St. Fevronia IV: Perfect Abandon

St. Fevronia IV: Perfect Abandon
Acrylic on Panel 18 x 24 by zoe blue

In his article Dream Theory in Malaya,* the anthropologist Kilton Stewart described his study of the utilization of dreams in Senoi society. The Senoi were an isolated tribe of the Malay Peninsula at the time of his writing and research, in 1935; his interest in them was piqued by the fact that they seemed able to keep other tribes at bay without the use of violence, simply through a reputation for witchcraft: he thus set about to study the way that they used lucid dreaming and dream interpretation as a major part of that perceived power to manipulate the world around them. 

Their response to dreams of falling struck him particularly, as it did me:

“The simplest anxiety or terror dream I found among the Senoi was the falling dream. When the Senoi child reports a falling dream, the adult answers with enthusiasm, ‘That is a wonderful dream, one of the best dreams a man can have. Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?’ ...The child at first answers, as he would in our society, that it did not seem so wonderful, and that he was so frightened that he awoke before he had fallen anywhere.

‘That was a mistake,’ answers the adult-authority. ‘Everything you do in a dream has a purpose, beyond your understanding while you are asleep. You must relax and enjoy yourself when you fall in a dream. Falling is the quickest way to get in contact with the powers of the spirit world, the powers laid open to you through your dreams. Soon, when you have a falling dream, you will remember what I am saying, and as you do, you will feel that you are traveling to the source of the power which has caused you to fall.

‘The falling spirits love you. They are attracting you to their land, and you have but to relax and remain asleep in order to come to grips with them. When you meet them, you may be frightened of their terrific power, but go on. When you think you are dying in a dream, you are only receiving the powers of the other world, your own spiritual power which has been turned against you, and which now wishes to become one with you if you will accept it."

The astonishing thing is that over a period of time, with this type of social interaction, praise, or criticism, imperatives, and advice, the dream which starts out with fear of falling changes into the joy of flying.”

This struck me as the perfect description for passing through Borges’ mirror to the other, less automatic, more alive (terrifying, unknown) universe; a passing which I have also depicted as the plunge into an underwater universe as taken by the people following St. Fevronia under threat of annihilation by the soldiers of Batu Khan. Falling comes somewhere between floating and flying, and in this lucid-dreaming version is a perfect abandon. 

In that post-painting haze, as I was trying to organize my thoughts about this plunge-float-fall, I stumbled upon a book with an intriguing title: Time Distortion in Hypnosis, 

 by Linn Cooper and Milton Erickson. The sensation of floating, like the sensation of falling, carries with it a suspension of time, and it is somewhere in that suspension that we can find the ‘source of the power’ Stewart was referring to in his study. In their book, Cooper and Erickson detailed the studies they had managed in which they taught their subjects to greatly distort time, a difficult concept to grasp mentally, for which they gave the examples of dream-time and those expanded moments of fear for one’s life:

“Thus, a young man who very nearly ran his car over a cliff while taking his fiancee for a drive, reported that the time interval during which they were in danger seemed to be very long. In analyzing certain other aspects of his experience, he told of doing an amount of thinking and reflecting that was appropriate to a long interval. In other words, the seeming duration was long. However, on considering the number of feet which the car had slid with locked wheels and its probable speed when the emergency occurred, he was able to calculate that the clock reading during the emergency was but a few seconds.”

You have a lot of things going on internally at all times, most of which you are unaware of--including not only things like breathing but also things like the decision about what to see --but in moments of intense focus, like the above car accident, you can more actively take in all those details that some part of your brain is always filing away somewhere: for example, the minute movements of facial muscles, subtle clues in body language, calculating your opponent’s next swing, the precise amount you should turn the wheel to avoid oncoming traffic, remembering to relax your body before impact and focusing on the breaths you are taking, how loud they might be if a predator is present, and how they are affecting your body’s ability to move and process information. A person who has this focus at all times would have immense communicative abilities, as well as a fantastic control over the ability to pull opportunities towards him and dangers away from him. As noted, we usually only experience that focus during those moments of intense terror or danger, but aren’t meditation, hypnosis, and lucid dreaming exactly this sort of pausing and stretching of time?

