Herself Read Online Free PDF Page B

their natural patterns of life.
    I was and am, I think, a species of human meta physically; since that time I have met too many in or near my pattern for it not to be so. These are the recording ones, who must forever confirm reality by making a new piece of it—verbally, tactilely, visually, musically, kinesthetically—and by doing so, bring themselves into the line of being, so confirming themselves. Any worldly ambitions that accrete are after-the-event even for the most greedy of these people; as artists it is only that other “hunger which will keep them truly alive. When that dies, then the inborn pattern dies with it, exactly as all other processes in life do—exhausted or diseased, or simply played out in a richness that is now done. Or, more likely, in a combination of all of them. Sometimes, in a long life in-the-pattern, there are little dyings and remissions; oddly, it is when this species is physically cut off from its “work” that it feels most cut off from other people. Immersed in such work, such a one doesn’t think about reality; he or she is it. He is being “allowed” to do what he has to. Like those others, or like the luckiest of them.
    Curiously, during all those hibernating sub-catatonic years, when at times I cannot read good prose or poetry from sheer despair at what could be done and I not doing it, when I dive into detective books as into a manhole, reading ever faster and more depressively—all along I know very well who is not allowing me. And that certainly it is not outward circumstance. (Certainly not because I am a woman, or a woman busy with children and without household help; I was never able to take that excuse route, which applies only to the surface things, and not to that inner life which is non-exclusive for both women and men.)
    Psychiatry never occurs to me, and not only because, outwardly, I am performing conventionally. Instinctively I feel that neither the impasse, nor the solution, is entirely to be found in my intrapersonal life, present or past. This pattern I am in is, as far as possible in humans, an impersonal phenomenon, (bound to the psyche of course, but somewhere a-psychic), a religious one if you like, with the godhead residing in the work done. To which the personality of the worker, a feeder, a soma, might indeed be “everything,” yet have to be so without benefit of a clergy—alone.
    … My guess is that the best work still is done alone, safe from a stranger’s invasion of that matrix which feeds it. Safe even perhaps from any amelioration of that madness which can also feed it, out of those insights which a collaboration, however “freeing” to the person, cannot give. A mind which has been freed to work by a process other than the work, is not the same, can never be the same, as the mind which has found its own precarious balance, murderous insight, and life celebration—within the process of itself. Psychiatry or psychoanalysis can no doubt be an experience within that process, but for writers particularly it perilously apes their own self-process. The examined self— when the examiner is the unaided self —is different. Indeed some writers, after the psychological process, though often conventionally kinder, wiser, happier or blander than before, also seem addicted to self in a way that the still-unraveled are not. And of course they have altogether another process to go to. To resort to. Whose standard, however delicately refraining from the older, obvious norms, somewhere generalizes towards these, somewhere pities “madness” and venerates “health.” Yet conversely, has no god-head of its own—except its process. …
    Art is its own form of life. Psychoanalysis is. Consider Blake or Genet, Whitman, Colette, Proust, Shakespeare, Shelley, Sappho, Firbank, or Chekhov, Beckett or Poe, the Brontes or Dickinson, Turgeniev, or Joyce or Dickens—doing both. Or the qualitative changes in the work of those, in our lifetime who have.
    But, by