concept of narrative theory is replete with contradictory and opposing definitions, my definition of narrative theory is as follows: First, put very simply, narratives consist of a number of events that are described as being related to one another and they occur over a period of time. In the Poetics, Aristotle defined narratives as having “a beginning and a middle and an end.” (Vol 11, line 7-12) Second, I will use the definition of the psychologist and educator, Jerome Bruner. He defined a narrative as having the following features: Everyone will agree that it requires a cast of characters who are free agents with minds of their own . . . these characters have recognizable expectations about the ordinary state of the world . . . a story begins with some breach in the expected state of things . . . . The story concerns efforts to cope or come to terms with the breach . . . and finally there is an outcome, some sort of resolution. (2002, p. 17) Bruner believes that in our culture narratives are “figuratively the maker and enforcer of what is to be expected, but they also, paradoxically, compile even slyly treasure, transgressions.” (2002, p. 15)

78 An autobiographical narrative utilizes these two conventions of narration and derives authority because, as succinctly stated by Carolyn Saari (2000), “One experiences oneself as having a stability by having a unifying goal story about oneself.” (p. 3) Derrida provocatively emphasized this position in his often time repeated question: Is there a point to life or do we create one? Mark Freeman (1993) restated this premise in Rewriting the Self when he defined rewriting the self as “the process by which one’s past and indeed oneself is figured anew through interpretation.” (p. 3) We use our imagination, Freeman asserted, to give a sense of meaning to life. He said, “We have a brain that is constantly putting it all together . . . our brains are “a meaning making machine.” (p. 26) We tell stories to artificially impose order and meaning on an indomitable world or, as Jerome Bruner concluded, narratives “domesticate human error and surprise.” (p. 31) The stories we create, according to narrative theory, are highly subjective. “Human agency and imagination determine what gets included and excluded in narrativization, how events are plotted and what they are supposed to mean.” (Riessman, 1993, p. 2) There exists a gap between one’s lived experiences and the telling of them. We try to bridge this gap with unruly words.

Hermeneutic theory and narrative theory both presuppose that as a result of the primacy of words in communication, human discourse produces a multitude of meanings, none of which exhaust or truly express all the facts of a situation. This is true because, first, in the telling of an experience one emphasizes certain aspects of the event and disregards other parts of the events. Second, the words one chooses to use to describe a phenomenon tilt the meaning of an event in a certain direction. Third, because both the speaker and listener have their own idiosyncratic internal definitions

79 for the words being used, it is possible to misunderstand what the other one means. As Nietzsche proclaimed, we are “caught in the prison-house of language.” (Jameson, 1972) Fortunately most people do not find themselves in the dilemma Alice and Humpty Dumpty confronted when he disdainfully told her he chose to use a word to mean just what he wanted it to mean. To which Alice added, with irritation, that he made words mean so many different things at different times. Most people, despite the transient subjective nature of every word’s definition, find enough commonality in what words mean to understand each other. This justifies using narratives as “important units of discourse for research because they allow for the construction and expression of meaning, an essential activity of human existence. Probably the primary way we make sense of our experience is by casting it in narrative form.” (Reissman, 1993, p.

68) Members of the psychoanalytic community have joined in the polylogue concerning the importance of narrative. Freud believed the therapeutic task was to make the unconscious conscious and to destroy its irrational hold on a person. Carolyn Saari and other thinkers argue that the task of therapy is to help the client create a cohesive story that emphasizes and explains what and why certain events are formative.

The latter group believes that it is essential for people to feel that their lives are cohesive. Both positions seem valid.

An important contribution psychoanalytic thinkers have added to the discussion concerning narratives is how a therapeutic dialogue can be a vital component in helping a client create cohesive self story. Donald Spence (1982) addressed the importance of

80 narratives in Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis and placed them in the realm of the psychoanalytic dialogue. He explained that the therapeutic process was one in which the client and therapist coconstruct the client’s life story through their on-going dialogue. This then creates a new reality for the client. (p. 31) This new story, Spence believed, emotionally bolsters the foundation of a person’s psyche. Roy Schafer (1976) also assumed that reality is woven into existence through the interplay of dialogue. Other psychoanalytic theorists such as Martin Gill (1982), Steven Mitchell (1988), Lew Aron (1996), and Irwin Hoffman (1998) have written about the therapeutic importance of the dialogue between the patient and the therapist. The power of dialogue is an addition to the theory of hermeneutics and psychoanalytic thought and is a critical premise enlivening my research.

The interviews I conducted were not intended to be therapeutic; however, both because the artists knew I am a psychotherapist and because I supported the notion that dialogue can play a curative role, I am of the belief that some of the dialogues between the artists and myself may have had a positive affect on the artists. In my interactions with the participants I used the definition of dialogue that Jochen Mecke (cited in Saari, 2004) wrote: - The two partners must engage in it with faith in the other’s honest desire to engage.

- Everything even that that is considered “normal” or “truth” must be open to inquiry.

- Both participants must get a chance to speak and hear the other and these roles should alternate. (p. 3) Using the premise that dialogue is important in making meaning, in collaboration with Denzin’s hermeneutically informed narrative methodology, I conducted in-depth

81 discussions with each artist. I approached these interviews based on the assumption that as the artists and I spoke, the artists would be actively involved in co-creating a new reality with me as to what constituted their creative process. In addition, I anticipated the likelihood that we would discover that the inner dialogue each artist engages in while working on a piece of art has an impact on their creative process and the resulting piece of art.

An important premise of this dissertation was that the narratives that would be created through my dialogue with each artist would make the process of internal dialogues have a conscious and articulated presence. This dialogue would transform the artists’ understanding of the function performed by inner dialogues. In addition, by using a narrative methodology, I approached this discussion in a manner compatible with an artist’s own means of organizing reality. As Spence implied, an in-depth interview building a story is in itself a creative act.

These narratives or stories differ from traditional psychoanalytic case histories: First, in a case study the therapist engages in extensive hours of interviewing the client with the goal of harvesting a logical detailed historical sequence of facts about the person’s life. The narratives derived from this dissertation were gleaned from very few interviews. Additionally, these narratives were limited to exploring the internal experience of the artists’ specific experiences of artistic creativity. Second, a case study is given meaning by the therapist who often uses the canon of psychoanalytic knowledge. The narratives for this dissertation will include psychoanalytic thought but will also depend on feedback from the participants based on their critical analysis and explanation of the transcripts of the interviews I conducted with them.

82 Denzin’s (2001) methodology of interpretive interactionism concurs with the phenomenon I studied so I used it to analyze the story driven data collected in the interviews. I correctly anticipated the synchrony between Denzin’s approach, my approach, and the subject matter itself would work together to add consistency to my research findings. I adhered to the seven steps Denzin outlined: The first step, according to Denzin, is “framing the how question.” (p. 144) The literature review justifies and frames exploring issues related to internal dialogue.

Second, Denzin described this task as “connecting personal problems with social issues.” (p. 144) Even though for each artist the relationship with an internal dialogue was deeply personal, I discovered through my discussions with multiple interviewees that this internal dialogue could be understood to function as a socially determined phenomenon. To begin, the very notion of what the artists consider to be an internal dialogue can only be answered in the context of this given society and at this time. John Caughey (1984), in his text Imaginary Social Worlds, asserted, As I see it a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves . . . . A crucial step therefore is to explore the inner world of one’s subjects, to discover and describe the perspective from which they experience their world. (p. 10) The third task outlined in Denzin’s (2001) methodology relates to the abovementioned concept that culture is socially constructed. This task is to explore and expose the hidden assumptions and conceptions of the phenomenon being studied. As Berger and Lachmann said in their 1966 classic work, The Social Construction of Reality, Since the child has no choice in the selection of his significant others, his identification with them is quasi-automatic. For the same reason, his

83 internalization of their particular reality is quasi-inevitable. The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds.

He internalizes it as the world. (p. 134) My task as a thoughtful investigator was to question the standard explanations of the function of an internal dialogue and, when possible, I posited alternative views. For example, I am conceptualizing internal dialogues as a form of transitional phenomena.

Denzin’s (2001) fourth step is to “capture” the phenomena. This meant that I interviewed the artists and got their “self story.” (p. 127) I accomplished this by audio taping interviews with each artist in which I ascertained through thick description how each artist’s internal dialogue functions. I analyzed the transcribed text.

Fifth, the phenomenon was “bracketed.” Denzin (2001) identifies five steps in bracketing: 1. Locate within the . . . self story key phrases and statements that speak directly to the phenomenon in question.

2. Interpret the meanings of these phrases, as an informed reader.

3. Obtain the subject’s interpretation of these phrases.

4. Inspect these meanings for what they reveal about the essential, reoccurring features of the phenomenon being studied.

5. Offer a tentative statement or definition of the phenomenon in terms of the essential recurring features. (p. 76) The sixth and seventh tasks were to construct and contextualize the material.

Denzin (2001) defines this as pulling together all the individual piecemeal observations into an overarching coherent description of how the phenomenon works within the social community. This goal of making the invisible visible corresponds to the relational theorist Donnell Stern’s concept of the existence of the unarticulated unconscious.

These six steps, taken together, created:

84 thick description, which . . . goes beyond mere fact and surface appearances. It presents detail, context, emotion, and the web of social relationships that join persons to one another. Thick description evokes emotionality and self-feelings.

It inserts history into experience. It establishes the significance of an experience or the sequence of events for the person or persons in question. In thick description, the voices, feelings, actions, and meanings of interacting individuals are heard. (Denzin, 1989, p. 83)

Thick description creates verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the feeling evoked in a reader that they are experiencing what is being described. The goal of such a strategy is to enable the reader to become empathically immersed in the data, in the hopes that they would not only find it more compelling but also it would help them learn from and retain the information.

Protection of Human Subjects This research project followed the legal and professional standards as outlined in the student manual for the Institute for Clinical Social Work. The informed consent process included the following: 1. Explanations of the possible long- and short-term discomforts that might arise from participating in the research.

2. A description of the benefits to the participants and society.

3. Reassurances that all participants’ questions would be answered throughout the process.

4. Instructions to the participants that they could withdraw at any time without penalty.

5. Reassurance of anonymity and confidentiality of data.

6. Since the artists I interviewed knew that I was a therapist, I was aware that something quasi-therapeutic could have been activated in our discussions. I watched out for this and offered up to three debriefing sessions and if needed a referral for psychotherapy. Participants were also offered an opportunity to meet with the chair of the Institutional Review Board, Dan Rosenfeld, if they had concerns. None of the participants requested these services.

85 Limitations of the Research Plan The usual limitations of all qualitative research are inherent in this study. The problems inherent in narratives are implicit to my study. As Garry Wills (2002) wrote in Saint Augustine’s Memory, “The past . . . is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again.” We change the facts, forget details, and emphasize others. To some degree what we recall is fiction.

Thus the selective memory of the participants and the selectivity of what I choose to attend to will tilt my findings. My final written project will be a text. . . . not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of an Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. (Barthe, 1946) In addition, because I actively chose to participate in the discussions, at times I might have cut off or redirected the course of the conversation away from the participants’ original intention. The narratives that unfolded were specific to what transpired between each participating artist and me. Another interviewer would have elicited a somewhat different narrative. This study was a subjective endeavor marked by my imprint. Of course simultaneously I tried to mitigate my subjectivity by consulting with my advisors.

Denzin concluded, “A preoccupation with method, with validity, reliability, generalizability . . . must be set aside in favor of meaning and interpretation. (Denzin 1989, p. 25) What I lost in statistical validity, because only 26 artists participated, I gained in verisimilitude because I retained, through thick description, the voices of the artists.

86 This research project was an amalgam of multiple dialogues (both real and imagined) between the artists with me, me and each text I read, my committee and me and, of course, with you, my imagined reader.

87

CHAPTER V

THE STORIES OF ELEVEN OF THE ARTISTS

Introduction to the Results I met with 26 artists. Fourteen of the participants were men and 12 were women. The artists ranged in age from their late twenties to their seventies. Most of the artists were in their forties and fifties.

One interview was eliminated. The artist, a painter, had a strong accent and he kept pacing up and down during our meeting, which made the audio recording of the interview muffled and unintelligible. In addition, his observations did not seem particularly pertinent to the study.

Of the 25 artists included in this study, 19 were interviewed twice; three of the artists met with me three times and three of the artists were interviewed only once. Of the last three, one painter moved to New York the week following our first interview, another writer was unwilling to meet for a second time, and another painter was emotionally fragile and I feared another meeting could prove deleterious to his mental health. Fortunately, despite having participated in only one interview, all three of these artists provided interesting and sometimes provocative insights into internal dialogic processes therefore their insights were included in the dissertation. In total 51 interviews were conducted.

88 Many of the artists I met with practiced several disciplines but chose to define themselves according to the art form they practiced most often. Using their definition I met with three filmmakers, nine painters, eight writers, one photographer, one sculptor, one composer, one print maker, and one choreographer/dancer. The interview I could not use was with a painter. Local galleries represented eight of the painters, the photographer and the printmaker. In addition, New York based galleries represented several of these artists. Four of the writers have had their fiction published by wellknown mainstream publishers. Two of the writers were playwrights and they have had their works performed in theatres such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

Fourteen of the artists taught in their medium, ten at the college level, the others in community centers and public high schools. Usually I met with the artists in their homes or studios. In three cases we met in a cafĂŠ. Four artists asked to meet at my home.

Each taping session usually lasted between one and a half to two hours. Many of the meetings lasted longer. I was unable to record interesting comments made by the artists during these extended sessions. I took notes on the unrecorded conversations and I will include some of these observations in my concluding chapters.

The data from the interviews proved to be rich and full of multiple meanings.

Each person had a unique story. Naturally in the course of our discussions many interesting ideas unrelated to the dissertation were brought up. In most cases I reluctantly opted to bypass these unrelated observations but in some cases I have chosen to make note of them.

89 The findings will be presented in a conversational style in keeping with the tone of the interviews and with the premise of the dissertation that dialogical engagements are abundant with creative potential. In accordance with Denzin’s appreciation of thick description I chose to use the language of the respondents themselves and to seek out and honor their definitions of the concept of an internal dialogue.

I will begin my findings by telling the stories of 11 of the artists. These artists were either exquisitely articulate or idiosyncratic in describing their internal dialogues.

These narratives will include direct quotes from our conversations. I will refer to myself as DH. The hope is that together these narratives best convey an in-depth look at the range of the phenomenon of internal dialogues. I asked the 11 artists what they wanted to be called and all of them, except for Icarus, Harryette and Dorothy responded and chose his or her own alias. The aliases I gave the above three referred back to our interviews.

While each artist had their own way of expressing what constituted an internal dialogic process several themes echoed repeatedly throughout the 51 transcripts. In Chapter VI I will describe and discuss these themes.

Eva The interviews with Eva were extremely important. Not only did she have an internal dialogue with her paintings but also, she told me, in large part because of our first conversation she embarked on a series of paintings that were a conversation via the canvases with her mother who had passed away. Our conversation had an impact on her

90 that led her to an internal dialogue with her mother. She translated this conversation into a body of art that helped her wrestle with her relationship with her deceased mother. This was a gift to this dissertation.

It was cold the afternoon we first met. I set up the tape recorder in the corner of her studio, a spacious room with high ceilings and large windows. Her paintings, some finished, most at various stages of being completed were hung up on all four walls as well as leaning against the walls of the room. I balanced the tape recorder on a small box with a pack of cards on top. I presumed that it served as her table. While she made some herbal tea, to help warm us up, she pointed out certain paintings and gave me a short historical chronicle of the era to which each painting belonged. Some were part of a series of paintings she had made linking a “linguistic exploration of the relationship between humans and animals.” She took terms that are animal derived and made paintings of them. An example was a painting entitled “Bitch” which showed a cute female puppy. She referred to these pieces as her conceptual work. Most of the other paintings were part of a series she called “Backyards.” These paintings were landscapes in which the viewer cannot see the entire area, but instead glimpses fragments of very painterly atmospheric trees, grass and fields.

We sat down surrounded by her visual history. Our conversation was lively and very friendly. She radiated an enthusiasm towards the questions and comments I made.

Her spirited responses encouraged me to open up about myself and that in turn encouraged her to open up.

Background Facts

91 Eva is from a small town in Nevada. (The specifics of each participant’s life have been altered when I felt the particularity of facts could expose their true identity).

As the youngest of four children and the only girl she spent hours by herself.

In a tree or under this enormous row of shrubbery that marked the boundary between the yard that people saw and a big old field that was great for catching crawfish when it flooded . . . in winter everything turned brown and it was really monotonous. The land is very flat and I learned to pay attention to subtle changes. I remember noticing different shades in the brown grass, and the way the grass took on colors from anything that might be around . . . I spent a lot of time hiding under the bushes as a child so for me, it was always the place I escaped to.

She started drawing “when I was about 8 . . . I copied photographs, you know . . . and then I would do drawings of brick walls.” She credited her father for encouraging her artistic eye.

He could have been an opera singer. But he did what his father wanted him to do. He painted. He took photographs. He always had a dark room when I was a kid. So that’s how—if I wanted to spend any time with him, I had to go sit with him while he did photographs.

In some important ways she identified with and carried on an understated artistic legacy from and for her father. After high school she went to college where she majored in art.

Upon completing college she applied to the MFA program at a prestigious Midwest university and was accepted. One of the appeals for going there was that she knew this was a school that would impress her father. She graduated in 1982. For many years she worked at a gallery four days a week. After that she worked for art movers as their office manager. Fortunately, for the past few years she has been able to teach part time and paint full time. She is represented by a downtown Chicago-based reputable gallery.

Her most recent one-woman show was in 2007.

92 Her Painting Story When I asked her if she had an internal dialogue, Eva replied, without skipping a beat, and in what sounded like what I call an “of course” voice, “With myself, certainly.”

“Great,” I thought, usually the respondents pondered the question and initially weren’t sure. She went on to describe how this dialogue unfolded. After painting for a while she would stop, “and then I’ll spend hours sitting there playing Solitaire.” This explained the cards. While she played she would face the painting, Sort of looking at it out of the corner of my eye, things float through my head, that’s almost a sort of meditative thing because, you know you sort of let things float through, you don’t grab on to them, but then you just wait until I hear myself—this idea is right. So there is the dialogue.

DH: So you’re saying that this dialogue is with the painting?

With the painting? Yes. Later on in the interview she went back to describing this process, Well it’s very rote you’re matching up the cards, you’re doing your thing blah, blah, blah, but at the same time, I’m thinking about my painting, or I’m pondering—you know, I’m just—I’m here. If I’m really thinking about my painting sort of—I’ll keep looking over there, and those ideas will—does this need to be done—does that need to be done. And I’ll sit here and I’ll wait for things to repeat themselves. Things repeat themselves.

DH: A question or a positive—like what?

Like, should I get rid of that white thing? Should I make all of that white?

Should I—should this—is that what needs—yes, that’s what needs to be done.

You know, it’s sort of—and then I go back, and I’m like that’s what I should do. And then I let it go and then I come back to it. And if it’s right, I hear it again. Or I tell myself that again, or it comes to mind again. It comes to mind— that’s a better idea . . .

DH: And when it comes to mind, is there also kind of visceral responses too?

Like your body sort of joins in . . . do you have a different body experience with different thoughts?

93

I think I get alert. When something’s a possibility, I feel myself get just much more alert. And I think—the way I think about—boy I just had a blank. It’s sort of like yeah, you let things float through your mind—or I let things float through, and then I’ll grab—and then I’ll—if nothing grabs me—if nothing seems—I’ll say, all right, I’ve got to find another way to think about this, because nothing seems—is there another way to look at this painting, and I’ll go back, and I’ll play more, and I’ll just keep looking. And I’ll ask myself questions, just back and forth—and there’s something about having my conscious mind, I guess . . .

DH: On the cards . . .

Sort of—that it frees up this other part of myself.

DH: When did you discover the cards?

Oh, I’ve been doing that for years.

Eva’s capacity to sit alone playing Solitaire (a fitting word) and to experience this practice as conducive for creative inspiration is reminiscent of Donald Winnicott’s description of the development of a child’s capacity to be alone. According to Winnicott, a person’s capacity to be at peace when she is alone is based on her experience, as a young child, of being alone in the company of the calming presence of the mothering figure. Winnicott believed that over time the child internalizes the soothing functions once played by the mother. Without a sufficiency of this experience he believed the capacity to be comfortably alone in later life does not develop. (1958, p.

32) Although Eva reported having a difficult relationship with her mother, her capacity to sit alone with her cards in a meditative state engaging out of the corner of her eye with her painting seems similar to Winnicott’s description of an infant’s peaceful play alongside her mother. This unfocused attention allows images and words to naturally float in and out of her mind.

94 Many psychoanalytically trained theoreticians who have approached the question of the creative process (David Beres, Marion Milner, Anna Freud, Anton Ehrenzweig) have described what reads like a blurred, surrealistic picture of the creative process. For example, Ehrenzweig, in his seminal work The Hidden Order of Art, described an artist’s inner process as amassing layers of thought superimposed one upon the other. In his description, the creative ego swings between undifferentiation and differentiation, without losing a sense of self, unlike the schizophrenic who would fragment if she experienced a sense of undifferentiation. Ehrenzweig asserted that an artist depends on primary process thinking, which he described as, “opposite ideas collude, space and time bleed into one another, boundaries blur . . . .” (p. 80) His depiction of this state of unfocused integration of images and thoughts made sense of Eva’s practice of looking out of the corner of her eye at her paintings, as she played Solitaire. Her unfocused attention allowed images and words to naturally float in and out; some immediately rejected, others fading away, while others returned again and again. The tenacity with which she allowed herself not to be definitive but instead to play with the ideas and images that appeared as she played Solitaire parallel Adam Phillips’ definition in On Flirtation of flirtation as a process that “exploits the ambiguity of promise . . . flirtation has always been the saboteur of a cherished vocabulary of commitment . . . a space is created in which aims or ends can be worked out . . . Flirtation is a way of cultivating wishes, of playing for time . . . ” (Phillips, p. xvii-xix) Eva’s process allowed her to flirt with ideas and images.

As a younger artist her process was different. She used to be swept up in This sort of romantic thing—of you know the artist, definitely from the abstract expressionist. . . It shouldn’t be easy. It should be about the pain . . . . There was

95 this sort of idealized audience I had in my head, or this viewer that I was always trying to—wow, I’m getting into deep water here—watch or please this ideal viewer . . . It’s almost parental, I would say. It was almost parental . . . Let’s call it parental for want of anything else, because it had that kind of authority . . . . I would hear—I would give voice to what I thought the art world would approve of.

It is interesting that she began the sentence by saying that “she would hear” and then corrected herself and said “she would give voice to.” She was describing a time when she was a beginner. Like many people during this developmental phase she concentrated on trying to understand and learn all the information. As a novice, because she did not have sufficient tools to make a critical assessment of what she was being taught, it was predictable that she would be cautious and “give voice to” what she thought the art community would approve of. Eva attributed her romanticized image of the artist as being drawn from the mythologized picture of the artist of the 1950s.

Abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko were depicted as wild, tormented and dissolute artists. In reality this myth predates the 1950s by at least 500 years. Leon Battista Alberti, in 1436 declared in On Painting that “the artist should be divorced from the rank and file of normal people.” (p. 67) In Vasari’s famous biography of artists, written during the Renaissance in 1550, he repeatedly described artists as melancholic and solitary by nature. In fact, in the 1500s, “Terminal qualities associated with melancholy . . . acquired a certain snob value.” (Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963, p. 104) However, Eva’s initial insight that she would “give voice to” also raises an interesting point, elaborated upon in psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, in selfpsychology, relational theories and object relations, emphasis is given to how if a

96 person’s genuine point of view is shrouded in the expectations or admonishments of others he often cannot hear his own authentic, true voice.

Eva went on to give evidence of this possibility.

The whole idea between critical and judgmental . . . I grew up in a family that was incredibly judgmental. So that was a real struggle for me—to learn the difference between being critical and judgmental . . . and the difference is the way you talk to yourself too, you know. Instead of saying this part of the painting is horrible, instead of focusing on that, you say okay what’s going on with this painting that’s good and what doesn’t belong you know . . .

Her insight into her inner world and how it was filled with voices from her past and present was fascinating. She was providing rich evidence of the workings of an internal dialogue. “How,” I wondered out loud, “did you get rid of those judgmental internal voices and negative conversations and start hearing a more positive authentic voice?” She answered this in many ways.

Her first direct answer was, “I was in therapy for 16 years that will do it . . . she was great . . . was supportive and came to my shows, she replaced . . . the voices.”

Her therapist replaced the punitive negative voices with her own more affirming voice. In keeping with relational theory, her therapist functioned not only to transferentially take on the role of past bad objects but also the therapist became a new positive object/voice for Eva. (Stern, 1994, p. 72) The second way she drove out the internalized negative voices was by making a shift in her worldview. As a child Eva remembered, “I was always taught that supposedly there’s an objective truth . . . I guess my parents raised me to believe there was always an authority that I needed to listen to . . . It took many years to let go of

97 that.” It was in keeping with her background as a young woman new to the art world when the zeitgeist of the art scene was in “the strangle-hold of conceptual art,” that she felt compelled to try and go along with the authority of this art style even though she found it creatively limiting. I found throughout the interviews that many of the artists reported feeling immersed in and compelled to respond to the vagaries of the art scene.

Some found this artistic inner and outer conversation primarily satiating; others often felt enslaved by it. At different times Eva felt both. Feeling constrained by conceptual art Eva eventually found the internal freedom to resist the aesthetic authority of the art scene. She discovered artists she admired and wanted to learn from.

Certain artists . . . I really admire. I’m very lucky I have little conversations with . . . artists like Bonnard, Louise Bourgeous, Goya, Agnes Martin, Japanese prints . . . So from Bonnard I learned about color . . . Goya . . . technical things . . . how he started a painting . . .

Third, the death of her father also helped her escape the shadow of other people’s voices/authority. In 1982 when she finished her MFA he died.

And you know that was the nicest thing that ever happened was that he died, because it really freed me. He died just as I got my Masters, and it, you know, my mother was, of course broken hearted, but it really freed me to-because talk about the patriarchal thing, oh my god, yeah . . . I would have been very constrained by my choices. I would have felt like I had to get a real job, you know.

Fourth, she identified therapy once again as helping her eliminate the constraints she felt emanating from these internalized voices. Not only did her therapist replace the negative voices with her own more affirming voice, she also acted as an ally helping Eva notice and listen to the ways in which she, almost without being conscious, continued to fall prey to toxic thoughts as she worked. Her therapist encouraged her to replace her inner punitive thoughts with more realistic, constructive thoughts.

98 It was not easy it was hard . . . I was tied up in knots . . . I’ve gotten better and better. Better and better. And I trust myself more and more. I think that’s been my whole process, is learning to listen to that voice . . . I listen to the voice more—I’m willing to use my will, will power. It’s a paradox I think. It’s like that voice, I believe, or that sense of rightness, you know, it’s hard to find sometimes, you know. Because there are all these other things in the world saying oh, this painting looks too different from that painting . . . and it’s terrifying to become clear to myself.

DH: Clear in terms . . .

Clarity in terms of what I liked.

DH: What you liked?

What I liked. What made me happy? You know the best question I learned to ask myself in this whole process was what would I like to see? And that’s such a simple question, but so many artists don’t ask themselves that. They’re always concerned about that ideal audience or the art world, or what’s going on out there or what’s—and you can’t be if you’re going to make work with any authenticity.

Eva learned to paint what she would like to see. The writer Seth reported to me that the writer Toni Morrison said she wrote because she, as the reader, wanted to know how her books ended. Eva went on to explain to me that even though therapy helped her discover her own voice, after she finished treatment, it took several more years for her to grow into it. “It was like—I had to leave home . . . I think I tightened up. I had to think more clearly on my own about what I didn’t like about my work and what I did like.”

To paint a good painting, she reiterated she needed to be authentic and to be authentic she believed she needed to be an independent adult who knew her own thoughts. The theme of finding one’s authentic voice is one of the most repeated themes in this dissertation. Otto Rank made an interesting observation that supports the

99 linkage between the importance authenticity plays for the artist as a person and as an artist.

Creativity begins with the individual himself—that is, with the self-making of the personality into the artist. The creative artistic personality is thus the first work of the productive individual and it remains fundamentally his chief work, since all his other works are partly the repeated expression of this primal creation. (Rank 1932, p. 28) Not all of her internal conversations were attempts to rid her of malevolent voices. Eva went on to describe several other forms of internal conversations that she engaged in. One internal conversation Eva described was the process she went through to prepare to teach. “To be a teacher you have to both have the kind of actual process knowledge and have verbalization for it. So if you’re verbalizing it, that is a kind of conversation you are constructing with yourself to then say to them.”

Another form of inner conversation she identified was her conversation with art history.

Art history, you’ve got to understand the theory. You know the formalism, the abstract-which too many people get caught up in and whizzed away. But that’s got to be there, you know. Gotta be there . . .

Later she added, It’s like I can sort of rifle through all of art history, and use the style to talk about specific content . . . my complaint about painting I always felt like I wasn’t able to talk about everything I wanted to talk about, my whole range of emotional responses. So this way, if I can use all of art history I can talk about what I want.

At this point in the conversation we started looking at some of her older work.

Her series of paintings of backyards was particularly interesting to me. I wanted to know the names of all the flowers in her paintings. I told her, “I am looking at this like a product catalogue.” This was odd for me because until recently I had never thought

100 about or even liked gardening. However, recently I had decided to plant a garden in the backyard of my condominium in memory of my mother who had died a few months before. Because she had been so open with me about her own parents’ influence upon her, in particular her father’s death and its impact on her life as an artist, I reciprocated by sharing with her the different rituals I had made up as my way of remembering and saying good-bye to my mother. She was interested. We talked about my mother’s garden back home, Eva’s garden back home when she was growing up and how, now as an adult, the fireflies in her garden inspired her to want to paint them. She ended the interview reiterating what we had started the interview talking about—how nature has always been important to her. As she later wrote to me, “I was alone by myself with only myself to amuse myself, but outside in nature thank goodness—and isn’t that what I do in my studio even now?”

The second meeting Several months later we met, once again, at her studio. The moment I came in I saw that the paintings on her walls were completely different from the ones that once hung there. She told me something happened after she talked to me.

Oh God, stuff got shook loose . . . You know you got me, by asking me these questions, it got me sort of thinking. And you know how that is when you start to think. I’ll tell you, we were cleaning out a basement this summer, soon after we met, and we had had a flood, and I found all these old letters that had been sort of compoundly ruined, from my mother and from my friends, when I first moved here. And I, the last painting I did, I don’t even know if you saw it, if I was working on it, I was so bored and I got so bored, I was, I was just, ok, I don’t know how to make a painting, I really don’t care anymore, it was very scary . . . One of my complaints has always been, about painting, once you paint a certain way, and then you’re working on a body of work, there’s always some, emotional range, I think that, can be so narrow, and I always felt things were left out, and I seemed to have, and so I decided I was going to use these letters.

101 I don’t know how I decided it, to make art that I’ve always admired, that I never had a way into, which is like Agnes Martin, very minimal sorts of things, where it’s about two colors next to each other, just very minimal, minimal things that I could deal with really directly. And not worry about, I don’t know, there’s something about working with paint, but just have this very immediate response to the whole, to the, you know, it’s a way in to make abstract art for me. There’s a dialogue, there’s a way in.

DH: Because?

There’s a letter.

DH: Well, wait, wait, wait. Why did you need the letter to have a way in?

How are you going to make decisions? How do you make decisions, when you make a painting? You’ve got to have some kind of idea, or place you’re coming from to make those decisions. For myself, it can never be purely visual, as I talked about before, there has to be some sort of matching that goes on.

DH: Ok, so explain that better. So using the letter as the first visual?

Right.

DH: You would have different ah, color sensibilities…

Responses.

DH: Responses.

Yeah. Sometimes it’s, it had to do with the, just the way the letter looked, would give me a compositional idea. And I tried this work. I’m so happy with this work, this work feels like it’s so mine, and that’s so ironic. I’m sure you see the irony there, you know, it’s, but it’s so, I feel free to do whatever I want to do because it’s a response . . .

Eva’s reaction to our first interview was so generous to my project. Her new work had taken up the gauntlet of expressing internal dialogues in a multifaceted manner. First, she began a dialogue with her deceased mother by “responding” to the letters her mother had sent her. As a painter she did not respond to the words on the pages of the letters with words, she spoke through the language of paint: color, shapes, design, size. Her response was to both the visual look of the letters and the words she

102 read. Second, she allowed herself to use the letters to carry on a very different conversation with paint than she had ever done before. Until then her paintings had always been representational. Using the letters her mother wrote to her as the basis for her paintings, allowed her, for the first time, to make abstract paintings in the spirit of artists she admired such as Agnes Martin and Bryce Martin. The letters served as one side of a conversation allowing Eva “a way in to make abstract art for me. There’s a dialogue, there’s a way in . . . before I never understood how, because I could never find a way to make decisions.” Third, the letters allowed her to simultaneously carry on several conversations. One conversation was with her mother and another was with artists such as Agnes Martin and Bryce Martin. Although she described her relationship with her mother, when she was alive, as having been restrained and inhibited, now after her death, her mother’s letters were liberating. They allowed her to paint in a style she had always wished to use but had never felt capable of actualizing.

Eva described the unfolding of the process she went through of responding to the visuals of the letters. As in a dialogue between two people, the letters represented a point of view, which then elicited a painterly response from her.

Well, the, the letter itself had these like water stains and stuff on it, and I put it down, and I was looking at it and looking at it and it was just, you know, nothing was coming to me about how to approach it, and then I realized I liked these lines in the fold, and it, and also in there, my mother says, it’s 91, it’s already 91 degrees, we’re getting ready to blow away down here, so I thought, that’s hot, then I thought, hot, and then I thought, ok, well, I can’t do anything sort of formally and meaningful showing the words, so let’s just make it hot . . . so then about those two lines . . . just look at, look at the writing formally.

Formally it tells you so much about what kind of person she was. It’s, it’s perfectly spaced, you know . . . So that becomes a metaphor, you don’t have to read the words, the words aren’t really the point, and for me it’s a place to start.

DH: Ok, now what about this wallpaper-esque one?

103 Yeah, look at the chair you’re sitting in.

DH: Ah ha! (The fabric on the chair I was sitting on was the same as the design on the painting.)

These were my mother’s chairs.

DH: Oh, well, wait, did you put, did you, how did you, is this the back?

Uh, it’s vellum; I just sort of traced it, just with a pencil.

DH: Oh, oh, you traced it, the back of the chair?

Yeah, and it’s, this piece was about that color orange with the black, it was about those two colors, I could tell you exactly what it was about.

DH: All right, tell me.

It’s, it’s that association for me, it was, and it felt right.

DH: Orange and black felt right?

Just in terms of my mother, my, that whole relationship, you know how, when you’re working on a painting, I’ve talked about that, the painting talks back and says, this is right, no, no, you need to change, that, it’s like these are direct sorts of . . . dialogue.

DH: Now wait a minute. Do you respond ever to the words, or is it mostly to the visual?

That’s very interesting, that’s a great question, cause it’s everything . . . It’s the visual, sometimes it’s the words, sometimes it’s, it’s, you know, it’s like those memories… it was pretty painful having them around my studio for a while, because I sort of got submerged in sort of reexamining these relationships, and it got pretty intense here. I mean, you can ask Rose I mean, I’d come home, I’d be exhausted.

DH: So you were looking at the words, definitely.

Yeah, and it was hard to look at ‘em. It was hard to like, read some of this stuff, and you’ll notice it’s like destruction, preservation and transformation . . . I realized when I first started doing this, I was thinking, well what am I doing? I liked the idea of wax. I used wax over these, so it’s preservation, it’s destruction, cause they’re not, it’s destroying, and I’m obliterating things, and then preservation at the same time, so it’s those, and then transformation, I’m making them into art. So it’s like sometimes, it’s about the words, sometimes

104 it’s about a constellation, you know it’s really not about any one; it’s a constellation of feeling around a person or a relationship.

What she wanted to come out of these conversations with the letters was of psychic importance to her. As she went on, her description of the time she had spent working on these pieces sounded as if she was telling me about a turbulent period in a present day relationship.

Well. I think what happened when I first started considering using these, I really went in over my head, and that’s when I was so exhausted. Now, it’s not as exhausting.

DH: So how do you mean you went in over your head?

Well, it’s just I was in, in these relationships all day long, or this relationship with my mother, with all the feelings, and, and, and anxiety, a lot of anxiety, and fear, and sadness. Now I’m not as exhausted, it’s you know, familiarity with them, I guess.

Memories and feelings got stirred up as she read and looked at the letters. As our conversation progressed her description of her relationship with the letters evolved.

She began by emphasizing her formal responses to the properties of the letters. Then she spoke about her painterly response to the words. Now she was allowing me to know the emotional intensity of this relationship. She remembered when she first started how she felt bewildered and almost dreaded the project. Joyce McDougall (1995) described the creative artist as being driven by the desire to both fuse with and destroy the medium of expression (a painting, sculpture, musical instrument). She believed that for the artist the basis of the violence of the contradictory feelings the artist felt toward his art was that it symbolized and reenacted his ambivalent relationships with early important objects. McDougall presumed that this was an unconscious process; Eva was

105 very consciously recreating her ambivalent ties to her mother, which was a compelling but daunting task.

When I started, it’s like, fucking what do I do with this letter? (Laughing) What the hell am I going to do with this letter?

I wondered myself but before I could ask she answered herself.

Well, it’s, it’s, you know . . . it’s sort of like you; I have to revisit them in order to make these. So maybe it’s my attempt to get some kind of closure on a certain thing, certain kinds, which I know is impossible, but that, nonetheless, it’s sort of like, sort of confronting the sort of frustratingly incomplete and sort of missed communications that was the basis of our relationship. It was so like this, it was just, it, it was, yeah, it, it was painful. And I think that maybe this is one way to talk about it with myself and then make something worthwhile out of it, because otherwise it was such a waste . . .

We had been talking in general terms about the ways in which she was carrying on a dialogue with the letters but I decided to ask if it ever took a literal form.

DH: Well . . . so have you had any dialogue with, well, Ma, I’m going to be using these, or, Mom, that was the stupidest letter, or oh, I’m so sad, why didn’t I respond to you differently? Are you having any conversation with her?

Um um. Have to have.

DH: I know.

I mean, cause that’s what the whole thing’s about.

DH: I know that’s what I’m trying to ask you.

You know, I think when I talked about the whole miscommunication thing, I tried to talk to her, before she died, yeah . . . she had sort of a slow decline over three years, and when she first got sick, I went down there and spent six weeks, I did that a lot. And I made every attempt to talk to her. The day I was leaving, I went in, and it was real windy, and she was sitting up, and I said, Mom, I have to go, I have to go back to Chicago, I said, you know I really love you. And she looked at me and she said, "Are you going to brush your hair ?… And so that sort of was the epitome of our relationship, right there, so I guess this is me sort of taking charge of this relationship, I’m basically saying, I’m going to talk to you, you know what, the way I talk. I’m not going to worry about you understanding me, I’m not going to worry about you getting feelings hurt or

106 whatever, I’m going to talk to you. And this is my way of talking to you . . . It’s almost like I feel like I took the poison out, I neutered ‘em or something . . . I wonder if this is about integrating stuff, I don’t know.

Eva’s search for some closure on her complex feelings towards her mother, by means of creating a conversation with her mother embedded in the process of painting this series of paintings, underlines how intensely dialogic and relational her relationship was to this art project. It also speaks to how her psychotherapy had equipped her with the language, both verbal and aesthetic, and the facility necessary to integrate the intense feeling that these letters from her mother aroused.

To make this psychological process more concrete she generously demonstrated her process by pointing to an example.

Oh, well, here’s a letter over here, actually down at your feet that I’m having a hell of a time with because I find it so enraging. It’s just, it’s been sitting there since I started this project…See a lot of this is also very sad, because it was when my father had cancer, and when my grandparents were dying, and so the, the letters are quite, that’s what I mean, there’s no one clear emotion, it’s that conflicted part, that’s what I meant with that constellation . . . That was part of the problem, was that she could never do it. She could never be clear about how she felt about my grandmother, I hated my grandmother, she was a horrible woman. She was so horrible with my mother.

From water stains that reminded her of Asian art, to creases in the letters that elicited the abstract art of Bryce Martin, to the colors orange and black that just seemed to say “that’s right, that’s mother,” to the words in the letter that brought up enraging memories of her grandmother, Eva’s art making was immersed in the richness of her history.

Eva’s process addressed several important internal dialogic issues. First, Eva spoke through her art making to an actual person, her mother, dead but a real person from her life. This conversation was very conscious. It existed internally, but also

107 because the basis of her art was the actual letters from her mother to which she “responded” with paint it was an external relationship with the letters. Also she broadened the concept of dialogue to include paint as an equivalency to words.

Secondly, she “blamed” her new work as being a response to a conversation we had had. In a sense it seemed that she carried on an ongoing internal conversation with me.

DH: Honestly, I have to say, it’s pretty amazing to come in here and see this really different work. Yeah, I mean . . .

Well, yeah. You know, I do blame you. I swear to God, when I talked to you, I haven’t been in treatment for seven or eight years, it’s like you were the first person, it’s like there is a way that a therapist asks questions, so I think it’s like, you know, I really sort of paid attention to what you were asking, and sort of, I think it’s just, you know, it’s like I was being held accountable again. That’s what I always thought therapy was, it’s about being accountable, and it’s like I was being accountable again to like, speak the truth. There’s a lot to be said for that whole talking thing. You know you don’t get it anywhere else, therapy, I mean, I mean there’s a heck of a lot to be said for it. So that’s why I say I blame you, it’s because I started, I think it just shook something loose, and I ran with it.

My influence had been both to initiate a conversation about internal dialogue and to describe how I had worked through my mother’s death through art. As a therapist it was rewarding and humbling to have her confirm the idea that the process of

verbalizing ideas in a conversation transforms them by enabling a person to think through and articulate what she or he authentically means which in turn enriches his or her internal conversation and life choices.

Prince Icarus

108 This interview revealed an internal dialogue at a level of intensity that felt dangerously out of touch with reality. However in its extreme it was an excellent example of the phenomenon that I was studying.

I met him at his small apartment. There were canvases of all sizes lined up in stacks throughout the apartment, leaving only a narrow path that allowed us access to a table with a chair, at which I sat, next to a single bed on which he sat. He appeared to be in his late 40’s or early 50’s. His accent was quite strong and his use of the English language often confused me. He was from the former Soviet Union “about 8000 kilometers away from Moscow . . . In a small town, very small town.” He claimed to have been a successful painter back home and had painted mostly flowers such as Edelweiss, Edelweiss, you know Edelweiss, I pronounce, is this, flower… it’s very popular flower, which, devoted to love. If some man love somebody or another woman or love a woman . . .

DH: Yes? Uh, he try uh, show it, he love her, he must bring her this flower, but this flower grow in very, very high mountain, very high mountain, and I brought this flowers, those flowers in Japan to my wife.

He had arrived in the United States, alone, without his wife, seven years ago.

Intending to sell his art, he brought 200 of his paintings with him. It seemed that most of them were still in his possession and were among those that lined his apartment floor. He had also brought with him 30-35 stories, which I have written in my country.

DH: Yeah.

Before, before I . . . and before I come here. And here, I tried translate uh . . .

DH: The stories.

109

Too, it’s too hard for me, because my language, I love beauty, and the language, it’s very, very nice, very beautiful, and I feel here the translate process and tried adapted six my long stories to screenplays, and sent them, submitted them to many competition that I didn’t win something, and I think because of my English. And now I return to my Russian story, in Russian, in my native language.

He told me all this without sounding distressed. Because he was not able to sell his art, to pay his bills he worked as a house painter. Soon after he had emigrated to the United States and within a year of her death he had become fixated on the death of Princess Diana and had started painting her. He showed me some 50 canvases all with images of Diana. Sometimes she was alone, other times she was with her sons, or dressed as a goddess or musician. He recalled that when he heard that she had been killed, It’s frustrating, it’s weird, melancholic, melancholic, and several maybe several weeks, I couldn’t believe it. Just when I heard it, when I heard it for several time, and I saw the television… I believe it really hard, it was really bad because, again, because, it’s my brain, I feel disaster, each people with my character. I feel myself, I don’t know why, I feel victim, like, not victim, I feel myself, it happen because of me, I don’t know why.

In contrast to the calmness in his voice when he told me about his artistic disappointments, his voice was agitated and intense as he remembered hearing of Diana’s death. He said that he felt he had a strong relationship with her. He described his internal dialogue with her by giving me an example of what he might say to Diana as he painted her, Well, how do you create, how you look very nice, I admire with you, oh, my baby, I love you, don’t, don’t see at me, don’t hate me, I am so terrible, I am ugly, I am so ugly, I love you, I love you. You’re brave, your music . . .

He looked at me and said, “She ignore, she ignores him.”

DH: The picture. She ignores you?

110

Ah, she ignores it, here, because it’s as if he’s nothing, he is not here. It’s like theater, like . . . She, she, she is saying, she is saying him, “Look at, look at yourself, you’re ugly. You are ugly. But you want something, or you want me, but look at yourself, how you are, oh, how you are.”

DH: Ok, so are you making up this story or are you talking to her?

I, I feel, I feel, uh, it’s very real; it’s very real conversation.

I couldn’t be sure how entangled with this fantasy world he was. At times his tone and words seemed to indicate that he knew these were fantasies but the intensity with which he spoke of her and the semi erotic grotesque conversations he reported made me uncertain. Freud’s interpretation, in his monograph on Leonardo Da Vinci that art served the defensive purpose of sublimating forbidden impulses came to mind although Freud’s postulation was based on the idea that the artist could distinguish symbols from reality. I was not certain that Icarus could. My suspicions were underlined when he told me that he couldn’t imagine selling these paintings because It’s my soul.

DH: It’s your soul?

It’s my soul. I can’t tear, tear off my soul, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, and I can’t. I don’t know, how can I . . . Say goodbye to this, I can’t, I don’t know, that’s why. It’s my world, it’s my world. It’s not just dream. I made it. I made it.

DH: You made this world.

This world, and I live in part of this.

DH: You live in that world.

I create, I dream . . .

He sounded fraught with anxiety as he described his life.

111 I simply don’t have time to rest, to talk, because for me it’s wasting time. I’m so sorry, it’s wasting time. I don’t know how many time I remain to live . . . . And I don’t have answer. I don’t know why. My feeling maybe I died tomorrow or next week, but what happens with this painting? I have to done. I have to finish, I have to finish this. I, (whew) it’s a terrible situation, but it’s sure.

I was confused and it took some back and forth with me asking him in different ways why he felt under such pressure to paint. He seemed to be saying that he felt that he, like Diana, might die because they shared, as he said, a “mutual sympathy” and that by painting her, I think I resurrect her, that’s why it’s a little bit easier, a little bit not so . . .

Because when I take those paintings out, I feel a little um, a little—

DH: Relaxed? Energized? Excited?

Released.

DH: Released.

Released, a little bit released. But problem is, all those paintings stay in line in here and never end. This problem, never end. Because when I, wake up, when I wake up, I wake up, it is already, with another painting, with another image, I don’t know what. I feel, I feel, when I . . .

DH: Whooa. The paintings, the paintings, the paintings, the paintings. Never ending. But I am saying, do you paint every dream?

Absolutely.

DH: Every dream?

Every dream.

Like Sisyphus, he is doomed to repeat the same action day after day. He feels compelled to paint every dream so he must paint her image over and over. His relationship with her was a constant. In his waking hours he painted her, often calling in sick to work because he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the canvas undone and

112 in his sleeping hours he dreamed of her. His mix of a relationship with her and identity with her had made it essential for his and her survival to continue to reproduce her image. He said these painting were his attempt to resurrect her and it seems himself.

In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud stated, His own death was just as unimaginable and unreal for primeval man as it is for any one of us today. But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes toward death collided and came into conflict with each other; and this case became highly important and productive of far reaching consequences. It occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his child, his friend—whom he undoubtedly loved as we love ours . . . Then in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against the admission; for each of these loved one was, after all, a part of his own beloved self . . . (1914, p. 293) Eva and Icarus both painted to resolve feelings they had about a death. While Eva was very intensely involved in a relationship and dialogue with her paintings as a symbolic representation of her mother she could step back from the process. She was aware of the symbolic nature of this exercise. Also she felt that her artwork could go past her personal history and strike a chord in a larger audience.

Icarus, on the other hand, seemed to be much more personally immersed in his work. He couldn’t even imagine selling these paintings. Because of the simultaneity of his emigration and Diana’s death it is possible that she symbolically represented the loss, which he might have experienced as akin to a death, of his motherland. If one adheres to Melanie Klein’s theory that creative endeavors are the unconscious restoration of a significant figure who the artist has destroyed in fantasy, we must ask the question: Did he personify the former Soviet Union and metaphorically kill it when he left? Were there reasons Icarus despised whatever split off part of his self Diana represented that unconsciously made him wish she were dead? Another interpretation

113 would be to call Lady Diana his muse. However a muse is usually a figure that inspires you, not someone who holds you together psychologically. Did she serve a self-object function for him?