What all that suggests is this: what’s important is not how long a second takes, but rather how much you can consciously extract from that second.

The second itself is apparently very, very relative. A good example of this relativity is given early on in the book with the task of picking cotton given to the subjects in two different ways. In the first test, the subject was hypnotized, placed in a mental cotton field, and asked to pick four rows of cotton, signaling the experimenter when the task was complete. It took her 217 seconds to complete the task, and she told the experimenter that she had picked 719 cotton bolls:

“She picked with her right hand part of the time, and with her left hand part of the time, shifting the bag accordingly. She picked only ripe bolls, leaving the green ones alone. Sometimes she stopped and brushed the leaves aside to make sure that she hadn’t missed any. She didn’t hurry, but she worked steadily. It was late afternoon, and the woods along the west edge of the field cast a shadow. She stated that she seemed to have been working about an hour and twenty minutes.”

Then the same task was given, but this time instead of the limit being four rows, the limit was one hour and twenty minutes. The subject was hypnotized, placed in the mental cotton field, and given three seconds--this fact was unknown to her. After three seconds, the experimenter had her blank her mind, stopping everything, then asked her to report. This time, she had picked 862 bolls, again without hurry. The felt time was an hour and twenty minutes. Asked to describe the experience, she remember detail, and she felt the time pass. The result suggests that the last second was actually decisive: at that point, the subject’s mind felt that the entire experience should be over, and it filled in the story, detail by detail.

Doesn’t that make you wonder where all your memories come from?

To further investigate, the doctors tried introducing sound to the test. Given a ten-second experiment, they would chime a knife against a glass 4 seconds in, without any warning given to the subject. The subject may have been preparing a meal as his or her task, and would then report a phone ringing or dropping a pitcher to the floor--his hallucinated experience would include a confabulation to make sense of the sound that his ears had picked up. The most interesting thing about that is how he managed to drop the pitcher before he heard the sound, so that the timing of it hitting the floor would match the sound of its contact. How did that happen?

What if everything, your entire life story, is happening all at once? What if all you think you have ever experienced is a pattern, which you are focusing on during this second, a pattern which explains world politics, the music your neighbor is playing, the proliferation of weapons at your local school, your food allergies, your preferences in a significant other, the quality of the education you have gotten, what you’re wearing right now? What if you’re really starting from that last second--the second right now--and explaining it all to yourself in high speed that feels like the normal unfolding of an entire life? What counts, what matters, if that’s the case, is the pattern, yes? Like a fractal, unfolding in each snowflake, each furl of a leaf, the placement of the planets. Like each bit of information contained in a hologram.

Cooper and Erickson worked with several musicians, and got some rather interesting results, exemplified in the reports of a professional violinist, who used her “special time” (what they called those gloriously long seconds) to review and practice violin pieces, describing them in a manner reminiscent of the eye-flickering it takes Neo to learn Jujutsu in the Matrix. She would play not just the entire piece, but also difficult passages over and over, strengthening her actual finger memory, her general technique, and her performance ability in the process.

The authors suggest that the reason musical subjects are able to both hear long pieces of music and practice them in such short periods of time is because “a piece of music is a pattern, extended in experiential time...” and another subject described her experience with this “special time” similarly:

“I can see the beginning and the end of everything I do in a trance. Like a dream, it’s a round thing--it’s not a progression. In music you have to begin at the beginning and play it through to the end, but in a painting you can see it all at once.”

I stayed up late reading all this, and the next morning in an incredible moment of synchronicity, I woke up with this poem waiting for me from Vesna, who had not seen or heard anything about this painting or the book I was reading, though everything in the poem, from its ‘all-at-once’ nature to the gradation of colors seems related, to me:

Where do I begin

If not from the end?

The breadcrumbs of memories will take me

Where I need to be

The Black will fade

Into Indigo

Purple

and Blue

Absorbed in soliloquy

Embracing the mystery

Where do I begin

If not from the end?

