Plan de Mitigacion de Impactos Ambientales de PGA - Principales Hallazgos, Conclusiones y Recomendaciones sobre sus Programas

…let him never come back to us;

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain, Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again.

(Browning 1845:60)

The man castigated by Browning in the poem for being the inspirational leader lost to young radical poets was William Wordsworth. Browning wrote this when he was 32. As an older man, perhaps having undergone similar changes, he partially retracted it. ‘I did in my hasty youth’, he wrote in a letter of 1875, ‘presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model’ (Browning 1845:61). In 1845, when he wrote the poem, he felt affronted by Wordsworth’s change of political and poetic persona from revolutionary eighteenth-century innovator to established Victorian Poet Laureate, the more so because of a sense of being betrayed by the best:

We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die!

(Browning 1845:60–1)

However, denunciation or not, Browning’s lines ‘…the glimmer of twilight,/

Never glad confident morning again’ echo the lines of Wordsworth’s famous ‘Ode’, in which he describes the loss of the ‘visionary gleam’:

Loss of presence and presence of loss There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it has been of yore;—

Turn whereso’er I may, By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

(Wordsworth 1984:297)

The first four stanzas of this poem Wordsworth wrote on 27 March 1802, a few days before his thirty-second birthday, and he took them the next day to Coleridge. It provoked an even more despairing poetic response from Coleridge, in the form of a poem that began as an unpublished ‘Letter’ to Sarah Hutchinson, his very recently lost love, and ended as ‘Dejection: an ode’, which was published in the Morning Post. As Richard Holmes describes, The first version is a passionate declaration of love and renunciation, of almost hysterical intensity; the final version is a cool, beautifully shaped, philosophical Ode on the loss of hope and creative power’

(Holmes 1989:318). Wordsworth also was involved in a crucial moment in his love life in the spring of 1802, and the two poet’s crises involving the Hutchinson sisters and Dorothy Wordsworth were clearly interactive if not interrelated. A month before writing The Ode Wordsworth had become engaged to Mary Hutchinson. He was planning before marrying to meet Annette Vallon, after ten years’ separation, and their illegitimate child Caroline, whom he would see for the first time. The meeting was to be in France, a country he had been excluded from since his days there of passion and revolution ten years before. His marriage would not end only that emotional connection; it also challenged the poetic trinity of Coleridge, Dorothy and himself. No doubt these external events, with their immediate emotional implications, played a part in the verses, which are so expressive of a lost perceptual past. There is ample evidence, however, that more basic internal processes were at issue. Both poets focus on a feared loss of imagination or spontaneity and both had expressed this earlier in their different ways. A year earlier Coleridge had declared: ‘The Poet is dead in me’ (quoted in Gill 1989:200). Wordsworth had anticipated this in his ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ in 1798, when he was 28 and regarded himself as mature. In that poem he contrasts the sober, sad reflection of maturity with his youth, when he had direct access to joy:

…For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity.

(Wordsworth 1984:132) Accompanying the ‘still sad music’ is the feeling of a ‘presence’ that is

‘interfused’ with ‘setting suns’, ‘round oceans’, blue skies, ‘the mind of man’

and ‘all objects of thought’. This ‘feeling of a presence’ and the capacity for thought are the ‘abundant recompense’ Wordsworth believed he gained for the loss of bliss, in which nothing intervened between passionate expectation and physical presence. His verse is often at its best when evoking a sense of loss:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind.

(Wordsworth 1984:302) It is when the presence of loss disappears from his verse that something of the quality implied by Browning is really lost. It seems to me that in 1804, when he completed the remaining stanzas of The Ode, he was speaking with two voices on the subject of the loss of a direct visionary presence.

When he sings with one voice, as in the ode quoted above and in some of the lines of the 1805 Prelude, the presence of loss is unmistakable and the feeling profound; in other places there is another voice in which it seems denied or, as in the ‘Ode to duty’, repudiated and there is sense of assertion rather than realisation. In Book 6, lines 61 to 63, of the 1805 Prelude, written on his forty-fourth birthday, he denies the loss later referred to by Browning:

Four years and thirty, told this very week, Have I now been a sojourner on earth, And yet the morning gladness is not gone.

(Wordsworth 1979:188) Wordsworth’s notion of a presence which in his youth provided him with a direct physical experience of bliss and later, after its disappearance, interfused all things, is like the incarnation of Christ, followed after his disappearance by Pentecost and the ‘inspiration’ of the Holy Ghost.

Wordsworth’s own theory about the origin of this presence is to be found in the first version of his poetic self-analysis, now known as the two-book or 1799 Prelude. William Wordsworth was 29 when he wrote it. We are separated from that relatively unknown radical young poet by Wordsworth

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the eminent Victorian. This is a particular difficulty with Wordsworth because, unlike Keats, Shelley or Byron, he lived to be an old man and, though he remained a considerable writer, I believe that he did not survive as the great poet he once was beyond his thirty-fifth year. He wrote very good verse later but it is generally thought that all his great poetry was written by 1806, including The Prelude, though this was not published until after his death. In this respect he is a striking example of one possible outcome for the creative artist, which Elliot Jaques described in his paper on

‘Death and the mid-life crisis’ (1968).

