E4 : The Alien
Type 4
A core piece of the Type 4 fixation might be conceptualized as an underlying sense that one’s DNA is irreparably broken or fundamentally different; or that the brokenness is the important difference. Imagine a DNA helix that’s much more tightly twisted than others, mangled and distorted. The torsional stress, figuratively, cuts off the intracellular circulation, a significant portion of the flow of intra-helical messages is stalled out, dwindling the Four’s options, rendering them frail in relation to their will to move, to do, to pivot around in corporeal space from the springboard of the Gut. The muscles of outer action appear crippled or built from the wrong stuff, sharply diminished in the number of available moves or opportunities, leaving the Four staggering toward a couch of sighs.
The will, which, among other things, would normally animate the self into literal motion, is largely bled off into subterranean processes, applying its native strength of force and energy to animate the imagination and bring life to chimeras. The arteries of the primeval Gut being rerouted, plunged into the inner landscape, generate Four’s characteristic inner storminess and proneness to psychological violence in multiple forms. The colors of the outside world pale in comparison to the very active crimson stage within.
Meanwhile the twisting snaky gnarl of the eye-intensive Image-driven DNA string tightens in on itself, bringing itself into visual contact with another part of itself, face to face in a Hall of Mirrors…an easy place to get lost. This ‘lost’ quality continues the overlap with the fractured cellular blueprint, the perpetual alien is drawn into the warped hall of self-impressions rather automatically and mechanically. The Land Inside, amongst a population of other distorted reflections of ‘me’, appears as the only place on this Earth that one belongs. “Yesterday, I heard they cloned a baby… Now can I finally sleep with me?”
This twist of fate is the blueprint for one of E4’s core dynamics, something that might be described as emotional torquing. Greatly over-generalized, for the purpose of illustration, it could be said that the other Types have a 2-dimensional pain schema: here’s the bad thing on one end of a straight line…and on the opposite end, there’s the hurt feeling in response. E4 does a peculiar thing: adds an unexpected and incongruous third dimension – Beauty – into the pain dynamic. An image of an ideal self or place or special Other or outcome or Feeling-state is dangled in front of the inner eye, an elegant paisley-carved carrot on a stick, the Four longing for what’s just out of reach and simultaneously a million miles away. A forceful feat of psychic engineering. A torque dynamic isn’t only possible in 2-dimensional (psychic) space. Twisting and then re-twisting in the other direction, in the depth/width/height of vivid virtual 3D, squeezing yet more bitter juice from the longing, the missing of the missing piece. “Waiting for the present to pass….Waiting for a dream to last”
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