Susan K. Deri has been a profound influence in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life. I only discovered her two years ago with her book, “Symbolization and Creativity.” In this riveting book, Deri explored the creation of the symbol as it emerges from instinctual energy which has a built-in capacity for creation of this “symbol.” It is the creation of the symbol that is necessary for “symbolic communication” in which primitive, old-brain “jabberings” (Carl Sandburg term) are shaped into what we know as “language” which is the means of “symbolic communication.” Without this facility we would still be in the stage of grunts, moans, screams, et al which precedes our ability to “wrap a word” around our wishes, including the ability to “name an object”; anthropologically this is very much related to the Old Testament accomplishment of “naming the beasts of the field.”
One critical dimension of this creation of symbols is “distance” or detachment. We start life inside an uroboric state in which we are not separate and distinct from what the Buddhists call “the world of 10,000 things.” We can’t “see” a rock because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” a tree because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” momma’s breast because we are not separate from it. “Close up everything becomes a blur,” declares Deri. “There must be some separation between perceiver and perceived. Symbols, in contradistinction to signs, provide this distance.”
But the creation of this “distance” is primeval; it is the “fall” from Edenic bliss into the limitation of form and the “fall” is so painful that we are insulated from the pain by repression. This is the “loss” that led T.S. Eliot to declare, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” which is why we cling so desperately to our symbols, even if in doing so we disallow the symbol to accomplish its function of bridging the gap between instinctual experience and symbol.
Here I wish to introduce a relevant poem by a Mississippi poet, Edgar Simmons, who related this to an experience with the Divine:
THE MAGNETIC FIELD
Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.
literary lew 