As already demonstrated in Eva’s interviews, the theme of the impact of a death of a loved person on the artist’s inner dialogue was one that reappeared in many of the interviews. If he were a client I would need to find out the symbolic meaning he had given to Diana that resonated with his past. This artist seemed emotionally raw. I found his insights germane to the subject of internal dialogue, yet I feared that talking to him about this relationship might encourage his distorted sense of entanglement in Diana’s life. I decided to only meet with him once.

J

J is an example of an artist who articulately illustrated an expansive inner world, which nurtured his inner dialogue. He used the term inner dialogue very easily and felt at ease describing non-verbal elements of his inner life as being dialogic.

We met at his place. He lives in a loft-like building and like many such spaces the wind leaked in through the windows making the room chilly. His hospitality, on the other hand, was warm and inviting. He had a delicious spread of food decoratively spread out on the kitchen counter. There were several kinds of fruit, olives, a fig-based bread like concoction, crackers, different cheeses and a choice of coffee or tea. I was surprised. I had assumed that it was my job to provide the treats. I had brought several muffins and some other snacks, which I added to the display on the counter.

114 Background Facts J is a 60-year-old man who is a tenured painting professor. He is also a practicing artist. He is primarily known as a painter but he also writes art history and criticism, and is represented in the Midwest by a well-known art gallery. When I looked back on our first interview it was clear that, in an unstructured non-linear form, his responses were intended to give me a sense of the events in his life that had made him the man/artist he was now.

J grew up in a large city in the 1950s. As a young child he remembered, Just a lot of time to just play by yourself. I had a sister, you know, a brother, too, so you know, and so obviously, it was a regular family life, but there were, there was a great deal of time to just go off and do what I’m doing, just sort of check out and do whatever it is that I do.

DH: What would you do?

It could be just playing; it could be just playing by oneself. I was sick a lot as a kid. I had polio when I was a kid, so there were periods when I was down for a year, or a year and a half, so I had a great deal of uh, of medical down time.

That also let a lot of space occur, so that was, that was another place where things, you know, would like, there was almost a segue between playing and then going into those same reserves as an artist, where I’m comfortable with a cultivated imagination . . . . There might have been a big change, my parents were, my father was a big sportsman, so I was going in that direction, so that would have, that would have shifted things entirely, cause I was geared up for that. I had seven uncles who were all involved in that stuff, so that would have been a big territory to go into, and so, you know, that, that got much less, much less, after polio, so those were the patterns that I was going into.

DH: So you were already a big daydreamer, inner world, but you might have, like diminished it and gone more in the athletic realm, but then the polio kind of created that . . .

Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

It was validating to find that he, like Donald Winnicott, linked the playfulness of a child with the “cultivated imagination” of an artist. It is also noteworthy that he

115 believed because he was ill as a child and was forced to spend hours alone, this prepared him for a life as an artist.

Throughout my research many of the artists I met with described hours they spent alone by themselves as children. Many of these artists believed that for whatever reasons, whether they chose to or needed to, spending time alone when they were youngsters helped them develop the strong inner life and imagination that was an essential part of them functioning as artists. As Eva demonstrated, by comparing the hours she spent hiding in bushes as a child to her hours alone in the studio and as I will later demonstrate, Magpie poetically described her memories of time spent in her orchard as being the inspiration for her art, many of the artists found pleasure and comfort in being alone with their senses and imagination. Once again Donald Winnicott’s thoughts come to mind. His thesis that the capacity to be alone with grace was a developmental accomplishment based on the successful internalization of the mother’s calming assurances would point to this having been achieved by these artists.

However in more than a few cases several of the artists, who as children had lived in not very nurturing homes, reported having developed the capacity to enjoy time alone.

Another extremely influential aspect of J’s character was his experience with religion. Although his father was Catholic and he was raised a Catholic, his mother was a Lutheran. He remembered thinking as early as age nine that something was terribly wrong with the church that proclaimed It was a sin to go to my mother’s church. Very early on I had a sense of overriding the rules I was like, that, that, that . . . something’s not, not right and then I am going to no matter what they’re saying, telling me, what the authorities are telling me . . .

116 When it was time to go to high school he applied to school “specially for the art department, it’s a commercial art department . . . ” He recalled having to take a mechanical drawing course.

I had a terrible traumatic time, submitting to drafting, to that kind of precise drawing. I could draw, I liked to draw, but submitting to precise drawing was very difficult for me . . . I, I would smudge the graphite . . . . I was not a good student because we were just guys goofing around . . . it was this teen-age lethargy, bad habits, bad student rebellion.

His father had to come down to school three times to lobby his teacher not to flunk him in the drafting course because J refused to do the assignments. J posed this as an example of his reluctance to submit to authority or the rules. In this case, his fight was with both the demands of the rules of precision that drafting necessitated and the authority of the school that required him to take the class.

After completing high school he was provisionally accepted at an art college.

He entered on probation because of how poorly he had done in high school. Very quickly something inside him switched. His peers, unlike his high school friends, were serious students, We were taking art history together, or philosophy together, or, you know, so, we had, the teachers, we were being connected with real ideas, and, and so it wasn’t that we would just sit around together and things would happen autonomously, we were in school together, and, and connecting to the art world, literally, going to the art magazines, or going to shows. It was in an environment where you’re constantly being what the educational process should be, you’re being fed all these things, and the teachers are facilitating that.

Life was topsy-turvy. On one hand, he was learning and loving it, making art and getting positive recognition for it, but on the other hand it was 1967. The war in Vietnam was intensifying and he, like many of his generation, was disillusioned with the United States government. Added to this in the art school community modernism

117 reigned and interest in any other traditions was scoffed at. While his peers encouraged his intellect and curiosity they also ridiculed his aesthetics.

The older peers, they were the ones with a vengeance, just going after me…They weren’t doing this for me, they weren’t any more able, selfknowledgeable than anybody else, but it was just sort of like they were in this process and they wanted everybody else to be in it…The idea was like to get engaged in current ideas in the art world, which is fine, and I wasn’t, my knowledge is more generalized, again, this is bigger, broader, if someone like Michelangelo was really important to me, they would say, what, what relevance does he have to Andy Warhol? None at all. And so I would be heavily criticized for hanging on.

Despite his efforts to retain his autonomy these social pressures seeped into his spirits. The art of Minimalism and Modernism seemed cold and distant to him and made him feel depleted and estranged.

This angst and emptiness which the art world pushed, you know, it’s like, Frank Stella’s the other guy besides Ed Miner, they’re all about denial . . . the cardinal rule in modernism is flat space, but it was like, the cardinal rule is that’s history, that’s over and dead, and it’s, so, the picture of history, the possibility of history, is this ever-narrowing thing that only pointed forward, and the past was nothing . . . It was kind of mirroring my own sense of, especially that turmoil of going with a kind of existential crisis, and a kind of emptiness. I remembered my last philosophy class, it was, it was about existentialism, and, and that emptiness, that, that, that, that Sartre talked about, was something that it . . . it wasn’t because of reading existentialism, it wasn’t because of anything I read, I mean it described something, an alienation I felt, you know, just that this connection, something, something powerful, empty, powerfully empty . . .

After graduating from art school, he was awarded a traveling fellowship. He was supported for a year and a half to travel throughout Europe . . .

You’re allowed three months in a country, so I ultimately spent three months in France and headed off to Turkey and Yugoslavia and a big, a big circuit, you know, from England, France, Vienna, on to Yugoslavia and Turkey and Italy . . . It was like a journey of discovery, and, and, and contacting stuff that as an American kid I would never have. They would have remained “things in books not life . . . ” Miraculously something happened inside of him as he traveled. A life affirming

118 impulse declared itself. The grandeur and lush colors of the paintings and churches made him feel alive.

The most powerful thing was, was France, the Gothic cathedrals, it was the Gothic cathedrals . . . that stuff was absolutely fascinating to me, it wasn’t that it was new, it was all the stuff . . . I knew, church, I knew all that stuff, so it wasn’t that, that was discovering, it was alive with something that was an alien reality, that was the point, it was alien reality and it didn’t fit in my life in America, or life in America period. However, it pointed to something that I was interested in, because I was interested in all this classical stuff, all this other world.

The beauty of Renaissance and Gothic art pulled him out of his psychic emptiness and reinforced his love of these art forms. He returned to the United States and began his graduate degree in painting. Simultaneously he began showing his art at one of the biggest art galleries where he lived and in the country. His life was busy and outwardly seemed golden. However in the midst of this he ended an intense and all consuming love affair. He retreated internally into a “mythic psychological symbolic territory.” His artwork shifted and he found himself spontaneously making new imagery, trees and mythic references mixed in with the abstract figures he was known for, And this stuff was sort of against the rules at the time, because the people running the gallery were involved in minimalism and so to deal with myths and this kind of imagery, you know, this not abstract imagery, and to put the two worlds together, was really probably, they actually had a meeting to see whether or not I should.

And his dealer told him, You know I can’t deal with this stuff commercially . . . If you’re going to do this then I can’t and I said well, I’m sorry, we’re just going to have to part ways.

So these were big stakes right?

He didn’t feel like he had a choice because,

119 My authenticity . . . there was a creative process that didn’t fit the structure, and I was going with the creative process, and I would do whatever I had to do, but it was emotional and it wasn’t, “I don’t need you.” It was like following the results of that decision and unfortunately it seems that there’s no room for this other thing, I need to do this, it’s not convenient in the scheme of things, but I need to do this, this is absolutely part of my, that I’m willing to put everything on the line to do that, it’s absolutely part of my necessity, it’s got to be, if I’m going to be real . . .

Both Eva and J emphasized the necessity to trust their own aesthetic vision. J’s sense of self and the attention he paid to his inner life was really stunning. From a very young age he described himself as having the capacity and need to follow his inner convictions. Whether he called it his tendency to defy authority or he described it as having a need to let “different kinds of things to occur, it’s not a matter of breaking the rules here, it’s . . . give me space” it became clear that he repeatedly made decisions that were not patrolled by the market or expectations of the art community.

That is not to say that he was blind to the art world. As a young man he had suffered from a sense of emptiness, in part because he felt at odds with the art community. Now in the present he insisted that he Never stop paying attention to art, never stop that, so there’s this ongoing art world and I was a part of the Chicago imagist’s stuff, so I’m part of that history.

Throughout the past 40 years his relationship with the art world has often taken the form of an on going internal and external debate. The first time we met he was working on an article in defense of the words “orientalism” and “primitivism.” Writing this article was his emotional response to one of his students who criticized him for using these words because they were “politically incorrect.” In countering this student he was knowingly taking on, as he put it “an internal dialogue,” with the well-known academic Edward Said. In his book Orientalism, Said claimed that the term

120 “orientalism” was a racist concept because it emerged from the worldview of British Imperialism. This paper will not get into the complexity of J’s rebuttal, but to give a taste of his thinking, J had researched the term and found that it was not the invention of British imperialism but had its roots in ancient Rome. While some might feel taking on Said would be a daunting task, J, once again, was not bullied by Said’s authority.

“Everybody has been absolutely uncritical and the acceptance, like you bow down and you just (snap) you just take on those attitudes.”

At the same time J is a very empathic man and teacher who thought very seriously about his role as a listener. He understood his process of engagement with other artists, particularly his students, as exacting another form of inner dialogue.

This is sort of interesting, it’s like, cause we’re trying to talk about what is this thing, this inner process, I use . . . I learned this in teaching, through teaching you learn to have a sympathetic connection to the thing you’re talking about, or a person that you see all semester, so you get involved in their dynamic, even psychodynamic, and at a certain point you, you have to discipline yourself, remind yourself . . . that person has to make whatever decisions, so you are helpful to a certain point . . . . Cause it’s merely, give them a sympathetic input, an expert sympathetic input, and then let them do whatever . . . Being aware of the line, whether it’s my wife or whether it’s a student, I’m asked to enter in and I’m asked, “What do you think, or what’s wrong here, what’s going on here, what’s your . . . ” you know, and so I would literally enter into different strategies of the work with the person, sort of go in there with them and talk about something, and . . . then I have to be able to detach, ok, completely detach, I’ve learned that, in other words, I have to sympathize, have the ability to enter into their working process, and then not identify with it, in other words that’s the difference between them and me . . . . With teaching that’s the job, and with Rose that’s the relationship, and at the same time it’s not helpful to mistake, it’s not my work, it’s that other person’s decision, they have to, they may absolutely disagree with my assessment, and I have to be ready for any of that, and so I have to have a detachment, and so I have to have a sympathetic entrance but at the same time maintain that detachment.

I could imagine him having an internal talk with himself trying to calibrate what to say and what not to say to his students. J was consistent; not only does he reject

121 submitting to other people’s authority, he also worked hard not to take on the role of an authoritarian in his dealings with other artists.

Creating Permeable Mountains From the beginning of our first interview J asserted that his inner life was inhabited with multiple streams of interconnected thoughts. He told me straight away, “It is a very powerful internal dialogue.” To be an artist, J believed he needed to constantly feed his mind. One of the principal sources of his internal dialogue started when he began meeting with a group of artists twenty-seven years ago.

We’d meet once a month . . . and the purpose was to discuss the intersection between the art world and the mythic, the spiritual, the religious, so that, that’s what it was about . . . And it was like, it was really amazing being involved with this, and so Jewish mysticism became part of that thing and… all kinds of other things.

J impressed me with the wealth of information he had absorbed. He incorporated real and mythical characters from Greek and Italian history. He spoke of neo-platonic philosophy, Egyptian religion, Christianity, Judaism, Renaissance Art, Abstract Expressionism and much more. Issues of an occult nature peppered our conversations. His interests produced spiritual mythical imagery.

This notion of the great goddesses . . . I was being aware of all this fertility, basically fertility images in France and stuff like that . . . I made a whole string of drawings of like, chairs, but they were . . . goddess images, fertility goddess, fertility images . . . there’s something of a kind of expressive interest that those ideas can . . . kind of resonate in me— This library of information populated his inner life.

It’s like, my inclusivist position is that I think it’s a mistake to become as dissociated as we are from the ancient world, from the richness of the ancient world. I mean, it’s a mistake in that we don’t understand the contemporary world, and especially this whole thing with Islam, is an idea that’s been around

122 well before that thing broke out, (the war in Iraq) it’s like, my attraction to that, the ancient world, Egypt, all that stuff, was just always there and, and, and I was fascinated by looking at the stuff, right . . . If you go to the Metropolitan Museum, which is one of my favorite places, right? And you go to, I’ll always go to the contemporary section, you know, that’s, you know, all that nice, new, fresh stuff in the galleries, at the same time, I just always go to Egypt or wherever, it’s like, anywhere in the world, you know, and I think that kind of access is important to being in the present moment, right? . . . . It used to…it was like, perhaps, it was 1860 and forward and there was no use, anything before 1860 is meaningless. Meaningless. And, and you can see that Caravaggio and Rembrandt were better and so one of my things that I find out is how, how do you make a relevant space for this kind of playing with time, it’s like playing with time, and it’s like, you know, it’s like, you know, make a space for that inner world . . .

He was also drawn to reading Jung and myths and “paying intense attention to dreams.” Of the 26 artists I interviewed the artists J, Magpie and B all mentioned using Jung’s interpretations of dreams and myths to assist them in making art. In particular they believed Jung’s influence insisted that, as J said, “Ah ha, pay attention to your inner life.”

To harness his encyclopedic mind in the service of his art making, J described an elaborate and varied system he used to pay attention to his internal dialogue. This process was expressed with an unusual capacity for self-awareness. He had a very well tuned knowledge of the complexity of the inner workings of his artistic process.

The first strategy he used to lasso his inner thoughts was that he went on walks and opened himself up to his environment.

I always walk with paper, right, so I’m on a walk, things just happen in my consciousness that I don’t intend to be thinking about. It’s, the process is cooking, right, I, what I do have is an openness there. I sort of have a sense of enabling it. I could divert to other things, so I allow for a certain kind of openness and things happen, and what I have to do, otherwise it goes away, I have to write something down right away, or images, in other words, and I usually make it very scribbled first things that then I can put aside. Now, sometimes, in these late night sessions or early morning sessions, I may get up from bed five, six times, I mean, this is when something is really cooking, in

123 other words, this is not normal, but like, when something is really happening, I have to write it down, I cannot trust, because it’s like a dream, I cannot trust, it won’t be there, and then I have to go back in after I’m clear the next day, and then I have to work with that and say, now, what was that again? Because sometimes I can hardly make out what I had, but I usually can, you know, and I can connect to a thread of an idea. Most recently, those things have been involved in the writing project, but that’s not much different than the visualization project.

DH: How do you open yourself up?

Well, I have to sort of let room for this other thing to intervene, in other words, I have to when the impulse comes, I have to act on it. I don’t know if there’s anything I do or can do to make the impulse happen. I don’t, it’s, I think it’s, the way I see it, it’s relatively autonomous, it’s a process, I’m engaged in something, I’m working on something, I’m deeply engaged with something….

I’m relaxing, but it’s relaxed in a certain way, I’m not watching TV, you know, I’m not reading a book, cause that would take, open up something else, I’m not meditating even, I’m relaxing, and then I’m, then, when something pops in, because this is not new, it’s been going on for a long, long time, so I don’t know, it’s something I’m not un-used to, I make a space for it in my life and I know that I have to respond to it. Respond to it means either making drawings, quick drawings, or writing words down, cause sometimes I write words down of things to do quite often, like, you know, make one like this with this, you know, now that’s a journal, that’s like an opening, that’s a new thought, that’s a try this . . . as a thought that I can interpret in terms of language, because a lot of things have to do with qualities or colors and there’s no way, I can’t, if I get involved in making that happen, uh, that begins to have its own process with its own things that open up its own territories . . . And you’ve got to try to relieve yourself of all kinds of immediate worries and concerns and a whole bunch of things, and you’ve got to try to let them nest . . .

His process, of creating a relaxed slowed down unworried place, seemed to correspond to the process Eva instinctively used when she played Solitaire. In the second interview he went back and described his walks in more detail.

I write, I write, so what I’m doing is as I’m walking, I’m writing, I walk and write. I like to do that.

DH: So you’re writing ideas?

Yeah, thoughts, things, it’s a train, a train of ideas, train of thoughts, it’s like, you know, and it’s like, I have to go back and reinterpret later, which I do, if it’s

124 like a regular day, but, so it’s pretty disorderly, but you know, I’m used to that, I just get things down and I know where I start and I know to keep track of the paper and I know basically the order and the flow and then I have to go back and look at the flow . . . It’s not in a solid notebook, it’s sheets, but I keep the sheets . . . . When I get home, and not right away, at a certain point, because I, I’ve found that if I don’t do that, I’m going to have this almost unintelligible scribble thing, it’s like, it’s no longer available to me, and so I can decipher it, I, I, I’m close enough to it so it triggers, I can remember the thought, I need a trigger.

The second strategy he used to organize his inner process was he created sketchbooks. He incorporated the notes from his walks, nocturnal thoughts, his dreams and his history alongside sketches and images he cut out and put together into sketchbooks.

I put these images together . . . in a Joyceian process is something that I work with, it’s associations, seemingly random, but there’s a strong connection . . . I forge connections . . . sense of connection, it’s like a symbol, it’s like this feels connected, it may not appear to be it, but it’s like there’s an attraction, these things, these things fit together, it’s like a puzzle, this connects, you know, um, this fits with this, and a lot of throwing stuff out . . . so I really like this idea of, of half tone, layer upon layer upon layer, so if the first thing doesn’t work out, if it does work out that’s great, if it doesn’t work out, I bury it partially, my visual work for a long time had been involved with process of layering, and that process of layering allows for this to happen, things show up, they may work or they don’t work . . .

DH: So would I be completely cheating if I said so you want to create a visual and verbal dialogue where conversations that might not seem that they match would have a chance to have a conversation together?

Yup, yup, absolutely. It’s actually image before it’s words, although I would say that there’s dialogue, there’s dialogue I’m making connections . . . There’s layers of complexities, because of when life gets complicated and I’m extremely aware of my history. We have an unfolding of this history, and we have the ability to step back years, it’s like, I reserve that right to do that, those layers of history are porous, as far as I’m concerned, so I reserve the right to play back and forth . . . And that’s, that’s what I teach, I teach about permeable mountains of this thing.

The third strategy he described was based on feelings. He pursued,

125 Meaningful patterns that get played out in terms of the stuff in my work. The inner part is the meaningful dialogue, ok, what is that? The other part is the stuff of the world, all the stuff that you make art with . . . but there’s another thing which balances out on the inside, which, I would say, is the best of that territory of meaning, now what is that? What, what is that? It’s a felt sense, it’s dynamic, it’s an economy, um, it, it, it, overall, it’s a felt sense, this connects, this connects, versus this connects, and follow this pattern of connection, and, and that’s in terms of feeling.

In each interview he reiterated that what moved him to make artistic choices were his feelings and when feelings were animated he believed that his art got infused with meaning.

There’s a sense of meaning, because it may be that to pursue meaning, that’s what, that thing that took effect back in 1967, that sense of meaninglessness and it could be that this whole thing that I’m involved, whatever this emotional thing, its called the pursuit of meaning.

DH: So is there, is there a certain kind of feeling, which of course you cannot verbalize, that you follow as a kind of Geiger counter for what you should do . . .

Yeah.

J believed his affects would lead him to an art making process that gave him a “sense of meaning” in the world without which, he feared, the sense of emptiness he felt at the end of college would return.

The fourth type of inner dialogue he had was an ongoing conversation in his head. In this inner conversation he culled through ideas and decided which ideas and images to use and which to edit out.

There’s, there’s this thing about priorities, one of the, one of the most strongest sense of that internal dialogue is, I think, priorities. Always asking myself what to, you know, what to invest yourself in, and it’s like, and it’s, it’s carried out in terms of feeling for me, it’s not a calculable thing.

126 To further illustrate his point he told me a story about seeing the artist Carl Andre, a well-known artist (who years ago had been accused of killing his wife, another well-known artist; he was eventually acquitted).

Carl Andre said this curious thing, and it was like, it was really double curious, given his past, he said, you gotta kill the thing you love.

DH: Don’t say that!

He actually said that . . .

DH: So wait, kill the thing you love . . .

Kill the thing you love, which was, in a sense that, I, I took that to mean that freer creative part. I’ve known some people that really are capable of extreme focus, at the same time there’s all this chaos. They’re able to channel in and they come in and they do that, kill that thing that’s present, and they come in and they know exactly what their task is and they go right to work and that’s it.

DH: You’re calling focus killing?

Well, that’s what he did, that’s what he said.

DH: He said to focus?

Right, he didn’t say, ok, it was my, my interpretation.

DH: I understand that, I know that, I know, I’m trying to understand why you called a focusing a killing. I thought that it was more, because you know sometimes, like a writer loves a phrase in their writing, and they know they can’t, there has to be a point where they edit it out . . .

Right, right, that’s absolutely true.

DH: And that’s how I made it, is sort of like the willingness to destroy things that are, that are precious to you for the work to really survive.

Yup. Yup. Symbolically, to J prioritizing was a form of killing. The inner prioritization conversation he carried on was highly charged. This conversation involved him

127 switching back and forth between words and feelings each reacting in response to the other pushing him to decide what to keep, as he painted or wrote, and what to eliminate. In his definition of the concept of dialogue, feelings were a comparable language to words.

Many psychoanalytically trained writers who have approached the question of the creative process (David Beres, Marion Milner, Anna Freud, Anton Ehrenzweig) have described a cinematic blurred, surrealistic picture of the creative process. For example, Ehrenzweig, in his seminal work The Hidden Order of Art, described the creative imagination. He described an artist’s inner process as amassing layers of thought superimposed one upon the other. In his description the creative ego can swing between undifferentiation and differentiation without losing a sense of self, unlike the schizophrenic who will fragment in an undifferentiated state. He asserted that an artist depends on primary process thinking, which he described as, “opposite ideas collude, space and time bleed into one another, boundaries slip . . .” (p.80) Ehrenzweig’s depiction of this state of unfocused integration of images and thoughts made sense of Eva’s practice of looking out of the corner of her eye at her paintings as she concentrated on playing Solitaire and, his description of the layering of images, closely resembled J’s portrayal of his process.

J’s description of the need “to kill” the images that shouldn’t be used and the need to focus his attention also matched the descriptions conveyed by several of the psychoanalytically informed writers who wrote about the creative process. The language of many of the writers of the object relations and Freudian schools of thought seemed to glory in dramatic assertions. Margaret Brenman-Gibson echoed J with her

128 contention that intrinsic to the act of creation is destruction. She declared to rewrite is an act of destruction. She cited how Beethoven wrote and destroyed as many as twenty drafts of his symphonies before deciding they were finished. (1976, p.336) Melanie Klein stated that the artist’s unconscious fantasy was to murder the object he painted.

She alleged that unconscious guilt propelled the artist to reanimate the person he wished to destroy in his art. Joyce McDougall (1995) described the creative artist as being driven both by the urge to fuse with and destroy the objects they make. While these dramatic poetic assertions were popular amongst theoreticians, at least consciously, J, Eva and perhaps Icarus were the only artists I interviewed whom, on occasion, experienced art making from these conceptual vantage points.

Creating the Right Conditions An interwoven but separate strand, in J’s process, involved his purposeful creation of an atmosphere conducive to art making. This happened when he was actually making the art object, unlike the strategies I first described, which helped him primarily during his harvesting stage. Several other participants affirmed the importance of creating an “art space.” While it is likely that all these stages weave back and forth, I am describing them separately.

Because of J’s self-described tendency to become “distracted” and his already professed need to learn how to focus his attention he had devised an array of methods to counter this tendency and keep him on task. The primary method that he described in all three interviews was creating a form of an internal dialogue based on the impact of his feelings at the moment.

129 Mood is probably not identical with the work. I would say it supports it. Maybe something that would support a quality of thought or some feeling and then maybe that mood that’s just for a time, maybe it just fits for a while . . .

J recalled however since he was a young boy he had been aware of how a difference in the environment could transform his mood and have an impact on his game playing and his art making.

I remember very early on that things, there were moods that made the whole process better…There were certain days, I liked cloudy days rather than sunny days, because it allowed for a certain kind of mood to take place, and the mood, now, this didn’t have any effect on my friends or whatever, but getting into, getting into a thought-feeling structure, there’s, it’s an emotional quality, something you feel, that is connected in a sense. This connects the art thing, to a sense of season change, seasons, and particular qualities of seasons, and I used to paint, very early on, seasonal pictures, it’s not happy or sad, it’s a feeling, it’s a quality of feeling. I think, I have to say, a particular quality of feeling, and that’s more difficult to describe, it’s not a simple emotion. What’s the weather today, internal weather, external weather, you know. It allowed certain kinds of excitements and anticipations and the quality, to infuse the games we were playing, for myself.

In the second interview he reiterated the importance of mood and emotion on his art-making process.

You go to work in the studio, because you have to make, you have to open up an emotional connection . . . it has to be emotional, and so that was always a nice thing, to sort of go through that dance and you know, ask myself how do I open that emotional connection for today?

I asked him, other than waiting for a rainy day, how did he open up an emotional connection? How did he create mood?

I’ll listen to music, or lots of recordings, lots of books and stuff like that, you know, something is occupying my mind . . .

DH: Ok, wait, wait, wait, but the music is, on while you’re . . .

It’s a parallel track.

DH: So wait, while you’re doing the work, you’ll have music?

130 Oh, absolutely, music or, or recorded books or things that I’ve read into tape, or you know, stuff, because it’s like, you know… doing the work can be really boring, you know, so it’s, it has to be, the things have to be right, cause sometimes I have large quantity of stuff to listen to, different kinds of, and it’s gotta enhance the kind of mood… I’ve always had a certain kind of emotional quality, or what I would call mood, that is, the work is not in a void, so there’s always, so something that is going to help that out , the word dialogue applies here it is an interaction I seek that enhances the work.

I asked him to give me some examples of what he listened to.

A couple of middle eastern things that were poets and recordings and that stuff, whether novels or music or a variety of things, just, you know, just, help, where it supports sort of taking you to a different place, slightly, the ideas, the emotions, there’s some amazing Greek and Turkish music and stuff like that, you know, some really nice stuff, you know . . . there are books, really good ones, that I’ll have on tape, so I actually read a bunch of novels on tape myself.

J had taken the time to both think about which books would help his creativity and to read these books onto tape.

Starting as a young child he realized that the quality of his imaginative play could be altered depending on his frame of mind, and he understood that the moods that invited his creativity could be elicited both by the weather and other deliberate influences. As an adult he used the same reasoning. Influences such as music helped him establish the mood and emotional environment that encouraged his creative choices. He named this unfolding process of mutual influence between the music and his art making a dialogue.

As D.A. Rappaport noted Early childhood educators emphasize how “the ability to fine tune feelings also transfers into an ability to fine tune mental perceptions.” There is a correlation between the ability to understand subtle feelings and the ability to perceive complex ideas in subtle ways. Feelings, they declare is an important tool for learning. (Rappaport, 1971, p. 24) J’s inner life trajectory is sound proof of how the complex and precise attention

131 he paid to his feelings and to learning enriched his art making.

Another tactic he used to help himself during times when he was unsure as to what to do, while unrelated to a conversation about internal dialogue, was a practice reported by many artists.

Well, maybe I have to sweep the floor, put things away, I have to, you know, dance around, I have to do a bunch of other things, and, I don’t come in and start, it’s like I’m looking at it and maybe I’ll just sit down with it for a while, maybe I’ll look out the window for a while, in other words, just, you know, the kind of things that seem like avoidance are certainly the equivalent of circling around, you know, what can I do to make this work . . . . I’m thinking about that and sometimes we’ll try this, or sometimes nothing comes out.

When I have worked with artists and students I have always believed that the “circling around” cleaning type behavior that many of them described was often a part of the process, not necessarily, as they worried, a sign of a blocked process.

During our third interview J concentrated on detailing the dispute he was embroiled in with the IRS. In our meeting he described his confrontation with the IRS as a defense of his internal dialogic process. The IRS was insisting that he justify the deductions he took on his income tax forms as expenses he incurred in his role as a professor. He was resolute in saying that these expenses were ones he incurred as an artist. J told me his interpretation of the IRS agent’s reasoning: The guy’s conclusion has been that I’m a “hobbyist.” I will claim, on the same basis of what we’re talking about, that my being an artist is filtering through all of these things, books, music, time, space, all these things are requirements that I fill the time for myself, and then it’s the residue of that that I teach with . . .

The, the, the thing I arrived at, which I was not sufficiently aware of, the idea of being an artist, this is the central identity thing, the core, if there’s an identity division, and this is what the IRS is going after me for. If they say, “Well, you’re a teacher, we don’t dispute that, but you’re just a teacher, the art is not essential.” What I came to is, the essential core, that’s the identity issue . . . and that caused me to sort of have to go in, dig in deep and create the defense, not as a fiction, but to go in and quantify, uh, where I’ve been these last forty years.

Whew! You know, and that’s been the job.

132

To create the bountiful internal dialogue he depended on to make art, he considered his exposure to and pursuit of an abundance of influences as vitally important.

He had spent the past several months, working with his accountant, investigating how each different expense he had incurred was in the service of making his art. He adamantly believed that upholding the cultivation of diversity within an artist’s mind was a professional necessity. The fervor with which he pursued this debate was not to save money but was ideological. He wanted to defend what he felt was the definition of an artist not only for himself but also for other artists.

DH: This is what you did with your sabbatical?

Yes, this was, and it was like, I couldn’t do anything else, because this was right there, you know, it was right in front of me, and it was like, you cannot put this aside, this is going to have to be dealt with, and if you’re not going to, some people have criticized me and said, “Just pay the money, it’s not worth your time, pay the money and move on.” But, my reasoning is, if you let them take away that, if you let them take this hobby thing, that has future repercussions, this is not just a present thing, this is, this is a larger issue here and the larger issue has to be defended, whether right or wrong, that’s my rationale.

Once again J was not going to be squashed by authority. Once again he felt compelled to do what his heart led him to do not what others might think he should do and once again he held tight to his identity as an artist or as he named it in the first interview “his authenticity.”

While it may appear to some readers that J was an oppositional man, this was not at all my experience with him. He had strong opinions but he was open to my thoughts and he listened to me. He provided food for me every time I came over. He willingly agreed to spend three sessions with me all of which lasted from 2 to 3 hours.

133 He thought about things we talked about and referred to them even months after the conversation.

His thoughts, as he himself described, seemed to go quickly from one idea to the next and sometimes the bridge from one thought or one word to the next was not uttered and I often had to fill in the blanks or remain confused. He clearly did not do this on purpose; he wanted me to understand him. His way of talking, I guessed, was a manifestation of the treasure chest of information inside his head vying for top “priority� to speak first.

In summation, J defined a dialogue as being an interaction that moved a process along. Because of the non-specificity of his definition he had an expansive view of what constituted elements of an inner dialogue. During the course of our conversations he described his inner dialogue as: interactions between two different feelings or moods, the dialogue between himself as he made art and music or words, and the interactions between words and images. He also pointed to the task of prioritizing as being an important on-going inner dialogue. These inner conversations involved him switching back and forth from words into images into feelings all reacting to one another and helping decide what to use in a painting or article. Another inner dialogue he experienced was the internal work he did to listen empathically to his friends and students. This required that he carry on an internal dialogue that helped him immerse himself in the other person’s skin and imagine what he could do to help him discover what he wanted to know. It demanded that J did not force his aesthetics onto anyone.

134 Because J paid close attention to his inner life he had a nuanced and symbolic sense of what he considered elements of internal language. Many other participants defined dialogue in a more literalist fashion.

Theseus K Theseus K was similar to J in many ways. They both grew up in the 1950s, in large cities. They were both very articulate and well informed. They both were interested in myths and religions. They were both painters and wrote art criticism.

They both felt at odds with the ethos of the modern art clique. They both enjoyed partaking in lively debates. They both had a free associate process that they followed closely. They both privileged emotions as the organizing force that inspired them to make art.

In terms of this project, the one large difference between the two was that J readily, without any coaching from me, referred to his process as an internal dialogue.

Thesesus K, on the other hand, balked at the idea of considering his process, which was in my mind similar to J’s, as an internal dialogue. The on-going conversation Theseus K and I had about the disparity between our two definitions of dialogue was an interesting process. To my mind, the interviews with Theseus K were rich with his detailed variegated descriptions of internal dialogic processes that, simultaneously, he was reluctant to acknowledge he engaged in. As Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland made it clear, language is subjective. Thesesus K’s interviews were excellent examples of the diversity of definitions given to the words inner dialogue. In addition, the interviews with Thesesus K exemplified the stark difference

135 between the research modality of this project based on both Denzin’s and Jessica Benjamin’s theories that prescribed my engagement in a dialogic process with the participants, versus a traditional research methodology, which emphasizes the neutrality of the researcher. The external dialogic process of our conversation was lively. I did not argue with any other participant about how they defined the concept of an internal dialogue. I accepted their definitions. Since it was evident that he was outspoken and enjoyed a good debate and it seemed so patently clear to me that he did in fact engage in an inner dialogue, I allowed myself, in a friendly manner, to spar with him. I believe we were both mentally invigorated by our discussions. Our conversations definitely abandoned the concept of research neutrality in favor of a deeper more complex and engaged interview.

As our two meetings unfolded it quickly and repeatedly became clear that Theseus K had a narrow and negative view of what was meant by the concept of an internal dialogue.

The First Meeting When I first asked him if he engaged in an internal dialogic process his response was, Socratic dialogue I’ve used, I know that, Galileo was a Socratic dialogical, but I always thought of it as the analytics of it, it’s the, doing, reflecting on, then rereflecting, that sort of thing. It’s analysis more than it is dialogue; I have to think about that, that doesn’t seem hum . . . . I always think of analytical things as lining up columns, but I think as an artist, well, it doesn’t take into account your emotions as much as it should. .

He assumed that the intrinsic meaning of the word dialogue was that it was unemotional and analytic. He seemed to think that having an internal dialogue implied

136 that it would consist of premeditating every brush stroke, would not be spontaneous and therefore was not something he practiced.

Second, he assumed that when I asked him if he carried on an internal dialogue while he was working on a painting that I meant it would necessarily be about art. He made a large point of distancing himself from doing this, The old story is that when critics get together, they talk about line and color and value, when artists get together, they talk about, oh, I can get turpentine at $2.99 a gallon (laughs). The people I have a lot in common with and we can talk, but we really end up talking about other things, other than our work, we talk about literature or we talk about music. .

Despite his protestations, I pointed out to him how certain processes he practiced could easily be construed as inner dialogues. The first observation I made was that he was a storyteller.

DH: I’ve noticed when you’ve shown me paintings . . . part of your process in making a painting is to come up with a story.

Or a dramatic, it’s kind of hard to say, I say narrative story, but a lot of that relies on, there’s no timeline, so it’s gotta be symbolic, it’s gotta communicate in the moments, you don’t have what the dramatists have when you’re progressing from one action to the next, you’ve got to put it all in one moment, so you suggest larger things with metaphor and symbolism and things like that, so you’re, you’re kind of exploding a moment.

DH: You’re having this conversation in your head?

I haven’t even drawn it yet I’m thinking . . . (he pointed to a large canvas on the wall). Yeah, so, nothing on paper at this point, ok, so then I’ve got to start fleshing this out a bit, so then I took down pencil and paper and, so then I said, ok, let’s see, maybe I can make it where it’s a, it’s a party on the ship, and we could have like a family, which is the émigrés on board, and you saw the celebration of the play is part of the family, so I put this family and they’re giving the boy his birthday gifts so the little boy’s got his little toys here that are all explorer’s toys, you’ve got a compass, a map… and the ship itself, so these are explorers and this is like the family and they symbolize closeness and it’s a symbol of marriage and togetherness, and then we’ve got the crew here, again … I’m going into analytical here. I’m saying, what can I add that contributes to making the painting deeper? So I have the crew here and the crew is looking at

137 a map, he doesn’t know, you see, and so the crew is lost, and here’s a sort of a philosopher figure who’s the one with the huge ears, and we have some musicians here, which makes it into, it is a party, and there’s something fun going on, life continues playing, right, and then also we’ve got a little child here . . . And, as you go through life, you have all the memories of childhood, and I kind of felt like I should put a little child in there. I’m deciding whether to put these things in before I put them in, I’m, what can I put over there that contributes, and then I think about it and then I decide to, I mean, you wait for an idea to come, you know, and then if it’s wrong you erase it and you do it again. Then after you do all that, you’ve got to figure out what’s the emotional atmosphere you want to create . . . At some point you may find that there may be something that you want to produce that is not in that original metaphor, that’s grown out of that original metaphor, so there might be, oh, let’s say there might be a love story or something going on in the background.

DH: Ok, so, ok, that’s interesting, so part of your process is just sort of a freeassociative story telling kind of thinking?

Yeah, right.

Although he disclaimed carrying on an inner dialogue, unmistakably this was an example of an intricate word based story that he made up to motivate his painting into being. Throughout our meetings he told me very complex stories with references to historical and mythological characters and world events that he invented about his paintings. Another type of story he enjoyed telling were anecdotes about great artists.

He used these stories to both entertain me and to illustrate ways in which he was similar to these historic figure. Several examples: There’s a very famous story, I don’t know if you ever heard this one. It’s with Lawrence Olivier when he’s doing Othello with Maggie Smith, and you know, Lawrence Olivier was a very self-conscious artist, he was a thinking kind of actor, he was not a method actor. I mean we always think about him being this really great sort of expert, and so one night he did Othello and he was just fantastic, everybody’s just moved and it was a magnificent performance, and so Maggie Smith was playing Desdemona, comes backstage and says, oh, she’s going to tell him how wonderful he is, she comes backstage and she finds him in this tremendous blue funk, and she says, Larry, you were terrific, and he says, I know, but I don’t know why (laughs). Right? So, so that happens, too, you get, you get things where really, it is good, yet you can’t know why . . .

138 Brahms . . . Somebody complained, you know, I love your second symphony, it’s a very lyrical symphony, but there’s this one portion in the slow movement that’s really dark all of a sudden. And he says, could you take that out, I don’t really like that. And Brahms writes back and he says, no, he says, because you see, the moment of darkness makes the happy heart happy . . . . I like to incorporate some of that, and you see that in this one, (he points to a painting) with the bit about where they’re lost? You have to have those little counterelements that are darker . . .they ground you emotionally, make it a little more rounded . . .

Sibelius was this person who was like, “I want clear mountain water, I want music, I don’t want anything else, I want pure music writing.”.. until he got to later life and . . . he’s now just thinking music. Nothing to prove anymore, and the great thing, the oboe concerto and things like this is his kind of masterpiece, so I’m of that school, I, I am, you have to be true, you have to in a sense not think about your public. You have to think about what’s true for you, you have to think about what’s good, you have to think in deeper terms of you’re always trying to make it better, you have to be honest with yourself . . .

This last quote was not only an example of his sense of being connected to a community of great artists. It raised an important theme that has already been emphasized in both Eva’s and J’s interviews. The theme was the necessity of remaining true to one’s authentic vision.

Theseus K’s whole art-making endeavor seemed to be animated by him imagining himself in the company of the grand masters. Even when he wasn’t comparing himself to the masters, he told me stories about them as if he was gossiping about old friends and relatives.

I once wrote an essay on diseases of 19th century composers. And uh, you know, almost every 19th century composer was sick. It was a sick century. You go through the list of them all, I mean, there’s only like, three healthy ones, which is Brahms and Dvorak, and um, maybe you’ll find another one in there somewhere. But you go through, Von Weber was tubercular, and drank acid one time, and so he had a weak throat, and Beethoven had all kinds of intestinal problems and lead poisoning, and that turns out, Chopin was consumptive, Schumann was manic-depressive and he had mercury poisoning, Schubert caught syphilis and gonorrhea and had problems, and then Donizetti went insane because of syphilis and Smietana had syphilis and then so you go on and on and on and they’re all sick, and then comes the, almost to a man, it’s

139 amazing, even when you get to people like Bruckner, who had breakdowns, and you’ve got Mahler, who was manic-depressive, and Verdi, and blah, blah, blah.

The second observation I made was that while he claimed that he did not engage in an inner dialogue, he talked about his art making as being like a “visual language,” “speaking a language beyond language” using a “musical language.”

Once you start working, you get away a lot from the verbalization and get into a world where you’re communicating in a visual language, so you look at the face, and it’s not a matter of saying, oh, that face is happy, sad, whatever. You are then getting into an element where the visual language is a language all of its own, just like a musician relates to how long the notes are… so it’s nuances of expression, nuances of color, I mean you don’t stop and think, well, I want…you know, this green . . . it just, it feels right, and you’re speaking a language beyond language . . . . You’re not, no longer using words anymore, is that what you’re talking about? And then your language becomes an internal one, of the nuances of the visual thing, so like I say, when you paint, let’s suppose I’m, I’m painting this person, and I’m thinking to myself, when I get into symbols and stuff like that, like I’m painting flowers and I might say, well, she needs something to communicate spring, so I might then do a word dialogue with myself, saying what would I need to indicate spring, which is naturally flowers, but then once I do, start drawing the flowers, I no longer work on a verbal basis anymore, I want to draw flowers in a way that’s graceful, that’s beautiful, and I’m intense with the brushstrokes and the colors and the shapes, I’ll let that, then I don’t use words much anymore, then it becomes very much like a musical language.

Since he was using the word “language” about things that were not words to describe the influences that swayed him when he painted, I posited that if we define the word dialogue as two or more “languages” of thinking influencing one another, then it logically followed that he carried on a non-verbal dialogue with music, color and affect.

He seemingly ignored this point and continued explaining his creative process.

When you’re first planning to conceive what you want to do, the first thing you do is you sort of touch base with your emotions, and you just think about somehow vaguely what kind of emotional statement you want to make . . . You sort of, you’re looking for an emotional thrust that you want to do, and sometimes that’s not as simple as it sounds, because it’s a feeling and it’s kind of vague and it has a lot of ambiguities . . . whether it’s in a minor key or a major key. .. it may be as little as you’re standing on a street corner and you see

140 a person getting out of a bus and it’s a particular gesture, and you want to put some face on that gesture, you want to make it into something bigger, but you’re fascinated by the gesture . . . I’m reading a Shakespeare play and I read a particular speech and I see some, some little glint in there that I’ve never seen before, and I want to make that into something larger, attach it to a larger structure. So then you have to find what Eliot called an objective correlative, you need to, something to take that little gesture, that emotion, or that little phrase of Shakespeare and give it, in my case, since I’m highly figurative, it’s giving me some kind of emotional situation. A little touchstone . . . my little touchstone was the Pluto/Persephone situation and once you start, and that is all kind of verbal. All your thinking and shifting through images is almost in words quite a bit, and then once you start working though, this is the way the change starts, once you start working, you get away a lot from the verbalization and get into a world where you’re communicating in a visual language.

In The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot defined the concept of “objective correlative” to which Theseus K had referred. In Eliot’s words, “The only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’ in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion: such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (Eliot, 1920, p. 100) Theseus K explained the equivalencies of his paintings to other medium as examples of objective correlatives. This concept was an excellent explanation of the nonlinguistic semiotics that influenced other artists such as Gretchen and J and auxiliary proof of the notion that a dialogue can exist between two different forms of expressions.

Using the influence classical music brought to bear on his work, he offered examples of how he internalized the concept of an objective correlative.

Music is a constant source of inspiration and I frequently will have a piece of music and I’ll say, I want to make something that is expressive in the way this is. This is very common. Usually it’s a deeper kind of music, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, for instance, I will with Charpier or something like this, which is more French and kind of fizzy, I’ll say, I want that quality of lightness, but

141 more often than not, it’s Beethoven, the quartets, or something Brahms heavy, or Wagner. Wagner is a vivid voice, Wagner is a crazy guy and has all kinds of sinister subconscious darkness (laughs), but in terms of his art, the way it’s constructed, with the color and the symbolism, that sort of thing, I, he’s had a great influence on my way of structuring. Funny, funny thing is that I feel much closer to Brahms as a man and in sort of many ways, his music too, but in terms of Brahms being a theatrical composer, where he had a stage, and Wagner is also a great colorist and in my, this whole theory, I’ve done I’m trying to create a new kind of harmony. This is very much, was stimulated for me, years ago, by listening to the music of Debussy, because of Debussy’s music, you have really sort of coloristic chords, they’re not necessarily structural like you have in Beethoven or Brahms, they’re more of a mixing of odd tones to give it purely coloristic. You have to find this equivalent to that, visually in your own memory, or in your own experience of life.

DH: So actually so I call that a dialogue. Two kinds of language influencing each other.

All right, it is a dialogue.

He explained, with intricate clarity, the profound influence certain composers had on him, from the integrity of their creative lives to the qualities of the music they wrote. Yet his admission that, “all right it is a dialogue . . .” sounded reluctant.

The Second Meeting When we had our second meeting, he began the interview by saying that upon some consideration he could consider the possibility of using the concept of internal dialogue.

It’s just that it’s a more difficult dialogue than that thing that we talked about last time, which to me was verbal, internal verbal dialogue, and there’s an internal non-verbal dialogue.

It was interesting that he seemed to have forgotten that I had suggested that he could consider his non-linguistic language as a component in an inner dialogue.

However I did not point this out, I was pleased that he was allowing the concept to

142 enter his schemata and eager to see where he let it take his thoughts. Immediately, he gave an excellent example of how he imagined such a dialogue.

And so while I’m looking at that picture, I’m obviously saying to myself, “Oh, its too much,” it’s like emotions kick in. You probably have had this experience listening to a piece of music, and all of a sudden you feel emotion rising, emotion that’s not analytical, emotion that’s just coming out of nowhere, but it’s there, and in a human being, this is all cross-referenced, you know, you’ve got the emotions and you’ve got the memories and you’ve got your analytical, you’ve got your, whatever else you’ve got as a person, and they’re all chitchatting in a thousand cross-sections, a thousand cross-sections on the crosssections . . . To have that emotional center, which makes the driving mechanism that makes you want to go in a certain direction in making artwork that means something, that comes out of an emotion, really . . .

His description of the cross referencing of emotions, memories and his history of living on earth was an articulate formulation of the polylogue a number of the other artists experienced. He, like J, believed in the importance of accumulating knowledge and placed the critical organizing tool of his art making process as being in his emotional relationship to what he was making. When he used the word “chitchatting” he made a small smile, cocked his head and looked at me. And I bobbed my head up and down, vigorously.

However, as we continued talking, he reverted back to his stance towards some of the connotations he believed were intrinsic to the concept of an inner dialogue.

And I, I’m trying to be Leonardo in a kind of a modern context here. I’m trying to paint things that have just tremendous nuance and spirituality, or whatever you want to call it. I hate that word, but I want to give it a lot of meaning, and treat it with the same kind of fidelity. Leonardo is a special figure for me; Leonardo is just, if you want to get the guy who has the slow, painful, but gorgeous kind of process— DH: Ok, so you don’t like this, but that, I would wonder that in some sense, that is a dialogue between you two artists.

Well, yes, it’s a neoclassical sort of one, if you want.

