If I look at a poem, I can’t say that poem is the opposite of another poem. Or that this short story by Edgar Allan Poe is the opposite of a short story by D. H. Lawrence. It makes no sense. I have to work with the D. H. Lawrence story as it is. In the arts you don’t use opposites. You may say there are strong contrasts in a painting, between blue and red or between the upper part and the lower part or the form and the content, whatever. But what’s in front of the eyeballs, the image, isn’t concerned with the question of opposites.
I don’t think about conscious versus unconscious or sadism versus masochism or activity versus passivity; I try to stick with what is presented.
There is another way I could go at this problem, which is through Christianity. The Christian view moves in on a situation immediately in terms of morality—good or bad; it starts off with a pair of opposites. So you’re trapped in judgments before you examine the phenomenon. If you say activity is good, then passivity has to become negative and weak and neurotic. If passivity gets the plus sign, then activity has to become aggressive. You’re caught. You can never deal with a thing as it is.
So why not try to understand a phenomenon, darkness, say, without referring to light, without contrasting it with light. You can study the quality of the shadows, where they are, their thickness, their depth, whether these shadows are painted with purple or blue or umber or burnt umber or shades of gray, without any reference to light.
— Inter Views, Pathologizing and Soul