Jaques coined this term when he noted ‘a marked tendency towards crisis in the creative work of great men in their middle and late thirties’ (Jaques 1968:226). This crisis may have different outcomes in the work of the artists who survived beyond 35. On the negative side, output might come to a stop, as in the case of Rossini, or become less original; on the positive side, it is for some, such as J.S.Bach or Beethoven, the point where the nature of their work deepens. Elliott Jaques suggested that, ‘With the awareness of the onset of the last half of life, unconscious depressive anxieties are aroused, and the repetition and continuation of the working through of the infantile depressive position are required’ (ibid.: 242). He vividly describes familiar defences against the renewed depressive position and the risk of character deterioration if this is not successful. Associated with the working through of the depressive position integration would be the task and the problem in the artistic work itself. Coleridge, both in the deterioration of his character and the cessation of his poetry, would appear to exemplify it. This would correspond with his long-term problems of integration and his inability to complete his work, as in the case of Christabel. Wordsworth, however, I would see as affected in a different way, and he therefore affords us with an example of someone whose creativity was diminished by a mid-life crisis, not at the frontier of the depressive position, but in the post-depressive position. I think his mid-life difficulty was in confronting change and uncertainty when his poetic world fragmented once more, and once too often, with a defensive, regressive move into a psychic retreat of coherent belief and moral certainty. In the terms I used in Chapter 6, Coleridge lost his way between Ps(n)→D(n),1 that is, in the pre-depressive position, whereas Wordsworth’s mid-life crisis appears to have been between D(n)→Ps(n+1), in the post-depressive position.

The Ode and a good proportion of The Prelude could be described as poetic accounts of the depressive position as Wordsworth gives us a description of the internal struggle to relinquish the unselfconscious bliss of a youth with an idealised future in favour of the imperfect but realised present of maturity. But in another poem written at much the same time, in 1804, he gives us a sad premonition of the eventual outcome of his mid-life crisis. He begins this on a note of triumphal obedience, ‘Stern Daughter of

the Voice of God! O Duty’. Later in the poem, in a spirit of anguish, he declaims as to why it is that now he must only have recourse to such a source for guidance:

Me this unchartered freedom tires;

I feel the weight of chance desires:

My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose which ever is the same.

(Wordsworth 1984:296) What a contrast to the passage from the 1799 Prelude, where he asserts that the survival of poetic power and of human insight depends on the constant struggle of the ‘first creative sensibility’ to resist what he called the ‘regular action of the world’ (Wordsworth 1979:24).

It was in 1804 that he assembled his second version of The Prelude in thirteen books, and he was such a secondary reviser that before his death in 1850 he had completed another version in fourteen books. It was this latter version that his wife published after his death, and it was only in this final version that The Prelude was known to the public until the 1920s, when the 1805 version became available. The two-book Prelude of 1799 did not appear in print until 1974. Thanks to the wealth of Wordsworth scholarship of our own times, we now have contact with the poet of 29 who produced this incredibly original, self-based notion of psychic development.

The 1805 thirteen-book Prelude contains some of the finest poetry in our language in its unexpurgated and untrimmed form, unlike the 1850 version.

However, I think that the full impact of his originality is greatest in the earliest two-book 1799 version, where it is closest to its origins in the flood of recollection, association and interpretation that took place in Wordsworth during his exile in the cold winter of 1798/9 in Germany and in the immediacy of his return to his beloved North of England in the summer and autumn of 1799. It is in this first version that his anticipation of some of the psychoanalytic discoveries of our own century is most evident.

His purpose was to explore mental development, particularly the origins of creative sensibility; what was unique was that he set about doing so in the form of a psychic autobiography. Wordsworth was being strongly urged by his twin soul Coleridge to write, as the first true poet-philosopher, the definitive work on ‘man, nature and society’. Nothing less would do for Coleridge, who, having found his friend to be a sublime poet, had convinced himself, perhaps more by projective identification than observation, that he was also the great philosopher of his age.

Wordsworth begins the first part of his two-part poem by describing himself as a 4-year-old ‘naked savage…/making one long bathing of a

Loss of presence and presence of loss

summer’s day’, prompting us to think of Rousseau in the process. He continues with episodes from what might be called the ‘latency period’. In these he describes some moments he considers of great import, which crystallise the past and carry forward latent significance to the future. He called them spots of time and they resemble what, a century later, Freud described as screen memories (Freud 1899). Like screen memories, the spots of time condense experience, and, thanks again to modern scholarship, we can see how Wordsworth has unconsciously conflated different episodes and different times in reproducing these crucial memories. To a psychoanalytic eye the three incidents he describes are alive with Oedipal themes. In the third of them he waits for the horses coming from his father’s house at a point overlooking the meeting place of two tracks; his journey home is then followed by his father’s death, which he describes as a punishment for his own presumptuous desire. This has such Theban echoes it has always prompted for me the following questions: did Wordsworth identify himself with Oedipus as consciously as Freud did? Was he familiar with Oedipus Rex? What I have learnt from Duncan Wu is that Wordsworth was examined as a student on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus at St John’s College, Cambridge, and ‘had considerable merit’ (Wu 1993:129). It seems very likely that he knew the other Theban plays.

