28

An Intentional Triologue

 Characters: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sabina Spielrein and Frank Erne in conversation

Maurice:  Let us say (Maurice tilts his head reflectively) … borrowing a term from other works … that the life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life– is subtended by an “intentional arc” …

Frank:  Like the Arc de Triomph.

Sabina:  Not like that, entirely.  Well, perhaps, in the sense that one exists within the monumental significance of, or even that one in a sense moves spatially “through”, such an arc. Would that be a long bow to draw Maurice?

(Sabina turns to him, she feels a powerful urge to reach out and trace with her middle finger, the long scar that traverses Maurice’s left cheek.  She resists, unsure of how he might react to a physical intrusion. Given the circumstances.)

Frank: (quietly) Noah’s Ark. Cutty Sark.  Joan of Arc.  Gutten … dark.

Maurice:  I will allow, Sabine, in deference to our young friend here, but returning to the point in question, an “intentional arc, projects around about us our past, our future, our human setting … all that we have been and might become.

Sabina:  Exactly, Maurice, in the existential realm. But then, of course there is the ancestral projection, and unconscious desires that go beyond the existential.

Maurice: (Maurice nods) … yes, yes, my meaning does, of course, include projections of unconscious products. They are present whether we attach to them or not at any given moment, just as the flowers in the garden are present even in the dark.  To continue, this intentional arc projects about us our physical, ideological and moral situation … or rather, results in our being situated in all these respects.

Frank:  In all of them.  All the projections.  All at the same time. Like standing in a hologram (Frank is happy with this idea).

Sabina: Hollow gram (Sabina doesn’t know the word, she repeats it quietly to herself to test it out.)  This means what? 

Maurice:  It is this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the senses …

Sabina:   Yes.  The unity of the senses.

Maurice: … of intelligence, of sensibility and motility (he pauses thoughtfully).  It is this which ‘goes limp’ in illness.

Sabina:  (Surprised and delighted) Oh I like that. That is a very strong image Maurice! Intentionality gone limp. Wonderful.  The containment of one’s perceptual life – one’s physical, ideological and moral location – suddenly limp, disunited, undirected.  No longer sensible, no longer motile, no longer sturdy.  No longer erect. So to say. 

Frank:  Mum went limp when she was sick. She spilt the cordial. Wobbling all over the place so I couldn’t even feed her.  Aunty Beryl said it wasn’t intentional.  Sometimes she couldn’t even talk. 

Sabina: How very distressing for you Frank, when you so loved to talk with your mother.

Frank:  That was alright.  I talked both parts. When she couldn’t answer me, I said my part, and then I said her part.

Sabina: I am sure you did, Frank, and she would have been so very appreciative.  (Frank smiles, although he hardly hears her)

Sabina:  (whispers) He has drifted off to sleep, Maurice. Just like that, almost in mid-sentence. How strange an effect it has on him, remembering.  He turns straight away to dreaming of his mother.

Maurice:  Yes he is a queer one. The little man. 

Sabina: Well, here we are (she pauses and leans in his direction) without our host, in somewhat tantalising discomfort. Wouldn’t you agree?

Maurice:  (side-stepping Sabina’s last comment) I couldn’t say Sabine.  If I knew why … I was wondering why we’re here?

Sabina: I’m not wondering (she straightens her skirt).

Maurice:  Perhaps you already know, then.  Why are we here?

Sabina: I do (she smooths her hair). 

Maurice:  Well then.  Say why.

Sabina: To satisfy (she stands tall with hands behind her back).

Maurice:To satisfy? Whom, exactly … or what?

Sabina:  Curiosity. 

Maurice: I see then.  This is a game.  I must tease it out of you word by word.  Whose curiosity?

Sabina: Yours it would seem (offended she changes the subject).  I bumped into Sartre very briefly once you know.  (Maurice shows interest but says nothing) What a delightfully irritating young man he was.  We hardly agreed on a single thing.  Paris, wonderful Paris, (she sighs) just before the war.  Pity I was so naive. 

(Maurice moves to ask a question but changes his mind)

How on earth could I have missed the signs? They were as if written on the walls. Everywhere.  If only I had packed up the girls and gone at once.  Zurich, of course we could have gone to Zurich.  Pride and vanity, that’s all (she frowns, pulling at button on her blouse).  I was just too proud and vain to go to Zurich.  (Her mood lightens) And then of course, I could have stayed in Paris with Jean-Paul (she flings her arms wide and laughs) I could have joined the resistance!  What would his little Beaver has said to that.

Maurice:  (irritated) Watch out Sabine.  She has a powerful antenna, and animosity for those who try to rewrite history. 

Sabina: Pity I didn’t stay (shakes her head).  How much more satisfying to die for a reason – other than that someone else has decided that you should! Animosity for me? Simone? Nonsense.  What a curious suggestion.  I’m only playing.  Or is it you who might be jealous of a chance Parisian encounter?  Anyway, I never met Simone and it’s too late now to find out what we would have thought of one another.

Maurice: Jealousy is an unfamiliar emotion as far as I am concerned, Sabine.  And why is it too late to meet Simone?

Sabina:  Because we are both dead. 

Maurice: So? As you and I both are, in that unenviable condition – much too soon for comfort, although one finds a way to reconcile, if only at the very end.  I was not ready, nowhere near.  I dare say, no more were you – books unfinished, friends and family, so many things undone (he sighs).  But we are here now, are we not, together large as life, and we never met before.  Why should Simone be inaccessible?

