On yearning for Eden

> The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefied and refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before.

Mother and muse are of the same relation, albeit poles reversed. There is muse as masculine, their influence as seminal impulse to the artist as feminine—in whom occurs the creative activity. Then there is the same relation as in mother and father, where the mother receives the seminal impulse and carries the creative activity. Every artist is a woman, which is perhaps why fewer women are artists. If we are to consider ‘penis envy’ then we ought also what might be called ‘womb envy’—that is, of the creative capacity of woman. Symbolically, mother is land as origin of species; it is the whenua, the womb, from which all emerges. The woman herself is the same, as the fertility goddess who mediates between the two and in which they are imagistically united. We speak of fertile minds, thus recognising the identity of all creative activity; its apogee, the womb. This is the basic metaphor which everywhere structures our understanding of generative activity.

The male as artist is driven by an envy of the mother’s intimacy. Mothers alone truly touch another individual, as otherwise each is always separate. What the father contributes amounts, in the end, to a failure; it is a falling short. The mother receives this loss and makes it her own, whence operates the seminal impulse. But it is to her alone that this is integrated, and from her proceeds all genesis which follows. The father achieves no lasting union, at end falls back into himself. The mother, in contrast, was not striving to enter into but to take within; and in this may be more successful in some sense. Pregnancy is as close as two ever are. The man remains forever outside of this, though having also come from there—and seeking to return. The masculine thus has this basic metaphysical difference: like Adam to be cast from Eden, that now cherubim with flaming sword guards the way back. Man may never venture that path again.