If on the strength of this I call Part I of the 1799 Prelude proto-Freudian I would like, for other reasons, to call Part II proto-Kleinian. In this second part, before he can tackle the transcendental experiences of his adolescence that he wants to account for, he finds it necessary to produce his theory of infantile psychic development. Like Melanie Klein, Wordsworth sought an explanation of the numinous in infantile experience:

…when the soul

Remembering how she felt but what she felt Remembering not—retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity.

(Wordsworth 1979:23)

Wordsworth’s scheme of his psychic development is in three phases. The first is infancy, described as ‘beyond the twilight of rememberable time’

(Wordsworth 1979:20). Then comes childhood, a time when he thought he absorbed Nature’s forms adventitiously as they formed a crucial but disregarded background to his boyhood activities. Finally comes adolescence, when between his fourteenth and seventeenth years his previously unselfconscious love of nature erupted into passion and Mother Nature became the primary love object of his life, ‘with an increasing weight ; he was o’erpowered/By Nature, and his Spirit was on fire/With restless thoughts…/The mind within him burnt’ (Wordsworth 1985:26–7).

He describes a number of transcendental states, which I suggest are of two distinct types. In the first everything is in the present, exalted, thoughtless and fused with nature, which is taken to be the primal object and not simply symbolic of it. In the second type of transcendental state there is a poignant sense of a past that cannot be recollected but only felt.

Melanie Klein referred to such experiences as occurring sometimes in the course of analysis and called them ‘memories in feelings’ (Klein 1957:180).

The first kind of exalted state Wordsworth describes is nature worship, whereas the second kind leads from a love of nature to a love of man. I believe the first of these mental states is part of a manic defence, very common in adolescence, against a world ‘dead to the eye’, whereas the second is evocative and consolatory. The first denies the loss of the ideal object in an orgy of symbolic transfiguration; the second remedies it with a sublimatory symbolism produced in the depressive position, that is, with

‘thoughts that spring out of human suffering’ (Wordsworth 1984:302).

Before pursuing this further I want to return to the 1799 version of The Prelude to examine the account of infancy which Wordsworth felt he had to provide before grappling with the experiences of adolescence and young adult life it sought to explain. Within the poem he interrupts his biographical narrative to share an aside with his absent intellectual associate Coleridge. He shares with his friend a reassuring comment on the folly of those who make cognitive distinctions in the world of the mind and treat these distinctions as perceptions. He writes of the foolishness of attributing all mental activity to identifiable specific moments of sensory experience. It is not hard to see this as a critique of Locke. The two poets felt that the empirical school of philosophy, with its assembly of a filing cabinet of sensory experiences as a picture of the mind, annihilated man’s sense of himself. In Wordsworth’s own words, ‘we murder to dissect’

(Wordsworth 1984:131). ‘Hard task’, however, he continues in The Prelude,

‘to analyse a soul’ if ‘not only habits and desires, but each most obvious and particular thought hath no beginning’ (Wordsworth 1979:20). Here he is confiding that his previous standby in his account of psychological development, namely David Hartley (Wu 1993:72), with his theory of associationism, is proving inadequate for his purposes. In fact no eighteenth-century philosophical theory is adequate for his purposes and he makes a conjectural leap into the theories of the middle of the twentieth century, where such psychoanalytic writers as Klein (1952b, 1952c), Balint (1952) and Winnicott (1945) sought explanations for adult psychological developments in early infancy.

In a relatively short passage of forty-four lines Wordsworth gives an account of infantile experience in subjective terms, though it is written in the third person. In it he describes the infant’s attachment to the mother, the infant’s extension of this to the external world, and the founding of an

Loss of presence and presence of loss

internal world. This set of ideas provided him with a means of reconciling his intuitive philosophical idealism with his equally strong natural materialism. The infant of his poem is ‘creator and receiver both’, allowing the author to acknowledge both his minds imaginative creations and his perceptual debt to the external world.

…Blessed the infant babe—

For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our being—blest the babe

Nursed in his mother’s arms, the babe who sleeps Upon his mother’s breast, who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his mother’s eye.

Such feelings pass into his torpid life

Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind, Even in the first trial of its power,

Is prompt and watchful, eager to combine In one appearance all the elements

And parts of the same object, else detached And loath to coalesce. Thus day by day, Subjected to the discipline of love, His organs and recipient faculties

Are quickened, are more vigorous; his mind spreads, Tenacious of the forms which it receives.

In one beloved presence—nay and more, In that most apprehensive habitude

And those sensations which have been derived

And those sensations which have been derived