143 DH: What does neoclassical mean?

It means that you are, you see yourself in the tradition of painting, you see yourself as part of a tradition.

DH: Um hmm, yeah.

And that in a sense is neoclassical, because painting is a long-revered art form, so in that sense I’m neoclassical. But the dialogue that I have it’s never . . .I never set out to say I’m imitating them, but you know they’re there, and there are certain flavors that I prefer, and those flavors repeat in, with like, certain painters, but I never, never set out to duplicate them, I never say I’m trying to imitate that, they’re just floating around and I pay attention.

Thesesus K sounded fearful that to embrace that he was in a dialogue with other artists implied that he was copying them. We debated this inference and I argued that it was evident that he engaged in a dialogue of influence from these other artists which seemed healthy and from which he seemed to reap great benefits.

His initial resistance to being identified as copying another artist is reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s (1973) thoughts concerning the “anxiety of influence.” In the 1970s Bloom studied the relations between past and present texts and their authors. His premise ran counter to the existing emphasis “that regards literary influence as a benign force.” Bloom ascribed the appearance in the post-Enlightenment period of a “psychological imperative . . . (to have) named something first, hence to sin against continuity.” (1973, p. 78) He ascribed this need as evolving from the Oedipal crisis, as described by Freud.

The poet locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating “precursor” will seek to disarm (the latter’s) strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursors poem; in this sense, all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as “misreading of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. (p. 78)

144 Bloom’s Freudian interpretation as to what animates the creative process highlights the possibility that both the desire to follow other artists in reverence or the desire to break from the influence of other artists are forms of conscious and unconscious internal dialogues an artist has with his predecessors.

Another possibility was that Theseus K was afraid that I was using the word dialogue within the context of the language of Post Modernism, a movement he derided. One of the terms used by Post Modernists, to describe artists who borrow styles and subject matter from other art periods, is to say the artist is “quoting” other artists. Was Theseus K perceiving “inner dialogues” and “quoting” as related concepts?

I clarified that I was not implying that he was copying other artists; instead I meant that they influenced and inspired him. He could accept this notion and he proceeded to furnish me with examples: They once asked Stravinsky the question, what do you do before you compose?

And he says, “oh, I listen to Beethoven’s quartets.” I listen to music, there are certain composers that sort of get me going. And I think that’s also true, too, that I may pick up books of either particular artists, or more often than not, I will pick up something that is not specific, I will pick up a book of like, history of art, or I will pick up even a National Geographic, that’s quite common, and … flip through the pictures, almost in a way like you would go through a library when you’re not going down the books in order, you’re just going down the shelf. It’s a process in imagery and you’re saying, what is useful, could be useful? And you look first for what, in my case I look for things that fascinate first both visually, they’re interesting shapes or interesting colors, but I also look for them from the point of view of structure, shape.

Not only did he collect images but he also surveyed his mind for the words of artists he admired.

Yes, I love to read letters; it’s like a time machine . . . and you really get the person, you’re not getting somebody filtering it . . .

DH: Well, but then, you have these artists’ actual words in your head when you’re thinking of them.

145

Yeah, a lot of, there’s a lot of nuance.

DH: Well, dialogically, you not only have their visuals, you have words of theirs that you kind of reawaken, so there’s sort of a conversation of words in your head about these artists.

He shrugged. The shrug was an objective equivalency to a reluctant, “Okay you have a point.” He shifted, for the second time in the interview, and described in great detail an example of the way an inner dialogue worked for him.

Once you hit the canvas, once you start working visually, and you’re not, no longer using words anymore, is that what you’re talking about? And then your language becomes an internal one, of the nuances of the visual thing, so like I say, when you paint, let’s suppose I’m, I’m painting this person, and I’m thinking to myself, when I get into symbols and stuff like that, like I’m painting flowers and I might say, “Well, she needs something to communicate spring.” I might then do a word dialogue with myself, saying, “ What would I need to indicate spring,” which is naturally flowers, but then once I do, start drawing the flowers, I no longer work on a verbal basis anymore. I want to draw flowers in a way that’s graceful, that’s beautiful . . . with the brushstrokes and the colors and the shapes…I don’t use words much anymore, then it becomes very much like a musical language . . . at some point during the course of doing the figure, no verbalization, suddenly it clicks, I’m trying to get a more expressive, I want to get a more deep, inner, inner thing, and then it suddenly clicks, “Ah, figure in the back, wrap it in cloth, that’s Ophelia.” It comes in, that’s a verbalization, that comes out of your subconscious mind then . . . It pops in there then I’m thinking, ok, that left in the painting, I’ve got to put something by the staircase, what can I put there that’s going to be visually interesting? So I said, well, you know, it’s kind of a struggle for Oedipus in his life, so I’ll put a dog struggling with a lion. So then I said to myself, “Well, he’s struggling with a lion, it’s kind of boring, it’s an old lion, why don’t I make it a lion that has more than one head, that’s kind of interesting.” So then I have him fighting with the lion, so then I said, “Well, that’s not very interesting, I want to make it where he’s really struggling,” so I’ll have the lion on his shoulders, and he’s holding the lion. So, it was just, it was all like that, and then later on, I’m going through, I’m looking at my book on mythology and I realize, oh my god, it’s Cerberus, it’s like Hercules, you see where Hercules is fighting with the multi-headed dog in the myth, and the idea is that I didn’t realize that at the time, but certainly I had read that and knowing that, your subconscious is kicking it off, and it fits in perfectly with the theme of the play, which is you’re going into the underworld and having experiences of trying to get in and fight your way through. That was not in my mind at the time, my, the stream of thought was, I want to make it interesting, I want to make it more expressive, and just your subconscious is

146 kind of guiding you. You always are running into your subconscious mind all the time…and the subconscious mind gives you this thing where it just feels right so I guess this is a conversation or what you call a dialogue.

For a man who resisted the concept, he had an opulent ability to articulate the particularities of how his internal dialogue unfolded.

A fourth and last manifestation of an internal dialogue (and external dialogue) he engaged in was the one he conducted with the present art scene.

When I get into that world, that gallery world, which is all these synthetic kind of . . . like people who all, I don’t like, they all have second-rate minds (laughs).

I shouldn’t say that, but a lot of them do, some of them are more genuine, but, when you get into that world, maybe it isn’t anymore, but I find that a very kind of ugly world. I’m a critic, and I deal with these people all the time, but I, it’s another part of me that deals with that, not the artist part . . . I deal with everyone and I write about everyone, but I tend to favor, I, I favor the ones I write about that I like . . . You get the other people who are you know, synthetic and they’re pushing what’s going on in Cologne and so forth, just because it’s chic and what’s going on. Our conversations tend to be a lot shorter (laughs) and we just don’t have too much to talk about, so that’s that.

His internal debate with the present art scene plays a determining role in what he chooses to paint.

The artistic dialogue is around negative things these days that I kind of just want to go the opposite way. I want to do something that says life is good, life is, can be happy, you can find fulfillment and so forth. I don’t think there’s enough of that, you know, it’s much more difficult, it’s much more difficult to do an optimistic piece than a pessimistic one. You can do a pessimistic piece that can be truly convincing cause there’s so much in the world that’s telling you that it’s dark and so forth. I don’t want to end up like Eugene O’Neill, just making dark metaphors, for me it’s almost too easy. I want to make a larger statement and in optimistic metaphors.

Theseus K experienced the zeitgeist of Conceptual and Post Modern art as depressed and negative. Conceptual art’s primary function is intended to instigate an intellectual reaction in the viewer not an aesthetic visceral response. It is an art form that has often been used to critique the social order. Post Modernism reveled in

147 appropriating architectural forms, art forms and imagery from different periods in history often in one painting or one building. Beauty is often bypassed or used in an exaggerated tongue-in-cheek way. Theseus K wanted beauty and genuine reverence for the past to be reflected in his art.

Harryette The next artist is a photographer. I decided to include her for several reasons.

First, she easily understood the notion of internal dialogue and intelligently articulated the variety of different forms and elements that made up her internal dialogue.

Second, similar to J and Theseus K, she was well read and developed her art by following a free associative linking of ideas, literature and visual images. It was important not to inadvertently, by omitting a woman’s voice, support a tired fallacy that only men played in the arena of the mind.

Harryette very consciously carried on internal dialogues while she made her art and the varied forms her dialogues took provided valuable examples for this project.

Unfortunately, many of her allusions will be difficult to follow because the interviews were very visual. She was continually showing me photographs and texts to illustrate her points.

Background Harryette is a woman in her early 50s. She is a photographer and is a tenured educator at a college. Several of her books of photography have been published. We met at her house/studio where she lives with her dog Flame. We began talking long

148 before I set up the tape recorder. By the time we sat down her first comments on tape were: What’s very clear to me is that it happens in a myriad of ways. So I do have an internal dialogue, and it’s with lots of things. It’s with lots of people. I particularly—like the catalog I just showed you, Earthwords, is actually a dialogue with this dead artist named Robert Smithson. I always joke about having a dialogue with a dead guy—I sort of came up with this premise that photography today is what pottery shards are for us from the past. They're these fragments of experience that we piece together. And we come up with a wide variety of interpretations based upon who’s reading it. Anyway, so I started with Robert Smithson and engaged, like I would read his work and basically ask questions and have a dialogue with him. But, of course, for me it was visual.

Like J, who found ideas as he took his daily walks, read books and talked with other artists and students, Harryette followed serendipitous clues that led her to art ideas. In this instance, she had found a book by Craig Owens at a garage sale and had opened up to a chapter “of Robert Smithson’s in a book that I picked up for three bucks. I just thought oh, I should read this because I know Craig Owens. So I did.”

On the first page she read a sentence of Smithson’s that she found remarkable.

“The stratum of the earth is a jungle museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text.”

This quote fascinated her and encouraged her to continue reading.

And in it he, I think, creates the most truthful kind of explanation of what I think an artist does. He wrote, “In the illusory babble of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning. Strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge. But this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counterarchitectures. At the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” The part I don’t really kind of agree with is the last part, but it’s mostly that there’s kind of this illusory babble of language, which of course I love the story of Babel, because it deals with language and the idea that we all spoke the same language. And then because of some quirkiness of humanness, we built something and it was destroyed. And now we can’t communicate with one another. So this idea that we really do what we do intentionally, to get lost, I think for me it’s about not knowing and asking questions. It’s not about solidifying known statements about the world.

149

DH: Could I ask the obvious question, because actually this hopefully will tie in to dialogue, too? You’re using the concept of words. Obviously, photographs are not the same as words, although I’m just wondering are you just using them as signifiers in the sense that . . . well, you were saying it’s the same as a shard, which is not a word . . . So how can I understand how you’re using words when you deal with photographs?

I’m trying to invert the way we look at text and the way we look at image. So really, I’m inverting it, but I’m doing it in a whole lot of different ways. I want to look at text and I want to read the photograph or the image, literally. Quite literally.

As an example she showed me a book that had been published of her photographs. She had taken photographs of the beautiful gnarled trees in Joshua Tree, California. She shot the photos so that the trees looked uncannily like letters in the alphabet. Nature became an alphabet or as she said above “I want to look at text and I want to read the photograph.” Quite clearly Smithson’s statement that the “Earth is a jungle museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text” had inspired her. The next set of images she showed me were also a tribute to him, these were photos of mirrored letters that she had placed in different spots embedded in the landscape.

So I’m reading this in terms of my—this is what began my dialogue with Smithson. This image here is called Mirror Trail. Smithson did a piece, a series of images where he placed mirrors in the landscape. They’re geometric mirrors, so they’re square or rectangular. They’re quite beautiful. They’re very, very, very beautiful. One of them is called Mirror Trail. In thinking about it, I fabricated some letters that had a mirror acrylic surface. Half the letters are scavenged and recycled from sign companies. I fabricated with this mirror, in thinking about referencing Smithson . . . I was thinking in relationship to kind of what Smithson had been doing with the landscape. His are very beautiful. They’re actually pretty lush for Smithson. There’s foliage in the blues and greens. This is very stark. So it’s sort of building off his idea of this idea of Mirror Trail . . . It starts with a visual response . . .

150 Her impulse to have a dialogue with Smithson’s piece entitled Mirror Trail led her to another set of associations which broadened her visual conversation to include other artists and art criticism.

John Sarkowsky wrote an essay called “Mirrors and Windows.” He did an exhibition. He was the head photo curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He says that photography functions either as a mirror or as a window. So I’m very interested in this idea of reflecting back out. I think, also I’m respondent to the fragments again . . . Smithson’s idea . . . this idea of photograph as fragment.

She continued her conversation with Smithson by giving her photographs titles that were clear references to the artist to whom they were in homage.

The Heap . . . . I gave this piece this title . . . to help people reference.

Especially when I’m kind of doing an homage, I think it’s really important to and it’s something I practice in my art and I also teach—that you need to sort of cite your sources. So when I called it Mirror Trail, it doesn’t say after Robert Smithson, but it’s sort of implied if you know his work. He also . . . did a drawing of language that he called Heap. It’s a pile of sentences in a very organized fashion.

So far the evidence shows that Harryette engaged in several forms of a dialogue with the artist Robert Smithson. First, she intellectually engaged and thought about the ideas he wrote about. This then led her to respond photographically to his ideas. His photographic work inspired her to create images that while different from his, playfully responded to his iconic pieces. Third, she titled her work in such a way as to let the viewer know her references. Germane to this project, Harryette commingled three concepts: an internal dialogue, the creative process and her notion that we learn in a spiral process.

I think that art making is about interpreting that interior dialogue . . . sometimes it’s so literal, it is like having a conversation. And other times, it’s so abstract that you kind of go “huh.” But I do think that all these things come to bear on the image in this internal dialogue, that it’s both conscious and unconscious. It’s

151 both literal and abstract. The creative process is always taught in a very linear manner . . . Diane somebody or other, who had written a book about creativity, about it being more like a spiral. I always kind of remembered that notion of the spiral, because that made more sense to me about how things begin . . . you are always moving forward. It’s not a circle. And it’s not like you’re never going back past what you’ve learned already or what you’ve thought about but it’s not the same place.

Her spiral process toward “knowing” her art was full of external influences, detours and inner conversations. Harryette tackled subjects she wanted to understand better in her art making. To underline the different forms her art-related internal dialogic process took, she provided several examples.

One. Dust to Dust. I made this photo and titled it Dust to Dust. Again, this photo was a very direct response to an essay I read by Leslie Marmon Silko. Leslie Marmon Silko, who was a brilliant writer about Native American culture—and a Macarthur fellow and really pretty spectacular. I heard her speak. I came across this essay. It was about how Native Americans think about people who died and about the dust in the home and putting a hole in the house so that the spirits can escape. All this sort of stuff, I was thinking about that when I made this image. Also, I’m Jewish and the whole Biblical kind of dust-to-dust kind of phrase has always been something that echoes through my religious upbringing.

This is an example of an imaginary conversation she had as a Jew and a woman with Leslie Silko and Native American culture.

Two. More than any other artist I interviewed Harryette was fascinated with the history of making meaning through other methodologies than verbal language. She believed that visual language pre-dated verbal language. She had a facility for reading visual information as if it was a language, her inner dialogue included.

Petroglyphs are something that I—they’re beautiful. The more I think about language, the more I think that visual language was our original language and

152 that like many things, as it goes through history, it becomes oppositional. So the whole language/image thing, I think at one point was one. At some point, and I think lots of people may have identified it, where it breaks off into where writing takes on an alphabetic. And the mark loses its meaning. So I was just thinking about that and where language came from and looking at these petroglyphs and looking at this tiny little squiggle here, that one that goes back and forth. I read quite a bit about petroglyphs. I have photographed the largest collection of petroglyphs in Europe in a place called Nadro in northern Italy . . .

Now pictographs are painted on rock and petroglyphs are pecked. So they literally take a rock and hit another rock. They remove this patina that’s on the rock. It reveals this white underneath. So I just sort of wander around just thinking about stuff thinking about language. Where did language come from?

After reading and thinking about these different forms of “language” she started making art that played with the sensual connections between words, letters and the images that defined them.

I had these letters and I just started playing with them and laying them out. I was like look, the “S” looks like that and then it also looks like a snake, how it would move through the sand in the desert. So I just made these very simplistic kind of connections that were wondering did snake come from the sound “sssss” that it makes or does it come from the way it moved.

Three.

She believed that people in our culture are raised to be visually illiterate. Using the language of this dissertation, she wanted her art to draw attention to the dialogue between visual and verbal languages.

I just really think that in our culture that there is a huge divide between written and image. And I think we teach it. My students don’t want to write. They don’t want to read. We’re artists. We don’t want to do that. I think writers are visually illiterate. These are huge generalizations. But I think for the most part, the culture—for being such a mediated culture—is visually illiterate. It’s something that really perplexes me, because we rely so much on the interaction of the two together. We have so much information. Often when we travel, we feel like we don’t even need to travel any more to go to see something, because we’ve seen it or read something. I’m really interested in—so I do see it as the written— language and image as oppositional. I don’t mean opposite. I never ever imagined that I’m trying to resolve a conflict. I do think, as I’ve said before, that I’m interested in shaking up the snow globe a little bit in terms of how we

153 respond. It never has occurred to me that it’s some kind of resolution there. I like the conflict, I think. It’s more interesting to me.

Four.

She reflected on the on-going internal and external dialogue she had with a friend who is a poet and the impact their dialogue had on her art.

A poet friend of mine, who is a really brilliant poet, she wrote a book, which was nominated for the National Book Award, which I’m so excited about. It’s a very mild collaboration. She e-mailed me the title poem while she was writing it. Immediately, I got these images of letters floating like this particular image.

DH: Yeah, that’s the one I saw.

Like her dreaming and being surrounded by these letters.

DH: So this is an actual literal dialogue with her.

Right. Which took place not only in my imagination. But when I go to LA, I use her home as base. So I’m kind of coming in and out, and we sit up at night and talk about language. She’s very interested in art, although she won’t even imagine that she could do art. (She points in a book to a photograph). This is another kind of outgrowth of a dialogue with her. One night as I flew in to LA—we go to dinner and sit up and talk about all this stuff. We were talking about our different points of view about seeing the world in like—I was wondering if it mattered if she thought in language and I thought in image.

DH: That’s a good question.

I sort of tucked this in my brain.

DH: What did she say?

The thing is, I don’t remember the specifics.

DH: You just remembered that a question is animated . . . you don’t know what was said but recollect that someone you enjoy and you had an animated discussion about it?

Right . . . To me it almost doesn’t matter what she said. I remember is it sort of came up as if we stood in the same spot, would we see the same thing. That’s how the dialogue went. So I thought I’m gonna put these letters in the exact same spot. I’m gonna make a picture of it through each of the shapes of the

154 letters. Because it was very windy—there was a low fence—so I actually tied with nylon cord the letter to the fence post, because it otherwise would have blown away . . . It’s a self-portrait actually. Because the letters are plastic, you can see me with my sunglasses. Here I’m holding up my Polaroid so it wouldn’t flap in the wind. So it kind of unknowingly became a self-portrait.

(The photograph is of letters made out of mirrors that spelled out P O E T, that reflect the desert environment and a blurred image of her. The effect is that the letters both blend in and stand out of the landscape.)

DH: You are a poet right here. You spell out poet.

Later in the interview Harryette reflected further on the similarities and differences between herself, as a visual artist, and her friend as a poet.

I have no idea what goes on in her brain, but I’m really fascinated by it. Once I even asked her. I said how do you do what you do. To me it’s so much about a response or a question about what I see in the world. And I know that her work can be highly political at times. And it has huge references to jazz and language and history and racial quality and inequality and all of this sort of stuff. But it’s so impressive to me how little she actually needs to move. It’s so internalized.

I’m really kind of enthralled by that, partly because I think at times I wish I could do that. For me, if I want to see something or make a photograph, I have to go and do it.

DH: You were making an important comment to me, that for your internal dialogue to move it has to have—it often has a very physical component.

It has a very physical component and it has a very kind of tangible, in-the-world component.

I described to her how in my meeting with Francesca, a fiction writer, Francesca had stressed how physically immersed she became when she wrote. She moved around, chewed gum and waved her hands. I also noted that to do the research necessary to write her novel Francesca had “to move around” because she traveled to foreign lands.

Harryette was interested in the physicality of this writer’s process although she veered

155 away to introduce another critical dialogic process that she engaged in which was addressing the question “Why?”

Five.

My work is deeply personal, but it’s not always autobiographical. It’s not always about me. I think if I have to say anything, it’s about my curiosity about the world. How things work. Why things work that way. Why people respond the way they do. Why why why why why. How come, how come, how come?

DH: So personal in that sense, that it’s about things that you’re really interested in. If it’s a photograph . . . you . . . got some personal interest in making that image. Is that how you’re using the word “personal” in a sense?

Yeah, but it’s also biographical in terms of like if I’m making an image and I’m upset about a relationship or something, then I could say . . . Going back to my poet friend. I’m very interested in our differences . . . For example, this back image was the last one I made of the series. I’m wild about this image. It’s a photograph. It’s based upon a poem that my friend, the poet, read me, not of her work Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Diving into the Wreck.” She said I think you should read it. So she read it to me once. Then the next day, I went to this neon to rent some signs . . . The woman who owns this multi-million-dollar company in Van Nuys, California, who does all the neon for Hollywood started out as a single artist . . . the next day, after having this poem read to me, I went and saw this little scuba diver. I just thought it was darling . . . for me; part of it is I didn’t consciously think oh, “Diving into the Wreck.” I just saw him. I said I don’t know what I’m going to do with him, but I really want to rent him. The other part is my knowledge of the desert prehistorically as being an ocean bed.

I’m really intrigued by that. There are places and vistas where you can actually sort of imagine it. The plants are so seaweed-like. Like the ocotillo, with their beautiful—there’s like these amazing branches that have these red, spiky flowers that are very seaweed-like.

She searched around her house and found a copy of the poem to read to me.

This is called Diving into the Wreck.

“First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on

156 the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for, we who have used it.

Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.

First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always

157 lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass . . .� (Rich, 1994, p. 22-24)

158 Harryette stopped at this point in the poem. In this anecdote she revealed how this photograph was born out of internalized conversations she had with her friend and poetry. Sometimes she was conscious of what inspired her photographic choices. Quite often, as in this case, the inspiration had initially been unconscious. The haunting nighttime photograph of a neon sign of a scuba diver nestled amongst shapes in the desert that looked like water plants was her intuitive response to the poem by Adrienne Rich that her dear friend had introduced to her.

It’s such an incredible, amazing poem . . . I love this photograph. Lots of people like this photograph. But it’s not really—the value of that photograph isn’t in the photograph itself, for me. It’s not about the product. It’s not about the final result. Lots of people have talked about art making as a journey. It is so corny to talk about it like that. It’s so corny because it isn’t about getting some place for me. It’s about having a deeper understanding of—and this is really corny too— the great mysteries of the world.

She was attracted to the poem because her close friend introduced it to her and because the poem’s subject corresponded with the internal dialogues she had with her art about the great mysteries of language, nature and death. The poem inspired her to create a haunting and magical photograph.

Suddenly, during the last few minutes left on the tape, she brought up the photography project she was presently working on. The previous year she had been on sabbatical and decided to take a road trip. Armed with camera equipment and her dog Flame she traveled for six months, by car, across the country. “I had three rules. No more than three hours of driving a day. No fast food. And no Interstates. Which I broke all the time.”

She took photographs of places and people she found interesting. For the first time she used a digital format which allowed her to review and develop the

159 photographs on the spot. As a result, she made an effort to give each person she photographed a copy of his or her portrait. In this manner, she believed she could give back something to those who let her take their picture.

Six. So every night, I kind of started getting a feel for what I was seeing. I wrote letters to Oprah every day.

DH: To Oprah?

Uhuh. Because she started coming into the project in terms of people asking me about her all the time . . . . That was intriguing that there was this huge shift from the Mafia to Oprah. And she’s everywhere. So I started writing her . . . I just said dear Oprah. I introduced myself. I needed to tell her over the course of the trip what I saw, who I saw, what I was thinking, what was interesting, what wasn’t, what was horrifying.

DH: Did you have an imaginary—did you imagine her responding to it? Did you imagine her being interested in certain things and not interested in other things?

It was just really fun. I found a book of her autobiography. So then I went to where she was born when I was going by it. She started weaving in. She became a sort of—embodied this idea of democracy that has come forward in this work.

Her letters to Oprah were the sixth example she offered of how an internal dialogic process propelled her art making. It was a shock to hear the tape recorder shut off just when she started describing this stellar validation of my thesis.

The Second Interview During our second interview she reinforced and explained in more detail the points she had raised at our first meeting. She started off by telling me,

160 If you can pull something out of this interview, I think I said two, basically two interesting things in all …

DH: Oh. And what did you think were the interesting things?

First, I talked about curiosity, I think that was here, and I think that was exactly how I’m feeling, was expressed correctly . . .

DH: What did you think was interesting about that?

Well, I felt that he (Smithson) clearly articulated what I think the artist’s soul reveals, in terms of the creative process, that you go through these labyrinths and these corridors of histories and echoes of humor and you sort of find your way, and, except he said it very eloquently . . . Second, I … was trying to say that art, like, visual art is like a, it is another language, it’s not a second language and in here I talk about how I think that petroglyphs and pictographs was actually the first language, our, as humankind, our first language, and that there has been this division between language and image and then I realized, in this work, I, and in the work that I’ve been doing with language and image, that I’m trying to bring them back together, so they’re not, as I talk about it here, oppositional . . . . Like I can read images so well and so fluidly at this point in my life. I mean, it certainly hasn’t always been the case, but I read them, and I think most of my colleagues, who are very sophisticated viewers of images, so I could look at something, and I can immediately understand…

DH: Yeah, give me an example.

She pointed to a series of small photographs that were placed next to one another on a page pinned to the wall of her house. They filled up the page. .

Ok… you know, looking at how the mermaid, like the bottom two rows of photographs, there’s a mermaid, a portrait of a woman in a red apron in front of a milk truck, a tableaux . . . and then a map that I made and then the third sequence, a third image of a sequence of someone eating key lime pie, a portrait of two young women drinking beer on a pier, an old guy with his bicycle, who’s actually an incredible jazz musician, and a surfer and this sort of folk sculpture of a strawberry. So as I was putting these together, like, I read them like a text, so, like, I kind of understood that the gesture of the mermaid echoed the gesture of the woman’s hand on her elbow, to the color relationships of the mustard color on the truck and the color of the mermaid’s hair to the mustard color of the tablecloth on the tableaux, and then moving down, you know, the relationship of the beautiful flowers behind the old guy next to the young guy, the strawberry next to the surfer, who’s really sunburned… I mean, I’m really fluid in reading, and they come into my head like in language, but I, it’s not, I guess it’s not, I’m not bilingual, like in English and French, but I imagine it’s

161 something like that, that you can, once you’re really, really bilingual, you could slip in and out of language, and you don’t say, oh, I’m thinking in English, or oh, I’m thinking in French. You just have this dialogue, and I do that, I think, with image and language, that I’m slipping in and out of reading the photograph visually, thinking about in language, and then moving back into a, visual language from an alphabetic language.

Her capacity to see the relationship between images, gestures and colors was riveting. Filmmakers, I knew, have this keen editorial eye but I don’t and watching her translate visuals into a cohesive ensemble of images made me see more articulately.

She called the visual linkages in her photography a language most likely because the visual cues worked together to form a cohesive whole, similar to when words weave together to make a coherent sentence.

There has been this division between language and image and then I realized, in this work…and in the work that I’ve been doing with language and image, that I’m trying to bring them back together, so they’re not, as I talk about it here, oppositional, but they are fluid and parallel, but different, and so I really think of visual language as another language, which I’m getting more sophisticated in my ability to utilize.

Seven.

Although she had stated there were two interesting points she made in our first meeting she went on to note two more points.

I want to underline what I said before. I see metaphors in everything.

DH: Have you always done that?

I think that I have to some degree, but I have to say that . . . I think everything has meaning, and it’s kind of fun, but it’s also kind of a pain because, you know, a friend of mine could do something, you know, a gesture and I’ll say, you know, this is what this means, and they’ll kind of go, oh, you’re at it again.

Eight.

162 She reiterated the importance her curiosity played in determining what, how, and why she photographed. Her process was moved forward by the question why.

How things work. Why things work that way. Why people respond the way they do. Why why why why why. How come, how come, how come . . . . My (internal dialogue) starts always with questions, and I always tell my students, you know, ask questions because if you don’t ask questions, it’s a period at the end of the sentence . . . You ask questions, and then I always do this thing where I say, “Oh, hi, Deborah, how are you?” “I’m fine, how are you?” You know, so you ask questions, and it moves things forward, and so I do use the idea of punctuation as a way to um, the kind of punctuation will either move the work forward, or to put a period on the end of a sentence, and then you’re done.

Harryette’s observation that to ask why implies the possibility of a response which can lead to further investigation, was an important insight into one of the essential functions of an internal dialogue.

I finally asked her if she could go into any more detail about her correspondence with Oprah since it was exactly what my dissertation topic entailed: an internal dialogue with another while you make your art. She had nothing new to share but she reiterated, how as soon as she said she lived in Illinois people had automatically asked if she knew, or ever saw or what was her opinion of Oprah. For many poor people she met on her trip, Oprah’s life symbolized the American dream of rags to riches.

Although Harryette had enjoyed working on the project she had endured cold and often unflattering responses from her colleagues about this enterprise. Despite the humorous tone she took in parlaying tales of their remarks, they had been cutting comments.

DH: Now when you were younger, or maybe not even younger but at different stages of your career, would negative comments have had more of a devastating effect?

Oh yeah. I mean, thankfully, I’m so past that.

DH: Well, how did you get past it? What do you think kind of changed your process?

163

I think you just develop a faith in your own voice and your own vision, and you also, I mean, I don’t know how, I’ve said it of so many critiques, everybody has a point of view, you know . . . but how did I get past it? I think I’ve gotten a tougher skin, which, not really, I’m really over-sensitive. I think that I just pick apart what they say and try to find something that is valuable, and also I guess I, early on I cared what people thought, and I think maybe now I don’t care so much what they think. Do I know how that happened? I, well—I’ve done things that even I am kind of amazed at, like going off to the desert for a month at a time like making those photos. Also I’ve done therapy on and off, that has helped me try to have some self-confidence, have some trust in my own voice, in my own inner voice. I’ve worked real hard at it. I’ve worked hard there, and people always say to me, how do you have so much confidence, and I say, oh, I’m a jellyfish inside (laughs). I’ve learned that you project this and then I kind of get left alone cause I project this sort of knowing, when in fact I think most art comes out of not knowing and wanting to know, that desire to, or curiosity, whatever, to answer something.

DH: So you, ah, so you developed a kind of persona that would be the more knowing . . .

Well, it’s interesting because, let’s see now, right before I, the summer before I did this trip, I went into therapy because I couldn’t, I was really fearful about doing this, and I wanted, really wanted to do it, and also I was really unhappy with where my career was. And I decided, I don’t want to go into therapy and talk about why I don’t have children, why I’m not married, cause those are things that I’ve resolved, but what I wanted to talk about is how to, I didn’t want to end up being a very bitter, old artist . . . and a dream the night before I started therapy I told her, and it was really interesting cause she said, well, you don’t have a persona. You don’t have that unique feeling that you have in the world of being competitive, or not being so straightforward, or whatever, so that’s what we worked on, and it was very helpful, actually.

DH: Developing a persona.

Yeah, like, like sort of that tougher skin or that mask, or whatever, that somehow allows you to be out in the world exposed and not feel so exposed, and not feel like it’s you or something, I, I, it’s hard, I have a hard time describing it, but I understood it, and also I see some of my colleagues who are very successful, and having this persona, much more so than I, and that’s helped me see how they wander through the world.

Therapy experiences had helped her achieve two seemingly opposite goals. It had helped her have more faith in her “own inner voice” and simultaneously develop a

164 persona or mask that shielded her from toxic comments and protected what she named the “jellyfish” inside. After she used the word jellyfish to describe herself for the second time she laughed.

Oh that’s, the jellyfish (laughs), the image I have, it’s funny, I have photographed jellyfish a lot. I really, really love them, they’re, I think they’re amazing animals. It’s this metaphor thing again, um, because I think that I’m you know, transparent, I can be, you know, a lot of jellyfish have a sting, which I can certainly do. So they’re beautiful and all that, but they’re also dangerous in the way of, and so I have, I see a part of that, especially the transparency part, as being a sort of metaphor.

Once again she thought in metaphors. Knowing that I was a therapist she ruminated on another way therapy had helped her both in her personal life and in her approach to making art.

When first I went into therapy, I learned how to ask questions of myself, and that was the single most helpful thing, and I guess the way I always saw it was how to have a dialogue with myself, like how are you feeling, why are you feeling this way, what’s going on and that ability to ask questions has sort of grown in proportion to my whole life, you know, like in my work, in my teaching, in my innermost private self, you know, it has served me really well, and so I’m pretty wedded to asking questions on all levels, I’m very wedded to it.

Unlike J and Theseus K, she was interested in Post Modern and Conceptual art but similar to them she approached art making with a wide net. Similar to J and Theseus K she defined dialogue as often being configured of elements other than words. Unlike Theseus K and J she did not describe her aesthetic choices as being based in her emotional responses. Instead she pursued topics and images that were born out of her relationships. Her relational explanations as to what animated her photographic choices reinforced the premise of this dissertation that we are relational even in our solitude. I had not anticipated that she would be so thoughtful on this subject.

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Gretchen The interviews with Gretchen exemplified a specific kind of internal dialogue. It was an internal dialogue with a person who was alive and a real person in her life. This inner representation of the person reinforced his role as her muse and mentor.

DH: When you are creating a piece of work—and that is a vague term, and creating can mean when you’re actually working on it physically or when you’re walking around thinking about it. So that whole process,what goes on inside your mind as you’re doing that? Vague question—I know that.

Internally it’s a dialogue with—personally with some of my mentors; primarily my starting off point is with my father. He’s sort of like an internal friend of mine.

“Wow,” I thought, “Thank you.” She was right there.

Background Gretchen is in her late 40s and was raised in Austria. Her parents grew up in the 1930s when Hitler was in power. At age 16, her father was drafted into Hitler’s army. An experience she did not elaborate on, but because this was the only fact from his past that she raised, and it was a profound moment in world history, it was most likely a critical event in his life. Her mother’s childhood she identified as having been traumatic. By the age of thirteen her mother had lost both her parents and was living with a family in which the husband repeatedly tried to sexually abuse her. Finally she could not take it anymore and as a teenager she ran away. Soon after she left home she had a baby girl. When World War II broke out she joined the underground and eventually was forced into hiding. After the war, Gretchen’s mother was training to be a dental assistant by day and an artist by night. Gretchen’s father was her painting

166 instructor. They became close friends and although she was 11 years older then he, and had a young daughter, the friendship transformed, “became a romance” and eventually they got married. Together her parents painted and produced theatre and dance pieces.

Gretchen was their first-born child. They later had a second daughter.

Art making was an integral part of Gretchen’s memories of being a young child: Well, I would go to my father’s studio, he had a very little odd studio, and he had assigned me this little area with my own easel, my own art supplies, and this private studio . . .

DH: Oh, you’re a big artist like Daddy.

(Laughs) Exactly.

She recalled meal times as being a time when art reigned. As they sat around the dining room table, her parents would plan their next art project and ask all of the children to perform different characters. She enjoyed these memories.

Yes, in my head. Definitely. I have conversations where I pretend in my mind that we sit at the breakfast table. That’s something we did in Austria all the time. We sat there for hours. And they talked about life and art.

During the summers the family would go to an art colony. They would go hiking and swimming and learn how to make “big sculptures, clay pieces.” This was her favorite time of the year, a time when she felt like she was getting her parents’ attention. It was not until the middle of the second interview that she revealed less positive memories of her family’s life.

There was really very little space or time, consideration for myself as a child, so as children, we were secondary, we, we’d be, I mean, we were there, yes, we had health and we were loved, you know, much, it wasn’t that we were major problems. What was most important in their lives were their art, their exhibitions, their performance, whatever they were doing, they were very egocentric.

She told me how as a young child she depended on her older half sister to take

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care of her.

I was always very close to my older sister, she was the one that stood, I mean, she was older than I, so she kind of raised us. I mean, she babysat us nobody else was around, so she had to feed us, take us around town, you know, she hated it because she was more of a young mom.

I asked her boldly, Well, so was making art the way you found to get your parents’ attention?

No, no. I mean art was just a part of our lives, you know, to be respected, to be a friend of us. My mother did not respect any of our friends if they’re not artists, I mean (laughing) we were interested in art, there was no, I mean no doubt about it, it was like, you know, it was just part of life, everyday life, because even the place was filled with art, you know, our sculptures, I mean, you know, anything, I, I, all the things I created were treasures, anything that was made, you know what I’m saying, art, whatever you believe, that’s what we are, that’s the extent of our identity.

Despite her protestations that making art was not a way to get her parents’ attention, she followed this thought with the association that her mother had no respect for people who were not artists. This associative link made a pretty compelling argument for the position that longing to get positive attention from her preoccupied parents encouraged her to want to become an artist. Fortunately Gretchen responded well to these pressures, I always had a very strong inner life, I always had. I remember when I was young, no, I think I was about ten years old, and I, I decided that I would have an imaginary friend, some kind of fairy, and the fairy would teach me how to fly. And I strongly believed she was able and capable of teaching me that, so I would, every morning I would go out in the garden and I would practice flying with that fairy of mine, and naturally believed someday I would be able to get up in the air. I would run and I would jump from like, higher things, which, I then tumbled to the floor, when I strongly believed that the magic fairy would teach me, you know, the magic.

Her parents were so dedicated to encouraging their daughter’s imagination that despite their concerns they allowed her,

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I would go out at night, I remember, I would go to the park, to go into the darkness and see, to get, be completely surrounded by darkness, my parents hated that and worried that (laughs) . . .

DH: But they let you do it?

Um hmm, they did. Uh hmm. And I would imagine creatures there, and spiritual kinds of like, creatures, and I would connect with these creatures.

On one hand her parents were preoccupied with their own art making, on the other hand they did encourage her creative inner life and her relationship with her fairies and creatures. As our interviews continued her parents’ preoccupation with their art turned out to be only one of the problems. “I was a very close friend to either one of them, my mother and my father, they were, you know, they were trying to side against each other through me.”

What her mother wanted her to side with her about was that Gretchen’s father was having affairs with men.

DH: He was gay? When did he come out as being gay?

He came out—after my mother, he dared to come out. It was kept secret in the family.

DH: Did you know?

Well, we all knew. We all along knew that he was gay.

DH: Since when?

Since we were little kids. I mean not little kids, but since we were youngsters.

DH: You knew.

My mom, she was confiding in us. She would tell all her sad stories about her finding out that blah blah. It was very painful. I was in the middle—between both parents. That was hard.

169 These tensions continued for years. Every year during the summer when Gretchen would come home to Europe, she would listen to her mother’s laments. Then in 1995 her younger sister died.

That’s my younger sister. She passed away mysteriously. All of a sudden, she was dead. She sat outside. It was a big party. She has two kids. She was newly pregnant. She was about to get married. And she passed away. It was very traumatic.

At the time of her sister’s death the family was working on a musical with puppets.

The children were asked, because their mother had passed away, that they didn’t have to perform. And they said no, they wanted to perform, though their own mother had passed away. So they still performed this amazing fairy tale together, with the voice of my sister and father. It was hard, but they did it.

Because they had this tremendous belief and faith that they had to still carry out her wish and perform this piece.

It was a fitting eulogy, considering this family, for “the show to go on.”

After her sister’s death Gretchen’s parents got embroiled in a lawsuit against their son-in-law. They fought to gain custody of their two grandchildren. In the end their granddaughter stayed with them and their grandson left with his father for the United States. Her brother-in-law tried to hide his and his son’s whereabouts, which caused the family in Austria considerable anguish and worry. Because Gretchen lived in the United States she took it upon herself to try and locate her nephew. Through detective work and good luck, I was able to make a connection. He’s now 16 and lives in Iowa. I brought my father and my nephew together, after them not seeing each other for 10 years.

That is traumatic and it’s healing also.

Although her sister’s death and the fracturing of the family was a wound to her heart Gretchen was still making art. Five years later, in 2000, her mother had a massive

170 stroke that left her totally paralyzed. All she could do was blink her eyes open and shut.

Gretchen suffered deeply during this period.

DH: How else did her illness and death impact your life, or how much did your creative life get . . .

I’ll tell you the one thing I think it really slowed it down for a while. I could not, it took about two years to go through that. I would just be out of it. Losing her was just too hard. It was too hard. It took a long time . . . It was just horrible.

It’s very hard. It took me a long time to really regain my inner balance. And I really couldn’t do much art at that time, because I was too disturbed.

To cope with mourning her mother’s death Gretchen went to Ghana to study drumming.

DH: What did it do? How did the drumming . . .?

Drumming and singing is a form of expressing your mourning, your feeling of grieving in a soothing way, because you sing and chant. Actually, that’s what I did when my mother was—half a year she was in a home. She was completely paralyzed up to her eyes. All I could do is—first I would cry for a half an hour.

And then I would sit down again, take my guitar, and I would sing to her—all the songs that she really loves, all the folk songs. Sound, I think, and your voice that’s the type of thing that’s a connection sometimes.

While mourning her mother’s death she was unable to create new art but she could and did find solace by playing music. She did not mention that in Africa drumming is considered a way to communicate with one’s ancestor. Using Ghanaian cultural standards by drumming she was having a dialogue with her mother.

After several years she regained her footing (pun intended, she is primarily a dancer and choreographer) and she began choreographing and performing. She also resumed going back to Austria in the summertime. Since the late 1980s, each summer, except for the time she was in mourning, she and her father had co-created dance and puppet performances. In 2006, instead of going to Europe, she arranged for a Chicago gallery to show her father’s watercolors and he came to the United States. It was

171 crucially important to her for the end of his life to be successful. She had learned from her mother’s death the need to seize opportunities while he was alive.

I will end this section with the same words I quoted earlier: We were interested in art, there was no, I mean no doubt about it, it was like, you know, it was just part of life, everyday life. You know what I’m saying, art, whatever you believe, that’s what we are, that’s the extent of our identity . . .

Her Internal Dialogue Let us now go back to her opening statement.

Internally it’s a dialogue with personally with some of my mentors; primarily my starting off point is with my father. He’s sort of like an internal friend of mine.

Learning about the family’s tradition of making art together it became easily understandable that she would have an internal dialogue with her father. This dialogue took many diverse forms.

First, whenever she choreographed a dance she tried to imagine her father’s advice.

When it comes to my own work then I do think in terms of his thoughts, his advice, how would he look at what I create by now? Like right now I’m creating a piece for All Souls day. I think in terms of what—he has very specific criticisms that he looks at. Is it—am I showing myself from the side or from the front. How is the lighting used? What am I using my imagery that I’m using?

Am I using props? Am I using a giant painting that I’ve used as part of my performance? What it is that I’m showing?

Second, her depiction of the process her father and she went through during the writing and rehearsal period of their summer shows consisted of a mix of real and imagined conversations between the two; some friendly, others conflictual.

I am completely possessed by the project. Oh, I go through tremendous personal pain. We have to have conflict or discussions . . . My biggest conflict with my father is that he is too hung up on visual things, continuously, which overshadow the active part of the performance. Like when you perform only

172 words, you don’t have to be continuously dressed up for the performance—and already in costumes at all times. So that’s a continuous conflict.

DH: Are you yelling or arguing?

All the time. Some of this is like we’ve been talking about internal conversations.

DH: Like what are you saying?

I say—I tell him—I think about well okay, no Father, that does not work.

I disagree. I’m thinking loose clothes and it’s cold outside. People better wear a lot of sweaters. They don’t have like nice fitting things. Then we had a whole conflict. People wouldn't do that. So yeah, there’s lots of conflict.

DH: So you were saying you would sit there and have, is this an internal argument?

To prepare for the actual fight.

DH: So the internal is in preparation for the actual confrontation with him?

Yeah.

He seemed like a good teacher but quite stern. I noticed this out loud to Gretchen. Her response was Oh no, my father, because he’s really just a great sense of inspiration and nice partner to dialogue, to chat with internally just because of his tremendous inner strength of creation, creating art himself, continuously. When I have a hard time creating something, anything, I think of my father and boom, it goes away.

DH: Really?

Yes. Her third inner dialogue with her father was unusual and important to her because she repeated it both times we met.

A lot of times, I would look at my father’s hands internally. His hands are gesturing, like he’s speaking with his hands. And the shape of his hand would very much inspire me in terms of like a formatter would draw. Then I would think about it. I would then have the dialogue again in my head and his hands

173 would come alive. That would be a continuous dialogue. I would think in terms of freezing the shape of his gesture and then internalizing them and think about it and then putting it into a drawing or a dance. I think in terms of the symbol or the meaning of the hands. Hand is something that creates. And my father creates amazing things with his hands, but he’s not only creating things physically but he’s also using them to speak and to express himself.

This description showed how interpersonal and simultaneously verbal and nonverbal her tie was to her father. Her transformation of his hand gestures into bodies in motion was an arresting idea. One, I later found out, common to dancers. Dancers often describe rehearsing steps in their head by moving their hands as if they were their feet.

Gretchen’s mental well-being was vitalized by her father’s real and imagined influence, a fact she duly noted. At the time we first met she was considering organizing a show of father and daughter artists.

It seemed strange to me that she only talked about her father’s influence on her artistic life since her mother had also been an artist. I asked her if when her mother was alive, had she ever worked with her mother?

I could not, no. My mother, she was a monarch. She was monarchistic, the queen. She wanted to rule everything. She had her own idea. She was very complicated. There was no collaboration possible. She was completely in her own little world. It was impossible.

DH: So your father was the more friendly, generous as an artist?

Absolutely. He was the one that cooked for everybody. She would cook a tiny little amount, and we could never . . . He was a big mother, and my father was more like a father.

DH: You mean your mother was more like a father?

Yeah, my mother was more like a father.

174 It was not my task to understand why she made this slip of the tongue. It was also interesting that she associated his generosity as an artist to his generosity as a cook.

A Kleinian might cast this as Gretchen being like the greedy infant seeking to “devour” her symbolic mother’s breast.

Another salient reason why she could not conjure up her mother as inspiration was, For me it’s kind of hard to think about her, because the last year of her life, she was on tubes, you know, and I do remember the last year, and I knew she was going the last time I would see her, and I left because I knew I couldn’t handle being there when she went through this space, I didn’t know that she was going to, I thought she was going to pass away, I didn’t know she was going to be on tubes for a year, this of course was like a process… She took so much on her shoulders, she sacrificed so much of herself for my father and she sacrificed a lot for her children, she was just tremendously resilient. I hurt thinking of her . . .

Thinking of her mother as an inspiration to make art was difficult. For Gretchen to think of her mother reminded her how difficult her mother’s life had been and stirred up memories of the degrading way in which her mother had died. It was not easy to internalize that a vibrant energetic independent woman had died paralyzed and unable to do anything except blink. However, as the interview proceeded and we got more at ease with one another, Gretchen warmed up and recollected her relationship with her mother before the stroke.

Like sometimes I would have conversations with my mother about something also. It may be on an issue on a choice of how to work with—how to deal with a difficult situation. She would always talk about—yes, she said. “Don’t fight darkness but bring the light into darkness.” She got that from an aunt who gave everything away. Yes, that’s an internal dialogue. She passed away a lot of information. And she had created this great book about her life that I still have to read, process, and translate. She’s a tremendous dialogue person, too, for me in maybe even a greater way than my father. My father is the one that creates and has fun in life, but she was like the philosopher. So yeah, she was a powerful one.

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With her father she could be silly and playful and create art, her inner creative life was peopled with his warmth and energy. Her mother’s qualities as a person and the grotesque way she died made it hard for Gretchen to internalize her as a source of creative “energy.” Instead, curiously, Gretchen was able to absorb her mother as an internal source on how to live in the world. Perhaps her father’s playfulness was what her creativity asked for and her mother’s philosophical gravity was what she needed to cope with the complexities of living.

In Kohut’s language, an argument could be made that her father was akin to a mirroring self-object. He was someone from whom she sought and received appreciation and attention for her accomplishments. John Gedo’s conception of the need many artists have for a “secret sharer” (1992) that is a person in their lives who functions as a muse and can hold the artist together emotionally, matched Gretchen’s description of her relationship toward her father. She looked up to him as an artist and as someone wise in the ways of making art so she idealized him as an artist although as a person she did not idealize him. It was her mother who was the moral and wise leader of the family, and in Kohut’s language served the function as an object of idealization in Gretchen’s daily life. Although because in Gretchen’s family art bled into their dayto-day life, one can speculate that both parents lent their internal voices to Gretchen’s art making and life making.

The impact death had on the working process of many of the artists was a theme that came up repeatedly. In Gretchen’s case, and several other artists I met with, the death of an important person in their lives drained them of their creative energy.

