Saturday, January 31, 2009

To explore is...

On reading this passage by Norman Brown's Loves Body I bursted out laughing; he states, following Melanie Klein, what follows:

To explore is to penetrate; the world is the inside of mother. "The entry into the world of knowledge and schoolwork seemed to be identified with the entry into the mother's body." (...) Geography is the geography of the mother's body (...) Geography; or geometry, as in FINNEGANS WAKE.

Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (1963)

Well, well. In the geography of dreams, it may be true. But this sounds only like somebody who has never really explored geography OUT THERE.

Yet Brown is interesting, and what interests me most is his being born in El Oro, Mexico, in 1913, as a son of a mining engineer. His view of "geography" may after all be the best illustration of the oedipal situation.