Sabina:  I hadn’t heard of her you see, before I died.  That’s why.  I knew of you.  It was I who issued the invitation. 

Maurice: The invitation to come here?

Sabina:  Precisely.  When I realised it was possible.  To be invited here, one has to know someone.  It’s simple really.  I am Frank’s guest and you are mine.  Frank knew of me and I of you and here we are.  Simply being Frank.  Ironic, when I consider my poor girls 29.  They had absolutely no idea how it happened or what to do.  He asked them first, before asking me – and then forgot.  When they arrived he wasn’t here.  He had become temporarily uninhabited.  You couldn’t be a conjuring of Frank’s, Maurice.  I doubt that Frank would ever have encountered remnants of you in his meanderings.

Maurice: Well how on earth would he have known of your existence?

Sabina:  His mother told him.  She knew of me.  She was a reader, a woman much taken with ironic twists of fate.  She talked of me a lot apparently, so Frank tells me.  Which is why he wanted me to come.  He had the strangest idea of who I was (she smiles) dear thing.  How curious he hasn’t brought his mother here! That’s very strange.  (Long pause)  Maurice, you knew Simone, you could invite her.  If you wished.  I could meet her then. 

Frank:  (scrambling to his feet unsteadily) Carmen! (He rubs his eyes) Where is Carmen?  She should be here … Antonio is coming. 

There is a noise like rushing wind and flapping wings. They turn towards a cluster of buildings nearby and there, hooked on the spire of the village church are Antonio Damasio and Carmen de Terremonde, two figures dangling from a tandem parachute.

Edmund Husserl, Martha Nussbaum, Daniel Dennett, Sabina Spielrein, Antonio Damasio, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Philosophical Mentors

In 1998 Daniel Dennett gave the Distinguished Fellow Lecture at The Centre for the Mind, Australian National University. His address was entitled “The Creation of Creativity” (Dennett, 1998). He began his lecture by describing the structural aesthetic of the well-made play, and pointing out that Hamlet, like any creation, was the ‘work of many hands’, a collaboration across time and space, a product of Shakespeare's mastery of the “magpie art of gathering cultural entities, little mind tools, around him .  .” which he used with “dazzling effect” in his writing.

Following this line of thought Dennett asked his audience to consider how long it might have taken to create St Matthew’s Passion ­– not how long Bach might have taken to compose it, but how long everything that had fed into the creation of this wonderful piece of music might have taken.  Dennett provided the answer to his own question by tracing the creation of the Passion in an ever expanding trajectory back through time and space; the ‘creation’ of Bach himself; the familial environment and cultural milieu into which Bach was born and emerged as a young composer; his variations on the Passion over time; the collective influence of Bach’s own works and the works of others flowing into the Passion's final form.  He acknowledged too, the social and cultural environment across several millennia contributing to the emergence and establishment of Christianity, without which the Passion would have no meaning or purpose; and finally he spiralled back and back and back to the birth of human culture itself.

Every creation, Dennett was suggesting, has its origins in a complex cultural, ‘memetic soup’ (my words not his), filtered through the mental sieve, and the unique digestive processes of the very particular mind of the maker.

In this sense, then, all creative work is a collaborative enterprise with input reaching back through time, across the globe and beyond. Every creation has its cosmological story, its story of origination.

There are many contributors, living and dead, who I could mention at this time who are significant in the development of this current work.  Dennett himself, for instance, and Martha Nussbaum who, amongst the throng of theoreticians and philosophers cited in these chapters, provided significant insights with the added pleasure of their appealing narrative style.  All of the inspirational people whose creative work is recorded in the movies and web pages in this work are worthy of being recognised for the importance of their contribution.  I want, however, to go further than citation and heartfelt “thank-you’s” in the case of three individuals who I have named as intellectual mentors and who I regard as unwitting ‘collaborators’ in this study of the phenomena of creativity.  I claim them as mentors not because their work is the definitive work in the context of my explorations, or because they provide the main methodological or theoretical foundation for my studies, but because of the texture and form of the language they used to express the ideas, which ignited my creative passions.  The right words, the right ideas at the right time for me.  I have seen them many times in my minds eye, side by side, and wondered what they might have said to one another if that opportunity had been available to them.  Wondered, also, if they would find one another as stimulating as I have found each of them in differing ways.

28 Frank's Mental Landscape with Sabina Spielrein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Antonio Damasio and Martha Nussbaum

29 In my play, Sabina's Daughters, the two sisters (Sabina Spielrein's daughters) are caught in a limbo like space between life and death after their murder along with Sabina and others in the local synagogue. They are struggling to come to terms with the events of the past, while they continue to struggle with relationships of the 'present' and the reasons for becoming 'stuck' where they are between two worlds. The Intentional Triologue on one level considers how the views of two of my intellectual mentors (Sabina and Maurice) blend, but also, in linking with the story in the play, ponders on the idea of identity held in memory and considers the possibility that the sisters may also have entered Frank's imaginative mental landscape at his bidding - as their mother and Merleau-Ponty have done in this short mind-play. The sisters, unlike the other characters, found when they got there that Frank was not at home - no longer mindful of them. Connections of this kind that I have made between the texts as the characters 'spoke' to one another, have often become points where the leaps of imagination occurred that have significantly contributed to the direction the research and the thesis narrative has taken.