First in babyhood the thumb, the
dummy, the pacifier. Then in infancy the teddy, the dolly, the comfort
blanket.
In childhood the favourite story, the
secret place, the imaginary companion.
In youth the best friend and the worship of the hero or the heroine. In
adolescence the security of the
group and the fanciful ideal in a
sexual partner, and in adulthood? Ah, in adulthood, so St Paul
tells us, we have put away childish things.
But have we? Suppose in fact we haven’t,
and that in our misapprehension of what we think of as reality, it only
seems to us that we have .....
As human beings most of us perceive
things - the impact on our senses of objects, facts, events, reality - in much the same way. But
as we file them with experiences already held in the memory of the
complex computer we call our mind, we begin to interpret
them in ways unique to us. Their association forms the basis of concepts,
each concept being inevitably
personal to ourselves. The
process is our conceptualisation.
Being human, we instinctively seek opportunities
to link our concepts with those of our fellows - one aspect of Stanley's prison-wall
tapping -
in order to assure ourselves of the common ground we define as the
mutual or universal aspects
of our humanity. These links are managed effectively when we are each aware of
the distinction between what
we perceive as reality and
what we conceive as our
interpretation of it.
Sadly in the hurly-burly of existence
we often apply the logic by which we perceive things to the imagination by which we form concepts, so confusng perception and conceptualisation. Artists
need to be sensitive to the distinction, and Stanley's
alertness to it was a vital factor in the power of his
vision. It was the source, for example, of the unexpected subtitle he
gave his Cookham Resurrection painting
through which he was able to promote a subtext clarifying the
difference between The Intellectual (the
logically perceptive) and the
Instinctive (the conceptually imaginative, or intuitive.)
The realm of conceptualisation is
the one to
which the poet and the artist - especially one like Stanley who called
it his up-in-heaven -
instinctively dedicates his output, hoping that maybe
others will find from it a
sympathetic link to their own conceptualisation and thus achieve a
moment of
joint recognition. In Stanley's visionary art, it helps explain
those
frequent
instances
in which he shows himself in some associate form or figure as standing
outside the reality of the experience he is depicting and presenting it
to us conceptually as a reflection of our humanity or our
universality.
Those
concepts which serve to comfort us
(give us joy in Stanley's
terms, or at least provide us with
such comfort as is available) we
adopt as our beliefs, or our hopes, or our longings or our ambitions. We weave them into
the substance of a comfort-myth,
an imaginative storyline we fashion for ourselves and by which we instinctively try
to steer our lives.