176 The interviews with Gretchen best exemplified the importance real people can have on an artist’s creative process. Gretchen’s last words to me at the end of our first meeting were I think it is very important to have an inner dialogue with your family members, whoever it may be in your family. Of course anybody in your family can be somebody who can inspire you as a mentor. And in some ways, yes it was my sister, because she would be very jolly and she would always create things. In some ways it was my mother, yes . . . I think the family is such an important nucleus of people who care. And that seems to have a dialogue that helps you get revitalized and to create things. I think that’s a very important thing.

The Writers The next four profiles are based on interviews conducted with writers. All eight of the writers that I consulted carried on lively full-fledged internal dialogues.

Unexpectedly, there was a lot of commonality amongst several of the writers in their use of an internal dialogic process. I had expected the writers to speak more articulately about their inner dialogue than the painters; however, while they were very eloquent, I found many of the painters equally as expressive and more idiosyncratic in the way their inner dialogue existed. I have chosen to elaborate on the four interviews that demonstrated both the widest commonality and diversity amongst the writers’ internal dialogic creative process.

Seth

I have included Seth because he represented, in a straight forward, easy to understand manner, the internal dialogic process common to most of the writers.

177 I met Seth when he was reading from one of his stories at a local bookstore. When I approached him, as a total stranger, he kindly agreed to meet with me.

The First Interview Seth completed a Master degree in fiction several years ago and a book of his short stories had been published by a well-known New York based publishing house.

He teaches creative writing part time at a local university. The first time we met he was working on a novel. Since then he has completed it and it will be published in 2009.

We arranged a meeting at a café. I started the interview off.

DH: When you write, and it doesn’t have to be actually writing, but in your process of creating something, do you conduct an internal dialogue? And that can mean anything, I, it doesn’t have to be with a real person, doesn’t have to be with a person, while you’re in the process, you could be walking down the street, and thinking . . .

And that’s the whole, that’s the question of your dissertation . . .

DH: That’s the whole thing.

Let me think about it. I feel like I have a couple of answers. Ok, I can think of three answers to start with, maybe there’ll be more. I’ll start with the most obvious one. When you’re writing fiction, you are necessarily conducting an internal dialogue, because in fact you’re writing dialogue, and so your characters are speaking to one another. And then usually you have a number of kind of rhetorical goals that you as the author have to accomplish by representing their conversations, how they, they’re speaking to one another and so you, I don’t know if you want to hear about this kind of thing, but I try and hear, I try, I do try and hear in an auditory way, the conversation . . .

DH: How do you try, how do you try to hear?

I don’t know, I guess in the same way you try and imagine something happening. I mean, if that’s visual, if you close your eyes and you’re like, I’m going to imagine a car crash, and then you see a car crash in your head. It’s just as easy for me, I don’t know if it’s not, not for other people . . .

178 DH: No, I think writers have a much stronger ability to hear things. Do you actually hear like a tone of voice? Or a . . .

I think there’s, I have like a standard man voice and a standard woman voice that I hear.

Like all of the writers I spoke with, Seth easily heard the characters in his head.

His imaginative capacity did not, however, extend to his having the ability to see them.

Which, not surprisingly, was different from the visual artists who easily imagined visual images.

I have to work harder to write the portions where my characters are described physically than I do to write a whole conversation. It feels constructed to me the visual representations. Hopefully it’s sort of seamless from a reader’s point of view, but it feels constructed for me to write a long description of a character, and pretty natural to write the conversation.

The second category of internal dialogue he constructed was Number two, what I was going to say, is the editing process. I would consider that a dialogue, cause you make it the first time and then you revisit, and revisit and revisit and revisit, and each sort of revisitation during revision is kind of a conversation with the old and then the new, or, but it, that’s a bizarre phenomenon, because you write it, when you’re writing it the first time, you can’t tell. It’s like you, it’s hard to be an audience member when you’re sitting there actually writing it, and then if you come back to it, day or a week or a month later, you can sort of take on aspects of the audience, and by virtue of that know more, make it better, engage in a dialogue, see things like, you know, this, I’ve said the same word seven times in a row in these seven sentences. I didn’t notice it when I was doing it, but now, me as audience member, I, well, I can’t, I notice it and I have to get rid of that. I have to fix that, so, but so I would think that would fit more into a traditional dialectic.

DH: You mean you’re having a dialogue with the text.

Yeah.

DH: Um, I don’t know what I wanted to ask, but you just said you as audience member is that the same as you as the editor?

Hmm. Well, they’re, I mean, the editor and the audience are related in that the editor version basically…when I’m reading maybe alerts me to moments where if I were the audience member I would start to be sort of kicked out of the story, for whatever reason, and you know, that may be just the wrong flow of

179 sentences or a bad pace or a line of dialogue that doesn’t ring true at all, so I think when I’m reading and trying to read as the audience, I just am noting places that need work, and then as editor . . .

DH: So the editor’s different from the audience?

No, I just am saying these two different versions of reader are related, sort of one tells the other where, so, I’m just sort of trying to read for pleasure when I’m trying to read as the audience, and when I’m trying to read as the editor I think I’ll take up those moments I have marked as something’s wrong with this and then actually get into the details of why, how can I change this to make it fit in a little bit better, how can I rework this sentence or this paragraph or move this stuff around to make that problem go?

Seth made a distinction between the internal dialogues he had with his novel when he read it as an audience member from how he read as an editor. If, as part of the audience, he noticed that he was losing interest in the book or that something was confusing, he took on the role of an editor and set out to find solutions to these problems. Later in the interview he reiterated his sense of the dialogic process at play when he was in his role as an audience member reading his work. He compared the task of reading his own novel as if he was part of the “audience” as being the same as the everyday internal editing most people perform when talking to someone. His comments were reminiscent of the painter J’s description of his careful internal calibration of what best to say to other artists when addressing their concerns.

As artists, you’re sort of charged with the task of constantly representing an audience in your mind as you’re going forward, and so I think, then, in the moment, you know, it’s everything that you write, every sentence that you write, even if it’s unambiguous and you’re plowing forward and things are going well, there’s a constant kind of other you watching what’s happening and guiding what’s being generated. I mean it has to make sense on the one hand.

Maybe this is how we communicate in the first place at all, that like everybody just to have a conversation, every person, unless you’re a horribly obnoxious person, you have to simultaneously be measuring how you’re, what the language you’re using, how it will be received in the mind of the other people. I don’t just mean making sure you’re PC, or making sure you’re not offensive. I

180 mean actually appraising the meaning content of every word that you’re saying to make sure that it’s transmittable.

In the book Like shaking hands with God: a conversation about writing that is a conversation between the writers Lee Stringer and Kurt Vonnegut, Lee Stringer represented Seth’s point bluntly when he said, “Someone said to me once, fuck the audience! Write what you want to write. But to me it’s a conversation: You have to be talking to somebody.” (Vonnegut, Stringer, 1999, p. 63) Seth’s third type of internal dialogue was the one that he believed was the most important and one he returned to in both interviews.

It’s other, other writing, and it’s unbelievably important, in fact I don’t really think that, I don’t know, again, about other people, but I, it would be impossible to be write without a constant stream of incoming literature as well. Other stories coming in, other voices, other writers, not because I get a technical solution to a problem and I see how this writer dealt with that issue and I use that solution. It is something far more organic, that really feels like something coming in as an energy that you then use yourself when you’re making stuff go out, in a sort of, there’s sort of a circle, and it’s obvious that it’s important because I know that the second I stop reading, and I get too busy to read very much, I can’t, I can’t write as much, it’s not as easy, it’s much harder, it’s not as good, you know. It just feels like the difference between, I almost want to think of it in a liquid form for some reason, it’s like the difference between being totally parched and completely full, or, I don’t know, I don’t know what it is, but I can easily, when I was at the writing colony , for example, I had so much time to read, I could read a lot, so I was reading, you know, a couple hundred pages a day of something, and writing for many hours. It just charges your mind in a way and energizes your mind, in a way and lets it, makes the whole process so much easier. And so I have to think that that’s a kind of dialogue with other writers, as well.

Along with helping him enormously, reading other writers also had its pitfalls.

I have, this has always been, I’ll call it a problem, but I don’t think it’s a problem, really, it’s probably the reason why I’m a writer, that, I have a pretty strong ability to mimic forms of writing after taking them in, and it’s not, not because I savvily deconstruct a piece of writing and them recreate it, it’s just because if I read a hundred pages of a story that’s written in a voice, it just kind of, I can do it, not permanently. I’ll forget it after six hours. I probably wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, but if I read a hundred pages of something,

181 and then immediately sit down and start writing, I feel like I can completely recreate it, and so, it’s good in that it’s an ability, but it’s bad in that if I am reading the wrong thing, of course it comes out in what I’m writing . . . . And so an example is I read Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron, who died last week.

The main character Stingtoe, is that his name? He’s so long-winded, big language, long sentences, really eloquent and complicated formal prose style, all of that stuff, and it’s first person and then of course it has like four or five time frames moving along together, and all sorts of different tones, all sorts of different characters. It’s about insanity as much as it’s about the Holocaust, and really, really complicated, and so long, I just couldn’t, I didn’t have enough time, so I was only reading these little snippets, but I could not escape the book.

I felt like I was just stuck, cause I felt like I would read forever, and I would have, did not make any dents in it, small type, too. Anyway, so I was working on the first draft of the novel I’m still working on, and then it was in first person, but the narrator just was always sounding like Stingtoe, was totally inappropriate for the novel, it makes no sense for the novel for his voice to be like that, it wasn’t what I had planned, it wasn’t how I started, and it just kept emerging, I did it anyway . . . And I didn’t realize it was such a bad idea at the time, too. And if you read the novel right now, there’s not a trace of Stingtoe there anymore, either in scene selection, or in voice. It’s gone, it is completely gone, and yet at one point, at one draft of that novel, it was all over it, it was like the entire second half, it may as well, it was like a poor man’s Stingtoe telling the story. So the story is largely the same, the voice and the character are like absolutely different.

DH: Ok, so how did you emerge?

From that? First of all, I finished the book, which helped.

The powerful influence that other artists had on the process of almost every artist I interviewed is the red thread that ran throughout most interviews and an important finding of this study. The Nobel laureate for writing, Orhan Pamuk, in an article in the December 25, 2006 & January 1, 2007 issue of the New Yorker magazine wrote about the act of writing.

I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who— wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature. But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books; the thing we call tradition. (p.88)

182

Another internal dialogue Seth, as well as other artists, engaged in was he anthropomorphized his relationship with his novel. Many of the artists referred to their relationship with their artwork as akin to one they might have with a friend, enemy or mentor. Seth compared the relationships he developed with his short stories in contrast to his novel.

His relationship with a short story.

A short story, you can complete, and you actually do start to forget about it, once you feel as though you’re done. You like it, you’re still fond of it, if you liked it to start with, but it’s not, it doesn’t occupy your imagination in the same way that a novel does… With short stories there’s something about the science of it, there’s something about it being easy to admit that it’s not good if it’s not good, because you only dedicated a couple of weeks of working on it, and because you only were there a couple weeks, you can kind of get away from it and more realistically appraise it. I feel like there’s a state of being in and out, kind of, and you always can get out of short stories. I mean, like if you’re working on a short story fourteen months after you started the short story, you have a serious problem, and you shouldn’t be a writer in the first place.

His relationship with his novel elicited another response.

Maybe a different dialogue that happens with a novel that never really has happened with me with short stories before is that I can no longer tell if it’s good. I feel like the novel I’m working on right now is doing damage to me psychologically, I don’t know . . . I’ve been working on the novel for a year and a half, that I’m working on right now . . . I’m working on a third draft right now, so I’ve completed it, but it’s still sort of like you can’t, you can’t really escape.

He described how this relationship became overly intense and melodramatic The funny thing is it’s so hyperbolic, you know, it’s not like I just wrote a nice two pages, it’s like the whole perspective on the entire thing flipped completely, and you’re like, no, in fact this isn’t, not only is it not bad, this is fantastic, this is a fantastically good book that I’ve written, and I just haven’t realized it all along. But then, I don’t know, you can be in a different mood and you can sit down and you can’t figure out how to solve a problem, and it’s like destitute.

It’s horrible, this thing is horrible, and I’ve wasted all of this time working on it ...

DH: It’s a much more ongoing relationship.

183 Yeah, yes. It’s like a monster.

DH: So your dialogue with your novel is, is, you, even when you’re not writing it, are carrying it around with you? . . . . Are you carrying it around thinking about it?

The novel, yes . . .

The Second Interview At the second interview I asked him how the novel was progressing.

I kind of concluded the novel that I was working on soon after that, and so of course my feelings and thoughts about it changed because of that, and our conversation helped.

DH: So um, when you finished the draft, what happened?

Oh, it just kind of goes away once I’ve, once I get the feeling that I’m done on this draft. It sort of recedes into the background.

DH: Does it receding into the background sort of give you a feeling that it’s finished, or does it . . .

No, because I think there’s always going to be a trickle of thinking about how you could make it better, so, I think the trick is to get to as good as you can do, and probably as good as it’s going to be, except for minor sentence-level revisions, um, and then maybe there’s another force sort of lurking in the background thinking that you’ve spent enough time with this project and it’s time to move on, because you’ve used up your enthusiasm for it.

He described writing a short story as if it was a fling with a cute girl whereas the novel was like a troubled marriage slowly disintegrating. At the beginning of our second meeting he recalled the words of two well-known writers who engaged in an internal dialogue while they wrote.

The one that is the most symmetrically pleasing is, Toni Morrison was talking about completing her first book and she said the reason, the, the final push of energy that she had towards finished it was that she wanted to read the ending of the book, and so the equation would be that you, you’re ultimately writing books that you would want to read if you weren’t the one who had written them.

Or, ok, and that one is a little bit too solipsistic, maybe, but Kurt Vonnegut has

184 another one where he says that he always was writing everything for his sister.

He had one, he had one audience member in his mind and she was, he knew that she was the kind of person that he would want to write a book . . . for.

As we parted he pointed out the act of reading is in itself is a dialogue. As an engaged reader, we judge the characters, engage with them telling them what we wish they had done or said and think about them when the story is over.

Seth carried on many internal dialogues: First, he heard the conversations his characters had in his head. Second, in his role as an internal editor, he was constantly talking to the last revision telling the writer in him what worked and what didn’t work.

Third, he spoke internally with other writers. At times he picked up their style and syntax but more importantly, he received inspiration and the energy to keep on writing as long as he kept reading other peoples’ writing. As a parting gesture he named every book or short story he was reading when he wrote his book of short stories.

I could name a couple novels or books for you, that I was reading while writing that book. I’ll go through them for you. The first story is called Puberty. I was reading the gigantic book of John Cheever’s short stories, and that is so big that that’s basically what I was reading for that whole story. The second story is called Trouble in the Shadow. I was reading a book of short stories by Adam Johnson, called Emporium, and I also reread a novel by Charles Portis, called The Dog of the South. The third story’s called Crow Moon, and I was reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which is, you can tell, it’s a third person present, and that story is a third person present as well. And I might have just flipped this over to the story, the next story is called Black Earth, Early Winter Morning, and I was reading nothing when I wrote that, and I remember I was reading nothing and having a hard time getting through, just actually sitting down to the process of writing, but I think it turned out to be a good story, because I sort of quickly got it done, even though I wasn’t really deeply involved in any books. Um, the next story’s called English Cousin, and I was reading George Saunders when I wrote that. There are two tiny stories that are two pages long that I wrote while I was in college, and I was reading, obsessively reading, Hemingway when I wrote those. There’s a story called The Future, the Future, the Future, and I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, and something, maybe something else when I wrote that, I can’t quite remember about that. And there’s a story called The Cold War and I was reading, for the first half of it The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, for the second half of

185 it, Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. So if you read the story, it’s interesting, I can totally see the new voice coming in halfway through the story.

Also, my parents were getting, my parents announced to me that they were getting divorced fifty percent of the way through that story, too (laughs). Might be interesting to read it in that light. The Cold War that one was called. The last story’s called So Long Anyway, and I was reading The Things They Carried

by Tim O’Brien when I wrote that. There you go.

DH: So you really do have a dialogue with these stories, you really . . .

Yeah, it matters. But it’s, but it’s interesting, because I think it’s, if you read the whole book together, you can see all of these are related to one another by virtue of what I’m interested in as well. And if I didn’t give you that list, you may not see it at all.

His ability to remember every story or novel he was reading and its influence on what he wrote demonstrates how important his inner dialogue with other writers was to his creative process. Several months after our last meeting, I received an email from him: You caught me at a time when I was very keyed up about the psychological stakes, I guess, of writing, and so I do think I talked some things out with you.

Reading the transcripts was good. And I do FYI often find myself floating around similar questions of dialogues going on between author and reader when I am in the classroom.

Babe Babe’s Team I’ve actually had a joke with different friends of mine, we’ll talk about it, you know, it’s so horrible, like you wake up in the night and you’re freaked out and then the voice in your head is making you more scared, and then I’ll say back to him, I’ll be like, we’re on the same team here . . .

Babe is a young man in his early 30’s. At the time we met, he had published poems in several journals and was working on a novel. This writing project had occupied his life for six years, and was coming to a close. Interviewing Babe was an

186 unusual bit of serendipity, when we first met I did not know the content of his novel explored the conjoining of multiple selves within one character.

In our first meeting he quickly established that he had a long history of carrying on internal conversations. As a young boy he talked to God. I was raised in a very religious family, so from an early age, sometimes, like, I would have a lot of dialogue with God at an early age, which was just my voice… as extremely religious as we are, and I guess honestly I still do this now, for whatever reason, I still developed my view of God as just this being and we kind of got each other, sometimes I felt that presence, but it was just kind of positive, it was never negative, it was never critiquing. I would just have moments where I was like, uh oh, this is going to be bad, and the voice was like, “I know, we’ll try to get through that.”

DH: Oh, so he, I’m assuming it was a he.

Well, when I was little I believed that it was my voice, because that was the way God would choose to speak, like that was the only way God could speak to me; do you know what I mean?

In The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood, Selma Fraiberg wrote about the young child’s use of magical thinking.

Babe’s sense that God would talk to him and that God would have his voice resembled the magical thinking normal youngsters use around age two or three. Young children believe that they are so powerful that if they think something, it can happen. Babe did not link his presumption that God would talk to him as being age appropriate instead he understood it as a reaction to family events. He speculated that he developed God’s voice after his mother’s father died.

I was like two and a half, and she was a wreck, and I kind of stayed strong for her and helped her through it, but she repeatedly told me, like she does to this day, that God listens to my prayers and that I was very close to God and that I have this connection to God. Um, so I guess my dynamic’s always been that it’s just like this presence.

187 God became a transitional object for this young boy, likely as a surrogate or compensation for the loss of his mother who was most likely emotionally unavailable to her young son while she was grieving the death of her father.

As an adult his internal conversation extended into his creative process. He made it clear that in all his writings he carried on an internal dialogue. Indeed he deliberately tackled issues in his writing that allowed him to talk through, in the voices of his characters, topics that interested him. Similar to Harryette whose photography projects served as an impetus to consider interesting subjects, the forum of writing a novel provided Babe with the time and platform to work out issues. For example, he deliberately included his preoccupation with issues of a spiritual nature as part of the narrative of his novel.

I wanted to be more comfortable saying I guess I believe that there’s an awareness that is non-human in the universe that is a higher consciousness than ours, than human beings. I wasn’t having dialogue with real people about it, and it gave me the space to have a kind of dialogue about it, because I wasn’t just making a book that was, like, I’ve got this pretty idea, it was all this shit I wanted to work out and think about, so it gave me the space to every day, six, eight hours a day, for years, have a dialogue about my life and what I believe, and what things meant…I kind of, towards the end of that process, felt comfortable having those dialogues on these things I was really interested in, with other people finally.

Because of the nature of the novel he was writing, he readily acknowledged the even more extraordinary impact his internal dialogue had on it than any other projects.

The Background of the Novel It started out being only, uh, nonfiction, kind of being like kind of a memoir, and the more I worked on it, it kind of became both fiction and nonfiction, and um, kind of the premise of the book in a lot of ways ended up becoming that the

188 person who wrote, let’s see, how can I say it… the first and the fourth book is a separate Babe than the Babe who wrote the second and the third book, and both of them are a separate Babe from me in reality. I’m kind of laying it up, is that, the Babe who wrote the second and the third book, the Babe within the book, dies at the end of the third book, but then the fourth book is this kind of movement through an afterlife that’s a parallel universe that ends with that Babe reaching this parallel universe, and they kind of bring the whole book together from the Babe who died, but in reality, it still creates a third Babe, not just the second Babe.

His description made it hard to untangle each incarnation of Babe from the other. He had written a semi-autobiographical novel in which the main character was a fictionalized version of him. The novel was divided into four “books” with a different Babe as the main character and narrator of each section. Each book required a different writer Babe to emerge as well as a different character Babe.

The first book.

The first book, the dialogue, the way I think of the internal dialogue in the first book is that it’s very much based on memory, so pretty much, instead of, to me it’s still technically dialogue. I’m not so much having a conversation in my head as much as… a separate Babe is showing me, like, a movie or film of these memories and I just describe them. All I do is describe the movie, I don’t have to come up with: What to do here? What’s the cool part here? Or what’s this person saying. I just watch the movie and write about the movie.

DH: Now is this while you’re doing it, you’re aware that there’s something other than you that you’re calling a Babe that’s presenting these memories to you?

Yes. DH: Just out of curiosity, does the reader know this?

No. He described the process of writing the first book as being similar to watching a movie. There wasn’t a lot of exposition in it, in the sense of the voice of the narrator

189 saying, “I felt this way or I felt that way,” instead his inner voice purported to function only as a transcriber of facts.

The second book.

DH: The second book is kind of the more . . .

The inner dialogue is more straightforward, logical, technical, editorial.

I can jump back and forth, like in book two, when I’m working on that, um, for me it’s a typical internal dialogue, like I’m used to as a writer, prior to the book, where you know, I have a section, or a story, or an idea, or some line, and I’m going through and I’m reading and I’m getting the rhythm and I’m feeling the voice, and “What do we have in the extras”, and “What do we have in this section?” and “What if I moved this over here?” and “What if that were more—” I am just kind of having a more very clear, logical conversation with myself: “That doesn’t work here, what I need is something that’s funny here.”

Or “What I need is something that’s you know, dark here.” or “Really I just need alliteration here, or I need—” DH: So is that more in your head, like an editorial you?

Um yeah I don’t know if this is true. Maybe when I was younger, it was a lot more intuitive, I would say, when I was younger. Now it feels definitely like two voices that are both me, but I’ve had a conversation about it, because there’s constant choices that have to be made, so that it feels like I have to make arguments and make points and say, (his voice alters slightly) “Well, we already have something like this, here. I really want this to come before this,” or “I really want to be able to make this point here,” (His voice went back to his voice) and because it’s such a like, weights and measures thing, it seems natural to have it be two separate, almost like two lawyers kind of going at it.

I guess, like I was saying with the second book especially, the voices really break down in kind of the writer and the editor. And as the writer Babe I have attitudes about, about myself and about that, like apathy and I’m very longwinded and I need to, you know, I’m obsessed with momentum, and if I’ve got twenty pages, the best stuff’s the last five, and I know I got to cut the first fifteen, so that is kind of things that I expect out of the creator, vs. the editor one . . .

DH: So wait, the editor one is the one who’s saying . . . The last five pages are best, and the writer’s just doing the writing?

Right, yeah, but . . .

DH: It’s hard, because the editor’s so intermingled.

190

Right and then you have to go back and forth between, because we kind of need each other.

This inner conversation he described between the internal editor and writer in himself was consistent with how all of the writers described the interaction between these two functions.

The third book.

The third book, which is, it’s twelve dialogues—I had to be narrator and suddenly the memories and the events and the things that I was shaping, there was a Babe, and it’s Babe: not even Babe speaking, and then the writer had to become the narrator, referring to Babe as Babe, not as I . . . that dialogue is still kind of interesting to me and problematic and, because it was, number one because all of a sudden it brings up an element of judgment that I really didn’t go through on the first two books.

DH: Judgment of Babe?

Right, by Babe, um, it, the, the inner dialogue wasn’t as nuts and bolts about writing as much as it was about events and things that I was doing and things that were coming out of my mouth and I think for a long part of the process, I lost myself in the character development of the other characters to avoid the conflict of that dialogue about Babe . . . The first thing chronologically that came up was my relationship with this woman who I dated in the past . . . it was just kind of an emotionally abusive relationship and you know, I thought of Mavy as Mavy in a very intimate way, whom I know, and blah, blah, blah, but in the separating her, kind of becoming a character and going in this book, and other people reading the book and editing and talking and conferring, everyone very much fell in love with Mavy, like, oh, you know, she’s so good, she’s blah, blah, blah, I really like her, like, and they really started to get angry with me, like, “You really treated her like garbage.”

DH: Were you aware of that when you were writing?

Um, no, well, cause I still was writing it in that like, “Well, this is our dynamic, like this is what we do, this is what’s sad about it and pretty about it and funny about it,” and it was almost like, what I just saw as the voice of a dialogue between Babe and Mavy became something that, for everyone who read it, is something really kind of sad and I guess the third book is really the first time I ran into the issue in a book where I really, like head on, of, ok, here I am, writing this book that’s technically about my life. I’m taking the liberty to

191 make up whatever I want to, I’m putting in everything from real life. I spent, like, about two and a half, no, maybe two years recording, just carrying a tape recorder around, and tape recording all the time. I’m kind of working on the book twelve, fourteen hours a day, going out a couple times a week, like the book itself is a lot more real and happening and then everything that does happen is completely under that microscope, where like the present of working on the third book, in the third book, meets the present of life. I’m writing about parts that are happening that day, that night, that situation, which, like I said I felt like I wasn’t just really living any moments at all, and then it felt like the fuel that was going into the book wasn’t even really like, worth much anyway, because I was already stepping into like, as, like it had already been painted in some way. I just (sighs), maybe gross isn’t the right term, but I was very uncomfortable, so that’s when I decided that the whole parallel universe, that I was going to pick a point in that third book where things are going, things are going, and then that, things are going to change right there. Where that person dies, where I was going to completely stop that process, so everything that happened in the book past this point would be completely fiction, and I could just go on living my life and there would be no overlap anymore.

The intermingling of his life with his fiction was closing in on him. The timeline between his experience of an event and his writing about it was squeezed together. As a therapist, when I have worked with artists if they were blocked, we often discovered that the subject matter they were exploring was bringing up issues in their life that both consciously and unconsciously they found too overwhelming to pursue. I asked him if he ever shied away from writing the book because the topic was too emotionally bruising. He claimed that he could approach anything because he felt the support of his other voices.

There’s no, like, drama or strife or conflict in my dialogue when I’m working…those two voices in my life, they always feel like, they’re always like infants together, like, trying to get through things together.

Although he reported being comfortable with the affect states being aroused by his choice to closely monitor his life in his fiction, he contradicted himself when he said

192 he decided to kill Babe, the character in the third book so that Babe the actual person could live his life.

The fourth book. . . is kind of, became the biggest challenge, because Babe is dead, so the fourth book is told from a perspective of the light, ok, basically the character in the fourth book is light, is a constellation. It’s told in third person, but the name of that third person character is I. There’s the constellation kind of moving through the prior moments of the book, so the constellation is kind of experiencing these moments that have already happened, where Babe is present, and is describing the moment as an I, but they’re the same person.

DH: Say that again.

Um, I guess the easiest way to say it is it’s a ghost, and the ghost is kind of, the ghost is an I, but can never be a Babe cause it’s a ghost. Does that make sense?

So it’s basically, the fourth book is a ghost moving through back through the book, and then it’s going like I had to kind of tie things up with a, not only with an action, with a voice, too, and a voice that was somewhat evocative of something, ghostly, and magical and not human. I mean, number one more so than anything else, I had to, I felt like I had to completely go into a trance and like knock out editor Babe and completely uninvolve him.

DH: Because?

I felt like the first thing I didn’t need was anything logical or analytical, like I felt like it, there had to be like a kind of fluidity . . . but I feel like as long as I can stay with that voice, and stay with that kind of cadence and tone and rhythm, that that, that I was having the dialogue with that, and I would know that something didn’t work, because if it didn’t fit that, that I couldn’t tell that voice, I couldn’t keep the story moving, the action moving, I felt like if I was in that syntax, the match felt right, then I didn’t need to be editing, like that was the biggest kind of light bulb that went off. The conversation had to be about that, like, the, the thing that came first was the syntax always and that was true in the first book and they have a lot in common.

DH: So, ok, so, was there any kind of, if there wasn’t an editorializing, other than monitoring the cadence and tone, were there any internal voices at all?

Well, I, a new thing happened in the fourth book, too, because it was completely fiction, I mean, I had these signposts, these things that had happened in the book

193 already, I was writing these four sections, it kind of, I kind of felt freed up. My dialogue with editor Babe was about ideas, which felt really exciting.

The fourth book allowed an older dialogue, his conversation with the spiritual world, to more fully blossom both in terms of the character being a ghost and through the trance like state he entered while writing.

I think that connects to something we talked about before, about those kind of spontaneous states and those trance states and writing in those states and writer Babe being always feeling like I’m in a magical state because probably, I mean, I wouldn’t argue about this or really, really explain this to anybody else, but I think part of me really kind of does like the idea of, of kind of like a magical shamanistic way of looking at it. It’s like you get in these states and you have a little bit of an access to these things, to that gap, to beings and spirits and that magic kind of fuels you, and you make up the shit. And then regular you, editor you, has to, so there’s dialogue there, even in that spontaneity between me and this kind of invisible world, and then there’s another dialogue between . . . what writer Babe made and what editor Babe thinks of what he made while having this other dialogue.

As a young boy he thought God spoke in his voice, as an adult he felt that when his writing process was going well he was a conduit to a shaman’s voice. Babe didn’t believe humans could ever satisfy the desire to know why things happened. This was the provenance of God. Basically, there, that there is a God and there’s this will of God and that everything is kind of for a reason, but that any human being who speaks with claiming to have the knowledge of that reasoning, is really scary and evil and bad and wrong and that no one knows . . . I guess what I was trying to imply was that, it’s a hard thing to explain, but that, not that I don’t think things are good and bad, but that for some weird reason, those things are not only bad, but worthy of being angry about and worthy of trying to change and worthy of as much emotion and thought that you can give to them. I guess for whatever reason, some part of me, I’m still very angered by those things and still find them really horrible, but they don’t affect my faith in God, and they don’t, and they make me, and I still believe that there’s still a reason for everything. That doesn’t make me feel like doing those things is ok, it just makes me think that there’s a reason . . .

194 While as a person he believed that it was not possible to know why things happened, as a writer he allowed himself to know and explain why different events happened in his novel. As I have already cited, theoreticians such as Vasari compared the artist’s ability to create a world in their art as comparable to the task God had of creating our world. Marion Milner, Melanie Klein and Anton Ehrenzweig all compared “the religious mystical experience to artistic creativeness.” (Milner, Klein & Ahrenzweig, 1987, p. 243) DH: Your writing in a sense gives you permission to . . .

It gives me permission to have fun with playing with, cause the book in a lot of ways became about exploring, especially the fictional element, what certain reasons could be for certain things . . .

In the fourth book the polylogue he had between himself as shaman, writer and editor was fecund. The appearance of the shaman allowed the writer Babe to lean back and effortlessly allow the shaman to speak through him. The editor’s voice in him was able to be an internal playful rouser of ideas where as in his other writing projects his inner editor acted as a stern corrector and eliminator of words and ideas.

In the end he reminded me that all of the Babes were in the same novel.

Um, I kind of have always gone, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four . . . Never, like, I’ll finish one and then . . .

DH: Oh, so like, you’re cycling through the voices a lot.

Yeah, cause I never wanted to lose, I always thought of them as married to each other, and it just seemed strange to like separate.

DH: Oh, yeah, that’s right, so how did the voices talk to each other, what kind of dialogue are they having? Are they having a dialogue, are you actually seeing them having a dialogue on the page, or also in your head? Are you thinking of the different Babes while you’re writing? Babe two, are you thinking of Babe four, or not . . .

195 For sure, because like, the book four voice and book one voice are very similar, so I kind of, I’ve done, I lean on book one while I’m doing book four, but with a kind of awareness that I’ve wanted there to be a different element about them, the Babe that the narrator’s talking about in book three, is the Babe of book two, but the voice in the book is different, because it’s narrator Babe, see?

DH: So ok, so there’s this dialogue in your head—

Between the books.

This was another dialogue. The Babe of each book informed the Babes of the other books. In his treatise on Dostoevsky (1985) Bahktin wrote that in Dostoevsky’s novels his characters’ “speech was internally dialogized and shot through with polemic.” (p.138) Bahktin speculated that this artistic devise was employed for several reasons. First, artistically it showed the chaos of thought and the degree of inner conflict within the characters. Second, Bahktin postulated, such discourse “connected with a decrease in objectification . . . represents multiple points of view . . . in such discourse, the author’s thought no longer oppressively dominates the other’s thoughts.” (p.198) This technical decision forces the readership instead of deferring to authorial objectivity to grapple with the subjectivity of the opinions and moral choices of the characters. Third, Bahktin noted that in the novel Crime and Punishment the character Raskolnikov’s inner speech habitually represented the thoughts of others “Because they all sound within a single consciousness, they become, as it were, reciprocally permeable. They are brought close to one another, made to overlap: they partially intersect one another . . . . A feat that “would be impossible among voices in an actual dialogue.” (p.239) This capacity to represent multiple opinions within one voice in a written text or one painted space was utilized by many of the artists. For example in the interview with

196 the painter CU he spoke directly about his desire to illustrate opposite and ambivalent memories in his paintings. In psychoanalytic discourse a goal of psychotherapy is to create the conditions that encourage our clients to allow ambivalent and conflicting beliefs and feeling to be in dialogue with one another. Although Babe did not name it as a conscious goal to corral his opposing multitude of thoughts together it would seem likely that this was part of his unarticulated agenda.

The Second Interview When we met for the second time, Babe had finished writing the novel. He described this period as if it was the end of a relationship. His description of this stage resonated with Seth’s description of the same stage.

I still think about it, but now instead of, instead of it feeling like my twin is with me all the time and I’m thinking about it like all the time, now it’s just like this person that I see every once in a while, you know, every few months, they might be in town and give me a call. Cause I was so used to thinking about it and having ideas and wondering about it, you know, 18 hours a day, and now it’s like, maybe once a week I’ll be like, well, maybe I should maybe do that thing in that section. Like it just is kind of fading, and, cause it just doesn’t, and the other thing that’s crept in is that I have an idea for another book that I’m really excited about.

In the second interview Babe no longer spoke about the voices that made up the structure of his novel. We talked in a more general way about the inner voices he heard as he wrote. Babe paid close attention to himself as a “we” and he was able to delineate the various characters inside himself.

So not only is there editor Babe and creator Babe, but there’s also the kind of Babe who works on the book and then there’s the guy who has to like, go to work and stuff. And even before I would sit down, I was like, what do we got to do, what do we got to do today? It’s always we, never what do I got to do today, because we have to have a conversation . . .

197 One of the members of the “we” of him consisted of the name he spoke to himself with when he wrote and edited.

I think when things are good it’s Babes.

DH: Is that what you’re called?

Yeah, a lot of my friends still call me that.

DH: Do you relate better as Babes?

Um, I think I think of it as an interiority thing, like, the closer someone is to me; they call me Babes.

Two other members of the “we” were two different voices of the internal editor Babe.

Editor one.

The editor comes in, the editor has different things that he’s looking at, he’s looking at language, technical and he’s looking at repercussions of social, social repercussions of what he just wrote . . . The editor Babe’s kind of handling shit and taking care of figuring out why, whether it’s a problem with the book or just the overall thing we should be doing, or you need to take a break, or we need something like this here, and creator person (Babe) was like, “I got nothing . . . so, here’s me, and I’m like, writing, and kind of fleshing out sections, but editor Babe is there too, so, whatever he’s doing, daydreaming, but, and then there’s moments within that where he’ll be like, “oh! Check that out. Or oh! Here’s a like, plot section we have to deal with.” And then there’s this flipping back and forth, and in the process of actually working on the book, then, so there’s writer Babe typing and editor Babe’s just hanging out in the room.

Editor two: The editor as drill sergeant.

In the very beginning of working on the book I had to develop a drill sergeant. I had to develop a voice in my head that was on my ass about working on the book, that was kind of valuing out my time, like, are you reading? Ok, reading’s ok. You’re hanging out with this person? Oh, they’re great, that’s ok. Are you watching TV? That’s not ok. Are you doing this? Like that created a value system like, you need to be working on this with every free moment possible . . .

198 Both because his novel was about real people, and because he asked friends and family members for feedback on what he wrote, he talked about their influence on his writing process.

My internal voice and my thinking and my view of the book and art are very heavily shaped by someone else, not just in a real light way that people are affected by others, but it’s specifically to my work, there are just certain people that really, really, really, really, anything they say about it is almost as weighty and important as what I think about it.

DH: There are some people that when you’re writing, so part of your internal dialogue is knowing that one of them might read it and have this sort of response to it? So are you imagining what they might . . . ?

Well, yeah.

In addition, his insights into the impact other art forms had on his creative process were very thought provoking and added another dimension to this theme. Seth was moved to write by other authors, whereas Babe found inspiration from many art forms.

Almost everything is from movies and books and albums and when I can get myself to a gallery or museum . . . Sometimes they’re out of the blue but a lot of them, again, I get my best thinking done when I’m reading, or watching a movie, or, if I’m in any way like in taking anything creative, it automatically makes me creative, it automatically makes me think about what I’m working on, and what I do . . . I really like this section of The Shining, and I really haven’t seen that movie in a long time, those things, I guess through the process I don’t, I stopped seeing how they were different than the conversation I had with Jim last night, or the memory of doing something with my dad when I was seven years old. I felt like they were all mine in a very tenuous way, and that my memory of something that happened when I was ten years old is really no different than this section of this movie or book that I really love, and I felt able to use.

It infuriated him that as a writer he could be sued if he quoted another book or the script from a movie. He thought that the same rules didn’t apply to other art forms.

I think it was called The Killings, the first Stanley Kubrick movie, which is about this big heist, is unbelievably, basically when you see Reservoir Dogs or

199 Pulp Fiction or any of the early Quentin Tarantino movies. It’s like oh, he obviously loved this movie. That never bothered me, and it clearly hasn’t bothered anybody else, cause the guy still makes movies, I mean you watch Reservoir Dogs and it’s just a remake of it basically, and I think that’s great. He loved that movie, he put it in a different context, he was excited about it and he used it as a springboard to keep making things, and that’s natural.

I remembered Seth’s concerns about his tendency to copy other writers’ style.

I asked Babe if he ever worried about inadvertently taking on the words or style of other writers.

Yeah, for sure, um, I think something I realized early on was that I was really susceptible to that, and so the best-case scenario for me, because my personality in general is like that, it’s chameleon-like in that way. And I realized that the, the trick I’ve taught myself, is to, when I’m in new periods or I’m in, is to go to other mediums . . .

DH: How do you mean?

To, to go to, to be in, to be watching a lot of movies, or going to a lot of galleries or listening to a lot of music, because then I’m affected by a mood and a style and a feel and ideas, but I can’t parrot it, because it’s not my field.

Then he addressed the question from a positive point of view.

Actually I always just thought it was good to, you know, if I could nail something, if I could get into the voice of like, this poet or this writer, and write this piece, which was totally in their voice and totally their style and like, nail it.

I guess I always looked at it as like, as like playing music, or like muscles, like, you know, you get this particular voice muscle, you work it out and you nail it and then you move onto another thing. You copy it and you ape it and you understand it and you find another thing and then as you get older, you’ve absorbed and stolen and worked with and parroted, you know, 2,000 different writers . . . Besides I think it is a dialogue, because I mean, to me, when you get down to the brass tacks of it, you couldn’t, short of copying everything, word for word, everything, it’s going to be something new, no matter how you, really, no matter what your intentions are, no matter what you’re after. I mean, even when you listen to a record, it’s a dialogue. Me, I could see having to argue that something new has to come out of it, but certainly, yeah, I mean, I guess I do see it as a dialogue . . . I mean, growing up I was constantly reading books and thinking about things and you get older and you underline things and make little notes, like “I really loved that part” and . . . you copy down lines and what happens it, I guess for me is, an internal voice took the stead of the author, because the author wasn’t there to talk to about it, so this internal voice kind of

200 took the role of the writer of the book I was reading and talked to me about what I was reading, what I liked about it, didn’t like about it, so I, I mean, for me, it goes back to the God thing and being little, it goes back to that I want to have a dialogue with everything, so I just kind of automatically have another Babe to talk to me about everything.

Babe’s desire and ability to construct imaginary dialogues was evident since his early childhood. Although sometimes he had to remind himself that these inner voices were not enemies and they were “on the same team,” usually he considered his relationship with his inner voices as welcome company. Related to this, Babe had a keen insight as to why he found it easy to take on the cadence and language of other writers.

Personally, I think it has a lot to do with internal dialogue, because I think that . . . when I really love a book, most of the time, what happens is that voice really creeps into my brain, to the point where when I put in down and I get off the bus, I put it down and I go make tea, my thoughts will be in that cadence and that rhythm, they’ll be colored by that kind of emotion and feel of that, and you are using an inner voice to read them. I think it gets mixed up with the way you think and talk to yourself, in a way that I don’t think would affect you as much in any other medium, just because all of us, I can’t speak for everyone, for me, there’s always, Babe’s always talking in there, all the time, so that’s colored by, you know, just reading a hundred pages of something, my voice, not just when I’m writing, but even when I’m thinking and moving and how I’m treating other people, is totally affected by that, cause I basically just ate the voice in my own head and my voice for an hour, or two hours, or half an hour . . . like I’m reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn right now . . .I don’t think of her telling me the story, and I don’t think of the narrator telling me the story, like, I’m reading it, but it’s in my voice.

Similar to what happens when friends and family take on each other’s accents and expressions, Babe and Seth related to other writers, in their inner life, as if they were friends and so too they took on their voices.

Babe saw himself as a cast of inner characters. He looked at the “we” inside him as his friends. The subject matter of his novel likewise concerned the concept of multiple selves. Earlier I addressed the depiction of a dialogic process within a

201 character as a device used by writers to enrich the portrayal of their characters. Another perspective on how authors create characters can be approached from the question of how one looks at the self. Fiction writers have always described human behavior and given their characters motivations, usually intuitively, other times consciously, using psychoanalytic discourse as an explanatory engine. When we, as psychotherapists read a novel, it is easy to identify characters that reflect Winnicott’s notion of the false self or characters who sound like case studies of Kohut’s theories. Characters are ignored or constantly admonished by their parents and then develop into hard self-centered people or they are written as fragile people who easily fall apart or have an air of being over burdened or chronically deadened.

The concept of multiple self-states exists in both literature and psychoanalytic thought. (Bromberg, Gergen and Gergen, 1987; Schafer, 1987 and 1992; Bretherton, 1991; and Harter, 1999) These two disciplines coalesce in Mikhail Bahktin’s analysis of Dostoevsky. He pointed out that Dostoevsky built his characters so that “it is impossible to master the inner man, to see and understand him by making him into an object of indifferent neutral analysis . . . . No one can approach him and reveal him—or more precisely force him to reveal himself.” (1985, p. 251) Bahktin stressed that only by a dialogical involvement with a person could we learn about them. “Only in communion in the interaction of one person with another, can the “man in man” be revealed, for others as well as oneself.” (pp. 251-52) Bahktin’s premise being that both in Dostoevsky and in life a person’s inner self only exists in interaction with others.

What constitutes the difference between an unhealthy and a healthy self, an authentic self from an inauthentic self? Do we look at the person as composed of

202 multiple self-states or as having a core self? These questions have occupied the minds and polemics of theoreticians in philosophy, sociology, psychology and literature.

Unencumbered with psychoanalytic leanings, Babe articulated a belief in multiple selfstates in his novel about four different configurations of Babe and their kinship with one another.

Francesca I chose to include Francesca because of her passionate commitment to what she considered the mission of a writer and because of her insights into the links between an internal dialogue and empathy. She also stressed the importance of creating an “art space,” a topic the other writers did not address as fully.

Francesca is a woman in her mid forties. She is slim, effusive, and attentive.

Despite her protestations that she was inarticulate, I found what she said deeply moving and laced with emotion. She was born in the United States but moved at age three to Italy and lived there until she returned to go to college in Massachusetts. She is married and has two children. Her daughter had just gone off to college for the first time, but she still had one latency-aged son at home. Her husband had been a writer, and in their youth they had both been struggling artists. At some point he stopped writing and took a job at an ad agency. Francesca remained a writer. To earn money, she taught creative writing. Several years ago she left a full time position at one university and began teaching part time at another college so as to have more time to write. Several of her books have been published. At the time of the interviews she was working on a new novel (since then she told me that the novel had been “picked up”

203 and is in the process of being published). We met at her house. After securing her very friendly rambunctious dogs we sat in the living room, in which a large carved canopied Indian mahogany bed served as the couch.

Francesca began our conversation by emphasizing the immense importance she placed on where and with what tools she created. She needed specific conditions to nurture her inner world. Her attention to creating the environment she required to write reminded me of J’s deliberate thoughtfulness about fostering a creative space. She described the techniques she had discovered over the years that helped her find and hear the voices in her stories.

Place I think when somebody sets out to sculpt something, they know they are being an artist, cause they’re sculpting, but when you sit down to write, you could be doing a grocery list, you could be writing to your mother, the act of writing, so how do you differentiate as art? For me, that has been accomplished by having a very specific environment, my desk, my chair, my laptop that I don’t let people touch a lot. So I’m, I’m in a sort of space that’s the art space. And I have my notepads to the side and in that art space, Susan Sontag did talk a lot about this . . . . So she said, I think she wrote her fiction longhand, but, you know, sat on the bed to do something else. I’m messing up the order. She had to do the different types of writing that she did in different environments, and the one was to be on her bed with a notepad, writing, another was at the typewriter, because we used to use typewriters, right, and another was at a desk, and she’d separated those environments for herself. I thought, yes, that makes perfect sense to me, because you can’t inhabit these different states of mind and these different creative processes, if you don’t separate them out, for some of us . . . I think when it’s all done with, when my hours are up, I need to leave from that trance.

I don’t think I could function in the world if I were carrying on with those characters like, but I envy people who can just take this on. I can’t, I have to be in a very enclosed space, a very specific space, and that’s the only way I can function as a writer.

Equipment

204 I don’t like anybody to touch the laptop, I get very, I don’t want my son to use it. I don’t like anybody to touch it and mess up the settings or anything, it’s my, it’s my tool, and I, I can’t, I’m very intense about it, you know. But, so I was trying to think, I was thinking sometimes I’m thinking like, to me, sometimes the dialogue is literally, I’m saying out loud, the voices . . . sometimes what happens is they’ll say (the characters) something that I either should have gotten to before in a different chapter, another scene, or that has to come out in the future, so I just have a paper next to me. I always have to have paper right there, just to capture that, and I don’t know why it comes out of order, but it does. It triggers a button, and it kind of, the other thing is that I have to really watch out for is distracting, what I call trivial voices, like, at the same time that I’m trying to fall into this and to be in my trance and to allow my body to be involved, a thing comes up like, “oh, what time is it that I have to pick up Stefan, when is his orthodontist appointment,” “oh, God, I mustn’t forget to get Grape Nuts for my mother,” you know, so the only way I can get those voices, which I consider to be totally, you know, just not necessary at that time and in the way and bothersome, it’s, you know, and it’s like noises in the crowd, is I have a little pad, another pad, so I have pads where I write the interrupting thoughts, another pad where I just write down what it is I need to, so it’s there and I can stop worrying about it and get rid of it, right. So there’s me speaking in character, there’s me finding my character speaking totally out of turn, and then there are the distracting trivia voices, which just are so frustrating. So I can’t create away from my chair where I go, I have to be in my chair and have a very strict set of rules, total silence, um, some chewing gum or licorice, something that I can put in my mouth. I will sweat when I’m like, excited about something, I gesture, you know, and for me, it’s like all part of trying to get into something like pottery, you know, like where you would be touching it.

Trance I guess I’d have to call it a bit of a trance, you know, not, I don’t want to sound weird. I find myself getting into sort of a trance with my characters and listening to them. I feel like a medium, that’s one of the things I say here, and I feel like a medium because I’m trying to get these characters into myself and do them honor and present the truths that they represent to me about human existence and how, you know, as people, we give pieces of truth to one another.

I’m trying to, you know, represent that, through the characters. If I’m going to be a boy, I’m going to get myself in a different mood than if I’m going to be a father who’s angry, or if I’m going to be a woman who’s yearning after her daughter, so I, I literally have to enable myself to be very open as a medium . . .

My characters start talking to me, but they’re talking in my head . . . and I’m trying to think, you know, if I’m Dirk, what would I really say, so I’m being Dirk and I’m trying out being Dirk, you know, with questions and then the same thing with Russ. Russ is the father, he’s a different man than his son, and his son is gentle and sensitive and confused and that’s gotta be a different series of

205 voices, so sometimes I might, I put Dirk down and it just doesn’t sound like Dirk, so I have to play my way into feeling the different layers of this character.

