MATTER OVER MIND: the mystery of where
by Robert Darroch
DH
Lawrence and colleague...snapped in
ON OUR WAY up to the Mountains before Xmas I heard on radio an interview
with a British scientist called David Peat
I had never heard of him before, but he is apparently quite well-known,
particularly as the author of books explaining complex scientific matters –
such as Quantum Theory and Relativity – to the general public
What, however, caught my attention was what he said, almost as an aside,
about a subject that has long puzzled and fascinated me…
…the extent to which the mind might not be the only instrument or source
of human creativity…
…and that - particularly in some rare, highly-creative individuals -
other physiological factors might be at work
Now, at the start of this exploration into a little-understood area of
human behaviour
let me make it clear that I abhor and reject the mystical, the
transcendental, the world of faith and ideology, of astrology, numerology, phrenology,
iridology, of fairies, pixies, hobgoblins, gurus, and all so-called “psychic”
phenomena
I am an innately sceptical person, whose attitude to the world around me
is as factual and rooted in traditional, orthodox, verifiable, scientific reality
as I can possibly make it
Nevertheless, I am also a curious soul – as all journalists should be…
(for their professional scepticism has to be tempered by a tincture of
credulity - else they may miss things of possible interest or newsworthiness)
…so I try to keep a small chink in my factual defences open, in case I
come across something that is not immediately explained via established precepts
And some time ago I did come across something that was not explicable in
terms of any received wisdom that I was then aware of
As many of you know, I have a strong and abiding interest in the works
of DH Lawrence in general, and in his Australian novel Kangaroo in particular
I think I can say, accurately, that I know as much as anyone else in
In the course of my study into
It turns on the question of where
I don’t know when it was, precisely, that I began to consider there was
something odd about
But I can give an example of the sort of disturbing incident that illustrates
what I am talking about
Almost everyone of significance who met
(the term “genius” was often used about him, and the word is in the
title of several books about him - Richard Aldington’s A Portrait of a Genius, But… and Witter Bynner’s Journey with Genius, for example)
One such memoir was written by the English artist Dorothy Brett, who
lived with Lawrence and his wife Frieda in
In her book Lawrence and Brett
she describes observing
One day, after one of these excursions, she asked him where he got his
inspiration from
He told her that he did not know where it came from…“but it comes”, he
said
Lawrence himself was interested in this question, and in fact wrote a
book about it
The book was Fantasia of the
Unconscious, and in it
One of the whackiest was that he was convinced that his creative centre
resided, not in his head, but in the vicinity of his stomach
…or, as he called it, his solar plexus - as he wrote in Fantasia:
Now, your solar
plexus...is where you are...It is your first and greatest and deepest centre of
consciousness.
(he writes in Kangaroo of “the
Dark God that enters from below”)
Moreover, this daemon, or whatever it might have been, was by no means
at his beck-and-call
Sometimes it was in, sometimes it was out
(
Indeed, throughout his working life, a number of his friends and
acquaintances remarked that, when he was writing, he seemed to be taking down dictation
One observer saw him composing a short story in a rooming house in
Croydon in
he was writing in a room full of people, with babies crying and loud
conversation going on all around him
while he, oblivious to the noise and distraction, filled page after page
of smoothly-written, continuous text, without any sign of pause or compositional
difficulty
…as if it were just “flowing out of him”
And it gets odder
For, whatever “it” was, it had an especial empathy with trees
– yes, trees
“It” was at its happiest and most productive when
...as, again, he explained in Fantasia:
I come out solemnly
with a pencil and an exercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot
of a large fir tree, and wait for thoughts to come...
However, putting aside the arboreal factor, it was the position in
For
Dr Peat cited several other great minds who also shared
He had an older colleague called David Bohm (who was a far-more-renowned
physicist than he was) who also experienced these “bodily insights”
“Bohm once told me how he felt a muscular sensation in his body that he
could relate to the mathematics he was doing,” recalled Dr Peat
(in Bohm’s case this creative activity was, apparently, in his right
leg)
Bohm had spoken to Einstein, with whom he worked at
...and the discoverer of Relativity confessed to something similar –
that sometimes he “felt” his scientific insights
in fact, Einstein told him that he carried a rubber ball with him which
he squeezed when working on his field equations of relativity, to stimulate his
bodily thoughts
Curiously, I myself have come across this strange phenomenon
In 1976, following the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, I
interviewed the Australian physicist Sir Mark Oliphant, who was then the
Governor of South Australia
He told me that when his mentor, the great New Zealand physicist Ernest
Rutherford, was working out the structure of the atom, he strode down the
corridors of McGill University in Canada saying that he perceived the answer to
his problem “in my water”
Dr Peat’s colleague David Bohm had a theory about the bodily-thought
phenomenon, for he believed that the mind was primarily the voice through which
the “thinking” body spoke
Bohm (who died some years ago) recalled what the French
post-impressionist artist Paul Cezanne had once said on the subject
Sometimes Cezanne, when he was painting, experienced what he called his
“little sensations”
and he found that if he moved his head to the right or the left, the
“sensations” would get stronger, adding to his creative inspiration
Cezanne once said: “I think I
could occupy myself for months without changing my place by turning now more to
the right, now more to the left.”
