She sees her mother as suffering from that unfed hunger, an unstable self. When Lilly enters the monastery She asks why Jesus is on the lap of Mother Mary while she feels so abandoned and left out, as if her needs for the same for the same nurturance were in fact invisible and illicit. She sees men as entitled, especially in receiving unconditional nurturing and sustenance from the women around them, as women remain hungry and deprived of such riches of support. I think Lilly, is very much a daughter of her era. Burkert to play in the novel and in Lilly's life? it came from old prints from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages of personal, unexplainable "spiritual journeys of the soul" so to speak.
I never thought of the bulb in purely Freudian terms. Though the pharmaceutical revolution has changed everything in many good ways, towards cure end stabilizing I still like to believe there are states, and questions about the nature of identity and existence that remain ineffable. It still somehow belonged to the poets to express and had no ready made answers. I wanted to create the sense of enigma, of bafflement that felt truer to me then the rational truism we apply to illness.
Again in response to the overly simplified and concrete medical models constantly used as one dimensional diagnostics, it simply felt so right to express her states, as a poetic metaphor might, with all the resonance and power possible through language and imagery, and I went with it.
The bulb was about so much! I wanted the "bulb" to express the ineffability and mysteriousness of her illness and mental illness in general, and of our vulnerable nature itself, I guess. I desperately wanted and needed a deeper exploration and journey and one that was not based on easy resolutions, "kitchen therapies" or being "fixed" which our current society has relied on, but, instead on an exploration of engaging philosophical and sexual questions of existence itself, questions about identity and intimacy that transcend our purely medical and limited understanding of mental illness and see it as part of a continuum of human experience throughout history. In recent years, drugs such Prozac have been used in memoirs and accounts of depression which I felt was only a partial, inadequate answer. I strongly felt that the continual oversimplifications in the media and elsewhere threw more confusion and darkness into this disturbing and beguiling state of human behavior and, in the end, muffled the cries from those in the throes of it. I wanted to write about mental illness because I was deeply bothered the popular medical and cultural presentations of it in commercial mediums.
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