DH: What do you mean play your way?

Well, like sort of theatrically, you know, like, you know, like Stanislavsky method of this is who I am, how will I, you know, perform it, how would I say it, you know? If this is who I am, and I’m going through these dilemmas, I wouldn’t say it that way, whereas she might say that, so I have to really just keep trying to be more and more and more like Dirk so I can talk better and better as Dirk.

Several months later I ran into her at a theatre. She was acting in the play! She told me that she used to act and was “just now getting back into it.” This information made sense. She had compared her writing technique of “playing out her characters” as being like the Russian theatre director Stanislavsky’s teachings on acting. In An Actor Prepares, he elaborates on acting techniques. Three of the critical components of his methodology are: actors are asked to recall experiences in their own lives that resonate with the circumstances of their characters. The premise being that bringing their own history into the character gives the character’s words more meaning. Next, the actor must create a “back story” explaining what happened in the character’s life prior to the play. The principle being that knowing the historical antecedents explains a character’s behavior and can help an actor make intelligent choices as to how his/her character will react to events. The final component of Stanislavsky’s method was that an actor must decide what their character desires and then show this desire through action and the body. The semiotics of desire must be embodied. It made sense that Francesca would apply these techniques when creating a character on the page. Her sense that writing was analogous to acting extended further.

206 My interest in writing is as an observer of the theater of life, the theater of humanity, and the dialogue that goes on . . .

DH: Why do you say theater?

Well, it just literally, sitting, imagine being in a darkened theater and looking at the stage and, and putting those voices out there to say things.

Francesca, like Babe and Seth, has a panoply of different inner voices that visit her when she is writing.

So there’s the me speaking in character, there’s me finding my character speaking totally out of turn, necessary, then there’s the distracting trivia voices, which just are so frustrating, and then there’s the critical mind, you know, because I’ve been spending all this time writing, saying, “is that good writing, should that be done, how are you functioning this”… you know, and the questions about style and technique, which are mostly, you know, they’re ok, but I think one has to be very careful, because I always think a critic should come a long time after the creator, and the critic can so undermine the creator and then the editor and the critic, they need to wait . . . Well, I guess the critic and the editor, for me, are often quite intertwined, sometimes they, they go out, the editor’s a very real presence, in the sense that the editor is the presence that’s trying to keep the text from sort of losing track of itself and saying, “Come on, don’t just fly off the handle, you, you’ve said you’re going to Arizona, or whatever, don’t go to Afghanistan, you know, just come on, stay in the…” you know, and so the editor can actually be helpful, but , the creator also has to be careful with this editorial voice because sometimes when you write, things come to you that you could never have predicted, and that’s the most exciting part of writing that you cannot plan it all the way through. I do know writers who outline everything; I think it works better for genre. For me, there’s, the art of creating brings its own gifts. It’s like being a very present person, you have a better dialogue with your friends than if you plan everything you’re going to say, it’s just, you’ve got it planned cause you may want to remember something, but if you let the thing go, you never know what’s going to come, and by being very present, you get some gifts, so, you know, the editor is actually being a kind of presence, because the editor is trying to keep me on the journey, but there are still some times when I don’t want either the editor or the critic. The critic is, for me, is a voice coming at me, and these are voices that come at me, whereas I’m trying to integrate the character voices, I’m trying to become them, the critic and the editor are me, but they’re coming at me from someplace high up that always feels, and they could be pounding me on the head, and I have to be really careful. The critic is everything I’ve ever read, everything I’ve ever studied, and the critic, you know, it’s very judgmental, and the critic is saying, how do you know this is good style? How do you know you’ve captured the moment? How do you know your characters are working,

207 and I do think at some point you need to stand up for your work and be responsible for it, not just go, oh, I’ve blurted it out and therefore it’s great. I don’t believe in that, I think it’s a discipline, but I think it really needs to come at a different time, so I try to go, you know, not now, if, you know, not now, you know, if I’m in a revision, then I think I can say, ok, let’s stand back, that voice can guide me, but I think I have to be really careful with that, because the critic is a more negating presence.

DH: Is there another presence?

I suppose it’s me. But see, for me, when I started writing, and this is really important to me, my impetus was, I felt from an early age that life is kind of a drama, and I felt that I was given a witness to see it. I was a witness to scenes all the time, so I wanted to record sort of the theater of life, my impetus was to tell the human story, which I felt was, in many ways a very painful story. My work is described as very dark, so I saw myself really as like a tape recorder, you know, taking in the world and not, you know, I’ve got to say this, I’ve got to say this, I’m not a Jonathan Franzen kind of writer in any way . . . so of course I’m the creator, but I don’t, I dread narcissism. I think of narcissism as a disease, and I do not want my creative process to be one of, I’m saying this, “I’m talking to you, I’m telling you, I’m brilliant.” I want to be the kind of artist that’s seeking the truth as best she can, and trying to record it in as best a way as possible so that I’m sharing a bit of truth, cause we all benefit by seeing pieces of truth, you know. I know in academia, like, you know, you can’t use that word, truth. Who are you to use the word truth? But I believe each of us on the planet has access to truth as we listen, and I think we can give each other good pieces of information, and those are moments of truth, are inside, so you know, not truth as God’s truth, but as human individual truth, but I think for me, because this is the way I do my art, it took me a long time to say, I am the creator. I have very much stepped away from saying, I am the creator, you know . . .

DH: And instead you say what?

A medium yeah, I think that’s a much better word . . .

“Allowing others into me” was her way of saying she hears her characters’ voices speaking through her. The internal voices that she heard were: her characters speaking in the moment; her characters’ voices speaking out of turn from another point in the narrative; trivial voices from her life interfering in the art space; a negative judgmental critic’s voice and an editor’s voice that tried to keep her on track but who

208 ran the risk of squashing new discoveries. As almost an afterthought she included her own voice, which she neutered by describing it as being like a tape recorder whose function was to share the theatre of life.

For her to create life on the page allows, . . . me to enlarge myself as a being and as a writer by allowing others into me.

I hope to become a more empathetic writer, and a more empathetic person, and I think that’s what art does best. When I read about somebody in India, I’m just thinking of an example, I just read Manil Suri’s book The Death of Vishnu.

Suddenly I’m in this building, I know who the neighbors are, I know what their conflicts are, I care about existences and beings, geographically thousands of miles away from me, and I consider that a gift, that I get to travel into these beings, and I think writers do this, you know, great writers do it.

Francesca went on to underscore her belief that good writing created empathy.

Her impassioned conviction is that imagination and empathy are crucial personally and politically. It is her mission as a writer to inspire both. Francesca poetically expanded upon the suppositions of Mary Watkins. In Invisible Guests, Watkins suggests that the capacity to empathically merge with others’ points of view is a gift because it allows the creator to transcend the confines of text and expand their actual lives. Watkins described the imagination as a “triumph of freedom.” (Watkins, 2000, p. 53) Francesca’s comments were notable not only because they spoke to me as a reader and individual but also as a psychotherapist. I think the experience and goals undertaken as a writer are strikingly similar to those of a psychotherapist.

The world of creative writing is getting at the areas of, you know, they’re so vital to intuition, and empathy and see, you know, that’s the thing, though, because it’s autobiographical because as a kid I was always, I don’t know if this is relevant, but I was over-sensitive, “you’re over-sensitive,” so I thought I was an awful person, this awful burden of over-sensitivity, but what it was, was intuition. An animal relies entirely on . . . they know immediately, they know a difference in their environment, they respond to it, that’s why they’re amazing hunters and you know, they know when there’s danger before it’s appeared before, all of that, it’s powerful animal chemistry and vitality . . . you know, like

209 intuition is stuff, that’s the territory of creative writing, you’re, you don’t know why, you know, because a character says this, another character says that, but you’re testing it out, like, how things work with each other, you’re looking at imagination and intuition, and to me, those, our country is in dire need of more of those, therefore, I totally disagree with people who are like, oh, the world is creative, there’s too much emotion because actually, to be creative takes a state of consciousness, or a state of willingness to be awake. It’s painful in some ways, and it’s, you know, and I think most people are not willing to do that, I think about people who are unable to imagine another person’s life, right, because they can’t imagine another person’s life, they don’t care what happens to that person. They cannot imagine, you know, that they have any responsibility to do anything, and this is how we, we free ourselves of any need to be responsible to anybody else, to work to understand what’s not our own, and to be, the hope of the world is, I’ve got to be, I’ve got to, if I throw out my empathy, if someone’s going to be so rude to me, and say, just, ok, I’m seething, but I know just breathe deep, just wait, wait and see what the moment gives you, and, and amazingly, again and again, that person, because I’ve just allowed them their space and then , that person will say, I’m having a bad day and do you want me to go get you something. I’m astonished at how often, if I can just not say, you’re ruining my day, you’re in my way, you’re making things bad, which is like, the me, me, me part, if I just stop and say, I’m in this person’s space, but I’m just going to let it be and to me that’s the whole art of creating, is saying, I don’t know these people, I’ve invented them, but they’re to me, emblems of existence on this planet, and how can I reach them, can I tell their story, what would it be like for me to inhabit their skin. To me this is a very, very important. I feel like a lack of imagination is just killing our country ...

For her, to have an internal dialogue meant insinuating herself into her characters. To flesh them out into full-bodied, unique individuals, her inner dialogue with them necessitated empathically trying to care for and understand even the vilest of characters. As our conversation progressed, she returned to the issue of creating empathy many times.

To encourage her readers to understand her characters and to be concerned about their lives she believed her writing had to facilitate the reader’s physical immersion into the characters.

Well, I think, you know, I think about the body. What does it respond to? Fear, the adrenaline goes up. Anger, your face gets hot. Passion, your skin’s glowing.

210 I think of the body as reporting on, you know, reports the senses, and the senses are what create our memories, and those are both very subjective things, and they’re not rational. You know, what makes one person angry doesn’t make another person angry. I can explain to you why it happened, but I think the body deals a lot with the sentient part of life, you know, the, you know, if I’m rational, my body is very dry, you know, like, dry in a good sense, I’m not sweating, I’m, my posture’s probably good, I’m focusing, I can almost feel my brain at work, my hands don’t matter, my feet don’t matter, my legs don’t matter. If I’m upset, like, my whole body is flailing, my arms are out, my, and because for me, not just for me, I think for many fiction writers, talk about how, what fiction does is create an experience in the mind of a reader. How do you create experience? You have to use your body. I have to make my reader feel that they are in the body of this character to, to be closer to that character, and then in a sense, then they are taking on the dialogue of this character.

To Francesca the concept of dialogue was not primarily about words; it also involved a physical responsiveness.

I’m thinking of, let’s say a sculptor with the clay, let’s just say a potter, like, you’re there with the wheel, I’m going to mix a little bit here, you’re there with the wheel and you’re feeling that wheel, the clay, the clay’s wet, and as you feel it, you start to feel good. You are having a dialogue with that material, very much, and if you don’t have a dialogue with that material, you could just put on your iPod and just throw out one pot after another. If anything, if each thing is going to be a new creation, you must be responding to it. How are you responding to it….our hands, which are the most tactile part of us possible. This is a dialogue. Right? I do kind of think of all this kind of like a dialogue, like, think of a dancer onstage, she’s using her body, but she is in a dialogue with space, right, and the viewer. So, too a musician, with his instruments, and the response of the audience, right? That’s a dialogue, if you know it.

DH: Well I know you’ve talked about it, but can you talk more about how you think about your dialogue with your characters?

Like, how do I have dialogue with my characters? Well, see, I think its a little like love…I think that once you are, you are starting to create a character and you’re trying to figure out, you know, again, who are they and what’s possible for them, and you know, what would they say, and you know, try to concentrate and be other than Francesca so I can report on another, because other people interest me greatly, and they free me, too, from being myself, well, it’s like love. When you love, or meet somebody, and you’re like, so fascinated, everything they say, you’re so alert to everything they say, and then after a while when you’ve been together, two or three weeks, you start to think, I know what that person would like, they would love it if I brought them coffee in the morning, or I know what he would say, he would say, that movie is prejudiced

211 or racist, because he talks a lot about our society and race. I’ve been listening and now I know that these are his concerns and so at a certain point you think, by following the character, you start to say, yes, that will be within the predictable pattern, the pattern I love with that character, that will be what they say and they do, so for example, Patricia, [A synopsis of the story: Patricia is a character in one of her stories who after years of misery runs away from her abusive husband. He eventually tracks her down. Resolved to find some way to get away from him forever she decides to burn down the house she is staying in hoping he would think she was killed in the fire. Unbeknownst to her he had snuck in the building, to try and confront her and he is burned to death by the flames] I didn’t think she could ever talk back to her husband, cause she’d never learned to talk back, but she could have a secret language, she could give herself a secret language. I wanted her to be, by the way, somewhat innocent at the end of that story, I didn’t want her to know she had killed her husband, because if she knew, then she has culpability and guilt and more choices than I felt were available to her, but if she doesn’t know, she’s just trying to erase evidence so she can keep on being free, that was what I was thinking. But I, one thing I was trying to do in that story was deal with some issues like culpability and innocence, because to me she’s innocent, but she has done a culpable thing, but not knowingly, and that’s also why I put his point of view in there, cause I think he’s a messed-up guy. I think he does terrible things, but I didn’t want him to be just completely evil, and that’s why after I put her husband in, and it was all from her point of view, I thought, well, then it’s clear who we’re inside with, and I wanted him in there just to see if I could present also his mess, a little bit, much less than hers, cause I was much more interested in freeing her, but, you know, that’s what I was exploring. I just think we need to have a lot of mercy with each other, and to me that’s another aspect of fiction, that it always, just, it makes it harder for me to judge others, you know, every choice is fraught with the moment and misunderstanding or limited understanding, and fear and jealousy.

Her relationship with her characters insisted on her remaining empathic to their point of view even if it was toward a “messed up guy,” otherwise she could not create three-dimensional characters. Her thoughts about the body’s involvement in knowing correspond to my experience as a patient and therapist. Psychologically, often when an important psychological insight is finally integrated, it is experienced as if something has shifted inside the body.

Philosophers such as Descartes (1596-1650) saw reasoning as a disembodied collection of facts and rules (Cogito ergo sum). Other thinkers disagree and pose that

212 knowledge is lodged in the body. Hermans and Kempen (1993) argued that we often use the vertical structure and workings of our body as a metaphor to understand, explain and make value statements about how the world works. For example, if something is working it is “up and running,” whereas if one is feeling bad “one is feeling down;” if things are expensive, “prices are going up.” In a recent study, third and fourth graders who were encouraged to use their hands to express themselves while solving math problems calculated 50 percent more problems correctly then those who were asked to keep their hands still. (Goldin-Meadow, S., Nusbaum, H., Kelly, S., & Wagner, S., 2001, pp. 516-522) Another aspect of Francesca’s imaginative inner dialogue was that it allowed her to invoke and flesh out many different characters.

I think, about being a writer, is you get to be many characters in your life, even if nobody ever publishes your work, you have been many characters, and that’s really a fascinating thing that I think writing gives you. We all are many personalities, and John Gardner talked about that, the way John Gardner talked about, the best writers have the most personalities, he said, because they at one point in their writing can draft a daughter, the next draw from the mother, the next draft they’re a humorist, the next draft they’re, like, a sex object, he talked about it in terms of having many personalities.

To which I added, after the tape recorder was off, that it sounded like my hypothesis that we contain multiple inner dialogues and Gardner’s thoughts that we are many personalities fit together; she agreed.

In concert with her goal to encourage her audience to widen their world and react empathically to her characters, was her desire to get herself and others to ask, “Why?” Why, you know, that’s why I write, it’s, why do people get, why do we abandon each other, why do we, why are we petty when we could be grand? Why, you know, why don’t we stand up for what we believe in times of great need? You

213 know, to me, the big questions are: Why is there pain and loneliness and human cruelty? And that’s what I’m always writing to, and it wasn’t because in my life I was constantly experiencing cruelty, but when I did see it, I remember being in a grocery store once, I don’t know why this came to me, and I was just getting groceries, and there was a woman with her son, he must have been about ten in the grocery store, and she was speaking very loudly, so loudly that it was distracting me from picking my cereal out, and I thought, it’s like she’s putting on a performance, and all of a sudden she turned to her son about something and she’d said, go get the peanut butter, and he hadn’t gotten it, and she just slapped him so hard, and I was like, why, what’s happening to this boy? And that’s what I want, if I go to a grocery store and that person, the teller, is really nice and cheerful, I leave out of there and I feel just great, and I’m happy and I’m just really grateful that that happened and that she was such a nice teller, but I don’t feel the impulse to tell it, but when that boy gets hit, I’m like, why does that have to happen to him? Why? DH: Ok, so there is a why conversation in your head; you’re asking yourself why.

Yes, always . . . I’m trying to write down this quote that I like, Milan Kundera, who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he said, “The aim of the writer should be to get the reader to look at the world as a question.” So why is very, very important to me, why, why, why, and I think we have unanswerable whys, but the better the writer puts down the territory of the why, maybe the better we get at traveling this terrain more mercifully or generously, you know?

DH: So when you write, you’re trying to respond to that why.

Yes, I’m trying to, I’m trying to bear witness to it, I’m trying to bear witness to the fact that this happens. I see something happen, I go, why does that happen, so first I must bear witness to the happening, and then hopefully the fiction will push this bearing witness to a point where hopefully the reader will ask questions about this more intently. Because a lot of the world is careless, right?

Indifferent. To me, writing fiction and reading fiction is the antithesis of indifference. It’s saying, we’ll go into the human condition more and study it more, you know, and we’ll go into the pains that we cause each other and care about it more . . . I guess I have a moralistic attitude, a little bit, towards fiction, I think it as empathy-making, I think of it as humanity-bringing, or humanitygrowing, and I, if I’m in that endeavor, feel like I have some value.

Francesca’s words echoed those of the photographer Harryette. Francesca believed as a writer she was fueled by her desire to pursue the whys in her world.

Harryette believed the same. As Harryette had surmised, asking “why” infers one is

214 looking for a response from another person, thus “why” is a dialogic conceit. This was another important insight into the function of an internal dialogue.

Francesca wrote about people in circumstances that asked me as a reader to think about what life must have been like for them and also made me chuckle or shake my head at certain annoying traits or beliefs of her characters that reminded me of myself and my friends. Even though as a writer Babe explored and answered why things happened, in life he was uncomfortable with the idea of humans presuming to answer why questions. He staunchly believed such answers were in the province of God’s authorial knowledge. In contrast, Francesca felt it was her responsibility to question and answer why in her search for human truths and human connections in life and in literature.

In Tribute Two people whom Francesca carried around in her head were her mentors Zia and John Gardner. Zia was a loving grandmother type who was her babysitter when she was a young child and John Gardner was her writing professor in college who recognized her talent and encouraged her to pursue writing.

I write to John Gardner, because in a way, I mean, I’m not saying, hey John Gardner, he’s dead, you know, but I, I think, I can write to that power of the person who trusts what I do. I also think I write to somebody I called Zia, who was a woman who helped raise me when I was a little girl, she was just a neighbor, you know, she wasn’t like a hired nanny or anything, but she became a babysitter sometimes, they had no money, my parents didn’t, they never had anything, but my mother was working all the time, my dad was working all the time, and Zia was this neighbor downstairs, and she took me into her house and told me stories and she is to me, the essence of human love. I, so I write to honor, like, that kind of a person, that kind of a character, that, if I write to her, I’ll always be honest, and I’ll always be doing my best.

215

Another inner dialogue she experienced was that of being bilingual. Although the artists Gretchen and IN were also from other countries and had talked about the impact of being a foreigner had on their lives, Francesca, even more so, noted how her two languages were in dialogue. This could have been because she is a writer and they use other mediums.

DH: Ok, but that raises another question. I assume you know Italian?

My first spoken language was English; my first read/written language was Italian.

DH: Do you find also that you have a different personality that comes out in the different languages?

Yeah. I do think that Italians have many more words for emotions. There are certain expressions that there’s no way of saying them in English, like we’d say, I wish you well, but that’s sort of formal, and the Italian is to want, to say I want, I want your wellness, you know, and it’s such a loving statement, there’s no way to, I think of that as in Italian, very, very different. So phrases like that, to me, denote values that really are cultural, not that Italians are perfect people.

DH: And do your characters have that Italian flavor?

I think, yeah.

DH: And do you have to at times struggle to translate words in your head from Italian to English?

[She nodded yes.]

At times, if she imagined a story in Italian but tried to say it in English, she was left mute. Her internal attempts to get the two languages to talk to one another sometimes felt insurmountable when she could not find equivalent words in each language. In these cases, she believed that this lacuna in communication changed the character’s personality. At other times Francesca could create an equivalent conversation that echoed between the two languages.

216 The last form of an internal dialogue Francesca experienced was one also described by both Seth and Babe. It was an intense, almost human-like relationship with her novels. The psychoanalyst, Anton Ehrenzweig postulated in The Hidden Order of Art that a piece of art was psychologically analogous to a split off part of the self of the artist. I speculated in Chapter III, in advance of conducting the interviews, that this assumption implied that many of the artists I would interview would anthropomorphize the art objects they created. This was abundantly clear in the descriptions the different writers gave of their relationships with their novels. Her portrayal of her relationship with the novel she wrote based on Zia’s life as an Italian colonialist in Eritrea is an excellent example.

Well, that book took me about eight years to write, cause it was a lot of research, and it was about historical periods, you know, pre-World War II, World War II, post-World War II, so really, going to a lot of archives and two of the years being just that, you know, library stuff, which is very interesting, but it’s a lot of work. After I finished the book and multiple revisions and it was rejected, you know, by twenty-plus publishers, you know, I would try to look at it to see what was going wrong, and the letters have no consistency so I couldn’t say, oh, that’s where the problem is, it was impossible for me to figure out, or for my agent to figure out what the problem was. I would try to read it, and I would feel like I was going to vomit. I mean, that’s how it felt, I could not read the words, I could not understand them, I could not . . .

DH: What happened to your dialogue, with your ability to interact?

Gone, absolutely gone, yeah, I could not look at it without being literally, literally sick to my stomach, and not be able to know what was on the page, it was like the words were invisible. So I thought, well, I can’t, I can’t . . . No, I think it was just terrible, terrible grief, that I’d worked so long and wanted to kind of honor the story of somebody who was very important in my life and I failed, cause nobody took the work, and this was, it was very, very painful. I mean, I don’t want to be dramatic, but it just was, and therefore, I just couldn’t look at the text.

DH: How do you, how do you finish?

217 Well, what happened, this was a great thing, when I finished my second novel, the first draft of it, and I sent it out to readers and said, what should I do now, I have time while I’m waiting. I could start a new book, you know, I’ve got enough books that are unpublished out there. So I thought, well, let me look at Zia: A Life Story and suddenly, because I’ve had distance and because I, I could see, and I was like, chapter 2 has to be the start, not chapter 1, and I could see such utter clarity and I could see again. It became a construct to someone outside of me, something that I could see as a whole and manipulate, and I’m actually really excited to go back to it, because I have some ideas that absolutely, I know some ways absolutely to make it better. It may not make it publishable, but I know how to make it better, and I see it clearly now, so I think distance helps. You know, it’s like a relationship when it’s just ended, it can’t be all, all you can do is rant and rave, and like, you’re incoherent and you repeat yourself and it’s always, yeah, I did, and then after, years, well, he was all right . . . just like, explain it, in like three sentences, and it’s, you know, you could make it coherent and cogent and talk about it and you wouldn’t have to shoot him . . .

Francesca carried on intense thoughtful inner dialogues: with her characters, with the “theatre of life” that she wanted her audience to witness, with the slippage between Italian and English, with the question “Why?,” with John Gardner and Zia, and with her novels. This woman was very motivated by a love of writing and a belief in its sacrosanct and very important mission of widening our world. Although she loved writing, it was an exigent activity.

I can’t think of anything more difficult than setting something down on a page.

You’re constantly, you never know what you’re doing, there’s nobody giving you directions, nobody can give you directions, because you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before by you or by anybody else, and even if it ends up failing, it still hasn’t been done by anybody else, it’s just you’re on a journey with no roadmap, and of course, it’s like, hey, it’s exploring and that’s the great part, but it is so hard. I’m using every cell at my disposal . . . I cannot guarantee my own writing; I cannot guarantee that anybody will understand, will ever read it.

Dorothy

I have included Dorothy because she very articulately and effectively spoke with me about the conflicts she faced being a parent and an artist. This was a theme

218 that almost every woman I interviewed brought up, some in passing when they were in the midst of describing another aspect of their inner process, others with more emphasis. She, more than any other artist, talked about the position of women in art making. Because she was very articulate and open, the interviews with her were fascinating and invigorating. Another aspect of what made the interviews with her meaningful was that she took our conversations, continued them in her inner life and they influenced her art. I went to a performance and one of the ideas we had struggled with together was now incorporated into the script. Later, when we spoke, she acknowledged that she was thinking of me when she added it to the script.

Dorothy is a playwright and performer. Her works tends to be semi-autobiographical monologues that are musings on life. Usually the character she portrays on stage is not her but not exactly a character in the traditional theatrical notion of a character. She has performed in many well respected theatres such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and La Mama in New York. She has traveled to Europe on several occasions to perform and is known in the performance community. In the past, she ran a theatre company. Presently she teaches performance at two colleges.

The First Interview The first time we met, we ate lunch as we spoke. When I asked her if she had an internal dialogue as she worked she described how it had been in her past.

So yes, the dialogue, inner dialogue was very much um, not a censoring or critical voice at that time, much more of a, kind of almost impish like, pushing, challenging voice . . .

DH: And did you always pay attention to it?

219 Yes, absolutely.

DH: You always paid attention to it.

I have great trust in my intuition. And I certainly did at that time, and sometimes it worked out great, other times it was weirder, but in general, artistically, it was on target.

When she was a younger artist she lived a fast life that revolved around making art. She wrote one-woman performance pieces in which she starred and theatre works for larger casts, often with the man she was involved with. In addition, she sang in a band popular in the alternative music scene. In the past I had seen her in performances many times and she always commanded the stage and seemed completely at ease.

When I was younger, I was a very happy drug user and drinker and I believed very strongly and consciously in the derangement method of creativity . . . the conversation that I’d have with myself during that time in my life was very much trying to consciously push myself closer to an edge of impropriety, so if any ideas or issues would come up, or images or a lyric, or words, or anything, I would be constantly looking at it and telling myself, let’s just say, push it further, why are you mentioning that, that’s very boring, what’s the underlying, what’s the underside of that, what’s the underbelly of that, and so on, and it was really a conscious thing on my part, even in the midst of my sort of delirium, often when I was creating, to be as, what I thought, for myself, shocking as I possibly could. I always wanted to have something that, for me, stepped over a line, and only considered the work successful if it did that, for me. I had been absolutely used to creating under the influence, and performing under the influence . . . I was in bands for years, and that was always a big drinking thing, cause it was fun to be really drunk and you know, throwing yourself around, and I had the ability, at that time in my life, to be, I could be really, really wasted and still be precise, which one begins to lose as one gets older.

Pharmaceuticals it was much more in the writing process. Drinking wasn’t so easy to write from, um, it was much better to be high on something else.

Her use of substances was a form of creating an artist space unlike the other more wholesome methods described so far. As discussed in Tom Dardis’s book, The Thirsty Muse, the link between alcohol and creativity has existed for quite some time.

220 For Dorothy, as a younger woman, her alcohol drenched personal life and her life as an artist, were inseparably intermingled.

I felt good about it, yes. I felt like I was achieving what I was trying to achieve artistically, which was to push something and risk something . . . and then I sobered up.

DH: What, can I just ask?

I’d hurt people too badly, and stepped over the line absolutely, and it was starting to affect my health . . . I never had been arrested, and I hadn’t had any car accidents, so there was not so much external, but there was an internal, you know, I’d really hurt my partner, I’d fucked around on him and I, it, it penetrated, I understood that this was like, going in a bad direction, so I sobered up and it really changed me artistically a lot. First of all, just volume-wise, way down.

She depended on alcohol and drugs to give her what she called the “grease, or the fuel,” to work. Once she was sober, the ease with which she created and the amount she wrote decreased a great deal, which bothered her enormously. This was mitigated by the fact that she was writing what she believed was her best work ever. However, five years ago another major upheaval confronted her.

Within the space of about nine months, about five years ago, I got married, broke up with my long-term partner, got pregnant, my father got sick, I had a baby and my father died . . . Actually I was with him when he died, I was one of the main caretakers, so I went through the death experience, I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, it’s totally fascinating, and it’s so draining . . . He had cancer. And it was just, it was awful, you know, and it also gives you a glimpse into mortality that, that anything abstract about it becomes concrete, and that changes your thinking profoundly. It’s sort of like the idea of getting sick, the idea of having physical problems, the idea of suffering, the idea of pain is one thing, but the reality of it is just too much.

DH: Oh my god.

And that was the end of many interior, my life shut down in a way I’m just starting to understand now, I didn’t write a single word for two years, I just had nothing to say. It was just so overwhelming, so devastating, and such an enormous… I had my child late in life, I was forty-two, so already I had an established life and a career and then having a child enter that was just, and it’s

221 still an apocalypse. I mean, I love my child dearly, as I’m sure you can understand, but for a professional person, its just, especially a woman, you become totally invisible, nobody even understands who you are anymore, and it’s been absolutely devastating as an artist. I’m just coming out of it now, so my interior monologue really changed during that time, and that two-year period where I could not write a word was basically a bereavement, my monologue or you call it a dialogue was, “what’s the matter with you, why can’t you get off your ass.” I had to keep um, teaching during that time, for money, so I was looking at a lot of work, student work, and stuff, and I was still able to be pretty articulate about their work, but I just, there was no way for me to frame my experience. It was just too huge, but it created an enormous depression and just self-hatred, you know, like I had defined myself all my life as an artist, and if I can’t do that, then what the hell am I doing? I just had nothing, and I’m still struggling with that terribly . . . when I was younger it was really like navelgazing to the Nth degree, like, I basically was incredibly in touch with every passing flip of emotion or experience, you know. I made it my business, that was like my job, basically, and I turned everything into material. And I think when those enormous things happen, it was just too overwhelming, and I did not wish to know my feelings, you know? Well, for one thing, I think that the work of helping somebody die is enormous, physically, and the work of having an infant is enormous, physically, and so there was just an exhaustion level for at least, I mean, my father died when my daughter was six months old, so the whole six months when he was ill, she was six months old, there was just a high level of complete exhaustion, physical exhaustion, much less mental and emotional.

The death of her father and the birth of her daughter killed her inner life, the source of her creativity. For a woman who defined herself as an artist this was catastrophic. Never before had she felt so badly about herself.

Every woman that I’ve ever met has also the editing, censoring voice that says, “You’re no good, because you haven’t achieved this. You’re no good, or because your ass is that wide, you’re no good . . .” So I definitely had all of that, for sure, but I didn’t, I didn’t take it as seriously, I’ve often wondered, and I’ve said this to students, why I felt entitled to having an artistic life, and I never felt like anybody had to give me permission. I just, I was completely, it would never have occurred to me, and you know, I think that’s unusual, and I have to say that most of the women I deal with, students and things like that, you have to kind of talk them up to that point. They don’t feel entitled, they don’t and somehow I thought I escaped that until recently.

Her observations concerning most women’s fears of asserting their creativity, outside reproduction, are fascinating but cannot be delved into in this dissertation.

222 Ever since she became sober, Dorothy had struggled with being creative, but she had still been able to write work she was proud of, and to enjoy performing. Now art, once the center of her life, which had provided her with her identity, was gone. All she could hear internally were insults and doubts. She feared she was only being seen as a mother; a role she felt made her and women in general invisible. We continued to explore this line of thought.

They don’t know what’s happening to them, especially, you know, not that I’m in a niche with women with children, but boy, you know, talk about a voiceless, alone out there, fucking rudderless, you know, like, who are they anymore once they have children? It’s very difficult, and I have a lot to say, I think, about this world, and what kind of world we should be living in, so many of us giving up things . . .

Her observations were saturated with what becoming a mother had extracted from her. Her time was no longer her own.

I know, because I think it changes a woman’s position in society so much more profoundly than it does the man’s…I think Sam is a stellar father. He’s much better than I thought he was going to be, really, I mean, he’s blown me away, but at the same time, I have that like, automatic inner voice which is, somebody offers me some kind of job, my first thought is, well, I can’t do it on a Tuesday or Thursday, because that’s when Ariel’s home. I can’t do these nights, because that would mean I was gone, blah, blah, blah, it’s all filtered through her.

Whereas his inner dialogue is much more, oh yeah, I can fit it in, I’m not doing anything else on Tuesday and Thursday … like he doesn’t, he, like then he’ll come around if we talk about it, and he’ll filter it through that, but that is not his first instinct at all. I just think that’s the difference between a care taking mother and a care taking father when both parents are present in the home. I cast no aspersions on single fathers, I think they do everything for sure that a mother does, but it’s very interesting to me that I’ll be in this support role and really resent the crap out of it . . . It’s like Katharine Hepburn, I’ve remembered this quote all my life, she said, “The reason I didn’t have children was because the first time that little Johnny or Susie had the mumps on my opening night, I would have fucking killed them.” And I can totally relate to that, you know, but what’s winning out for me is definitely the child. I feel like I brought this child into the world, I’m responsible for her. I can’t justify to myself being gone six or seven nights a week, I can’t do it. So I’m gone a few nights a week sometimes, but you don’t get ahead in your career without that level of ambition and drive . . . I remember several very sobbing, panic-stricken conversations

223 with Bart and Sam, and B, just saying, I don’t want to make work that’s like that typical, “Oh, she’s had a baby, now all the work is about her baby now.”

You know, it’s all about a woman and her baby, like, I just, the idea of being pigeonholed into, or even pigeonholing myself into that kind of like mamacita and all this very specific almost genre of work out there just horrified me . . .

I’ve written work about it, but I’ve tried really hard when I wrote that work, I really tried hard to stretch it out of just this very tight little, this is work about having children, because I just, there’s something in me that that’s abhorrent to.

DH: An obvious question is, is that what you want to talk about, are you interested in it, do you think that it’s interesting, or are you taking up all your mental time with something that you are embarrassed to be . . .

Interested in?

DH: Yes. No, I think that something taking up my mental time is not the same or synonymous with what’s interesting to me, and I think that’s been the problem, is that what’s taking up my time are things that are not particularly interesting to me, and yet they are taking up my time.

The distinction Dorothy makes between her husband’s and her way of attending to their daughter was addressed by Carol Gilligan in her seminal book In A Different Voice. Gilligan’s thesis was that men are raised to believe in the superiority of asserting their individual rights whereas women are raised to think in terms of their social responsibilities. Despite her “natural instinct” to attend to her daughter, Dorothy did not find the subject of what it was like to be a mother interesting.

Dorothy was not only a writer she was a performer and this too changed once she had her daughter.

I did a show right after she was born that I’d already made a commitment to before I was pregnant, and I’d always prided myself on a real sense of communication with the audience, energetically speaking, and it was very tantric, like it was absolutely a circuit, it wasn’t just like I put it out there and take my bow and go. I really had a relationship, I always liked to see the audience in relation, and then when I was pregnant and nursing and right after I had my child, my energy was like this (makes whooshing noise while pushing her hands into her stomach), like, I couldn’t push it out, it was just all in, and

224 that was why I couldn’t write for that period of time, too, I think, so now, I think that if I am with her, or in my daily life, I simply cannot summon the selfhood to focus on all these very well worn and individual tricks that I used to have that I could really rely on.

The time alone that she needed to write and to get to know the characters that were growing inside her was no longer possible.

I used to be kind of a binge writer, like, I would rent a hotel room and go and just sit for four days and you know, just write . . . Actually I have a whole theory about art making. For myself, it’s very true, and I’ve seen it in students, I don’t know if it’s generally true or not, but a lot of ideas can’t take direct focus, the minute you put your whole attention on them, they kind of wither, so it’s a peripheral focus, letting something kind of cook to the side for some length of time and trusting that that’s ok to not try and use discipline to not drag it into the front and put all your focus on it, and also talking about it to other people way before it’s ready kills it. I think that that part of the process, letting something cook for a while, and have like, dream questing, like grabbing images I actually literally would take images and thoughts and gestures out of dreams . . .

Dorothy’s observation that she needed to allow her artistic visions time to stew on the periphery of her thoughts resonated with J’s description of how his days cleaning up and sweeping his studio were a part of his creative process. She continued describing her process.

I’ve kept a notebook all my life, of images, of you know, just collecting, and then the binging would be to organize. To go somewhere without distraction and you know, when I was using drugs and alcohol, it would definitely involve derangement, but after I stopped using drugs and alcohol, even then still sequestering myself away from daily life, trying to get into a different state of mind where I would just really try to tack it together on some level… one other technique that I’ve used since being sober has been exhaustion, like, I can write, that’s also a derangement, you know, like if I go for four days, I would stay up really late and try to get anything to get out of my rational thinking and that editor voice, and I also . . .

DH: Ah, ah! Editor voice?

The editor voice, that would start, no, that’s no good, stop writing that.

DH: So when did the editor voice happen, you never brought that up?

225

Well, I think that the editor voice is always there, but I was just about to say that for some reason I had a deal with myself, and I always have that I’m able to, when I’m really in that binging writing, I have had a handshake agreement with myself that the editing can come later.

DH: Oh, you’re lucky.

But I don’t have it now, this is something, this is another change for me, from having a child. Since having a child, my time is not my own, my life is totally transformed, and I’ve had to write in this very piecemeal way, there’s no going away for four days, I mean I do go away and work, you know, I teach and stuff like that, but the four days in a hotel, gone, although my husband and I have recently been talking about me doing that for this show I have upcoming, because there’s just, there’s no time to get any continuity, you know, any writing time is just snatched, there’s nothing, I don’t have the right mind for it, you know, and so therefore the editor is way in front. I’ll start to write something, and the editor is just like, ah, that’s going nowhere, just drop it, you know, that sucks.

DH: Well, wait a minute, why do you assume that the, you’re saying the, if you have the four days or the extended time, you have a place to go either physically, or also . . .

Mentally.

DH: Or also, sleep-wise, uh, that creates a condition where you think that the editor is weaker because . . .

Not weaker, but I make, for some reason, I have the internal discipline to make a deal with it and push it off to the side for now.

DH: If you feel you have extended time.

Yeah.

DH: But if you don’t feel you have extended time . . .

It’s right up in the front.

DH: Do you have any thoughts about why the extended time, do you give yourself permission to write . . .

Well, I think I sink into more being myself when I have the extended time . . .

226 Before motherhood, her inveterate attention to her inner voice was, in many ways, totally selfish. As the mother of a young child, this focus on her inner life, to date, felt impossible to obtain. In the past, Dorothy’s hotel stays were her equivalent to creating an art space similar to Francesca’s private room with her own laptop, gum and notepads or J’s immersion in his music or walks. Now that her daughter was almost five, Dorothy was considering going away to a hotel for several days leaving Sam to take care of their child. Until then, she believed her creative process would suffer.

When I asked her if she ever had internal conversations with other people when she was working on her performances, she had an interesting answer: All the time I m feeling devastated and jealous and worried . . . I watch Bart and I watch my brother, and other, you know, good people around me, their careers taking off and doing things and certainly with Sam it’s gotten to where we can laugh about it. Like Bart’s the figurehead and I’m the one screwing around doing all the crap, you know, and he gets faculty of the year and he gets the Ireland trips and the this and that and the other, and I’m just like, well, you know, I’m still fucking scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I chose to have a child, I understand that, but it just, there is something wrong in society if having a child makes a woman, pushes her back ten steps professionally. It just sucks, you know. I very much have the inner voice going on about all that stuff . . .

Although she harbors jealousies towards these important people in her life because they are getting ahead as artists while she flounders, she simultaneously continues to count on their support and feed back.

I have my husband and I have my friend Bart, and I have my brother, those are like my readers, who, who look at my work first and give me, so they’re part of my, definitely part of my dialogue inside me . . .

DH: Oh, so are you saying, like, oh, I bet Sam will say . . .

Oh, I can’t wait to see what they say to this, or I wonder if Sam will hate this . . .

227 The Second Interview When I came to her house for the second meeting she announced I think that a lot has changed since you first got, I really do feel like something really like (makes cracking noise) opened, you know, and it has to do with being able to teach that work and do that kind of writing, and see the word combinations and understand that my voice, my aesthetic of words is still alive in me. It was really banked, not was banked, you know, it’s still banked, but it’s there, I really feel like a surging confidence, like, now . . .

Her epiphany had happened in a class while she was teaching.

I was able to create a very focused, womb-like environment for them and for myself, and I found myself, sometimes I would have them go, we would do basically conscious breathing, writing and experiences for up to two hours without taking a break and no talking, except by me, like, they would just be working the whole time. The class was called writing from the body, which is writing techniques based on moving and trying to detach yourself from just being a walking, it’s like really getting into your body, it uses stream of consciousness techniques and so on, that’s working for me, When they’re writing, I write, and I’ve written more in the last six months than I’ve written in five years . . . I’m using a technical, a technique, just to get my pen moving on the page, and I’m finding that what comes up, although I’m finding that there’s a lot of crap that means nothing and is not interesting, within there, there are things that have become interesting. I looked back over some of the writing that I had been doing, and I was able to excerpt about six or seven interesting things . . . and I really felt good about that . . . And so I’m really, this is very fresh off the presses, I can tell you this is just after the last few weeks, I’m really aware that perhaps I’m stumbling into a renaissance, even of a very tiny little kind.

This was surprising, since the last time we met she blamed teaching as partly responsible for draining her inner life. This creative process was quite different from her old method of “holing up” by herself in a hotel with no distractions. Her creative space was now a “womb like environment” with other people present. Now her words and songs began to flow when she moved and wrote in the presence of other people.

The similarity to her previous methodology was that her inner life got awakened when her body was altered. Before it was alcohol, drugs and sleeplessness that induced this, now it was movement. Movement, as it turns out, has been identified as important for

228 the creative person. In a letter to Jacque Hadamard, Albert Einstein claimed that his scientific discoveries were first experienced by him as “visual and muscular . . . motor.

When words intervene at all they . . . have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage.” (Gheselin, 1952, p. 43) In Martin Nass’s research on composers he noted that as young children there was a correlation between children who were encouraged to move around and the child’s creativity. He pointed out that for a musician, part of the creative process is activated by attending to the other musicians’ bodies in motion not just their music or words. Music is not simply auditory it is a bodily experience. (p. 482) Dorothy’s relationship to her inner voice(s) had not changed completely since our first interview; she still needed to endure a mean inner editorial voice, Yeah lot of insecurities and fear and like, I feel like a fraud, you know, so it often starts there, and that’s ok, I’ll just start off by thinking, you know, well, I don’t know what I’m doing, this is ridiculous, I feel like an asshole, but, you know, they’re seeing through me, or whatever.

However, something had broken this voice’s power over her and she knew to muscle through the insults until a flood of, as the soul singer Percy Sledge said, “sticky words would emerge.”

She read the free associations she had written in class the day before, including several of the phrases I heard her perform several weeks later.

“She thinks she should be quiet/but then she realizes/fancy never cooked a supper right/speed never rocked a baby/special never hung a wash/perfect never cleaned the floor/number one never read a story never paid the bills” . . . Now for me, being able to have just a few of these images just come up out of the depths, that I didn’t have to think them up, they just kind of spewed out . . . you know, fancy never made a bed, I, there’s no way I’m going to think that up . . . from the depth, and I couldn’t have come up with some of this otherwise . . .

She had found a new way in.

229

Years ago.

I’m not exaggerating; it would be pretty much close to bang-on. I very rarely rewrote, when I was younger, cause it was all cogitating inside of me all the time, that’s all I was thinking about, so by the time I wrote it down, it was fairly clarified.

Now. I have to start from such a wide net, I just have to get something, and first of all, I just have to get the pen on the paper. That, in and of itself, is just half the battle. Then, I have to get to a place past the self-hate and that I’m a bad teacher and they all hate me, or what’s going on, or I don’t know what I’m doing, blah, blah, blah, you know, just some image, something, so that, right there, again, is stretching the process out, So then, I have to be able to leave it alone and not look at it, it’s kind of like baking bread, I’m beginning to realize, or making a soufflé, if I open the oven too soon, it falls. If I look at the raw writing that day, this is very interesting to me, I literally cannot see the words, like, I look at this chunk, all I see the graphic, the way it looks on the actual page, I can’t even look at the words, I just, I’m like, you know, so I have to leave it for weeks, even, till I’ve completely forgotten about it, I, I’ve no idea what I wrote, and then I go back and I’m able to allow the things that I find to be sparky to spark out. But if I look at it too soon, it’s all a mess, it’s all just, it’s all equal, it’s like there’s nothing that rises up as interesting. I don’t know why that should be so, but it is, it seems to be so, I’m learning that right now.

The observation that immediately after writing, she was unable to judge the quality of the piece of writing, reflected both Seth and Francesca’s remarks that only after time had passed could they look back at something they wrote with a critical eye.

Dorothy’s tone was animated as she read her notes to me, But I love it, I mean, this is some of my favorite stuff I’ve written in two years, (she read off the page) um, no more crap eating anxious worm sounds, or halfassed incoherent, erstwhile, ham-handed arguments, smack-rage or red-faced, slap-happy drama stoplights. I love that shit, that’s great, I mean, to me, that says it, you know. And you can’t sit down and like, compose, slaphappy drama stoplights, you know . . .

And then she read me one that was relevant to our previous conversation.

230

That comes from a piece about being of two minds. One mind is I want to be both light and love and the other one’s like, I hate everybody, leave me alone, I don’t want these . . .

DH: Well, do you know when I, when I interviewed . . .

Yes, and I thought of you actually, when I was doing the piece and I, when I wrote that piece, I thought of that, when we talked about that, about how these two things just, how I was saying I was just one and then a minute later the other because that piece, I’m of two minds, even last night in this impossible room, that was so difficult, it was this poetry reading in a smoky bar, it was a ridiculous situation, ok, that was the one thing people really laughed at, was being of two minds, cause they recognized, you know, they recognized themselves and it really pleases me.

She was referring to a conversation we had had at our first meeting. She had described herself as essentially someone who organizes herself around taking care of other peoples’ needs. A few minutes later she said that she was essentially a selfish sloth who just wanted to eat and watch pornography. She kept seesawing back and forth between these two representations of herself seemingly unaware that she was contradicting herself. I finally pointed out that she kept saying that she was essentially two opposite beings. It seemed to me that she was both and that there was a dialectical interaction between both of them. This was an observation that she took to heart and three months later when I went to see her perform, I was touched to realize she had continued our conversation inside her head, when sitting in the darkened theatre I heard her say these words.

At the end of our time together she revisited why being a writer/performer was so important to her, I do think there’s something very fascinating about how one is in space, like how one carries one’s body, I think that the liminal realm of being on stage, for example, that experience I had doing that show, how could I be so comfortable, how could I be so at home in a situation that 99% of people would find

231 absolutely horrifying and daunting and would want nothing to do with, and yet I just, I’m so, like that communication with the audience, that closeness I feel, that giving and receiving and just, like, I have the excitement of feeling, this feeling I get like I really want to show you something. I have something to tell you, that I feel is of high value to tell. It is about the voice because I feel there’s moments in this, and I know that’s depressing, but it’s most of it, that really are, only could have come out of me, you know, they’re really singular. I feel like, at the same time, they’re not exclusive of anybody, like, people are going to get something, even if it’s really my formulation, like, they will put their own feelings into it.

Magpie And last but not least Magpie. As the woman who transcribed my interviews wrote me, “Never mind Lilith—Magpie’s the muse. She’s such a gift to your research, and I find her world view tremendously compelling.”

Magpie told me about the muse in all her incarnations. When I came up with the idea of studying how an artist uses an internal dialogue it hadn’t even occurred to me that for some that might take the shape of a muse. Now the idea makes perfect sense.

The muse is a well-known myth-like being often described as an ethereal, usually feminine, presence that inspires an artist. Magpie’s muse was not a fluffy Botticelli woman, as I tended to imagine one would look like. Magpie’s muse(s) were complex, quirky and full of interesting questions.

Magpie wins people over. She has a voice and aura that reminds me of the good witch in the Wizard of Oz, or of a perfect grandmother. Not that she is old; she is only in her mid sixties. She has beautiful long fingers on which she wears two large, unusual rings that I stared at every time we met. When I came to her home for our first meeting she had prepared a delicious breakfast. We ate her homemade omelets and bacon, hash brown potatoes, toast, muffins and coffee. Her walls were hung with paintings, carved

232 masks and quilts. She was working on putting broken shards of ceramics in artful mosaic designs on the walls of her bathroom and kitchen. Her place matched her, it was inviting and interesting to look at.

Her Story Magpie told me about her family during our last interview. However, I will begin there. I had noticed that when we looked at her paintings she would often tell me a real or imaginary tale that she associated with the painting. She confirmed that she did this and told me that she came from a family of storytellers.

We had what you would call heritage stories. Where do you come from? And there were different people within the ancestors that were more defined than others, all right? And so their lives, whether it was true or not true, were characterized and they became dinner table stories . . . . They’re very, very adventuresome stories.

