Poetic Anatomy of the Numinous Creative Passages into the Self as Beloved

Abstract

This research is shaped by the actual experience of practice: as painter and writer. My preoccupation is with the nodal moment when conscious awareness is suspended, and both the corporal and psychic involvement in realising the work almost transport one to another zone of effectiveness. This zone, which I name as the poetic zone, is where the numinous enters the ordinary. The investigation for a space/place/moment that lies beyond the logic of acceptable discourse can help initiate and give shape to a new vocabulary - visual or literary. By orchestrating a methodology, which functions on several layers, I have endeavoured to create a synthesis between painting and writing. My method in all the aspects of this research - the thesis, play scripts, studio paintings, and albums - is firmly rooted in the conscious and critical intellect, as the vehicle that helps facilitate my need in establishing a personal arena for Becoming: - a deliberate yet semi-controlled state of charged eidetic experience, whereby the 'other' of the self is met with and (perhaps) named. By probing into the specific makeup or anatomy of the poetic moment, and coming to understand how it functions within both the pragmatic and the apparently undecipherable creative processes, the artist/poet, like the mystic visionary, may give an affirmative answer to the Self, as /-that-is-not-the-other. Thus I hope that this research will contribute to the feminist project engaged in trying to delineate the divine presence in 'feminine writing', as a powerful guise and method for a clearer understanding of the psychological other.

Date of Award	2001
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Plymouth