
From time to time (thoughtfully, preferably at the start of a weekend) it’s worth getting up on a ladder
It doesn’t have to be wooden or ergonomic, as long as it’s sturdy, leans against the edge of the frame and leads somewhere higher, whatever that means. Of course, a ladder comes in very handy when we are just talking on the phone and our conversation is with someone, or something at a distance and promises to be exceptionally long. Abstractions formed on the ladder cannot be verified, ideas „talked about” on the ladder cannot be embodied – they remain interesting delusion. Delusions are very much needed by Homo sapiens as a natural habitat through which our species maintains its superiority over other primates. Even more than for conversation, we need delusions that can be turned into an image, into a possibly simple, intuitively usable object or tool. Of course, both colour and tools can be brought on a ladder. But it might not be that simple. Especially if you want to climb the ladder engraved by Dürer – at the very beginning you have to do some exaggerated bending, crossing highly irregular, useless blocks in order to get your foot on the first rung. Professor Kazimierz Dąbrowski has aptly described what can happen in the next moment. „Let us now turn to the question of transcending one’s own mental type. Is such a transcendence even possible? We may think that not only is it possible, but that it is even a necessary developmental imperative, a necessary imperative to transcend psychic one-sidedness. To transcend the limitation of life attitudes. It is a mechanism for authentic understanding with oneself and with others, a basis for interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary thinking. The uptight guy, the developmental type, which does not have the possibility of transcending, even partially, certain psychic qualities, will act in a schematic, automatic way”. (quoted in K. Dabrowski, Positive Disintegration,