She told me one.

My father’s father’s father, which would be my great-great grandfather? . . . . came over from Germany, he was probably part of the German aristocracy . . . he was very involved in the land rights, and sort of went against the aristocracy way of thinking, because he was, had been trained a little bit in medicine, a little bit in law, and he was very much for land reform. And what happened was that at that time, a lot of the people that were involved with land reform were hung, were eliminated. Well, he was a member of the aristocracy, he got off, and he was sent away. So he was sent to this country, so he at that point entered this country through the Gulf of Mexico and ended up in Texas, or what is now Texas. And he goes to Texas. He is captured by the Apache But fortunately he’s a redheaded German, and tall for those days, and I’m sure stood out, and he knew medicine, so he probably fixed a broken leg or he did something, and they didn’t eliminate him.

DH: He was almost eliminated twice so far.

So ok, he’s living with the Apache, and they, and he decides it’s time for him to go on, and they say, well, we want to give you a gift, what would you like?

Now he remembers that a couple of nights before or whatever, see, the Apache used to raid into Mexico, this is before the civil war, the Apache used to raid

233 into Mexico and taken prisoners and then sell them into slavery, ok . . . Yeah, I mean, that was something that people did to make their living, sure, that’s the way life was, right? So they had raided into Mexico and had taken like a threeyear-old child, they had a three-year-old child, and so my grandfather asked for the child, that that’s whom he wanted, that would be the gift. So they gave him this three-year-old child and he took it, originally we thought he had sent her back to Germany, but we later found out that he had taken her to a Huguenot settlement in Texas, and so here was, we had a picture of her and all she could evidently remember was a church and that her name was Nina Olina. They, he named her Lina, and he took her to the Huguenot settlement, and she was very dark, she probably was Indian and Spanish, she was definitely Mexican, right?

And they raised her. So you can imagine these big German people raising this little tiny Mexican person, so of course she didn’t know Spanish by that time, so anyway he went on to do his life, which was to become a rancher in Texas, and he organized a lot of the German ranchers, with one stipulation within this organization, which was that they were to have no slaves. Well, lo and behold, two of the ranchers got slaves. So what did my great-great grandfather do? He got all of the other ranchers together and they went over to the ranches and killed them. And freed their slaves. Which made the Texas authorities a little upset . . . . So he was put on trial, and the reason we know all this is because he wrote letters back to his sister, who still lived in Germany . . . Well, I guess because he had, they had established this as a law within their group, they decided that they would let him off, and so they pardoned him, so there’s the third time, right? And he went back to the Huguenot settlement, and picked up Lina and married her, and they had like, 12 children . . . One of his sons, it was Herman was his name, came back to New Mexico when it was still a territory and became a lawyer and was called the Black Eagle of San Miguel. He was dark and wrote the constitution of New Mexico. So that’s how we got back to New Mexico.

Right, so that’s my father’s side of the family, and then there’s my mother’s side of the family, which is another story.

DH: What’s that story?

Well, my mother’s people were from Spain, probably Jewish, we think they might have been Jewish and two of the, two brothers became priests. But they left Spain and came through and went up to New Mexico, two brothers and a sister, Josefita was her name, and they lived in Taos, and we think that the reason that they chose Taos was because it was close to California, because California Spanish were anti-Semitic . . . . And all of these people that moved into the Taos area, they still had many Jewish traditions there.

From this “very, very adventuresome” heritage she inherited a devotion to and the knack for storytelling.

234 Magpie has two grown children. Her son is a painter and lives on the East coast and her daughter is a writer and lives locally. She has one young granddaughter with whom she has a very close relationship. Her husband died, unexpectedly, in 2000 and she lives alone. She is a painter and is represented by several galleries and has been an active member of the art scene for many years. She makes money selling her art and teaching drawing and painting classes at several community centers and to private students. After the second interview I had the opportunity to go to her one-woman show at a downtown art gallery and to another group show that included several of her paintings.

The muse and other internal characters.

Magpie had an Aesop’s fairy tales collection of inner voices. At first it seemed that she was describing one voice as being the muse. I later realized that there was more than one muse. Magpie didn’t find her muse on a spiritual retreat or in discussion with other artists. She found her muse in the orchard where she grew up.

Everybody needs a private space, and I think that’s number one, is that I think anybody who’s going to be an artist needs that private space. I think that, I think that everybody who is a creative person, and I’m not saying just the artists, but I think anybody who’s a creative person, needs to be able to get to that space again . . . I think I was more luckier than the person that has to find their space under the circle, under the table. Because what was in front of me in the orchard was another world, and I became a voyeur to that world, and I think in many ways an artist is a voyeur; or an interpreter, as an artist, as a voyeur.

Magpie continued her homage to her orchard.

I’m saying to you that what made me who I am was the orchard. I’m not denying that my parents, my sisters, my brothers and all for good and for evil or for good and for bad and whatever didn’t put into the stew, but I’m saying that it is the orchard that really made, let us say, the spiritual self or the inventive self or the creative self or the—that other self. I am sure that had I not had an

235 orchard, I would be a relatively well-centered, functioning individual in this day and age, but I don’t know that I would be an artist.

This place from her childhood home was the organizing site that taught her imagination and provided her with the imagery she would come back to throughout her career as an artist. Each time we met she described it to me.

DH: . . . do you mind describing it a little bit?

Behind the house, at the lilac bush, over the bridge, you wanted to go the left way, and if you wanted to go the right way, we went down the driveway over the bridge . . . Beyond it was the pasture, little cows here, all right? We walked into a path, a little path, and it was very overgrown, it had been at one time not overgrown. It had been used at one time by my teenage sisters, but I was much younger than them, as a place to have their barbecues and things like that . . .

They no longer were there, it was now mine, and my brother had built a, had built a tree house, and we could go up there, and, but I didn’t like going up there.

DH: No? I liked going back into the bushes where you could look out and then you’re like, the bushes would make, like, caves . . . They were like little, the bushes had grown over and had made, out of them had made caves, made these places, and there was one in particular that was just outside the orchard, we crawled inside there, the vines were very thick and they sort of wove themselves around, and we could look between the vines and we could look out and we could see the world, but no one could see us, and you could be that voyeur, it was a wonderful place, it was a place where I, I had many different outposts to go.

DH: What do you mean?

Well, there was, down where the ditchwater came there was a waterfall, and it was very, well, a short waterfall, little waterfall, it was very dangerous down there, cause it made a great big pool, quite a dangerous area, and just outside of our property line, and then there was the corn field, where my brother had put corn in that he didn’t take care of, and it was sort of like insurgent corn field, you know . . . And then there was the old oak tree on the other side, where a mysterious creature lived in the hole, we knew there was a creature that lived in there, but we didn’t know what it was. And then there was a, let’s see, was that the third bridge, but then you came down, yeah, I guess it was three bridges, and you, you came down into a little meadow at one point, and then you came into the orchard that way, and there were apple trees on one side, and then plum trees on the other, and then there was a cherry tree . . . One cherry tree always

236 bloomed in the spring. And by the time it got cherries, the birds attacked it and there were no more cherries. It was a source of a discussion. I could discuss life and death in that forest or in that orchard . . . The thing that is interesting is that you can go there and you can talk to yourself about whatever is concerning you about your own family or your own life, but then you’re pushed beyond that, because around you is the world, a different world, the world of the bug, or the, or the meadowlark, or the magpie, or the black-winged crow, or, you know, the black-winged bird, like that, red-winged blackbird. I could have a beetle and I could discuss with the beetle what the beetle thought about the world. And understanding that the beetle’s world was a completely different world. I’d look up at the trees and I would see the birds. And I would say—they live a completely different level than you live, grasshopper . . .And you’re in their lives; you’re in another place . . . . I mentioned the birds that attacked the cherry tree, the finding of a dead animal, the discovery of, of what happens when it floods, and what happens to the soil, the lands, the crops, the trees, and what happened to that kind of thing, so you’re in a different universe, and you move away from your own family problems into looking at something that you’re the observer of. I think that that, to me, that has brought me more inside, because you, you sit and study. You know, you’re studying things. I sat and studied and talked to the birds and I had my trusty dog with me and I had adventures . . . .

Of course, my orchard is gone. It has houses and stuff like that, but what was interesting to me is I saw a magpie. And magpies were my birds. And the magpies lived in the cottonwoods that lined the ditch and lined the river, which was further down. I was there a couple of years ago, and I looked onto a fence post. And there was a magpie. It was—it made tears come to my eyes. There was a realization of continuance. That magpie was the ancestor or the antecedent of the magpies that I watched as a child. And that just got me. That was I knew your parents. That really got me.

Her magical, realistic, beautiful orchard is still an important integral part of how she gains access to her creativity. Magpie often conjures up her sense memories of the place; in a manner much like Francesca’s use of the Stanislavsky method to inhabit her characters.

I go there symbolically. And I go there an awful lot. Particularly when I’m trying to find solutions to problems. I think the orchard gave me, at a very young age, the understanding of the world that has a dual, duality to it. I think it gave me an understanding that there is a world beyond ourselves . . . I go back to my orchard a lot, I have not lost the memory of that place . . . I can imagine . . . the feeling of it, you, you go to a place, and there’s, let us say, a babbling brook, and that conjures up within you a feeling of serenity or a feeling of curiosity, or a feeling of, whatever that feeling is, it conjures for you, and then

237 you return in your memory to that place, to recapture that feeling that you got there originally, and those are, I think those primal feelings, DH: You’re saying that that feeling is based on tactile, sensory memory that then also brings forth the ability to go into imaginary spaces that you use for art?

And I think that’s what the artist does, is take a wordless emotion and work with it, and try to make it so that the viewer somehow maybe feels something. Now I don’t know that that’s what all artist have been in the last 20 years, but that’s what I want to be, and I want to make you feel something that is primordial, that’s not within, you know, not within a vocabulary list . . . To do that I have to feel them myself, you have to keep them around you, you have to kept those emotions at your fingertips, and how do you do that? You’ve got to find the place where you first felt them yourself, when they were fresh, or where you were, where you were examining them, or where you were feeling them, or where they’re, where did they come from, well, for me, I felt these things in that orchard.

Her explanation evoked the theoretical musings of Milner (1955) and Segal (1955) who both emphasized the artist’s search to recover the past.

“But how,” I asked, “was this evocation of affects related to the muse?” Her answer introduced how her internal dialogue and the muse lived together. She explained the silence of her private world in the orchard.

Well, I think you learn to talk to yourself. I think you learn to talk to the different voices that make up yourself, because we all, we have the voice of the muse, who says, Ah ha! You know, but we don’t often give ourselves time to listen to our muse.

Later on she referred to the orchard as her muse. When I said I thought it was where she first heard the muse but it wasn’t the muse, she laughed and said, Time has passed, you know, and I may have changed my ideas. That’s, you never know, that’s happened, you know, give it a little bit more thought and I think, ah, that’s not right. There’s something else, there’s something else there, that I’ve clearly missed.

Her definition of the muse transmuted each time we met. Sometimes she called it an epiphany; other times her grandmother’s spirit, or the orchard.

238 I was thinking this week—what is the muse? At one time, I thought it was my grandmother that I never met. It could very well be. But then I was thinking could the muse be anything? Can the muse be an animal? And then I was wondering could the muse be a place. I was thinking maybe the muse is all of those things, since it comes from that—what do I call it—the divine creative.

And the muse, which is the thing that comes from outside that probably is an educator, probably is an enlightener, probably is the thing that came to the founder of Buddhism—what’s his name? An enlightenment, an epiphany. A muse is probably an epiphany, an enlightener, and an engager. And it comes with the spark of a creative thought. I supposed if you’re not attuned to it, it will go through you and not catch. You are kindling to the creative thought or to that spark. And if you are wet kindling, it’s not going to spark. But I think that that is different than that subconscious place that you go to. I think muse brings you that. And then you absorb it. And then you go to those other places. And then the self becomes involved. But I think if it weren’t for the muse, you would never be enlightened.

She explained that different muses were elicited for different artistic purposes.

So what I’m trying to say is that you have to find a way into the idea, or into the concept, and I suppose all of those different ways that I get into the concept of the muse I mean, they’re just different ways of getting into a concept. If I, if I’m saying, all right, the orchard is calling me into this concept, then I know that I am going to hear sounds. I am going to find wilder things happening, there’s going to be a lot of juxtaposition of things, and uh, as opposed to, let’s say, my grandmother, that’s a gentler thing, that is like a guardian angel kind of thing, all right? So that approach is a different, a little bit of a different approach, and what was the other, an epiphany? And epiphanies, of course, are epiphanies.

They probably come from an accumulation of things that you’ve been thinking of and then all of a sudden you make a giant leap, I mean I would think that that’s actually how it happens, that you make a giant leap, and you think that they’re actually coming out of the blue, but they’re not actually coming out of the blue, they’re coming out of, it’s an accumulative thing. So sometimes you just have an epiphany and you sit down and you say, oh my god, look, there it is!

Difficult circumstances elicited different muses and sometimes they were all present.

When I’m discussing with myself about how to create a piece of work, let’s say, and I’m bringing in everybody, everybody’s sitting around talking to me, right?

Now, I may say, the answer to this is X. And another part of me says, “Well, there has to be another way to look at this.” So, one of the conversations might be from the orchard, let’s say, that says, “No, well, the answer to this is Y.” And then somebody else maybe my grandmother says, “No, the answer to this

239 is . . . ”and as you keep going down, the answer gets more and more abstract from the original seed, if you will. So, if you, then you have five answers. And as you examine each one, as you look at them and you pull them out and you look at them and you say, “Well, would this be the answer? Hmm, I don’t know, that’s a good one to put to the side. Would this be the answer? No, that’s too, that’s been done before. Uh, that’s too prosaic. That’s not going to be the answer this time. Maybe another time, but not this time. Is this the answer?”

There’s a communication, I think, that you go within yourself, constantly bringing up, and maybe some of it’s the muse, and some of it’s the orchard, and some of it’s, each one of them has a different point of view.

Magpie’s internal discussions synthesized multiple perspectives into new ideas.

Steven Mitchell’s concept that what constitutes a robust self is the fluidity with which one can go between, be cognizant of and respond to the needs of one’s different self states is strangely pertinent here. Magpie did not describe herself as flowing into different self-states. She was able, however, to call forth different muses depending on her needs and on occasion, she was able to have them confer with one another.

Although this is different than Mitchell’s conception, it is a related manifestation of a robust self.

Despite her belief in the muse she had qualms about how the muse was used by some artists.

The muse syndrome is a way—number one, I think that an artist—if they become egocentric—they lose something. So I think that an artist many times doesn’t believe that they themselves did this thing that was created. By saying that the muse came or by saying that it came from somewhere else—I think that even people who don’t believe in muses often will say it came from someplace else. Keeps their ego out of it. It keeps them more pure. It has purity. There’s purity there.

This comment brought to mind Francesca’s reluctance to name herself as the creator of her novels and preferred to refer to herself as a medium.

Magpie gave several examples of times when she could not solve the puzzle her painting presented to her and she needed the muse to intervene.

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I can remember this one with this painting. I was painting it. It’s a painting with a lot of heads and water. I was thinking there’s something lacking. It doesn’t have the zing. Something is not there yet. And I don’t know what it is. At least the canvas was telling me that there was something not there. I had gone through my list, my mental list, of all things that one can change or things that one can do…just a simple list. What is the composition? Is the composition in trouble? And then you go through the elements of the composition. Is that what is a problem? Is the color a problem? You're going through all of these things.

Is the symbolism a problem? You’re going through all of these things that you know through experience have helped you to get somewhere. And you don’t get an answer. I can remember sitting there saying okay, I need something else, just something else. And it’s sort of like the muse tripped in the door and said, “put in the blue head. Put in the blue head.” And then I argue—“but that’s so inconsistent with the rest of the painting.” And the muse says, “Yes, and that’s why it’s right.” And I say, “Okay. I will make the head blue.” And it worked!

And it made the painting. It’s something—you go through everything, go through everything, go through everything. What is it, what is it, what is it, what is it, what is it? And then suddenly—and it doesn’t necessarily come from yourself. It comes from someplace else. It’s like, “hey dummy! Hey stupid, make the head blue.” “Well, which head?” “Well, stupid, the one on the left.”

“Oh, okay. But that doesn’t look right. It’s inconsistent.” “Yeah, dummy.

That’s what you wanted. You wanted something to jar the painting.” “Ah! I see! Okay. I’ll make the head blue . . .” Many years ago, I was doing painting like the one that’s in the hallway. Much more abstract . . . I painted a whole series like that. And I could have probably continued painting a whole series like that, because I was relatively successful with it. Okay? But the muse said, “Go to the right. Go this other way. Go someplace else. Go over here. You have things to learn.” And my question was what do I have to learn. And the muse said, “You don’t know a damn thing about form.” “You’re right. I don’t.” And the muse said, “Go there. Go over there.”

Then she introduced the subconscious.

Then I asked—I knew there was something missing in painting—and I asked the subconscious what’s missing in the painting. The subconscious brought up to me an image I had as a child sitting in a chair, watching the light coming through the window and noticing all the little pieces of dust. I said well, I need floating ribbons in my painting to speak to that which is there but which we cannot see. And I put floating ribbons in the painting. My whole way of thinking changed.

I didn’t get the difference between the muse and the subconscious. She attempted to clarify the distinctions and unique qualities between the two.

241 The subconscious is something that is internally in me. But the muse is an external element that comes from something else. It’s awareness. The muse . . . you might think of it as creative unconscious. But I also wonder if those things come from the divine creative—not the divine creator, but the divine creative, which is something else, which is something completely different—to have a divine creative as opposed to—and I’ve been really thinking about that—as opposed to a creative unconscious. A creative unconscious would be more Jungian, I would think—meaning that we all owned it. But a divine creative means that there is something beyond us where these ideas come from.

And then there were the negative voices: If we’re gonna talk about the muse. If we’re gonna talk about the creative unconscious or the creative collective or whatever you want to call that other thing. And if we’re talking about duality, we have to talk about the dark side of the moon. So along with all of those positive things that talk to you and speak to you and are gentle with you and are loving with you, come the entourage of demons that invade you. Self-doubt being one, big one. Monster demon can take up the whole room and has bad breath. Worst demon in the world.

DH: Does it remind you of anybody?

Only of myself, I suppose. Self-doubt—my daughter, when she was being very religious, would call it Satan. And there’s very much to that. And she would say that Satan is the liar . . . it frightens you. It keeps you, ties you, and binds you.

It’s constipation. It’s all kinds of things. It’s a destroyer . . . One needs to banish the one who gives you all those self-doubts. And that is the opposite side of all the other good things. There are demons and there are demons. There’s the big guy with the bad breath. And boy, I have met that big guy on many occasions.

And then there are the little guys that I call the peccadilloes, which are the little demons that come along. You could actually have a decent conversation with them. I draw them. I paint them . . . They look like regular little devils. But the one thing with the peccadillo, it always has a very small penis.

She continued her list of that which comes, as she said, “from the dark side of the moon” to sabotage an artist.

I think depression immobilizes you, I think grief immobilizes you, um; I think illness immobilizes you; there’s a lot of things that immobilize a visual artist.

DH: So the muse does not do well under those conditions.

I don’t think so. I don’t think the muse does well; it can’t break through that fog.

242 Her relationship with these internal figures was always evolving. Every time we met she posed interesting questions for us to discuss.

Does the muse only come to those people who are literally creating things like painting or sculpture or dance or writing? Or can the muse come to the janitor?

Maybe it does. I don’t know. Well I have an interesting thing I was thinking about—thinking, thinking. I was thinking about God, which often enters my mind. I was saying to myself—I had a question for you to think about.

DH: Oh-oh. Yes? Did God have a muse?

DH: Well, I don’t know Well what do you think therapist?

DH: I think this is outside the realm of therapy.

I don’t know if it is. I think it has a lot to do with how you think—or at least how you entertain—in the real world, whatever that is, it doesn’t make squiddlybum one bit of difference whether God had a muse or not. But . . . if you assume that God is a male, which we’ve been told he is, then it would be right that he has this, the traditional, the traditional Greek, Roman, or whether it was a muse, the traditional muse that would be a little woman, that would come to him. But if God is an entity of all spirits, then the muse could be anything, the muse could be the burst of joy, the planets, it could be place.

DH: Hmm. That could be his orchard.

His orchard. But if, if, if, God, being an entity, a supreme character, does God need an orchard? Does God need to hide under a table? Does God need to think of these things and say, ah ha . . . maybe Lilith was God’s muse.

DH: I don’t know enough about Lilith; tell me more.

She was the one that God said, why don’t you, I’ll make you, I mean, why don’t you go and become the first woman and then you can do this, that and the other thing and then Lilith said, no way, it’s not a good contract. So He got Eve to do it . . . I don’t know. Does that really make any difference? The fun thing is to contemplate the possibility, because let us say there is this omnipotent being and to contemplate this omnipotent being who could or could not have a muse– what if He had a muse, or She had a muse? Uh, what would that mean to this omnipotent character? Would that mean that this omnipotent character would

243 have more humility? . . . I enjoy the thinking about these conundrums, if you will. Is it the right word, conundrum? Because that stimulates my creativity.

Magpie was playful. She had such a curious mind, always asking questions, posing answers, changing her mind using her thoughts in her paintings. Even subjects that for some might be untouchable she played with. She imagined conversations between Lilith and God. She asked me to play with her to consider weird and unexpected questions.

And then there were the ongoing conversations she had with her paintings.

There’s the dialogue that you have with your art itself, when you put something on the canvas. And the two-dimensional form or that three-dimensional form takes on a life. And then it speaks to you. And then you are speaking back to it.

Magpie differentiated between the components of the “you” who spoke with the painting. One you was the experienced artist who brings technical suggestions to the conversation with the painting and the other you asks lots of questions to the painting.

There’s a dual thing that’s happening. I think there are some times when you’re talking to your painting and it’s the you—the you of experience, the you who’s been there before, the you who knows what’s gonna happen, or the you who’s saying, “Why are you fighting me, what are you trying to tell me—?” You have a dialogue with this painting. And there are times when that painting refuses to answer you. You have done everything but stood on your head and spit nickels to get that painting to converse with you. I think at that point in time, you call on that divine creative or whatever that is—you call upon that other place and ask for information. Because the information that you need to ply, to entreat, to tease that something out of the canvas, you evidently as not tuning in or you don’t have it or whatever. I think you have to apply to that other place. I remember years ago when I would get into those positions that a good fifteenminute nap tended to open those channels. I would sometimes come up with ideas. And I’m not going to say that I came up with ideas, but I’m going to say that they were implanted from somewhere. I don’t know where, an idea or question. See I believe that most of the time, our problems are—that we don’t know what the right questions are. It has nothing to do with answers. It has something to do with questions.

244 Magpie’s, Harryette’s and Francesca’s creative processes all relied on asking and sometimes, but not always, answering questions. Magpie, more than any other interviewee, wanted to include me in our conversation. She was always asking herself and me questions and waiting for my answers. It was not surprising that the conversations she had with her art would be a back and forth of questions and answers.

Seymour.

Oh yeah. I ask Seymour R. what he thinks about— DH: Who’s Seymour?

He was a Chicago artist that has passed away.

DH: So you still now you, ask him what he thinks of the painting?

Yeah, I ask him what he thinks, because I respected his opinion. He was not a mainstream person. But he was very well known.

The storyteller.

True to her story telling nature, Magpie’s paintings, like Theseus K’s, were imbued with both real stories from her history and fairy tales of her invention. The stories she made up about her paintings were another form of an internal conversation she carried on with the people she loved and with her paintings. These tales gave her inspiration and helped concretize her inner life on canvas.

One of my stories—and I’ve said this a couple of times to people—is that the birds—this is so child-like—birds really don’t migrate. Now we think they migrate. Maybe in this other world they don’t migrate. But what actually happens to the birds is this giant woman comes and gathers them all and puts them in a house for the winter. And then when spring comes, she opens the house and they all come back. I’m also interested, at the same time, not only the attitude of gathering the birds, but as she goes through season after season, gathering the birds, it’s not that there are less birds as far as multitude is concerned. It’s that the birds that she gathers—there are less of the actual birds.

245 So she could be gathering because we destroy—because the human element is destroying—it’s really an environmental statement, that we are destroying nature. And that she is actually picking up less and less of the blue jay to where there’s no body to the blue jay any more. There’s only the head of the blue jay.

Death as the Story She pointed to another painting.

Now that big one over there, the black one that was a mourning picture for my niece . . . My niece was this very beautiful young woman. She was a minister.

She had a daughter. She got cancer and died. And one of her things in the readings—a statement was, “Even the exceptionally beautiful”—which interests me, that saying. Even the exceptionally beautiful, that there is no difference. …

She is the pink one. Where everybody else is the traditional red penis kind of flower, she is the pink one.

DH: So even the extremely beautiful die.

There is no difference. Death plucks all. Right? So each one (she pointed to the paintings) has sort of my own story.

DH: Magpie, your husband’s death had a profound impact on you.

Yeah.

DH: Are you still working on his death?

Oh, absolutely.

DH: In the art?

Oh absolutely.

She showed me a painting she was working on of a woman standing in a boat with a funnel-like shape going from her eyes into the water.

With the death of my husband, how do you, what do you do with tears? Ok, so, the thought came over there, has to do with tears and tears that, I mean, there’s tears of sorrow, can, I suppose I wondered whether tears of sorrow can lead to a nurturing place, or does it have to stay in sorrow? Can it grow? Can it be something else? So the tears in this painting, they are purification, all right? So they’re purifying the water, right . . . So they’re getting out, they’re tears of sorrow, but they’re, tears of sorrow are almost like sacred kinds of things, and they come down, and it turns the water, that blackish water, blue, all right? So

246 it’s trying, they’re trying to purify the water, so there’s something good coming from there, from the grief. All right?

Since her husband’s and niece’s deaths, many of the stories she painted served the function of being both tributes to them and a conversation with them about how she was enduring their loss. Once again Donald Winnicott’s description of play as a “transitional phenomenon” or “potential space” which allows a child to imagine and practice magically controlling the outer world, seemed relevant. Magpie’s painting served as potential space for her.

Lajos Szekeley (1983), in his article “Some observations on the creative process and its relation to mourning and various forms of understanding,” used the example of the scientist who, having experienced throughout his childhood an unpredictable world filled with losses, developed a theory of stable atoms. Similarly, Magpie used her pictured stories to gain mastery over death.

Death also had a political dimension. Having grown up on a farm her orchard taught her to love and respect nature in all its incarnations. As her story of the woman who was gathering up the remnants of birds attested, she wanted her art to start a conversation with the viewer to get them to see the savagery of destroying our environment.

I think that when you have lived in an orchard, and I really think I lived in that orchard, and you observe the world from that orchard, and then you see that that orchard does no longer, no longer exists, and I mean even symbolically doesn’t exist in many places, I mean, you don’t see the wild places anymore, and you don’t see the same amount of animals anymore, and you don’t see a lot of them, that is the realization that that is, that which you knew has died, and that it’s dying everyday, and it won’t be there. Maybe in some ways I feel like I’m the, the guy screaming at the castle doors (laughs), hey! I’m one of the few, one of the guys out there that are screaming, and I try to do it through my paintings that we are, are killing, killing things, you know, we are. And I know that it

247 doesn’t always, now this work is a little different, but it doesn’t always come across anymore.

Being True to the Muse I made a decision when I was in art school—I believed in one thing, and that was I had to find my own spirit within art. And I couldn’t—to be true to that, I couldn’t be an abstract expressionist or I couldn’t be—I had to be who I was within my art. If it was out of date, then it was out of date. If it was uninterpretable, then it was uninterpretable. To be true, and I had to be true to that muse—I had to be true to that because I knew one thing, that if I were not true, it would leave.

DH: How did you know that?

I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Maybe I tried. Maybe in the past I had tried to be something else. And the realization that if I tried to be somebody other than what I am, it will go away. It will leave.

DH: You must have had a fairly strong sense of self.

Guess so. Never thought about it. No, I don’t think I ever had a strong sense of self. I think I always had a strong sense of finding self, which would be different than having self . . .

The theme of authenticity reverberated throughout many of the interviews.

Many artists said that when their art did not reflect what they intuitively knew was genuine, they either became blocked or the quality of their work suffered. Magpie was so familiar with her very full inner life that she could name the characters who appeared: there was a grandmother muse, an orchard muse, the little bad guy peccadilloes, the big bad guys with bad breath, stories she told, Seymour, her husband, her paintings, and herself. Magpie was so attuned to her inner life that she was in little danger of being inauthentic.

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CHAPTER VI

EMERGENT THEMES All of the forms of internal dialogue that I culled together from reading through the 51 interviews were raised and explored in the eleven cases represented in Chapter V. In this chapter I will further gather together, delineate and illustrate these themes with examples drawn from the original eleven cases and from the remaining fourteen artist participants. Because most artists described crisscrossing intersections of internal dialogic practices, the forms often intermingled. For the purposes of investigation, I have artificially parsed them out. I have divided the forms of internal dialogue into four groupings.

The first grouping I have identified as: The artists who experienced their inner dialogue as being a conversation with someone or something. Under this rubric I have included: (a) Artists who, while they make their art, carry on inner dialogues, arguments or heated discussions with people they know; (b) Artists who carry on an internal dialogue with the characters in their art; (c) Artists who have an internal discussion with the art world; (d) Artists who talk to the piece of art they are working on; (e) Artists who carry on an internal dialogue with a specific person; (f) Artists who make up stories about their work; (g) Artists who communicate with the muse.

The second grouping is: The artists who experienced their internal dialogue as being with aspects of themselves. I have included: (a) Artists who carry on an internal dialogue with their own personal history and their knowledge of art history; (b) Artists who hear an internal editorial voice and negative voice(s); (c) Artists who search for

249 and listen to their authentic voice; (d) Artists who listen to and use their free associative voice; The third grouping consisted of the conditions that affected the artists’ access to their inner dialogue. In this category I have placed (a) Creating an “art space;” (b) The use of music; (c) The use of movement; (d) The impact of having children, and; (e) The impact of death.

The fourth and last group was the internal dialogue the artists had with me as a result of our conversations and this internal dialogue’s impact on their creative process.

There was one form of an internal dialogue that only one artist raised but I found it so refreshing that I decided to give it this brief cameo. His inner dialogue was with his wise cracking humorous inner voice. He told me that if he could make himself laugh that was a good sign. The filmmaker who reported this was a very funny man. I laughed the whole time I met with him. His films were irreverent and very funny. For example, years ago he produced, wrote and directed a documentary on a midget’s bar with the stars being several of the midgets from the Wizard of Oz.

The First Dialogic Arena

Inner Dialogues with Someone or Something

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In the interview with Gretchen she mentioned that one of the internal conversations she had was in the form of internal arguments she had with her father in preparation for live disagreements with him. Five other respondents reported having internal heated discussions and arguments with people while they worked on their art.

The painter K talked at length about this phenomenon. She had discovered that when she had to paint detailed images that needed to be rendered in a slow methodical manner, using two or three haired brushes, she found herself having furious internal arguments with people who she felt had wronged her. What she found so perplexing about this was that prior to beginning to paint she usually would have no idea that all this rage was waiting to emerge.

Another artist, Biscotti originally assumed that his inner dialogues had to be about art. When I clarified that it could be about anything he blushingly admitted that, I mean, you know they’re, they’re, they’re dialogues, they’re conversations I have with like my family and you know, things that I, things that I should have said that you know, six months later, I’ll come up with the perfect response to my brother— He was ambivalent about this practice, I’ll have debates with people about, or discussions with people about events, but I, I don’t, I don’t know that this introspection is something that I’m really comfortable with.

DH: Because why?

Because it doesn’t really accomplish anything, I mean rehashing old events.

But despite his distaste for the practice he admitted that just that morning while he was working on a tedious part of his art making, It’s pretty boring stuff, and so you do have time to, to ponder things, cause there’s really not much to, to think about otherwise, because it’s pretty

251 incredibly boring. And so, you know, when I do, when I’m having sort of an emotional, a uh, a uh, relationship kind of a conflict, then yeah, that becomes something I do, probably. Discuss the mess; kind of formulate a consensus, a conclusion (laughing). Like now it’s such a long term kind of relationship, it’s sort of a delicate issue, to me, because I really have to, you know, figure a way to gently conclude it. I try on all these different scenarios. I don’t think about how I’m going to specifically going to, you know, approach it, I may have, you know, I’m not, I’m not working on a script, sitting there and thinking about this.

I’m just trying to generalize how I can (laughs), how I can maybe, should I do it by letter, should I email her . . . should I do it face to face? I got to kind of rough out, you know, it’s kind of like a granite block and I’m chipping away at, you know, at the, the, superfluous kinds of things and trying to get to the pearl of the issue, cause, you know, it’s going to be one of those interminable conversations and how it’s going to turn and turn and turn, and you know, it’ll be good for me to have, have an idea of how I’m going to negotiate.

Biscotti’s inner world, while he performed the mindless tasks associated with making his art, was peopled with scenarios he rehearsed between himself and important people in his life. He imagined things he should have said and he prepared himself for difficult discussions he anticipated having. Another painter, Gio, admitted he also did the same thing.

When I paint, I’m definitely by myself, I, I’m alone. So, while I paint, I believe I get these opportunities to go back in time, and to say or do all the things that I wish I could have said or done in certain scenarios, whether it be old relationships— DH: So that you’re thinking about them while— While I’m actually producing the art . . . I’m definitely going through that process of going back and redoing things that I’ve done in the past. And I think a lot of us look back and say, I wish I had said that. But I actually go through the process of, like, man, I really wish I would have told this person how I felt, or this is what I really felt at that time, but I guess I couldn’t express it the way I’m thinking about it now . . . so I wish I would have gone back and said something . . . Well, they all went the way they did, because the things that I can’t control, you know, I can’t control what other people say or do . . . I think I talk to myself a lot about a lot of the events that have happened in my life that I can think of as very dramatic and very big events in my life. And I forget, I forget a lot, some things more than others, to look for the good, or you know, being, I forget to be optimistic, so I think about, gee I got laid off from my job

252 because they said it was downsizing, but in reality I kind of think they didn’t want me. I get really negative.

The painter CU told me Absolutely, yeah, I talk to myself a lot.

DH: So what do, do, what type of things do you talk to yourself about?

Oh, all kinds of uh, all kinds of like, personal interactions with other people get played out, you know, and changed and reworked and uh, you know, that kind of stuff definitely goes on.

DH: Do you do that a fair amount do you think?

I do that a lot.

DH: And a lot of times in your thinking . . .

I did a lot of it just this morning (laughs).

DH: What were you dealing with?

Well, I’ve been dealing with a lot of this kind of stuff because, actually, the woman who all those paintings are about was just arrested, and it has nothing to do with this. She stowed aboard an airplane and got busted with drugs in Texas, and uh, and of course everyone, or a lot of people, she’s also a very well-known artist, and a lot of people, you know, want to, people I don’t even know, phoned me and started asking me, started asking personal questions and you know, then, those conversations get taken and replayed and talked and reworked, and also I have a lot of anger with her and about certain things and um, I have, but there’s a lot of different feelings about her than most, and all of those uh, and all of those things . . . got played out in the last 24 hours. I imagine a better way— DH: Oh, right, “I should have said, or I would love to say—” Yeah, exactly.

The writer B also weighed in on this practice.

I frequently have the experience of, having the experience in the world and then, in reflecting on it, rework it internally with this voice as the other person and um, sort of you know, reliving it in a similar advantage or something.

253 DH: So you’re saying like you’ll have an argument or a discussion with someone, well, give me an example, I think I know what you’re saying, so I want to know if it’s right.

Well, you know, like a real basic example would be, well one that I was involved in for a long time was, you know, with the public park building, and there’s a lot of people there, and you know, these kids from the neighborhood would go there, and they’re not part of the program that I work for specifically, but they are frequently there and they’re real trouble makers and um, you know, they have no one supporting them, and their parents aren’t around, there’s no real authority in their life except for the people at the park, you know, the supervisor at the park and the adults there, and these kids um, I got myself into this situation where they just infuriated me, and I was like, stammering, trying you know, to make them understand something and for a long time, and still, and this was like, actually, last spring, and it still is bothering me and I still sometimes go there to that place and hear the things that they were saying to myself as trying to like, think of how I could have said it better and how I could have penetrated the veil, or whatever, like, separated us.

For these artists when they were alone and working on monotonous, mindless tasks related to their art project their minds either wandered to unsuccessful interactions with other people and ways they wish they could have reworked these meetings, or they rehearsed what they anticipated would be difficult interactions. Erving Goffman (1981) described in detail people’s tendency to rehearse anticipated interactions. Winnicott ‘s thoughts about how play functions for a child as “transitional space,” a time and space where a youngster tries to gain mastery over an unsettling event by pretending through play to rework the experience into a more satisfying ending, are reminiscent of how adult artists attempt to gain mastery over unsettling events by playing with conversations in their head.

Another type of internal dialogue, mentioned by all of the writers except one, was that they reported hearing their characters’ voices in their head. As I have already described, the writer Francesca spoke quite poetically about her mission of empathically immersing herself in her characters. Seth and Babe also spoke at length

254 about how they channeled the voices of their characters. Two of the other writers described hearing their characters. The writer, B, overheard the characters talking when he wrote plays where as when he wrote a novel he heard his own “organizing big mind” give suggestions on how to improve the text, to the part of him that he identified as the writer.

I do have many dialogues, I would even call it more, it’s not just me and a voice, it’s like an author who uses multiple voices and perspectives and um, specifically, when I write plays and dialogue for plays, I often will hear that, I totally hear that as dialogue and frequently it’s overheard, I’m overhearing it, I’m not actually participating in it. I’m hearing it as other people speaking it . . .

The conversation for plays is really separate from a lot of different kinds of things, because it is kind of a dialogue, it is hearing the voices, and in the other writing processes, it’s more of a dialogue, or more of a recreating into the omniscient voice, you know, like you’re organizing big mind voice, saying, you know, suggesting an influence over how the shape of it will come out and arguing reflecting on this suggestion and redrafting it . . .

The writer JC also heard her characters.

It’s just like I hear that voice. I had also written a screenplay and a novel set in the south. Now I’ve never lived in the south, but I did, I did go to Louisiana and Mississippi with a director I was working with, and I just got that in my head, and when I shopped it around to agents in New York, you know, I sent them a letter and I sent them part of the work, and they said, “Oh, you know, I was expecting an African American woman from, you know, Texas or something,” and then I showed up this white Jewish girl, so I mean, I know that the tone can be pretty convincing, Somehow that voice comes and it’s, that’s what carries it through.

DH: Do you hear it?

Um hmm.

DH: Do you hear a person talking in your ear?

Um hmm.

DH: So do you hear it pop up while you’re walking down the street?

Definitely, yeah, I’ve heard it; you never know when it’s going to come.

255 DH: Really?

In an essay entitled “What Writers Do” in On Writers and Writing, John Gardner draws a compelling profile of the writer.

In a given work a writer is many different people . . . what happens here of course is not that several writers inside the writers head are clubbing each other for control of the typewriter keys. The true writer mind is not a jungle but a noble democracy, in which all parties have their say, even the crazy ones, even the most violently passionate, because otherwise justice, balance, sanity are impossible. Scanning possibilities like a chess playing computer, weighing the votes of his innumerable selves, following now this leading voice now that, the writer-multitude finds out, page by page ad draft by draft, the sane and passionate whole which is his novel. (Gardner, 1994, p. 199) This paragraph elegantly sums up the important finding that those artists who allow a democracy of voices to live in their head often find that this makes their art more complex and meaningful. The writers Francesca, Seth and Babe and the painters J, Theseus K, and Magpie and the photographer Harryette all attested that they sought out the “multitudes” in themselves and hoped it extended into their art.

One writer, who wrote political commentary in a fictional form, experienced a twist on the concept of an internal dialogue. She described hearing her own voice, while she imagined a radio audience listening.

And the thing about it the way that I write is very much geared to how I imagine, it’s sort of based more in radio than in traditional writing, so I always write to perform it vocally, and so I have this, this imaginary radio listening audience . . . I mean definitely like a cross between college radio, where it’s sort of freeform, and NPR, where it’s intelligent and there’s a dedicated listenership, and then something where it’s a little bit more, but more accessible than NPR is, and much more fun. Whatever. I mean that’s, which really just describes what I, the, the milieu that I feel like my work is put into . . . I probably imagine it, in inflection, and tone . . . Yeah, with the cadence of my spoken voice, but my spoken voice when I’m reading that text, like in the way that I’m practicing it being performed.

256 In her head she heard the intonations of how she would want to deliver the text even as she created the piece to be read.

The painter FU carried on a similar process as this writer with his paintings.

He, too, was interested in making political and social critiques. He paid attention to the imagery he used because he wanted to be in conversation with his audience. He wanted his audience to understand the cultural symbols he used in his paintings.

I have this in mind that there is a shared set of references with this group of people and when working on a piece. I always try to remove myself a little bit from my own work to see if it’s legible to me . . . If you want to carry on a certain sort of dialogue, you might again tailor your communication in a particular way. So, and, and in the case of art, there are, there are things here that might be just too oblique really to maybe convey—in a painting, say—you can’t expect someone to read your mind and to understand certain things, so you’re creating a piece of work and making these sort of internal calculations.

I think of it as sort of a, a calculation and just, the way I usually work is using, using popular imagery in, from this culture that I share with viewers in an art gallery, so it’s, it’s American, but it’s also Western tradition, mostly, but it’s also people generally know what a smile means, or a frown means. They can judge if, if there’s a painting of a person in an emotional situation. You can assume that people are going to recognize, say a sad, a picture of a sad woman as a picture of a sad woman, and so that’s, it sort of is even beyond popular culture imagery, that’s just, it’s very, very common stuff, I, and it, so if you could build up from there, like happy faces, frowny face, but then also like within our culture, just anything, there’s sort of an infinite number of associations that we all, and I think we more or less share, um, say the American West might have a number of associations, and varying somewhat, but still it represents like, sort of mythology of say, independence, or open spaces, that’s just a random example of a kind of popular concept you can exploit.

He added to the concept of dialogue the semiotics of the commonly known meanings of imagery such as “happy faces and frowny faces.”

A third important inner conversation that many artists reported having was an inner conversation they had with the art world. As with all the categories, this dialogue was a double-edged sword, at times it was enriching and at other times it was stifling.

257 In the eleven cases already described, most of the artists addressed this conversation Eva spoke about how as a younger artist she didn’t enjoy conceptual art but because of social pressure she attempted to make several conceptual paintings. At the same time she also spoke of the positive influence artists such as Agnes Martin, the Spanish painter Goya and the French painter Bonnard had on her painting technique. J talked about how pressure from his fellow art students to follow the aesthetics of minimalism, popular in the art scene in the 1960s, contributed to his “existential depression.” It wasn’t until he visited Europe and saw works of the artists from the Renaissance and Gothic periods that he found works that inspired him. Theseus K, similar to J, was against what he called “the negativity,” the lack of interest in beauty and the gimmickry of the present day art world of conceptual and post modern art. He found inspiration in the work of painters in the Renaissance and a variety of classical composers. He was also an art critic and wrote essays that were critical of the modernist and post modernist movement. He has continued to send me links to articles that both decry the postmodern art movement and laud the artists of the 1600s. The sculptor Biscotti played with the art world when he did a tongue-in-cheek series about the contemporary art scene. His work in particular utilized the concept of intertextuality, the practice of art referencing other art. (Culler, 1997) I had this Jasper Johns piece and then I just took the target, and I took, like, the logo from the Target store, and so . . . Well, so then you were like, supposed to fill in the Target logo, cause I just included red with the Target thing, so then you were supposed to, it just, I don’t know what it was, it was a dialogue with targets, the 1970 idea of target and then the 2006 idea of Target . . . . Then there was an article about Picassos being sold at Costco. They turned out to be fakes, and so I have a, a, it’s a picture I did of sort of a Picasso-esque drawing, and then there’s a letter, oh, and the drawing has, the signature underneath says Picasstco (laughs). Then there’s a letter that I fabricated with, there’s a portrait of Picasso on the top, and they said that all these were certified by his daughter

258 Maya, and so it was a letter from Maya certifying that this piece of mine was an authentic piece by my father Picasso. And that goes on for about three paragraphs, and then there’s a receipt from Costco that has, you know, has a box of uh, box of condoms and some ink for my printer, and you know, all this stuff from Costco, and at the bottom it says artwork for $37,000, and then it’s got the yellow, or the orange marker that they do while you’re leaving the store, so you can’t return things without, you know, leaving the security, the guy who checks off your receipt, so anyway, those three things were part of this piece, so the whole show, there were a couple of other ones, too, but the whole show was kind of like, it was kind of this art-related, fabricated, uh, commenting on what, I’m not sure, I mean, the Picasstco thing is pretty obvious, but I just wanted to kind of make a series of pieces that were sort of contemporary art-related.

The filmmaker TP found encouragement in the life of the artist Delacroix, I, what I like to find ways to justify things, you know, I look for models, so the artist Delacroix for instance, would try, you know, every, he did mostly romantic stuff, but he’d also did still lives, he, he’d look at how big the art world was, art history, and he jumped into a lot of different rooms, he went into and explored a lot of different directions. So I say, if he did it, uh, it’s ok. I’m looking for somebody alive or dead, to give me the ok.

The print maker MM described how the use of marijuana allowed him to be more playful in his art making and less mindful of the expectations of the people in the art community.

I have to admit that when I started smoking pot for the first time, it got me thinking in a certain way that, even though I’m not smoking anymore, I learned to think a certain way based on that.

DH: Ok, so tell me a little bit more about that.

It’s pretty much just forgetting the expectations of a final product, you know, and forget functioning in the gallery world of you know, that same, that kind of finished product, but it was bringing up, for me, it was bringing up my world of expectations, and so I kind, it gave me, it made me feel comfortable just spending an hour doodling and laughing at it and, and so that’s, that sort of set the pattern.

The filmmaker IN described the dilemma of being an artist.

Like you cannot pretend that you’re completely isolated from your cultural context, so you have to let it in to a certain degree just to assess where your

259 piece might work, you know. Where it finds its place. But at the same time, you can’t let those voices overwhelm what you’re trying do.

But these other voices were usually difficult for her to internalize So that there’s one former colleague of mine who is very intellectual and who has very, yeah, probably pretty dogmatic views about what films should be, and he disses everything that I ever bring up, so, you know, he’s political.

DH: But you think he’s smart, or something?

That is how he presents himself, yeah . . . To him a really great experimental film, I’m not talking about narratives, you, it would work on all these levels, it would work on an emotional level, it would be like theoretically like some rock solid, you know, it would just like this intellectual masterpiece, you know . . . .

So it’s built up as this ideal model of a film, you know. If truth be told, I’m not really interested in making these kinds of films, you know. I can’t really come out and say that because . . .

DH: You were raised on that ideal?

Maybe. I haven’t thought about that. These people represent that because they have a certain haughtiness and a certain self-absorbed intellectual selfsatisfaction about themselves, where they judge all the other films that are not as radical, not as minimalist, not as whatever it is, you know. So—and I’ve often gotten that sense, even when I was a student there were some professors, you know, where you felt like oh, your just making like girl films, or you know, your making like feminist films, and there’s something wrong with that. Or, you know, it just never quite measures up to what this imagined, ideal—maybe male film, would be . . . You know, definitely, that’s definitely coming from my father, somebody who, being intellectual, found everything else just so . . . and my mother’s boy friend he was also very, very intellectual and I admired him greatly, so I think I got it from all these, you know, this came from all the father figures. I felt this pressure, you know, that there’s a certain, there’s theory, and you need to absorb it and it has to come out in your artwork and all that kind of stuff, and for me it came from this personal kind of feeling, but it also was something that was in the air in the eighties, you know, that whole cultural studies, there was this whole pressure on artists to be, to have work that’s very conceptual, you know, and then enriched by psychoanalysis and enriched by all this theory and on the one hand, I embraced that, I enjoyed parts of it, but it also became something of an oppressive . . .

DH: Yeah. So, I’m just thinking the school, when I around. Okay, so all these people who were into Lacan and Derrida—

260 Right. And there were like all these people, and I keep trying—okay let me learn about it and I’ll go for a few times, and I thought, this is so boring, it’s so bullshit, it’s so unnecessarily convoluted, and then. And two years later a friend of mine is “I’m going into a Lacan study group,” and I look back with this little tinge like I should want to do this, but I don’t. Like, am I stupid, or—what’s wrong with me—but, every time I try to do it—it doesn’t meet who I am and I don’t—and usually I feel like, no, I, I don’t even agree necessarily, when I do get some smidgen of their view, or I’ll say, big deal, I know that, that’s not such a huge idea. I tried to back away from that, you know. I tried to not even expose myself to that cause it can get kind of a hook into my unconscious, and then I’ll start mulling it over, and I’ll feel insecure again, and I’ll feel lousy about what I’m doing, and I don’t want to.

