Hughes and Pearce

In this weeks reading, Pearce makes a distinction between humans and animals. I am one of those people who believes that humans are nothing more than complex animals. How did we get here? I don't know. But without human parents at the early stages of our lives we revert to animal behavior. For example, feral children, who were raised in the wilderness by animals, act like the animals they were raised by. (I mentioned this in a previous blog.) When society attempts to rehabilitate these individuals, some abilities we think as normal are never realized. A good example of this is the case of Oxana Malaya who was raised by wolves.

I think the importance of a human upbringing with human parents is fascination. Even more profound is how easy it is for a human to lose that human edge. Our lives (though they may seem complex) are actually rather simple. Core elements of the animal experience such as eating, intercourse/reproduction, sleep, work, migrating from place to place, establishment of territory, death, et cetera are still the foundation of our lives. In fact, any other "more advanced" (human) element we possess, are used by us to secure one of those basic elements aforementioned.

I guess that's a bland Freudian way of thinking of things. Humans are flat basically predictable creatures that are nothing more than different from the other animals... certainly not better. Despite all of our "advances", humans (as a whole) are lower, in my opinion, than animals... especially in the core ways that actually matter. Instead of living in harmony with our surroundings (which I believe is the most important thing in the greater scheme of things) we consume, consume, and consume. May be humans are actually devolving.

Referring to Northrop Fyre's Four Essays, Pearce describes the core parts of the texts, which I think are worth mentioning. "Our modern image plays the alazon in that we pretend to be unique from previous developments; superior, because our science and gadgets, to all other cultures in spite of a lack of a cohesive culture of our own. And we play the eiron in that we deprecate ourselves— considering ourselves but a clever ape, able by some freak to catch on to a mechanism a priori and superior to us. Thus we suffer guilt and fear of reprisal over our manipulations of nature, and a sense of alienation from our continuum, or ecology, our fellows and ourselves."

Pearce focused a lot on complex thinking. Ultimately, his book forces us to ask the age old question: Where do all of these ideas come from in the first place?

In Altered States: Creativity Under the Influence, Hughes attempts to answer that question. In chapter 5, he focuses on the creative process and the AHA Factor. He states that the AHA is a product of inspiration, an alteration in breathing pattern, often accompanied by tension or anxiety, suggesting that it may embody unconscious conflicts. The "AHA" is the bursting of the bubble, containing the seeds that eventually spur the poet or artist to insight. Unfortunately, finding that muse is hard.

Hughes mentions the Romantic poets and artist who used narcotics as a catalyst to reach the end result of this process. These are all things that we have talked about before during class. We have discussed the possibility of these drugs as a means to tap into our original state, the altered state, where ideas flowed freely, unfettered from the physical world. As we age, many of us lose that connection. A caption in chapter 8 reads "Children's incapacity to distinguish between their imaginative world and the "real" world is the source of their enviable creative enthusiasm."