This phenomenon, interestingly, has something of an echo in other visual
artists
The British painter David Hockney finds that listening to music stimulates
his creative insight, so that he can “sense” colour coming out of things he is
painting
This phenomenon may also be analogous or connected to a condition known
as “synaesthesia”...
... in which a small percentage of the population - in Australia it’s about
one in 20,000 - “think” or experience various stimuli in colour
(also see below re savantism)
My wife Sandra happens to be one of these rare but fortunate “synaesthetes”,
to whom the world around them is imbued with an extra personal and particular
sensation of colour, which they “feel” rather than “see”
...for example, for her, every word, number, and even sound generates
its own distinctive, and unchanging, colour
(Sandra is currently part of a program at
In some more extreme cases of synaesthesia, it can extend to taste and
other senses (smell, touch) and faculties
...Sandra, for example, dreams in vivid colour
(Mozart was a synaesthete, as I think
It may well be, speculates Dr Peat, that such phenomena as synaesthesia demonstrate
the body as a single, undivided entity interacting - in an organic or holistic
way - with an environment of which it is an integral part, and which it has, in
some human beings, a special connection, or empathy with
Dr Peat writes: “In this sense
mind and matter cannot be separated, for they are aspects of a greater
whole…there is no longer a fixed division between matter and mind.”
(to illustrate his argument, he cites Gerard Manly Hopkins’ concept of
“inscape” – of individual objects containing some more general “life force”...
…and he may well have cited Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the
“noosphere” in this context, too)
There is a theory in psychology – first advanced by Freud – that
consciousness is not the usual or normal state of existence
...but rather a specialised state of something more fundamental, which is
generally referred to, perhaps inadequately, as “the unconscious”
A former Professor of Literature at the
Of course, the most famous example of this phenomenon is Coleridge’s
story of how, in a dream, his unconscious mind composed his poem, “Kubla Khan”
...and I quote his own words on this:
“On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of
the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down
the lines that are here preserved.”
|
|
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Alas, these are only the first five lines of the 54 he was able to
reconstruct from his dream before he was interrupted, notoriously, by “a person
from Porlock”
...and when he returned to his desk, the memory of the dream-poem had faded
away, and he was unable to remember the rest
(thus he entitled the poem “Kulba
Khan - a fragment”)
Professor States believes that a great deal of what is taken as
“creative insight” (such as poetry) can occur at the level of the body beneath “normal”
mental consciousness
Indeed, it may well be that in some rare people the connection with the
unconscious level is more synaesthetic than in others
...and can indeed be militated by various physical phenomena – which
might explain
(though where the trees fit in is an even greater puzzle)
R
PS - Synaesthesia is associated
with a far-rarer condition known, medically, as the “savant syndrome”. This phenomenon, first observed in the late
19th century by Dr John Down (of Down’s Syndrome), is today used to
describe a very small number of people who have highly unusual “mental”
abilities. Probably the most famous form
of savantism involves prodigious mathematical skills (though a more common form
involves visual memory feats, such as being able to draw an entire city – such
as Rome – after just one helicopter flight over it). For example, one living savant, Daniel
Tammat, currently holds the world record for the number of decimal places of
the mathematical term “pi” he can recite from memory – 22,514 of them (it took
him five hours and nine minutes to reel the numbers off). To Daniel, each number has its own individual
“colour” – up to and over 10,000 – and this helps him remember, for example,
the decimal-places of pi. (This, I
think, is the most extreme case of synaesthesia ever recorded.) The extreme rarity of savantism is its most interesting
aspect, for it is detected in only a handful of individuals. Currently, in the world today, there are less
than 100 people out of seven billion who have been identified as having this
syndrome. About 50 percent of these are
also autistic, for savantism has a strong correlation with behavioural abnormalities
such as autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. One
of avantism’s distinctive characteristics is that possessors of it, similar to
synaesthetes, “see” or “feel” (rather than “think”) their rare insights.
PPS – since writing this I have received from several people responses
pointing out that in eastern metaphysics, the solar plexus is the third chakra
and regarded as the source of a person’s power and creativity.