Just like the nuances and polemics between the different schools of thought in the field of psychology have at different times polarized and agitated psychotherapists, many artists reflected upon the positive and negative impact theories concerning aesthetics had on their artistic process. Most often the artists mentioned wrestling with the theories of Modernism, Post Modernism and Feminism.

Almost all of the women artists raised the specter of being a woman in what has historically been a man’s domain. As just mentioned IN believed that many of her male colleagues were negative and disdainful towards what they called “women’s art.”

Dorothy spoke of the entitlement, she believed, men felt to be artists and how the social expectations as to what a mother must perform often diminished a woman’s sense that she had the right to an artistic career because the needs of both roles were so often in conflict. The writer, JC, also experienced a similar set of conflicts in her inner and outer dialogue with the men in her creative life.

I was thinking of that artist, what’s her name, that she had a show at the MCA. I was thinking, God, what a story, because her early work is so strong, I loved it, I loved the stuff she was doing in her seventies even more. I thought it was so incredible, but here’s someone who just vanished off the face of the earth for twenty years and just did what she wanted to do, and it was fantastic, and I just think, well, there’s a woman, you know, I mean, I can’t see a man doing that somehow, but I think for a woman, that really makes a lot of sense, because

261 you’re so tired of trying to, you know, make it in this male world, in this very competitive world, and you’re really just doing it for yourself, and if other people find out, then that’s really good. That’s not how I felt when I was younger, I mean, I wanted to make a name for myself . . . at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, you know, that was the expectation, either you make it or you fall off and you don’t have a writing career, but I think there’s, you know, other ways to do it. I think as the young writer, I think because I went through a program that I felt was very destructive in, certainly the female voice was not respected they didn’t listen so I think it took me a very long time to actually find my voice and to be happy about my voice.

A fourth form of internal dialogue reported by many artists was the dialogue they had with the piece of art they were making. Eva’s work was the stellar example of this. Not only was she having a conversation with her deceased mother through her responses to the letters, I’m basically saying, I’m going to talk to you, you know what, the way I talk.

I’m not going to worry about you understanding me, I’m not going to worry about you getting feelings hurt or whatever, I’m going to talk to you. And this is my way of talking to you.

She also allowed herself to respond to the formal qualities of the letters (the folds, the size of the print, the water stains, etc.) in an abstract painterly style quite different from the representative work she had made in the past.

All four writers Francesca, Babe, Seth and Dorothy described conversations they conducted with their writing projects, whether it was in the form of conversations they overheard between the characters or conversations they, as the author or editor, had with their characters and their novels. Those who were writing novels were particularly caught up in these relationships. Seth and Babe described hyperbolic anthropomorphized reactions to their novels. Seth called his novel a “monster.”

Francesca recalled a painful time when she couldn’t even look at a novel she had

262 worked on for eight years without getting physically sick because she was so sad that it had not been published.

The painter Magpie recalled, You have a dialogue with this painting. And there are times when that painting refuses to answer you. You have done everything but stood on your head and spit nickels to get that painting to converse with you. I think at that point in time, you call on that divine creative or whatever that is—you call upon that other place and ask for information. Because the information that you need to ply, to entreat, to tease that something out of the canvas, you evidently not tuning in or you don’t have it or whatever. I think you have to apply to that other place.

Of the other artists I interviewed three of the painters and one filmmaker described having what they called a dialogue with their paintings or film.

NC, a painter, described it as No, it isn’t, it isn’t usually a verbal form, except of course with poetry. It’s a verbal form, and writing, it’s a verbal form, but in art you’re seeing images rather than words when you’re, when you’re creating something. And I think of my process of creating like a binary computer where the answer’s yes or no, where you’re going through, you’re going through concepts and images, ok yes, no, yes, no, maybe, maybe not, so I don’t think creative people recognize it as a dialogue, but it is one.

The painter CU said Are you just talking about like, what’s going on inside of me while making work. Part of me is maybe dealing with a specific event, ok, to give you, there was a recent painting I made in that last show, it’s like a great big painting, it’s like seven feet square, and it’s called The Pile Up. It was, it kind of, the composition kind of came to me as a basic form after I was in a very serious car wreck . . . and also, it was after a very intense relationship had ended, right before that, and then there were several relationships that started right after that relationship, and all of these different things kind of collided . . . so I made a like, a painting that kind of came out of that. And so the internal dialogue on that painting, I guess part of it had to do with my own feelings of being you know, very frightened by what happened, being very sad about parts of the relationship, being happy, angry, and then kind of like looking inside and seeing, you know letting all of these things start touching each other and interacting with one another and kind of looking at the forms that these things take, you know, inside of me. Well, in the painting, there would be, images of

263 the women, there would be like, images of smoke, which uh, had to, probably had to do with either the heat of the relationships, but also the impact of crashes and . . . there’s like a woman, my ex, my girlfriend’s head is like, it’s kind of like a big decapitated head that’s like sweating and crying and it’s like smashed on top of my, my head’s like, flattened out underneath it. And then there’ll be like a, so there’s like, there’s kind of like this violent imagery, but there’s also like these compassionate littler forces like, whispering to her or like, kissing her, or there’ll be like, a little grouping of figures on top of my head, like and uh, there’ll be like, uh, different scenes being played out there. Um, uh, yeah, so it’s just allowing like, many different things to occur and talk to one another in the painting and then like, trying to . . . achieve like the, the proper tone of those events . . . where it’s like being in touch with all of these feelings and the thoughts connected to them . . . but also being able to step back make art about, and have like, perspective on them so you can like, draw on them and really make sense from them, and uh, and uh, you know, but letting, letting each, kind of like letting each thing have its say, have its space and let a contrasting feeling, like, be in contact . . .

DH: In the painting and in your life?

Yeah.

In the painting he referred to, he painted a number of affect states and contrasting images all in one space therefore forcing both himself, as he painted them, and these disparate images to dialogue with one another. Images of rage and compassion toward the same person coexisted on one canvas. Margaret BrenmanGibson (1976) noted that an artist replays past object relations in his art making process. She believed that artists become blocked when they cannot tolerate the internal ambivalence and psychic conflicts that accompany their relationship to the art object they are creating. CU was able to “tolerate internal ambivalences and conflicts” in his inner life and his art, which allowed him in a symbolic form to make peace with feeling a wide array of feelings towards specific people and events.

The filmmaker IN described her camera work as a physical dialogue with space much like a dancer might express.

264 I think when I enjoy camera work the most, it’s when I play off the rhythm of what’s happening in a situation. In that sense it’s much more dialogic, is that a word, dialogic. I mean there’s a lot of movement going on, and then I have to make choices, as a cameraperson. So I play off the rhythm of what that scene in front me is giving me, and I feed off that. So if these people are very slow, I’m not going to zoom around like a crazy mosquito, you know. But while I’m there, part of the rhythm of that—that I enjoy and where I also have this dialogue going, on a different level, are the movement that happens in space, the tension between the people in the room, and how does the camera interact with that. So it’s kind of this play, and I insert myself as the cameraperson into that, and I feed off their energy.

A fifth form of an internal dialogue was the internal conversations artists had with specific people. Ted Solotaroff, the writer, critic, and editor in his book entitled A Few Good Voices in My Head begins with the essay of the same title. In the essay Solotaroff recalls an interview he had with a young writer. The writer asked him, “Whom do you write for?” To which he replied, I guess I write for a few good voices in my head . . . I think it’s the way people start out writing—or painting or composing or doing scientific research: for one or two powerfully meaningful figures in their lives. And I think that those who continue as artists remain in touch with complementary and internalized versions of those early good voices. Needless to say, there are also bad voices in one’s head- voices of doubt and despair and intimidation . . . hence the importance of the right literary role model . . . Part authority figure part ally whether real or imagined . . . . His durable presence instills within you a hopefulness that you can somehow, someday, embody—not imitate but embody—the same felt values that this higher kindred spirit does. (Solotaroff, 1987, pp. 25-27) Gretchen’s story provided an excellent illustration of this phenomenon. Her art-making was bolstered by the fertile and diverse conversation she had with her internalized father. Francesca used her internal conversations with her mentor, professor John Gardner and Zia, her babysitter from youth, as inspiration. Icarus spoke to Princess Diana. Babe had internal talks with the different Babes in his novel and with specific people whose opinions he said mattered deeply to him. Theseus K heard the

265 words of and got inspiration from many famous dead artists (Leonardo Da Vinci, Sibelius, Beethoven, Wagner). Magpie had imaginary conversations about art with her dead friend Seymour. There were also internal voices that Gardner identified as “bad voices.” All the artists who I earlier cited as engaging in internal arguments as they worked on their art (Biscotti, Gio, CU) were addressing these arguments to specific people in their lives who were aggravating them.

Of the fourteen other artists, four talked about their internal conversations with specific people as they worked on their art. The painter NC: Yeah, yeah. Internally, no, I would say, my internal dialogues are with, with my history, with my aesthetic training and . . . George Toney, he’s a sculpture professor, he, he was, of all the art professors I’ve had, he was the most influential. I think voice is maybe too anthropomorphic, it’s more with his presence, you know, um, I would like to think that George would like my work right now.

When the writer B wrote he often imagined conversations with a young girl who was an amalgamation of several characters from movies from his youth, imaginary contemporary young girls, and his real sister.

DH: Well, you said earlier something about this 12 year old girl, that you— It’s actually a voice that I can access pretty readily.

DH: So ok, if you think this will screw up your process, just . . . don’t . . . do you have any idea about who she is, or why, why, why her? Does she remind you of anybody?

Well, it’s maybe partly my sister, partly Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, partly um, uh, you know, Hayley Mills from The Parent Trap— DH: Well, is it because when you were younger you really liked the Wizard of Oz and you really like The Parent Trap, I mean—?

I mean, I think it’s because those things were in me in some way, or sparked something in me.

266

DH: Did they?

It’s actually more urban than Dorothy or Hayley, it’s almost like a Latino or a black girl, that’s the kind of voice . . . the quality of that kind of urban, but very delicate . . . or something that is, you know, it’s sort of, that I really lacked in some way. But yeah. And partly my sister because my sister is sort of, we have a creative sort of friendship, I guess.

From a negative perspective, two artists described how they tried to keep certain voices out of their minds because they feared these voices would have a devastating impact on their art making. IN said, My dad has, you know, his criticism would be much more devastating, or some of my colleagues, you know . . . . If they say a word to me, you know, that resonates for days, you know, like I’m not minimalist enough, or not political enough, or whatever it is—I try and keep these men out of my head.

And JC: I tried to mute my own, you know, I, I, my approach, my intellectual approach, trying to mute that, and just let that other tone come up, something that’s more authentic than I am.

DH: How do you, how do you uh, how do you do it? How did you start doing it?

Um, I think part of it is just, you know, experience, and part of it is just impatience with, you know, my everyday persona . . . Well, you know, if you want that more creative side to be the stronger, you know, if you want to call it a dialogue, you know, you want that other voice to take over and get rid of your own personal thing . . .

DH: I mean, I think you were saying mostly, it’s sort of, it’s kind of a monologue, trying, it’s a dialogue trying to shut up one of the voices.

(Laughing) That’s funny.

The sixth form of an internal dialogic process was the stories the artists made up about their art. A story is inherently dialogic. It is invented to be told either to oneself or to a real or imagined audience. According to the narrative coherence model of

267 psychotherapy (Spence, 1976; Schafer 1981), “the co-construction in therapy of a story that one believes has narrative coherence is thought to have more of an influence on current psychological life than does historical truth.” (Stern D.1995) I believe this premise can be generalized to encompass the function of storytelling in general. Mark Freeman in his text, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative argued that there is a disjunction between living and telling which renders one’s life narrative—not quite fictional but he asked, “Don’t they inevitably falsify life itself?” (Freeman, 1993, p. 21) Our history, he says, is not in our memories but in the stories that have been told to us.

Creating a coherent story, fictional or “factual,” gives it importance within a person’s mind. In the tome Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity, the chapter “The Historian as Curandera,” quotes the South African proverb “Until lions write books, history will always glorify the hunter.” (Morales, 1998, p.23) Truth is created by whoever controls the way the story is told. This supposition leads me to believe that when these artists created written, painted or photographed stories, in a sense they asserted command over determining what was history. Whether they told a story from the perspective of the hero who conquered obstacles or if the story they told was about a victim, because they had created the tale and decided what happened, this gave them agency. Many of the stories told by the artists while metaphoric and not directly autobiographic were emotionally autobiographic. Freeman and Sterns’ teachings that psychological truth has dominance over historical truth are applicable.

Gilbert Rose (1996) postulated that once a private truth is made public and there are spectators this truth/story gains veracity. He described this as witnessing. This

268 applies to an object of art. If it is exhibited in a public display it acquires more psychic weight.

Magpie’s stories about her paintings captured both these practices. One evocative painting of a woman in a boat crying into a funnel was explained by the story that the character in the boat used a funnel to capture her tears of pain because of the death of her husband. The funnel routed the tears into the river so they could cleanse the water. Creating an image and a story that transformed her tears from pain into something useful must have allowed Magpie some sense of imaginary mastery over her husband’s death.

Theseus K had conversations with his paintings in the form of the intricate stories he made up using mythology and history to explain them. He used these imaginative stories as the inspiration, which prompted him to crowd his canvas with intricately painted images that illustrated the multiple narratives he invented. These stories synergistically moved from explaining the imagery in the paintings to justifying his inclusion of specific imagery in the paintings. The stories may or may not have had autobiographical significance, but it was clear that creating these stories gave his paintings added importance and gravity in his eyes.

The writer Francesca talked with me about a story she had written that I read.

In brief, the story is about an older sister who tries to steer her younger troubled sister who is unemployed into getting a respectable job. She gets her sister a dress and sets up a job interview. The younger sister goes to the interview, can not perform, in fact she makes a fool of herself, returns home and yells at her older sister.

Yeah, no, do you want me to tell you where that story came from?

269 DH: Sure.

In graduate school, I was in a relationship with someone who was dry when I met him, so as far as I knew, he didn’t drink, but he went away for Christmas and came back raving drunk…I was very in love, and it was a very difficult relationship to extricate myself from, and I wanted so much for him to be the first person I’d met, and I tried talking, and I talked about AA and I tried, and then I realized, the only thing I could do is leave, which was really hard to do, and I just thought, my god, I wanted it to be so different. I was in grief over this breakup, it was all I could think about when I sat in my space, which I’ve always done, that part, it was all I could. I couldn’t get it out, and I just kept thinking, why, why can’t we help, why can’t, we can’t save each other, we can’t, oh, and I know what else was happening, I forgot. After that relationship I went to a counselor with AA, and she helped me to see and say, your job will never be to go out there and save the alcoholics of the world, it just, everybody who’s a husband or a wife who has an alcoholic, wants to just say the right thing or do the right thing, it doesn’t happen. So, so I was very much thinking about, you can’t change anything, and then I thought, well, you know what, the human condition is always to try to gain control, we’re always just, you know, people think they’re going to help somebody else, and instead of helping the person, they say, well, what you’ve got to do is get out of that house and go do this . . . and that’s never, ever what anybody needs, as far as I can make out.

People need to find their own way, and the best gift on earth is to have a friend who stand by you, listens to you, people who support you as you’re finding your way, so I thought, but this is what people do, and what can they find out ultimately if they keep trying to change. I couldn’t write about this because it was to immediate but I thought, well, another area where I’ve tried to fix things is for my sister, because she’s my baby sister, she’s only four years younger than me I thought, ok, you know, what are all those trips about when I would go visit her and I would say, well, you could do this, and you could do that, and that, and that to find a job, but just, being a bossy older sister . . . who tries to tell my sister what to do, because I’m older than her and I know. Even though it’s ridiculous, cause we’re both adults and I’ve gotten better at not doing that, but so I thought, well, but can I translate this issue of not being able to help.

By writing a story, in which Francesca was represented as the older sister who failed to help her younger sister, she controlled the outcome. Paradoxically, writing the story allowed her to exert control over the uncontrollable experience of being unable to help a loved one.

Babe’s goal in writing a fictionalized autobiography seemed to serve a similar function. My speculation is that he enjoyed manipulating his fate. He discussed how

270 his decision to include the spirit world in his novel allowed himself a platform to thrash out and describe, in front of an audience, his relationship with God. In the fourth book strange events that had happened in the first and second book, which according to him, were based on actual events in his life were explained by paranormal events. These explanations gave him, as the narrator, the omnipotent ability to know the etiology of events. At last retroactively, even though it was fictional, he could know the meaning of these life events.

The seventh form of inner dialogue reported was a dialogue with God or the muse. Magpie believed in the muse. As I have already illustrated, she described the muse’s multifaceted character with curiosity, humor and insight. Gretchen described her internalized father as a “mentor,” a “provocative force” that “inspired” her. Her description makes me believe that he served the function of a human muse for her.

J alluded to the muse, “I have to be much more disciplined, you know . . . to let the muse in, to let the creative process in.” He also mentioned his study of different spiritual traditions (e.g., Judaism, Egyptian religions of the past, Islam) as having had a powerful impact on his art making. Babe described experiencing the phenomenon the writer Lee Stringer called “Shaking hands with God,” that other-than-oneself-almostspiritual-revelatory-experience an artist has while making art. In the article “Regression and reparation in religious experience and creativity,” Kevin Fauteux confirmed this supposition when he revealed how artists often described feeling in unity with God when they were immersed in making their art.

Of the 14 other artists, the painter Gio said this: Now, during the painting process, the actual creation, I have, I’ve been known to say that it’s where I find myself to be at the highest levels of peace that I’ve

271 ever been at, and that’s why I enjoy doing what I do. I’ve also said that I, you know, in one way or another, I talk to God while I’m, or I’m closer to God, or a higher being, or a higher power than at any point in my life. And that’s really why I go there. I don’t know if it’s like, therapeutic for me, or if I use it as therapy, but it’s very relaxing, it’s very, it’s very comforting to be at that point.

I also, I think it’s pretty natural to go from an idea to a sketch, and then actually materializing it. I think that’s a pretty powerful thing, I, I don’t know if it’s powerful, but I, I think it takes courage. It takes a lot of strength, mental, physical and spiritual, to, you know, bring about what you believe in, or what you created.

B hinted at his relationship to the muse.

Well, it’s tricky because the way I’m going to answer that is to say that this outside, sort of critical voice, or the critical eye, is learning more and more about you know, what’s, the economics, the true economics in the world of things that are creative, whether it’s going to be a book or a play or language or a car, you know what I mean? Like what sells—the other voice, the other thing, the muse, and stuff, I’m really hesitant to even attempt to ascribe a personality or to analyze it in that way, or to pay attention to it in that way, because it is such a delicate, mysterious thing.

Since early Roman times the artist has been mythologized as having access to the divine. In his classic text The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Rank noted that during the Renaissance, the artist was endowed with supernatural qualities for “the artist did play the part of the religious hero on earth being the creative representative of a humanized God.” (Rank, 1919, p. 122) The artists in this study who felt a spiritual connection as they made their art belong to a long tradition. Magpie’s relationship to the muse was humanized and humorous. B referred to his experiences of being visited by the muse as being mysterious, Gio awaited the experience of feeling in unity with God when he painted. When Babe felt that his writing was going well he had “a magical shamanistic way of looking at it. It’s like you get in these states and you have a little bit of an access to these things, to that gap, to beings and spirits and that magic kind of fuels you.”

272 The muses or gods these artists referred to were non-denominational and inclusive of many traditions. For these six artists, in varying degrees, there was a relationship between their creativity and their spirituality

The Second Dialogic Arena The Internal Dialogues the Artists Experienced as Being with Aspects of Themselves The first inner dialogue in this group was one the artists had with either their own history or their knowledge of art history or both. As already quoted Eva declared in our first meeting, Art history, you’ve got to understand the theory. You know the formalism, the abstract-which too many people get caught up in and whizzed away. But that’s got to be there, you know. Gotta be there.

She returned to this theme in the second interview.

I can sort of riffle through all of art history, and use whatever style . . . [that leads to] a whole range of emotional responses, or response. So this way, I can use all of art history.

J eloquently talked about mining his life history and art history. The phrase he used to describe this practice was, “layers of history are porous as far as I am concerned so I reserve the right to play back and forth.” He celebrated the cross pollination of imagery and themes from the past and the present in his art.

It’s like, my inclusivist position is that I think it’s a mistake to become as dissociated as we are from the ancient world, from the richness of the ancient world, I mean, it’s a mistake in that we don’t understand the contemporary world, and especially this whole thing with Islam, is that’s an idea that’s been around well before that thing broke out, it’s like, my attraction to that, the ancient world, Egypt, all that stuff, was just always there and, and, and I was fascinated by looking at the stuff, right.

273 Theseus K referred to his experience surviving the Our Lady of the Angels School fire when he was a seven-year-old child, as having been a formative experience in his life. He, also, talked about using his entire history when he, for example, painted a face.

I’m not drawing a face here, I’m drawing 35 years of life, of total experience, and I’ve got one crack at doing it, so I, I mean I put endless effort into my faces, I want them to express almost a whole lifetime in one face, and so I don’t go for a cheap shot, I try and go for something that’s a very inward and a deep and it can take me a day to do one face . . . all of these experiences bubble up and sometimes they, it’s particular people you knew, or a particular moment.

Theseus K constantly quoted and referred to great artists from the past to prove points he was making. He felt no kinship with the popular culture of today, but he felt an enormous affinity to the Renaissance. He referred to himself as a neo classical painter, which he defined as a painter in Leonardo Da Vinci’s tradition.

The photographer Haryette referenced history throughout her interviews, specifically her interest in anthropology and archeology. It was in keeping with her respect for history in general that she was mindful of her own history.

I see everything as having intersections with everything else, and what I realize when you asked me that question was, in fact, you know, remember I’ve been making art for almost thirty years, that I have sort of lived into a time when I can be more articulate visually.

The writer and painter NC gave a concise and articulate description of the role history played in her life.

Well, I think, um, I, as I told you on the telephone when we were talking, I think every creative thing is the result of every day that the creator has lived, starting from very early childhood until the moment of creation. I think that it, it, you cannot separate the artist from the art . . . Their whole life is what creates the art. And so I suppose from what you’re saying, or you’re defining dialogue, you are always having a dialogue with everything behind you… so, it, it’s going on all the time, I’m talking to myself when I’m doing dishes, I’m talking to myself when I’m on the train going into Chicago, I’m talking to myself when I’m

274 folding laundry, whatever I’m doing, when I’m cooking, I’m talking to myself all the time. Now, to which of my selves I’m talking probably changes each day . . . I’m in my seventies, as you probably guessed. Making art is far more satisfying than it has ever been, because I probably have dialogues with my history, if that’s a dialogue . . . It’s a question of sort of sifting through all your experience, when you’re, when you’re embarking on something . . .

A second type of inner dialogue that many artists experienced as being a part of themselves was an inner voice that was negative and discouraging. I have included under this heading what the writers referred to as their internal editor’s voice. Seth, Babe, and at times Francesca, found their internal editor’s voice could help them get rid of excess verbiage or keep the writer in them on track, but this voice needed to be reigned in because if it appeared prematurely they all attested it would arrest their creative process. In the interviews that I have already described, Francesca spoke of her hesitancy to call forth the critic’s voice because this voice was often very judgmental and stopped her spontaneous creativity. Dorothy described how in the past she had a handshake agreement with herself not to allow her inner editor a voice while she wrote; although presently her inner voice was saying, I feel like a fraud, you know, so it often starts there, and that’s ok, I’ll just start off by thinking, you know, well, I don’t know what I’m doing, this is ridiculous, I feel like an asshole . . . they’re seeing through me, or whatever.

Magpie described how at times the “big guy with bad breath visited her inner life” and at times the “little Peccadilloes” came who also had negative voices.

Of the 14 other artists, there were four who commented on the presence of a negative internal voice. The composer IL approached the idea of having an internal dialogue from an interesting bias.

I would have [an inner] dialogue in a, like, in the moment of I don’t know what to do, “Should I do this or should I do that,” I would silence it and do something, because it’s not helping, and I would tell my students to say, ok, I

275 don’t know what to do, this is too primitive, this sounds like a bad song, or, you know? But you need to choose something. Go and do this piece of music, and if it’s a bad piece of music, it’s a bad piece of music, but through going through the process, you get to the next piece.

DH: Yeah, but an internal dialogue doesn’t have to be doubtful. It can be, “oh, I love this—” It’s a monologue.

DH: It’s a monologue. Oh, you think a dialogue is a negative thing and a monologue is a positive thing?

Well, I, yeah, yeah. Because I, I would not really accept that someone is telling me what to do, I am the creative one.

DH: But you’re saying, ok, so wait, wait, wait, oh, so it’s not like negative in the sense that you’re being forced to do it . . . but so, if someone is, someone has said something and you thought it was a good idea, and you internalized it, you wouldn’t want to admit that.

If you put it that way maybe—

One of the filmmakers, L, discovered in talking with me that what she had always framed as an intrinsic part of herself could also be seen as an internal dialogue she was having with parts of herself.

Yeah, I think that a lot of the internal dialogue was about working or not working. When I wasn’t working on it beating myself up because I didn’t have time and when I did have time not being able to bring myself to do it. So the whole conversation became about self-flagellation. “Why am I not done yet?”

When we met for a second time she commented, Our conversation last time it’s brought up some interesting notions about what function does this serve this critical dialogue. Is this getting me anywhere, if it’s not getting me anywhere, why am I doing it? . . . . I thought about what you said . . . am I not claiming ownership of it and saying, “Oh this is just happening now and I feel bad” rather than saying, “I’m doing this to my self again, and it’s counterproductive.” And as a friend of mine and I have been iterating to each other . . . once in a while one of us will say to the other one, “you need to tell that voice to go—literally to bug off.” Honestly getting to that point where I’m aware that I’m letting myself go down that path, getting and telling that voice to

276 bug off is—I don’t know that it’s something that always works necessarily, it’s a great idea.

The female filmmaker IN has already been quoted describing her fear of internalizing what she imagined would be the negative opinions of the important men in her life.

The writer B talked about walking the tight rope between needing to be critical and at the same time giving space for words to appear spontaneously.

Well, when it’s purely an editorial voice, it is negative, to me. Not negative, but um, it’s less useful in some ways, because it doesn’t, it’s, it’s not engaging, um, with part of creativity that I like, it’s more like just commenting on something.

Well, that’s the trick, I mean you have to tune into it some, because you have to be critical about what you’re doing, but you can’t pay attention to much, because it’ll stop, it very, very quickly silences the other part, the more intuitive thing. And I work with teenagers teaching them writing and teaching them writing from an interior place, purely, for the most part, we don’t even look at, like, normal process until we get to the revision part, and that’s the whole key of the work is to get them to silence the critical voices that stop the action of the authentic mind and it’s really hard, because, you know, school is more than ever about a very strict form and kids are impressionable and indoctrinated, and also want to please, so, you know, if their teachers are like, it has to be like this, and they want to please, so that’s how they start thinking, so to get them to think otherwise is tricky.

A third form of an internal dialogue that was ubiquitous and extremely important was each artist’s search for his or her authentic voice. The stock phrase “finding or being true to one’s authentic voice” presupposes that one could use an inauthentic voice, and raises the possibility of an inner dialogue between false and authentic inner voices both vying for aesthetic power.

In the eleven interviews described in detail almost all of the participants approached this subject at some point. At our first meeting Eva credited her therapy as helping her find and remain faithful to her own voice. J addressed his need throughout his career to remain faithful to his “authentic” voice even when it cost him a degree of

277 fame and ease of mind as in his conflict with the government. Seth described his inability to betray his writing, I think a little bit, but not so much to make me think that. Like, maybe I would write something that could potentially appeal to a wider audience . . . but I mean, I just can’t, like, I could physically not write The Da Vinci Code, by virtue of just the way, level of attention to the prose, you know, and the level, the interest, what the thematic of that novel are, or . . . any thriller, or John Grisham novel or something like that, I mean, those guys, I just can’t, I couldn’t, I could not, it’s not even a question of choosing to do that anymore. I just, I don’t think that I could, and so, which is good, because I think that insulates me from having to completely betray myself or whatever . . .

The photographer Harryette revealed that psychotherapy had helped her simultaneously discover her true voice and protect and shelter it from derision from others. The writer Francesca’s passionate immersion in her characters, her need to ward of her inner critic and her inner editor because they didn’t allow her spontaneous creativity to come forth and her belief that the mission of her fiction writing was to depict the complexity of the “theatre of life” and create empathy in the reader towards a multiplicity and range of people, all strongly suggest that she cared about the authenticity of her voices.

The writer Dorothy talked about her “intuitive” trust as a young woman in her “impish, pushing challenging voice.” Magpie referred throughout all of our meetings to the close attention she paid to her muse and her lack of concern for what was de rigueur in the art world. At the conclusion of our last meeting she asserted that if she weren’t true to herself her creative voice would wither up and die.

Of the other artists I interviewed at least three directly brought up their struggle to find and to be true to their authentic voice.

278 As JC said, I think, I think the issue is in some ways, trying to mute my own, you know, I, I, my approach, my intellectual approach, trying to mute that, and just let that other tone come up, something that’s more authentic than I am.

What’s the point of following a trend, because you’re always going to be, there’s always going to be change, I mean, change is good, but you know, I think being authentic is a lot better . . . I think as the young writer, I think because I went through a program that I felt was very destructive in, certainly the female voice was not respected they didn’t listen but, so I think it took me a very long time to actually find my voice and to be happy about my voice.

DH: Ah ha! So let’s talk about that. So your own voice, though, when you say your own voice, you’re talking about a not-you voice? The character through you— Right.

This is an interesting paradox. The authentic voices that the writers strived for were in fact fictitious voices.

The writer and painter NC’s history as the child of a clergyman infused her sense of self.

I would have thought more about what other people were going to think. I was raised as a minister’s daughter, and a minister’s daughter from the moment she is born, has to worry about what “they” will think. And I remember my brother, who is in his late seventies said, NC, do you know who “they” were? And I said, I don’t know, but a lot of our life was, was predicated on what “they” would think…But I was very rebellious about this, and sometimes (laughing), but my brother was too. For example, he was in the Civil Rights Movement, he went down to Mississippi and got himself arrested, and, and for a clergyman to do that, it could have backfired in our home.

DH: Was he a clergyman?

Yes, yes, he was a minister, too. So was my grandfather. And three uncles.

DH: Oh, my God. So it took a while for me to keep them out of the internal dialogue and just have it with myself.

279 The writer B raised an interesting dilemma that he faced as a writer. At times it was difficult for him to distinguish the difference between what he found pleasing from what was authentic. Like Magpie who predicted that her creative spirit would wither and die if it was tampered with, he too found, creating something that wasn’t authentic while initially “sexy” was ultimately unbearable.

Writing is a balance between mining the authentic thing that’s inside of you and organizing it without involving your ego to the point where it just becomes about expressing your talent or your technique or your, something that just pleases you in some way . . . which is hard . . . What I would do is I would overhear the voices, and then I would mess it up, I would be like, oh, wouldn’t it be better if it was actually this way, or that way…” What pleases me as a writer and my ego as a writer, sometimes is not even authentic . . . Part of what bothers me is what is original? You know, if I can’t even, I’ll never know what is, what is who I am, and what is my creativity and what is my originality, if I can’t do it, you know, that, that really bothers me, if I can just inherit forms that already exist, that is never satisfying, you know, that’s like, that’s easy to do enough, but— DH: But do you always find that what you’re calling an authentic voice is not influenced ever . . . the other outside voices . . . ?

It may or may not be, but I know when it is itself, inherently, above everything else, it certainly isn’t going to be some completely different thing, because no completely different thing has happened for a long time, but it is true to me, you know, and that is something as an artist that really is important for me, in fact, it’s essential, you know, and it’s part of why I stopped writing, I went through this process where I created this play that took me a year to write it, and I wrote it as an assignment, almost, for the theater that commissioned me to write it, and at the end of the process, it was like, you know, I had done this thing, and I got paid to do it, and I really valued the artistic exchange that I had with the person I worked with, but the thing itself, at the end, didn’t satisfy, you know, didn’t express something that I felt, in some way, real, and uh, I almost couldn’t face it, I was almost thinking, I don’t know what this is, it’s like, I can’t work on this anymore. I just knew that, and I set it aside and I started to write fiction again because I felt like I wanted to immerse myself in a world that yeah that I didn’t have to share the process with someone, that I hopefully could, that I would return to some more solitary, more sort of complete thing that would hopefully be a truly fresh approach in some way.

280 In the psychoanalytic culture of theories, the concept of authenticity has gained traction; whether it be in the language of Winnicott’s notion of the false self, Kohut’s idea of the core self or Steven Mitchell’s search for the authentic self. Donald Winnicott (1958) worried about the creation of a false self, a self that has molded its shape to fit the perceptions and expectations of other people (such as parental figures) as opposed to being attuned to the person’s true self. Heinz Kohut’s theory of self psychology (1970) focused on what he thought were the building blocks necessary for the development of the self. He emphasized that for a robust core self to develop, one’s caretaking environment needed to perform three interconnected essential self-object functions: (a) the need to be mirrored; (b) the need to idealize; and (c) the need to experience a twinship with someone. If these developmental needs are sufficiently addressed he believed a person developed an “authentic core self;” if not the person would have “deficits in his self structure” and would be prone to fragmentation or over stimulation, or feelings of being overburdened or understimulated. (Wolf, 1995, p.108) Whereas Steven Mitchell did not believe in helping his clients bolster up a core self, he believed in discovering and asserting one’s authentic self.

Helping a client attain a sense of authenticity or a sense of having a core self or a true self has become one of the goals of a successful treatment. It was interesting that the language of authenticity had invaded the lexicon of these artists. Having gone to art school I know that psychoanalytic studies often were interjected into the curriculum.

I wonder if cross-fertilization was responsible for the interest these artists had in what they called authenticity; or is this quest an intrinsic developmental challenge most artists struggle with? Does serious art making by its nature ask artists for some

281 measure of introspection (whether it be verbal or visceral) in order to find the subject and style that matches themselves?

A fourth important type of internal dialogic process that was experienced as a part of the self was described as a free associative (stream of consciousness, Joyceian) process. Anton Ehrenzweig in his seminal work The Hidden Order of Art described the creative imagination as syncretistic. The artist grasps the whole before knowing the details and then amasses layers of thought. All of the artists except one (Theseus K) who practiced a free associative process emphatically claimed it was dialogic. In the eleven interviews already drawn, Harryette, J and Theseus K depended upon and described how their rich inner life housed associative lines of inquiry that informed their artwork. Several other artists also relied on this process.

B: Well, true stream of consciousness is, you know, it’s the experience of completely without judgment listening to all the voices and recording what you can as it flies, and you know, the voice is, you know, I’m using voices to describe a wide range of impressions, it could be images, it could be sounds, it could be sensations, but it’s just the way the mind works naturally, or authentically, or without prescription, and when I first started writing, I used to really practice that a lot, I thought I was, anyway, and in fact it was really more sort of getting into like this intoxication with words rather than actually being in the moment in some way.

FU: But I think the thing that I’m trying to talk about is something like classic free association where you have just very vague impulses . . . Very interesting things can come out of that. Ideas that you might not achieve if you just have one approach to think about. On the other hand, rational life has value so that I don’t want to just create these sort of inane navel-gazing blips. But that is something that actually conveyed. There is the dialogue between what I believe can be understood and what I’m not sure can be understood . . . I’ve really kind of become immersed in subjects for several years, I guess. I read, read books on, I’ve read subjects related to the idea. I read pretty broadly, pretty broadly on the subject and I, I guess my main intention was to, to acquire, to flesh out these ideas that I had that would kind of blur the distinction between humans and nonhumans and blur, I guess the sort of definition of what the natural was. Other things I’d read kind of led up to this also, just in, just comparing readings in climatology to readings in human psychology . . . . And of course, um, yeah,

282 people like Hobbs . . . Marxist historical materialism, I mean of course, Freud had something very similar like . . . through the restrictions of, of society, we’ll end up with neurotic behavior, but it’s much preferable to unrestricted, dirty diaper life of the uncivilized human.

Harryette elaborated upon her creative process when she described the impact the inventor of the Polaroid camera, Edward Lands, had on her intellectual and artistic worldview: He was a brilliant man, scientist, and he connected everything to everything.

Everything he learned impacted every bit of the next thing that he learned, or the next thing that he did, and I was totally mesmerized by this guy. I was like, I want to think like that, because the world is connected, and that’s one of the reasons why this project is both been so difficult and so kind of amazing, in American Alphabet, because the way that I am mapping out the relationships of the pictures begins to visualize how I see everything as having intersections with everything else . . . The thing about the creative process is when you say the creative process; it makes it sound like there is one way. What’s very clear to me is that it happens in a myriad of ways. So I do have an internal dialogue, and it’s with lots of things . . .

The Third Dialogic Arena

The Conditions that Either Helped or Hindered the Emergence of the Artist’s Inner Dialogue The first external condition mentioned by several of the artists as necessary for an internal dialogic process to unfold was the need for a creative space. Writers such as Virginia Woolf have written forceful and well-known pieces about the need for a space of one’s own to make art.

In the interview with Francesca she referred to Virginia Woolf.

I see I mentioned Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own here, and I think what she had to say to women was incredibly important. Because women inhabited domestic space, and a domestic space is crowded with people with needs, physical people and usually, I have dogs and cats, with needs, and how to concentrate clearly and invent and imagine becomes a much more difficult

283 problem when your other main job is to tend to all these other needs that have nothing to do with your vision and your concentration and your, you know . . .

DH: Inner life.

Francesca’s comment that the tasks of mothers are “crowded with people with needs” echoed the observations made by Dorothy. Because as a woman she occupied a caretaking role, Francesca paid careful attention to creating and guarding the space that allowed her access to her internal creative dialogue.

Dorothy remembered her practice of holing up in a hotel for four days, not sleeping (and when she used drugs, using drugs) and immersing herself in her writing.

This process allowed her ideas to come out uncensored and uninterrupted by the detritus of day to day living. More recently she had discovered another way to create an art space that involved moving and writing down everything that came to her mind.

Eva described her practice as a young girl of lying outside in the bushes and daydreaming as contributing to her ability and wish to be an artist. As an adult artist she reproduces this daydream state, because it allows her inner thoughts to instruct her on what next to do on her canvas. She facilitates this by sitting in her studio and playing Solitaire over and over again looking out of the corner of her eye at a painting she’s working on and waiting for her inner voices to spontaneously reveal and repeat themselves.

Magpie also had as a child an outside haven in her orchard, where her inner life blossomed. As an adult to help her self become more sensually immersed in her art making she would recreate in a Stanislavskyesque manner her memories of the orchard.

J took long walks and wrote down his observations and associations as he walked. As he painted, he listened to a library of music and texts that he had

284 deliberately compiled and recorded. He had chosen these recordings because he believed they elicited painterly responses. Theseus K also talked about listening to music to give him sensual information to inspire him as he painted.

Two other artists also brought up the topic of creating a space that encouraged them to create. IN, a filmmaker, described her need to protect her inner life so she could cultivate her ideas outside the internalized glare of other people’s opinions, I have to build this sort of little garden where the, the beautiful flowers, the poems, the little film books can grow and not be overshadowed by, you know, these massive demands . . . those are internalized things that they, you know, represented in my mind, they’re, you know, they’re boyfriends, my dad, you know, some of the other master, masterful artists that I’ve encountered in my life.

B emphasized his need to write on a daily basis as a strategy to make it an integral part of himself.

I write every damn day.

DH: For years?

Yeah, for, for many, for a long time, every morning . . . I mean Tom Robbins, who wrote, he writes in the same place at the same time every day because he wants to, he doesn’t want the muse to not be able to find him, he says something like that, and it’s kind of the same deal . . . you know, writing might be, I might rewrite a sentence, you know, spend an hour working on that one sentence, that and that’s it sort of for that day, but yeah . . . sometimes it’s not actually sitting down at the computer and writing, sometimes it’s like chipping away at an idea, you know, I think like the whole thing I was saying about kung fu training and stuff like, I have to get this form so unconscious in my body that it uh, I’m not even aware of it, it’s just part of the approach.

B compared his writing ritual to Kung Fu training: martial artists believe in the necessity for “unremitting practice . . . so that you realize the principle from within your own heart, study hard to absorb these things into your body.” (Parsons, 2000, p.

18)

285 A second condition that was both described as a language and as having a profound impact on many artists’ internal dialogue was the importance of listening to music. Different artists described their art making as responding to music much like they would respond to another person’s opinion. They also found that listening to music helped them silence their self-critical inner voices.

J used music to help elicit specific moods conducive to his art making. Gretchen used drumming to help her mourn the death of her mother. Theseus K drew symbolic equivalencies between certain composers and the responses they engendered from him as a painter. He even had a theory of color inspired by music.

Wagner is also a great colorist and in my, this whole theory, I’ve done a theory of color which I use, you have color tones which go, they go from warm tone here, and you’re going to cool in the shadows. You’ve got this same thing here, as you paint, you are constantly using little tubes of colors and I have learned to hate colors in the tubes, I hate them. And, cause they’re so content-ridden, so what I’m trying to do is make colors, which are more chromatic tones, with the mixtures of tones, and I’m even sort of tired of colors which are just plain old color, so I have these little sort of almost pointillist sort of touches of color, done in terms of bands or textures, and I’m trying to create a new kind of harmony. This is very much, was stimulated for me, years ago, by listening to the music of Debussy, because of Debussy’s music, you have really sort of coloristic chords, they’re not necessarily structural like you have in Beethoven or Brahms, they’re more of a mixing of odd tones to give it purely coloristic, which creates a great sense of atmosphere. So, and Wagner is so, and Von Weber before him, he referred a sort of beginning with that before. I see a pretty close touch with myself and music, and another thing about them is that in the art world, you have a lot of very trendy kind of things going on, here, and people are looking at what other artists are doing . . . but when you draw your sources from music . . .

The painter NC also ascribed linguistic and visual equivalencies in music that stirred her.

I, for instance, with these new drawings, do not do any sketches first. I turn on the, I turn on music; I try to cut off the part of my brain that’s analytical, and let her rip, and see what happens.

286 DH: Ok, so, the voice in you that’s analytic, how do you, how do you find that you shut it off?

To listen to music and actually pretty much concentrate on the music because, see, I, I have this feeling that the same aesthetic um, energy in a painting and a piece of music are exactly the same. There has to be balance of line, there has to be repetition, it has to be colored, there has to be passion, and all of those things work in poetry, literature, art, visual art, film, all of it, and I, I, I . . . don’t think about what this poem is, whether it’s a great poet or not, just listen to the music in the lyric, and then look at your poem and try to hear the music in that, and if it doesn’t have any music, go back and rethink it, because all of great poetry has music. Because, if you read, for instance, Neruda, you don’t need to know the Spanish, you don’t need to translate the Spanish, you can hear the music in the poem . . . I do, I do tend to like the classical, and I do tend to like some of the German, Bach and Brahms, particularly, and Mozart, because they have such beautiful poetry in their lines. You have a theme, you have an embellishment of the theme, you have often, a structure, which is very I think, biological. I think there’s certain music now that is so dissonant that it, it is disturbing to the point, and it’s disturbing at a lower level than an intellectual level.

Gio described his precise attention to creating a song list on his iPod that he could listen to while he painted. He said music kept him from feeling lonely, and “it helps me paint because it matches my brush strokes, or the way I’m drippings the paint.” As the jazz historian Phil Schaap phrased it, “Free jazz is the action painting of American music.” (The New Yorker, May 19, 2008, p.61) A third external condition that had an impact on several of the artists’ creative process was the need to move their bodies. As already pointed out, Dorothy’s rebirth as a writer was accomplished when she led her class through a series of movement based exercises. In the profile of the painter J, he described his habit of taking long walks during which he harvested the back and forth internal dialogue that spontaneously leapt forth.

So what I’m doing is as I’m walking, I’m writing, I walk and write, I like to do that . . . it’s a train, a train of ideas, train of thoughts, a train of thoughts, it’s like, you know . . . and it’s like, I have to go back and reinterpret later . . . this kind of open-ended walking, walk-write experience.

287

The synergy of the movement of ideas with the movement of his body as he walked elicited his creativity.

Of the 14 other artists, the composer IL told me Well if I get stuck . . . I’ll take a walk. I would say it’s a selective process, how the composer, creator selects . . . no one can explain how this first spark comes . . . from physical motion like Mahler was going for long walks to contemplate, so physical, I’d say it’s physical motion, walking.

DH: Do you walk?

Yeah, I like walking, yeah, yeah, it’s the solitude.

Movement and solitude both created an atmosphere that allowed him to hear his music. IL did not think in terms of listening to his internal dialogue; he preferred to describe these two conditions as advantageous to providing “the spark.”

When I asked the filmmaker L what she did to shut up the internal negative voices that plagued her when she worked on her animation and stopped her from working, she responded: I’m trying to think how I got out of it last time I was stuck, I think—one way was to just walk away from it. Literally walk away from it, like I got out of my house and I’ve been wearing my gym shoes a lot lately, as you can see, really unfashionable sneakers and just you know hitting the pavement. Hmmm.

A fourth external condition that had an impact on many of the artists’ inner dialogues was the impact of having a child. In Dorothy’s case she spoke at length about how having to tend to the physical and psychic needs of her child robbed her of the requisite amount of time and affective energy she needed to pay heed to her inner dialogue. Not surprisingly, five out of the six artists who mentioned the impact having a child had on their creative process were women. The male participant remembered his children as having benefited his process whereas the women found their children

288 hindered their process. Understanding the societal expectations of women in our culture that a mother “naturally should” serve as the primary source of care for their children, it comes as no shock that parenthood would be more time consuming for the mother than the father. One woman, IN, told me, Maybe when the kids grow up I can spend hours in the editing room again . . .

Till then its going to be hard for me to find the time to think about what I want to do let alone edit in the way I’d like my work to look.

As I was leaving her house the artist L remarked, Yeah, my birthday’s next week. I’ll be turning forty . . . I never thought I wanted kids but now I gotta decide. I see my friends with kids and they’ve stopped making art and that scares me.

I ran into her almost a year later and she was very pregnant. Several months ago I received a birth notice with a photograph of a very adorable little girl. We will see what having a daughter does to her art making.

The writer Francesca worried about how her creative process complicated her relationship with her son.

See the two most intense areas of my life are writing and being a mother. So the next very difficult very thing for me, cause I consider writing to be very difficult, I consider it to be very very difficult and very hard work, for me. The other gift is my children, I mean they are a gift, but they’re so draining, they’re so, they just take my attention, and, like if I just, like, if Loran were to come home early suddenly, and I’ve gotten into gear when I’m writing, I’m enraged, towards him, and you know, I try not to act enraged, but no, I just—I think it’s hard for the kids to witness sometimes, not so much for Jackie, although it’s true that she has a very artistic temperament, so she has a very easygoing time with drama, but you know, my poor son is, he doesn’t understand why I can just explode for no good reason. I mean there are reasons, and I tell him, maybe my days gone bad, so I think, you know, I think sometimes I really need my glasses of wine at the end of the day, because I really, from the emotional exertion, it’s very draining . . .

Another writer, JC, described how different her creative inner process had become once she had a child.

289

You know, I think my process has changed a lot. Before having a kid and after having a kid, simply because of the pressures of time, so you know, before I had all the time to think and reflect and dawdle now it’s a much more compressed process, so I feel like I need to take advantage of it when I feel that I know what I’m going to do, I have to take advantage of it, you know.

The one man, MM, commented that as youngsters his children had had an extremely positive influence on his creative process. Their presence had helped loosen him up and become more playful, Sometimes I’d be drawing and a kid . . . they’d be crawling over me— DH: Your kids?

So it’s that kind of um, freedom that, that I felt that the kids encouraged in me.

So uh, maybe I was just allowing myself a little more freedom, and uh, voices, I wish there were another way of thinking of it other than voices, but they, they are voices, encouraging me.

The fifth and last condition that had a profound impact on many artists’ inner dialogue was death. Of the eleven artists I described in Chapter V, five of them cited the death of an important person in their life as having had a profound impact on their internal dialogue and creative process. Gretchen, Dorothy and Magpie described forcefully how the death of a family member had, for a time, paralyzed them creatively.

Eva, on the other hand, experienced the death of her father as liberation. She no longer felt compelled to try and live a conventional life in order to please him. She was also inspired to create an entire body of work of painting in response to letters from her deceased mother. Harryette said a near death experience in her youth had made her interested in and less frightened by death. Icarus, while devastated, used Diana’s death to fuel his creativity. Theseus K attributed the Our Lady of the Angels School Fire as

290 having had a profound impact on him. His description of the impact that the deaths and maiming of his classmates had on his creative process was revelatory.

Well, ok, I’ll give you one, uh, in, early in my life, one of the most dramatic things that happened in my life when I was very young, was the burning of the Angels School fire. I was in that, ok?

DH: What is that?

That was in Chicago, the year was 1958, I believe I was in second grade, very young, and um, that was, 96 people were killed in that, right? And I can go back in my mind’s eye and December 1 or whatever it was of 1958, that day is extremely vivid, and it’s like every little memory of that day is like a photograph, smells and sights and sounds, are very real, and then it drops off after that, but that little period in there. So, in that fire, a couple people I knew died—so December 12, I was born, and the fire was on the first, so I would have been 7 then. Oh, anyway, the, the point is, though, when it first happened, it had a sense of, you were a child, and a lot of these things that were not filtered enough that you didn’t really realize the tragedy. In some cases you did, it was, there was a girl in my building, Roberta was her name, and she was a playmate of ours, she was a little bit older, she took care of us, but then as you get older, you sort of realize the tragedy even more because that person is constantly, a person at that age, at that time. I know that for instance, uh, what’s his name, the guy that wrote Peter Pan, Barrie, he based Peter Pan on his brother who died when he was 12 years old. And he was always that age, never grew up, I find this an interesting transference. So you had asked me for one experience, so that’s an experience, so now, how does that translate into what your work is doing . . . one would be just as experience, but there’s two takes on that, there’s the take of the horrible experience that happened at the time, the fire, and all those images, and smoke coming off the roof and people jumping, and just horrible. But then, as we went to school, the kids that were hurt in the fire were in classes that we were in, and the kids almost to a man had really almost sort of bright personalities, they were like, not all, there certainly were some exceptions, there were some that weren’t this way, but they had gone through a crucible, and came out the other end, almost literally, and became very life-affirming and I kind of liked, I made, I remember, I made very good friends with a girl named Marie. She sat next to me, but she was totally burnt over her whole face and everything, her skin just looked terrible, like a piece of cheese, and, and, but I was always impressed by this quality of hers that she was bright and lively and just charming, and I liked her very much, and yet she was horribly disfigured, right. I’m certain that with surgery, now, she’s back to probably looking fairly normal if she’s still alive, cause some of these kids had health problems in later life, but that little sort of incidence is just one sort of example that this is sort of a heroic thing. This is somebody who had been through a terrible experience, they had overcome it, and they’ve still have that on the one end, and then you have the tragedy with the horrible fire and kids were

291 killed on the other end, so there’s still life/tragedy/life/heroic and so forth, you will find yourself as you go through life, looking at things like that and looking for deeper levels of what that means, and so I, if you see somebody who for instance has a struggle of some kind to overcome, and it’s a friend, or someone you’re well acquainted with, you will think about what’s going on in their minds, and think about the struggles they’re facing and how they overcome them, and that is a touchstone to your own work.

His recollections of that day remained vividly alive in his sense memory and he credited it with having shaped the way he thought about life. He professed that the experience had deepened his ability to be empathic to the suffering of people and that it had intensified the seriousness with which he approached representation in art. David Aberbach (1989), in his article entitled “Creativity and Survivors: The Struggle for Mastery,” claimed that traumatic losses could act as motivation to create. The urge to search for one’s “robbed humanity” through art making, Aberbach maintained, enlisted the artist to be part of aliveness rather than surrender to the numbness of the trauma. (p.

34)

The Fourth Dialogic Arena

The Internal Dialogue the Artists Had with Me as a Result of our Conversations and its Impact on Their Creative Process According to the narrative model of psychotherapy, The construction of a story that one believes that has narrative coherence is thought to have more of an influence on current psychological life than does “historical truth.” (Stern, D., 1995, p. 37) According to this premise, the stories the artists created that described the nature of their internal dialogic process as they worked on art projects had the possibility to transform their awareness of and subsequent use of their internal dialogic

292 process. In fact, several of the participants reported that our conversations left their mark. The most dramatic example was that of Eva. She announced that the lively conversation we had stirred her up, Oh God, stuff got shook loose . . . You know you got me, by asking me these questions, it got me sort of thinking. And you know how that is when you start to think. Well, yeah. You know, I do blame you. I swear to God, when I talked to you, I haven’t been in treatment for seven or eight years. It’s like you were the first person, it’s like there is a way that a therapist asks questions, so I think it’s like, you know, I really sort of paid attention to what you were asking, and sort of, I think it’s just, you know, it’s like I was being held accountable again. …That’s what I always thought therapy was, it’s about being accountable, and it’s like I was being accountable again to like, speak the truth. There’s a lot to be said for that whole talking thing. You know you don’t get it anywhere else, therapy, I mean, I mean there’s a heck of a lot to be said for it. So that’s why I say I blame you, it’s because I started, I think it just shook something loose, and I ran with it.

One of the ways I “shook something loose” was that my description of the ways in which I mourned the death of my mother inspired her to develop an art project using her mother’s letters. This decision transformed how she related to the canvas and used paint. Her new work was no longer representative but was abstract responses with paint to the letters that she affixed to the canvas. Our conversation made an impact on how she painted.

A program of songs and monologues the writer and performer Dorothy performed incorporated an interpretation I made to her about the duality of her character. During our first meeting, I pointed out that one minute she described herself as selfish and sluggish but in other moments she described herself as empathic and engaged. I suggested that she wasn’t one way or the other. Despite these seeming like opposing traits they were both equally authentic conceits of her nature.

293 Seth told me that our first conversation helped him realize that he was in fact finished with his novel. At the beginning of our second interview he commented, I kind of concluded the novel that I was working on soon after we met, and so of course my feelings and thoughts about it changed because of that, and our conversation helped.

It also had surprised him that he had spent so much time during our conversation talking about how preoccupied he had become with calculating ways in which he could make a living as a writer. Prior to our discussion he had been embarrassed to admit to himself that something as crass as money would be a concern to him.

After both interviews he wrote me an email.

You caught me at a time when I was very keyed up about the psychological stakes, I guess, of writing, and so I do think I talked some things out with you.

Reading the transcripts was good. And I do FYI now often find myself floating around similar questions of dialogues going on between author and reader when I am in the classroom.

The writer Babe told me: Rereading the transcript of our interview was really helpful. I will hold onto it as a historical document describing where I was when I wrote this book. I am not sure that it influenced me at the time but reading it now helped me remember the me who wrote it and that’s worth something to me.

As earlier quoted, the filmmaker L believed that our conversation had shifted her stance toward her negative internal voice, Our conversation last time, it’s brought up some interesting notions about what function does this serve this critical dialogue. Is this getting me anywhere, if it’s not getting me anywhere, why am I doing it ?….It’s probably that Midwestern Catholic sensibility not to be a showoff and this notion that don't get too excited something is going to turn on you . . . Probably my parents taught me that . . . . But I thought about what you said . . . am I not claiming ownership of it and saying, “oh this is just happening now and I feel bad” rather than saying, “I’m doing this to my self again, and it’s counterproductive . . .

And as a friend of mine and I have been iterating to each other . . . once in a

294 while one of us will say to the other one, “You need to tell that voice to go . . .literally to bug off.” . . . Honestly getting to that point where I’m aware that I’m letting myself go down that path, getting and telling that voice to bug off is—I don’t know that it’s something that will always work necessarily, it’s a great idea.

I chose to actively engage in the discussions with the artists. Eva, Dorothy, Seth, Babe and L believed my responsive engagement helped them.

At the time of our interviews J was coincidentally creating a case for the IRS explaining how the activities he engaged in and the expenses they required fed his mind and were therefore a necessary part of his creative process. My dissertation’s emphasis on exploring the importance of an internal dialogue helped him formulate his position and gave him moral support.

Several of the other artists have kept me in mind and even now a year or two after we last met, I continue to receive emails and postcards from them with information about speakers coming to town giving lectures on subjects they think might be relevant to my dissertation, or to inform me of their upcoming shows. I hope the interview process was helpful for those artists with whom I lost contact with as well. In all the cases, as Belenky (1986) stated, people make meaning through conversation and personal reflection. Hopefully, our conversations gave the artists a chance to think out loud and thereby articulate and process their own thoughts.

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CHAPTER VII

SUMMARY, DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS & CONCLUSIONS

Summary of the Findings Twenty-six artists were interviewed and responded to the question: Do you engage in an internal dialogue when you make art and if you do can you describe it?

As my friend who painted the portrait of General Custer initially did not recognize that he conducted internal dialogues, so too in the beginning many of the artists I interviewed did not understand the extent to which an internal dialogue played a part in their inner life. At the outset I had speculated that the phenomenon of internal dialogue often “lives in a liminal space between being a conscious process and a preconscious or nonverbal process, a space that is rarely investigated.” Donnel Stern described this phenomenon as “unformulated experience . . . . Thoughts can exist in an inchoate form.” (1991, p. 81) Almost like water is to a fish, the internal dialogue many of the artists carried on was so integral to their normal day to day life that it was not noticed until I pointed it out. While this supposition was true in many cases, I was surprised to find several of the artists were aware of their inner dialogue (i.e., Magpie, J, Gretchen) and in fact prized it as an important component of their creative process.

296 Upon examination I was able to identify 15 types of internal dialogic processes within four distinct categories that are integral to an internal dialogic processes. These categories were: (a) the artists who experienced their inner dialogue as being a conversation with someone or something; (b) the artists who experienced their inner dialogue as being with aspects of themselves; (c) the conditions that effected the artists’ access to their inner dialogue; and (d) the inner dialogue several of the artists had with me as a result of our conversations and its impact on their art making process.

Discussion of the Findings This research grew predominantly out of an object-relations and relational point of view. The intention of this investigation was to explore several questions. First, by exploring the experience of those artists who used an internal dialogue, I wanted to determine if there were internal dialogic processes common to the participating artists.

The hope was that if the artists experienced corresponding processes, this knowledge could be of use to psychotherapists in understanding and assisting their artist clients. I believe the knowledge gleaned from the interviews can be useful.

Second, this study was conducted out of an intellectual interest in exploring how relationships, both real and internal, are an integral part of normal human life.

Because the concept of an internal dialogic process is in keeping with both object relations and relational theory, I was hopeful that the dialogues I had with the artists would contribute to these theoretical paradigms. I believe this was the case.

A third, derivative concern of the study was to question the myth of the isolated artist. He—and I use the male pronoun advisedly—is imagined in the culture as being

297 self-involved, rebellious, tortured, and oblivious to other people. My position was that while this stereotype was true of some artists, many other artists seek out and appreciate a supportive community. This premise was richly confirmed. In addition, I was also correct in proposing that some artists who appear lonely or isolated actually had an internal world in which their creative process was dependent upon internal dialogic ruminations.

As I speculated in my literature review, the need to connect with other people is ubiquitous throughout the artistic process. Even when the internal interaction was not experienced as being with a sentient person it was often described as a conversation or debate between two or more stimuli, each impacting the other. To my mind once the concept of a back and forth dialogue enters the conversation the shadow of human discourse is imposed on the interaction. At the beginning of this thesis Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), the originators of the term “relational therapy,” were quoted as saying, “everything exists in a relational matrix.” This theoretical observation resonated throughout the dissertation. There were countless examples of how immersed the artists were in a relational matrix.

In conjunction with this an important finding of this study is that for many of the artists acknowledging that they carried on an inner dialogue and experiencing themselves as existing in a relational matrix were interwoven concepts both integral to their art making process. Magpie’s painting of beautiful flowers exemplified, in her words, “a dialogue” she was having with her dead niece. She also experienced it as an embodiment of what mobilized her to make many of her paintings; Magpie painted what she considered testimonials commemorating her relationships with people and

298 places she loved. In this form she metaphorically concretized the ineffable internal relational matrix that she lived in. Without these internal conversations with both real and imagined memories from her complex history of relationships with people, animals and places, the urge to make art would have vanished. Seth emphatically disclosed that the driving force behind his creativity was the relational matrix between himself and other authors. He acknowledged that without the inspiration he got from reading books by other writers his own creative process would deeply suffer. Harryette confirmed that these two concepts intermingled. Both her relationships and the conversations she had that were imaginary (i.e., Oprah) and real (i.e., her poet friend) influenced her to read and explore ideas and places, which she eventually transformed into her photographed art. J remembered feeling oppressed and depressed by his peer group as a young man because they painted in a minimalist fashion and derided other art forms as being sentimental and “dead.” The relational matrix he was immersed in was stupefying. He described his exposure to Renaissance and Gothic art as opening a “dialogue” with an aesthetic world that made him feel alive. Changing the relational matrix, within which he associated himself as an artist, opened up the content of his inner dialogue, which transformed his creative process.

There were also those artists who recognized these two registers existed and were interwoven but who had misgivings about integrating one or the other, or both.

For example, the women artists: IN, a filmmaker who has worked on many local films and documentaries and has written, produced, and directed a full-length independent feature film; and JC, a woman writer, who has published in nationally recognized literary journals both worried about their place in the “relational matrix” of their

299 professions. They experienced the atmosphere in their fields as saturated with prejudices against women artists. In conjunction with this, IN made a deliberate effort to disallow an internal dialogue for fear that it would elicit the unwanted voices of male colleagues and family members. Although JC and IN recognized themselves as being in dialogue and creating within the context of the masculine art community, they were leery of the relationship. This is particularly noteworthy because both of these women came of age in the 1970s when the Women’s Movement and art criticism were just beginning to investigate problems related to the dual issues of the plight of women artists and the objectification of women in art. Three seminal articles on the topic of women in the arts from that time period by Linda Nochlin, John Berger and Laura Mulvey were the subject of a myriad of interdisciplinary commentary and ongoing polemics and were imbedded in the relational matrix of intellectual discourse in the art world at the time. As an art student in the 1980s I was repeatedly assigned to read these polemics and the faculty, male and female, critiqued the art I made using the concepts iterated in these articles. It became de rigueur to at least give lip service to these ideas.

During our discussion, both IN and I referenced the influential article of Laura Mulvey, a British film critic, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.� In 1973 Mulvey published this controversial essay using the theories of Lacan and Freud; her views asserted that the film viewer, whether male or female, sees films from the perspective of the male protagonist. She believed that the figure of a woman on screen is inevitably reduced by the spectator into an object of desire.

Independent filmmaking blossomed as attempts were made on the part of an active core of women artists and some male artists to challenge filmmaking

300 conventions, both thematically and in the use of the camera that identified women as primarily objects of desire, not subjects of agency. IN had trained in a school setting where there was an active feminist presence in her filmmaking department and she had participated in the movement. Therefore her disheartened appraisal of the chances women filmmakers had for success in the present day relational matrix of filmmaking must be heard in the context of her having been active in efforts to transform cinema and the community of filmmakers.

The painter and art critic Theseus K initially decried utilizing internal dialogues, although ultimately he concluded that he did. On the other hand he was proud to acknowledge his immersion within the relational matrix of artists from the past. During the first meeting I had with him, in the course of two hours he regaled me with anecdotes about the lives of the composers, citing Sibelius, Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky, Charpier, and many more. He discussed Shakespeare’s plays The Tempest and Hamlet and Sophocles’ plays Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus as well. He described what he admired about the painters and painting styles of Gothic architecture, Renaissance Art, Leonardo Da Vinci, early Mondrian, Michelangelo’s drawings, Rembrandt and Braque. This giddy array of artists he affiliated himself with did not, however, include many of the artists and art forms practiced in the past seventy years.

Similar to IN who noted the significance of the theories of feminism on her art, Thesesus K was impelled to develop a stance toward the theories of Modernism and Post Modernism. He felt that his relationship with the art scene, propped up by these theories, was at worst antagonistic and at best apathetic.

Theseus K: Ok, well, think about it in these terms. You’ve got a tremendous love affair.

301 DH: Right, right.

Theseus K: The love affair is with a person you love.

DH: Art? Thesesus K: If that’s who you’re relating to, and the person and yourself, but that’s your little private world there, your joys and pleasures, you go off to the country together, that’s your little private world. Well, if some guy comes in and says, I’m the love doctor, I’m going to talk to you about your love life and make it better, you know? And you should be doing your love life this way, cause this is what they’re doing in New York, right? And what kind of a love life is that, that’s the way I think about it, it’s like, who needs you, guy?

In this parable, Theseus K eschewed any ties to the present day art culture yet minutes before and moments later in the same interview he was proud to be included in the relational matrix of artists in the neo classicist tradition: You can look at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and you can see that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring began with Rimsky-Korsakoff and you can see that they came into being with Hayden and Mozart, so there’s always somebody that, you’ve got to start somewhere, and you’re standing on the shoulders of giants when you’re looking at your work. I sort of have that in an obvious way, like you can see the neoclassical roots of my work.

As discussed earlier, despite his own use of the word “language” to describe many of the influences that marked his involvement in his art process, he was initially reluctant to consider that he used an internal dialogue as part of his art-making practice.

His disavowal of carrying on an internal dialogue with these “languages,” yet his acceptance of the idea of “standing on the shoulders” of great artists was difficult to understand. The explanation he gave was that for him the idea of an internal dialogue implied an analytic rather than an affect-based investigation. In addition he thought it meant he was copying other artists. One other artist, the composer IL, also believed that if a composition was influenced by an internal imaginary dialogue that implied that it would not be his original idea. The notion that an idea was no longer his own if it came

302 out of an internal imaginary conversation was strange and unexpected to me since the conversation was of his own invention and was going on in his head. Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence appears to have validity.

I was surprised to discover the fickle nature of language. During this investigation there were myriad different connotations each artist gave the concept of an “internal dialogue.” The importance of language’s role in determining how people see and engage in the world and the inherent subjectivity in people’s use of language was explored in the earlier discussion about the importance of semiotics and hermeneutic interpretations in a qualitative study such as this one. The need to unravel and clarify what each artist meant when using the words “internal dialogue” was something I thought I had sufficiently anticipated. I was wrong.

The definitions the artists came up with for what an internal dialogue was were not as random as Humpty Dumpty would have had it; however there was a wide array of definitions. They ranged from ones as straightforward as: an internal dialogue consisted of internal conversations the artists had with real people in their lives, or with imaginary people or with different aspects of themselves (i.e., the internal editor with the internal writer) to other less obvious definitions. Several of the artists described an internal dialogue as the interplay between their emotions and the art piece; others identified an internal dialogue as what happens when music stimulates brush strokes and choices of color. The relationship between space and bodies in motion was identified as an internal dialogue. The task of prioritizing what images, projects, etc., the artist should and should not do was also identified as an important internal dialogue.

Several artists thought an internal dialogue was always negative.

303 It was expected yet simultaneously gave me pause to realize that the participants not only had a specific understanding of the meaning of the term inner dialogue but that they often assumed their own definition was the only one anyone could have. The range of meanings the artists had underscored the important premise of psychotherapy; that we cannot assume that we know what our clients mean, we must ask our clients how they define their words. We must be aware of equivocations.

Another important insight into the function of an internal dialogue iterated by both the writer Francesca and the photographer Harryette was the observation that an internal dialogue comes out of the question “Why?” To ask “Why” invites a response and an investigation; through an investigation one’s curiosity is often rewarded, not stymied. A dialogue keeps a process moving.

Implications and Conclusions: Clinical and Theoretical for the Social Work Field The possibility of this research being of benefit to clinical social work was reinforced when of the 26 participant artists in this project, 3 of the artists volunteered that psychotherapy had played a major role in helping them become the artists they were. It can only benefit our clinical work with artists if we refine our understanding of the inner working of artists’ creative processes. This study revealed that artists, often unwittingly, engage in internal dialogues.

In examining the multiple functions delineated by the artists of what constituted an internal dialogue, certain lessons can be gleaned. For those artists who are unaware of their inner dialogue, becoming aware of it and its impact on their psyche can be useful. L realized during our conversation that she engaged in a relentless negative self-

304 effacing inner dialogue. She identified this dialogue as an internalized manifestation of her exacting parents, whom she had tried to extricate from her conscious sense of self without realizing that she had failed to do so in this semi unconscious form. She also realized that this voice was not intrinsic to her and that she wanted to learn how to stop giving it authority over her sense of self. In several other cases (e.g., B and IN) the artists drew a link between their semi conscious internal dialogue and genetic influences that had an impact on them. Helping our clients pay attention to their internal voices may be one way we can help them gain access to their unmetabolized past.

Unlike L, there were other artists who considered their internal dialogue as a positive influence and they depended on it to inspire and guide them as they made art.

The techniques they developed over time to help these positive inner voices come forward are delineated in detail in Chapter VII. For example, some of the artists described listening to music while they worked and one artist described how she played Solitaire. Both activities sufficiently preoccupied their minds so as to block out intruding thoughts and helped them pay attention to their creative inner dialogue. Other artists believed that taking walks or dancing allowed their inner thoughts to germinate and flow. These artists were creating a milieu in which a process—much like what Freud conceptualized in his paper “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” as “free floating (evenly suspended, hovering) attention.”(Volume 12, p.111) could flourish. This form of attention allowed the analyst to associate to her clients’ associations rather than the literal words the client spoke. The premise being

305 that this allowed a deeper understanding of the clients meanings. These artists used a parallel technique to help them articulate their artistic impulses.

Theory One of the most important findings of this research is that there is an equivalency between the concept of an internal dialogue and the concept of objects as described in object relations theory. Naturally the unconscious processes that define the complexity of an “object” cannot elegantly and breezily be made manifest in the voices that make up an internal dialogue. However, manifestation of one’s internal objects in the form of semi-conscious inner voices does appear to exist. The link between object relations theory and an internal dialogic process was also evident in the similarity between the function of internal dialogues, art making and Donald Winnicott’s description of the purpose of play. Winnicott identified play as being “potential or transitional space,” which he defined as being a space that allows a child to imagine, practice and pretend to control the outer world.” Play allows a child to feel a sense of agency. It permits the child to both act out uncivilized desires in a benign manner and to practice socially admired behavior. Play is not only inner psychic reality but is also not part of the external world. It is somewhere in between. It is connected to real objects (a Barbie doll, a pile of blocks), but the child’s emotional reaction to the objects and the stories the child creates are laden with more than actual reality. Winnicott described the therapeutic encounter as being similar to the transitional aspect of play.

He suggested that the interchange between the therapist and the client needed to incorporate elements of the fanciful interplay of subjective and objective reality. This

306 concept also applies to the function an internal dialogue may serve when an artist is making art.

One excellent example of this was Magpie’s relationship to her paintings. Since her husband’s and niece’s deaths, her art making process consisted of stories she told herself and the conversations she had with these two deceased loved ones as she painted. The paintings that came about through her imaginative playful construction of an alternative reality served to reanimate the people she loved, acting as tributes to them and functioning as a way to tell them and the viewer how she was enduring and making sense of their deaths.

Not only did her husband’s and niece’s deaths inspire Magpie to paint but her process of painting these tributes to them provided her with potential space. It also corroborated Hanna Segal’s contention that art can reanimate positive memories. Her process can serve the same function for an engaged viewer. A viewer recognizes that the picture is on a canvas and is painted, however it can still elicit a strong emotional response if the viewer becomes immersed in the world of the canvas.

It is possible that Winnicott’s notion of the function of transitional objects also applies. Classically a transitional object is a soft toy or a blanket that feels good to cuddle with, thus allowing the child to infuse it with maternal significance. By virtue of its dependability and the child’s control over it, it can be called upon when needed. For Magpie, these paintings were representative in a metaphoric fashion of people she loved, particularly her husband who had been an important source of comfort and love for her. In cases such as this, the painting, like a teddy bear, is charged with multiple meanings, is infused with an affective significance well beyond its reality, provides a

307 tie to a significant person, can withstand mistreatment (e.g., abstract garish colors and brush strokes, pieces sewn, glued staples on the surface of the canvas) and is a source of comfort.

There are several important weaknesses in this analogy. First, a child has but one object (or one type of object), which she eventually sets aside, It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning and this is because the transitional phenomena have been diffused, have become spread out over whole intermediate territory between “inner psychic reality” and “the external world as perceived by two persons in common, that is to say, over the whole cultural field.”

(Winnicott, 1951, p. 233) In contrast, it often takes many paintings, sculptures, performances, movies, before the technical or psychic issue the artist is working out gets resolved. It might even be the organizing theme of their entire body of work. While the significance of the series of paintings may speak to a vital relationship, like a teddy bear does for a child, since the content transforms from each painting to the next, the similarity between the two is not identical.

Second, some art projects elicit clashing feelings and difficult dark memories resulting in the artists’ desire to avoid working on them. Whereas for a child, the transitional object is primarily soothing and even when the object is the recipient of the child’s violent feelings, the child seeks the transitional object out.

Third, while it is important that the family recognizes the significance the transitional object holds for the child, it is primarily a private relationship between the child and the object, whereas the artist is creating the art object/experience to communicate both with him or herself and with the public. Something that may start as a private internal dialogue, dense with personal meanings, transforms into an art object

308 that may likely be experienced by an audience. Once it enters a dialogue with the world the artist’s relationship with it is naturally transformed. Unlike the child who assigns the teddy bear his own personal meanings, an artist, from the beginning to the end, must simultaneously relate to the art object as having both personal significance and potential public meanings outside of his or her control. The possibility of the art object having meaning for other people is an important function of the art object. As Ehrenzweig noted, the art object is ultimately an “other” with a life of its own outside the control of its creator, the artist. In relational terms it is a subject with its own meanings. Jessica Benjamin’s thesis that where “objects were subjects must be” (Benjamin, 1995, p. 29) becomes complicated. For some artists once their art piece is introduced to the world its personal significance is altered. Even if the artist has the capacity to recognize the art piece as having an independent identity the public now defines the art piece. The viewer will experience the piece of art as an object or subject of his or her projections.

Sometimes, even when the reception is negative, there are artists who find their need for recognition is fed by this attention. For artists seeking a twinship or validation, or mirroring from the public, their psyches are more like the child who cannot tolerate the teddy bear having alternate meanings. The process an artist goes through while making an art object can at times fit both Winnicott’s conception of transitional objects and as he said, “There is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this to cultural experiences.” (Winnicott, 1971, p.51) For many of the artists this premise of Winnicott’s was a two way street.

For example, music, a cultural experience, was named by several artists as creating the

309 conditions (a playful transitional space) that elicited artistic creative responses from these artists (a transitional phenomena).

A link between relational theory and internal dialogue specifically became evident in terms of “the self’s relation to itself.” As raised in the literature review, the works of Phillip Bromberg (1999) and Jody Davies (1998) are relevant. Philip Bromberg viewed the mind as comprising multiple selves and self-states. For some people these states are unrecognized because “data that are incompatible with the ongoing self-state are denied simultaneous access to consciousness.” (p. 398) Bromberg defined this as dissociation. Jody Messler Davies (1998), in discussing work with clients who have been the survivors of trauma, explained that dissociation functions to create “independent, functionally autonomous subsystems; unique representations of others and part others.” (p. 64) Davies implied that people’s failure to acknowledge their disturbing self-states might initially help them to cope, yet in the long run it leaves them feeling unintegrated and often in the throes of unmediated enactments that do them harm. Clinically, the task is to encourage dissociated internal states to acknowledge and interact with one another, the premise being that communication between parts of self helps a person build the capacity for a coherent sense of self.

The painters Theseus K and CU’s stories addressed their ability to avoid dissociation and to keep traumatic experiences alive and integrated within their memories. For example, in his painting called The Great Pile Up, the artist CU allowed his inner dialogue, made up of conversations allowing negative and positive memories of a woman he had been in love with, to coexist in material form as painted

310 images side by side on the canvas. Both the inner dialogue and the external painting were bridges between conflicting but equally authentic emotional feeling states.

Theseus K described how he integrated his sense memories of surviving the Our Lady of the Angels School fire: That day is extremely vivid, and it’s like every little memory of that day is like a photograph, smells and sights and sounds, are very real, and then it drops off after that, but that little period in there.

Although several children he knew died in the fire he also established friendships with several of the survivors. He was profoundly moved by these children’s bright personalities, they were like, not all, there certainly were some exceptions, there were some that weren’t this way, but they had gone through a crucible, and came out the other end, almost literally, and became very lifeaffirming and I kind of liked, I made, I remember, I made very good friends with a girl named Marie she sat next to me, but she was totally burnt over her whole face and everything, her skin just looked terrible, like a piece of cheese, and, and, but I was always impressed by this quality of hers that she was bright and lively and just charming, and I liked her.

Rather than devastating him, he believed this experience deepened his passion for life and empathy towards people.

Another finding of this study was that a number of the artists (i.e., Magpie, FU, Gretchen, J, Eva) volunteered that in their childhood they were either forced by health or environmental reasons to be alone, or they voluntarily gravitated towards places of solitude. Most often, these places were outside. They would watch the natural world and either daydream or play in an external make-believe world fashioned out of the detritus of the environment (twigs, mud, bushes, etc.).

311 As clinicians, we will encounter some artists who isolate themselves and prefer the company of their art to people. It must be remembered that even in solitude these artists often carry on internal dialogues.

Another important finding of this investigation is that an internal dialogue can serve a similar function as an observing ego. Because so many artists depend upon their imaginary musing to provide them with the material that makes their art, they have a need for a deep relationship with their inner life. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy has for generations helped clients to develop “an observing ego” so as to help them reign in or act upon desires in a meditated manner. Attention to one’s polylogue of internal responses, allowing the democracy of the multiple (often conflicting) inner voices to unfold, and then prioritizing the importance of each response is another engine that can help achieve mental health. Additionally, as demonstrated and discussed by two of the artists, Magpie and J, listening carefully to their complex inner voices was an important component of the arsenal of technical equipment they depended on to help them make art. As Mikhail Bahktin commented in his book on Dostoevsky, writing characters that have a complex inner life enhances the depth of the characters’ development and deepens the quality of the art.

The premise is that as psychotherapists, if we can help create the conditions that nurture a tolerance of and attention to the inner voices in our artist clients, not only are we fostering their mental health, but an important by product may be that this facilitates their art becoming more complex and meaningful to them and the viewer. The writers Francesca, Seth and Babe, and the visual artists Theseus K, J, and Harryette all asserted this point of view.

312 When I began this investigation I was interested in the phenomenon of internal dialogues. I did not expect to discover the diversity of related topics that emerged.

Since beginning this investigation I have found the concept of an internal dialogue omnipresent. Just recently I was browsing through a text on teaching reading comprehension (Mosaic of Thought). The author’s premise was that to enhance children’s reading comprehension, the children needed to be able to recall the information in the books they read. In order to increase their comprehension, the authors supported teaching the children how to carry on an internal investigation of the text. The investigators taught children how to stop while they were reading, and engage in an internal discussion with themselves about the material they had just read. They were encouraged to ask questions of themselves, recall memories and follow their associations as they read.

All these techniques helped the children understand the information more deeply and personally because “we build meaning by doing something to the text . . . by creating personal meaning . . . it is anchored in memory.” (Keene and Zimmermann, 2007, pp. 161-162) Engaging in the world through an internal dialogue can help cement our connection to it.

An interesting theoretical question raised by the artist Magpie was whether or not it needs to be people who serve as important “objects” in a person’s early life. She was convinced that it was not her parents who made her into the person and more specifically the artist she was today; it was her orchard.

313 Findings Unrelated to Internal Dialogues Unexpectedly, many of the findings of this investigation that are useful to the field of social work are not specific to the use of internal dialogues, but come out of the revelations the artists made about art-making in general. Many of the artist’s spoke of the lack of emotional, financial and societal legitimacy our society offers artists and art institutions. The problem with trying to make a living while simultaneously making art was often noted by the artists as an enormous obstacle. Without sufficient time and energy to go to their studios, the artists described feeling either frustrated because they craved more time to make art or worried and depressed because they feared they were not adequately dedicated or talented enough to consider themselves as artists.

While I did not always include comments in the text describing the almost bodily urge artists have to make art or the way it creates psychic balance for many artists, they frequently told me that this was the case. The need to make art cannot be over stated as a driving force for many artists. Some of the artists I interviewed were established enough to have gotten some measure of financial security, usually by teaching or sharing expenses with a partner. Of the others, many were living quite modest lifestyles because they chose to work part time or at temporary jobs; often without health care benefits, cars or extra money for emergencies, because their urge to have enough time to create art was more important to them than financial security.

The difficulty these artists encountered making a living without sacrificing the opportunity to make art was a constant refrain. Moreover, most artists mentioned that much needed praise and recognition was hard to come by. Since most artists work in isolation, it follows that they yearn for affirmation, recognition and appreciation from

314 others. This need for responsiveness was often combined with the desire to be highly regarded as an artist. Because of what they declared the callousness of the art world, the plethora of artists vying for recognition and the paucity of venues, many of the artists bemoaned the difficulties in getting recognition. This desire for and pursuit of fame speaks to an unstated hopefulness that even the most dispirited artists still cling to.

Interestingly, several of the artists who were fairly marginalized had created opportunities to show their art in offbeat settings that they designated as signs of success. Others however were not optimistic. The fear that what they had to “say” in their art was unimportant persistently blocked their process or made them abandon projects mid way. Related to this, several of the artists who were struggling financially and artistically described themselves as having to fight feelings of worthlessness. They had not acquired the lifestyle their families, peers, and, in part, they themselves believed proved their worth. On the other hand, younger artists (i.e., CU, Gio, AM) paradoxically held a romanticized reverence for living on the “edge” and resisted what they voiced as the “trappings” of creating a family, making a stable income, or living a substance free lifestyle. This was predicted at the beginning of this research project. As already mentioned, the lifestyle many artists are willing to live may be different from other people; however, several of the participant artists (usually the younger ones) believed they should duplicate romanticized stereotypes of “the starving artist.”

Not surprisingly, considering the ongoing struggle women have had to acquire equal opportunities, several of the women artists pointed out that they felt marginalized because they believed their aesthetic was at odds with the dominance of the male aesthetic. (The question of whether there is a separate masculine and feminine aesthetic

315 is a subject for another dissertation.) In addition, all of the women who had children emphasized how difficult it was to simultaneously work outside the home, raise their children and find the time to make art. Even when it was abundantly clear that they found art making critically important, several of the women participants described how they or other women they knew wavered in the conviction that they were entitled to make art. This instability of a sense of self-worth as an artist was not unusual in general for artists, but may be even more of a problem for women artists.

Linda Nochlin, an art historian and feminist, in her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” dissected the myth of the “Great Artist:” “unique God-like bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence . . . called Genius . . . this entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based . . . is a white Western male viewpoint.” (Nochlin, 1971, p. 29) She believed this influenced social expectations to be against perceiving women as capable of being artists. Her argument mirrors the reasoning stated earlier in this dissertation that debunked the myth of the individualistic, genius, brooding male artist.

Her contention was such myths were created and maintained because they reinforced a political and social agenda. She stressed, The institutional—that is the public—rather then the individual, or private preconditions for achievement . . . it was institutionally made impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius. (Nochlin, 1971, p. 29) Although it is no longer unacceptable for women to enter the academe, the women who participated in this dissertation often felt marginalized. Using Nochlin’s logic, IN’s creation of an internal negative male voice, that she believed stopped her

316 creative process, could be understood as a social commentary as well as having an etiology in her troubled relationships growing up with her father figures.

The powerful influence that other artists had on the internal and external dialogic process of almost every artist I interviewed, is the red thread that ran throughout most interviews and an important finding of this study. Some of the artists believed feeling a part of a community of artists served a positive and at times an essential influence on their art making.

For other artists it was more complicated. They felt pressured to go along with the aesthetic of the moment. Some enthusiastically rallied to the style of the moment, others to being different or indifferent to the pressures of the current fad, others wanted to resist but felt pressured to create what is popular because they wanted to make art that would be accepted in the best galleries, picked up by the best publishers and, of course, that would sell. One cannot underestimate the influence of the “art scene� on artists, particularly younger ones. The conflicting pressures of living up to the myth of being individualistic and original versus conforming to the zeitgeist of the art market versus finding their own vision were concerns many of the younger and several of the more established artists experienced. These struggles are not just aesthetic, but political and social in nature. For example, artists such as J and Theseus K were disturbed by what they believed was the negativism and an ahistorical lack of historical contextualization intrinsic to the culture of postmodernism.

Looking at art as a manifestation of social and historical conditions has validity within the psychoanalytic community. For example, the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1997) explained the social and historical ramifications of the modernist movement in

317 the plastic arts in the 1940-60s as a reflection of how the social unrest and upheavals of the times penetrated art. His theory’s emphasis on the problems of the fragmentation and disintegration of the self was also a reflection of the social times in which he lived.

As already mentioned, many of the artists acclimated to living a life outside of middle class culture. If examined from a sociological perspective one must wonder if this decision truly reflects a lifestyle preference or if it is a compromise many artists are forced to make if they want to create art. One must also question if this society adequately supports (both financially and ideologically) the arts.

Future Research A number of questions surfaced in the course of writing up the findings. The following list is a compilation of potential investigations relevant to the present research.

1. Is there a difference between artists who use an internal dialogue and those who do not?

2. Do artists experience that the task of art making demands authenticity?

Related research questions are: A. Is finding a true voice an intrinsic developmental challenge most artists struggle with?

B. Does serious art making, by its nature ask artists to be introspective?

C. Is this struggle more correlated to artists than other professions?

3. Does an inner dialogue often encourage an empathic understanding of others or is it usually constructed to favor the author?

4. A study that asked artists if psychotherapy had helped, hurt or changed their creative process and if so how?

318 5. A study that explores the differences between someone who thinks with language and another who thinks with images.

6. A study that asks artists if they credit catastrophic events in their lives as having being instrumental in making them become artists.

7. A study that asks artists if there were nonhuman influences in their life that they believe were instrumental in developing their character.

8. A study that interviews male and female artists to investigate if it is in fact true that women artists feel less justified in pursuing a career in the arts than men? If so what are the reasons they give?

9. A study that asks both male and female artists to describe if they think there is an aesthetic typical to women’s art that is different from men’s art. If so do they see this difference having changed over time and how divergent is it from male art?

10. A study that explores if other professionals (i.e., scientists, doctors, teachers, engineers) use an internal dialogue and if so what is the nature of and impact the internal dialogue has on their work?

11. A study that asks artists to explore their relationship to the art world and how it has changed over time.

12. A study that explores how artists use other art forms than their own medium to facilitate their own art-making and if this other art form serves the role of a transitional phenomenon for the artist?

Last Words The experience of meeting with these 26 artists was very rewarding. They were unusual and interesting people who were open and generous with their time and inner lives. I was surprised and very pleased to discover that many of the artists could describe with precise and sometimes poetic detail their creative process. Although many of the artists initially had not been consciously aware of using an internal dialogue, almost all of them very quickly realized ways in which they did and were able to understand it with a metaphoric complexity unprompted by me. It was very

319 heartening to discover these artists spontaneously describing as part of their day-to-day life ideas that object relations and relational theoreticians have written about in abstract theoretical form.

I have already found the lessons I absorbed from this investigation enriching my clinical practice.

APPENDIX A INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD RESEARCH PROJECT APPROVAL FORM

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321 Institute for Clinical Social Work Institutional Review Board Research Project Approval Form

Researcher: Deborah Hellerstein, LCSW Title: An Investigation of Internal Dialogues and Their Impact on the Creative Process IRB Committee:

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3.

4.

5.

Approval: Indicate for each area with signature and date.

Disapproval: Indicate the problem(s) in each area of disapproval.

1. Value of research project This will be a qualitative study using an interpretive interactionist approach. The goal of this project is to describe as thoroughly as possible the artists’ experience of how their inner dialogic process works, while they are making art, noting important commonalties and variances in their responses. The literature review will consist of three areas. First will be a review of seminal psychoanalytic theories concerning the origin and nature of artistic creativity, especially in relation to inner dialogues, with an emphasis on object relations and relational theory. Second will be the literature from relevant disciplines (Literary and Cultural Criticism, Philosophy, Religion, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy and Developmental Psychology) concerning imaginary dialogues and imaginary companions. Finally, the literature review will address the myth of the artist as an isolated genius.

This study will contribute to the social work field by enriching the body of knowledge concerning creativity. In addition, because exploring internal dialogic processes is in keeping with object relations and relational theory, the insights gained from this research might contribute to these theoretical paradigms. In our practices we see artists. They, like all clients, are struggling with a wide range of concerns. Often a compelling problem they raise in therapy is their difficulty creating art. By making visible the phenomenon of the lived experience of those artists who use an internal dialogue, I hope to discover common internal processes that appear amongst those artists with the hope that this knowledge can facilitate these artists “to gain more inner freedom to move toward and in imaginal space allowing an abundance of ideas and images to flourish.� (Watkins, 1976/1984, p.vii) In addition, I suspect that the insights gathered about this population of artists can be applied to understand and to help those engaged in other creative endeavors, such as scientists or academicians.

322 2. Credentials of researcher or supervision plan for student The researcher, Deborah Hellerstein, LCSW, is an Advanced Student at the Institute for Clinical Social Work. She holds the professional license of a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the state of Illinois. She has been a practicing psychotherapist for over 20 years, having worked in a hospital, the Chicago Public School system, a community mental health center, and private practice. After graduating from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

She has had many clients who were active in the arts and also has friends and colleagues who are artists.

The researcher will be supervised by the dissertation committee, which will be led by the chair, Thayer Lindner Ph.D. Other committee members include Cynthia Stone Ph.D. and Marcia Adler M.A. Readers will be Peter Shaft M.A. and Lynn Borenstein M.A. 3. Risk/benefit Although no risks are anticipated from participating in the study, it is possible that in the interview process, an artist may uncover personal material that could be traumatic or troubling in some way. If someone reports psychological distress, the researcher will offer up to three debriefing sessions under the supervision of the committee chair, Thayer Lindner, PhD. It is not possible to predict how participating in this study will affect the artists, but benefits may occur. Some participants may gain insight into their art making. As Mary Watkins wrote in Waking Dreams, they may “gain more inner freedom to move toward and in imaginal space, thereby allowing an abundance of ideas and images to flourish.� (1984, p. vii) Another benefit would be for artists to acknowledge and appreciate the power of relationships, interpersonal and internal.

Finally, it may be that non-artists engaged in creative endeavors, such as scientists or academicians, may be able to understand and apply insights obtained from the artists.

4. Selection of subjects The subjects will be artists who have reported using an internal dialogue during their art making. Subjects will not include friends, former professors, or colleagues but will be referred by such individuals. If necessary, artists will be solicited by advertisements in art publications and journals. Snowballing, that is, asking participants for additional referrals, will be used to enlarge the pool of potential subjects.

323 5. Informed consent/assent Subjects will be asked to sign an informed consent before any interviews will take place. Before they sign, they will be made aware of exactly what use will be made of their data (see Use of data). No coercion will be involved. Subjects will not be placed in a compromised position or be pressured in any way to participate. See attached form.

6. Use of data Data gathered from these interviews will be used to complete the requirements of a dissertation study that will have potential for publication as a dissertation or perhaps be adapted for publication as a journal article. Interviews will be audio taped and transcribed. Artists’ names will be deleted during the transcription process. Once transcription has been completed and checked for accuracy, the tapes will be erased.

Artists’ names will not be used, to protect the confidentiality of identities. This study will include member checking and will therefore include the sharing of data with subjects to give them a chance to offer feedback.

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APPENDIX B CONSENT TO BE INTERVIEWED

325 INSTITUTE FOR CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK Consent to be interviewed for the study An Investigation of Internal Dialogues and Their Impact on the Creative Process I, __________________________________________, agree to be interviewed for the study “An Investigation of Internal Dialogues and Their Impact on the Creative Process.” This work will be carried out by Deborah Hellerstein, LCSW, under the supervision of Thayer Lindner, PhD. This work will be conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Clinical Social Work (ICSW), 180 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1605, Chicago, IL 60601, (312) 726-8480.

Purpose. The purpose of this study is compile narrative data in order to examine the subjective experience of artists who use an internal dialogue as they create their art.

This study will shed light on how engaging in an internal dialogue affects their creative process.

Procedures used in the study and the duration. The participants in this study will be artists who self-report using an internal dialogue while making art. Their interviews will generate narrative data that will provide insight into the role of internal dialogue in their art making process. Each artist will be asked to participate in two to three interviews of approximately 2 hours each. The actual interview time will depend on how much the artist chooses to say.

Benefits. There may be no benefit for an individual artist, but some participants may gain insight into their art making. As Mary Watkins wrote in Waking Dreams, they may “gain more inner freedom to move toward and in imaginal space, thereby allowing an abundance of ideas and images to flourish” (p. vii). Another benefit would be for artists to acknowledge and appreciate the power of relationships, interpersonal and internal.

Finally, it may be that non-artists engaged in creative endeavors, such as scientists or academicians, may be able to understand and apply insights obtained from the artists.

Costs. Participants will not be required to incur any monetary costs in order to participate in this study. I will travel to the artists’ locations or I will reimburse them for their expense if they travel to my office.

Possible risks/side effects. It is possible that in the interview process, an artist may uncover personal material that could be traumatic or troubling in some way. If someone reports psychological distress, the investigator will offer up to three debriefing sessions under the supervision of the committee chair, Thayer Lindner, PhD. Privacy/Confidentiality. Data gathered from these interviews will be used to complete the requirements of a dissertation study that will have potential for publication as a dissertation or perhaps be adapted for publication as a journal article. Interviews will be

326 audiotaped and transcribed. Artists’ names will be deleted during the transcription process. Once transcription has been completed and checked for accuracy, the tapes will be erased. Artists’ names will not be used, to protect the confidentiality of identities. This study will include member checking and will therefore include the sharing of data with subjects to give them a chance to offer feedback.

By signing this consent form, I agree to take part in this study. I have not given up any of my rights or released this institution from responsibility for carelessness. I may cancel my consent and refuse to continue in this study at any time without penalty or loss of benefits. My relationship with the staff of the ICSW will not be affected in any way, now or in the future, if I refuse to take part, or if I begin the study and then withdraw. If I have any questions about the research methods, I can contact Deborah Hellerstein, LCSW, 30 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1628, Chicago, IL 60602, (312) 409-9516, or Thayer Lindner, PhD., 1525 East 53rd Street, Suite 516-10, Chicago, IL 60615, (773) 493-4329 If I have any questions about my rights as a research subject, I may contact Dan Rosenfeld, MA, Chair of the Institutional Review Board, ICSW, 180 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1605, Chicago, IL 60601, (312) 726-8480.

I HAVE READ THIS CONSENT FORM AND I AGREE TO TAKE PART IN THIS STUDY AS IT IS EXPLAINED IN THIS CONSENT FORM. ______________________________________ Signature of Participant

__________________ Date

I CERTIFY THAT I HAVE EXPLAINED THE RESEARCH TO _________________ __________________________ AND BELIEVE THAT HE OR SHE UNDERSTANDS AND THAT HE OR SHE AGREED TO PARTICIPATE FREELY. I AGREE TO ANSWER ANY ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS WHEN THEY ARISE DURING THE RESEARCH AND AFTERWARD. ______________________________________ Signature of Investigator

__________________ Date

327

APPENDIX C PROFILES OF THE ARTISTS

PROFILES OF THE ARTISTS

328 AM…………………………………………………..A cartoonist/writer who wrote as if she was talking to a radio audience.

B……………………………………………………A musician/playwright/novelist who “wrote every damn day” and who was concerned about his work being authentic.

BABE…………………………………………….A writer who wrote a novel with four different manifestations of himself. He was raised in a religious household and matters of faith were an important theme in his work.

BISCOTTI………………………………………...A sculptor who talked about how he imagined what to say to break off with a woman he was seeing as he worked on his art.

CU…………………………………………………A painter who allowed conflicting feelings and memories to coexist on his canvases.

DOROTHY………………………………………A performer/writer who became artistically blocked upon the death of her father and the birth of her daughter. She talked about the challenges of being a mother and an artist.

EVA……………………………………………A painter who used her mother’s letters as her inspiration.

FRANCESCA……………………………………A writer who emphasized the importance of empathy. She was raised in Italy and thought about the differences between the English and Italian languages.

FU…………………………………………………...A painter who raised political issues in his paintings.

GIO………………………………………………..A painter who felt close to God as he worked on his paintings and who used music to motivate him.

GRETCHEN…………………………………….A dancer from Austria who had an intense internal and external collaborative artistic relationship with her father.

HARRYETTE…………………………………..A photographer who used the artist Robert Smithson and Oprah Winfrey as sources to inspire her.

IL………………………………………………………A composer from Russia who did not like the concept of an internal dialogue because to him that implied he was not the author of his compositions.

IN…………………………………………………….A filmmaker who was negatively influenced by internalized male voices. She thought about women’s issues.

329 J…………………………………………………A painter and professor who used myths and abstraction in his art and who wrote art criticism. He wrote in defense of the terms “primitivism” and “orientalism.”

JC…………………………………………………...A writer who talked about the challenges of trying to be a writer as well as raise a child.

K…………………………………………………..A painter who had internal furious conversations with people she was angry with as she worked on her paintings.

L……………………………………………………….An animator who realized during our interviews that her internal negative dialogue was created by her and she could possibly suppress it.

MAGPIE………………………………………….A painter who identified the muse and the orchard she lived near as a child as being her sources of inspiration.

MM………………………………………………….A print maker who felt that in the past both the presence of his children and the use of marijuana had helped liberate a sense of playfulness in him as he worked on his art.

NC…………………………………………………….A multimedia novelist/poet/ sculptor/painter who talked about her dialogue with her own history.

PRINCE ICARUS…………………………….. A painter who painted portraits of Princess Diana.

SETH…………………………………………….A writer who drew immense inspiration from reading other writers.

THESEUS K……………………………………A painter who referenced other artists and felt a kinship with neo classical art. He drew inspiration from music.

TP…………………………………………………….A filmmaker who did a film on the midgets from the Wizard of Oz.

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