--Vesna

In the above painting, St. Fevronia has taken the plunge: she is relaxed, floating or falling towards another pattern, another universe entirely, in a moment of intense focus and need that somehow feels like joy. The blue (moonlit) hellebores are here again because it is all a matter of perception.

*Stewart later wrote Pygmies and Dream Giants , a book which wielded a great influence on the development of dream theory. Note that UCSC research professor G. William Domhoff (who was not there for the study) began around 1985 to argue that Stewart inflated and embellished his findings, and he claims that there is no evidence that this analysis of falling dreams belongs to the Senoi. Since my interest is in the idea the analysis itself provides, not who created it, I will leave that argument to others.

Dreaming Reality: Theo Ellsworth

Something Just Happened

From theo ellsworth

"I Wish Something Would Happen"

From theo ellsworth

"I Know I should be Careful What I Wish For, But This is the Kind of Thing That I've Always Wanted to Have Happen to Me"

According to his website, apart from writing stories and illustrating them with a mixture of mad abandon and inhuman patience, "He does invisible performance art that no one will ever see."

But...on his Flickr page, he lets this slip:

From theo ellsworth

"Performance Art"

He claims to have a miniature city inside his head, which he took me on a personalized (*"insert your name here _______") tour of in his exceptional book Capacity, but which he gives a more generalized view of here:

From theo ellsworth

"Miniature City"
(Note that you can see a bigger photo of ALL these images by following the links)

He regularly hikes and walks around everywhere, apparently seeing all the gorillas the rest of us have been missing, then runs home and records it on paper to help us catch up.

From theo ellsworth

"Another Elephant Woman Sighting"

At some point, he decided to make a journal of these types of things, and called it "Capacity," and had it published. I stumbled across it, and it made me so happy, I'm going to tell you about it here:

Capacity




The first thing that struck me about this comic book is that in every panel, everything is alive. Objects and creatures (including humans) mix. For example, there's a human whose head is part helmet-birdhouse and whose chest resembles a cuckoo clock, with a little opening under a drawn heart for the bird to come out of. There is a monster partly made up of roots, because everything is part of the natural world, too. Almost all of the buildings have faces, there are faces everywhere.
And he invites you in to this, completely. He invites you to become the mute being who bears witness to his story, but in a very active, very present, and necessary way. You are necessary to the story. (Or maybe I'm psychotic; I felt that way). The monster welcomes you into the story, you are given a blank on which to write your name as he greets you, and he (Theo, not the monster) asks you, How does the monster's breath smell? He apologizes if it's terrible. He encourages you to envision your view from your new perch atop the monster's head as he carries you to where the story will be told.
All in all, there's a lot here expressing (and inviting) interconnectedness.

From theo ellsworth

From theo ellsworth

Theo takes you through his dreams and through his waking hours, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the difference, as he appears to be one of those lucky guys that sees magic everywhere. When you enter the comic, you enter a dream, whether it claims to be waking life or no. Matter is more visibly fluid than in my waking life (though I'm making an effort to see things this way). The monster who greets you morphs various times, trying to come up with a physical identity which suits him, but this doesn't disturb the action or his monologue.


Theo here creates not another world, but many other worlds, and he gives them all an incredible amount of detail. He tells us "Stories always get more complex the closer I look at them. Even the tiniest character could have whole worlds inside of them, and those worlds could be filled with characters that have stories of their own. I become terrified of losing myself."

But he listens to everyone, even if they don't speak a language he understands, trying to understand and give each one a voice. Which is the very idea of St. Lucy, and of Tlon: to be able to unhinge from your own perspective, which defines yourself; to make yourself open to many, often completely foreign perspectives; to immerse yourself in them, and become something utterly new. This is what he offers us, as he invites us in.


And Now for a Self-Portrait

Later in the comic, there is a brief performance of a conversation between a man (the author) and a woman. The woman gives herself over to all of her emotions, showing what kind of creature each of them would be--what you would see if you could see each of her moods, instead of her regular old body costume. (This section almost seems like a tool for dream exercises: If in a dream, I'm being chased through an abandoned house by a noisy puppet, what does it mean? But that's actually from a different section...) And then she finally asks him: what about you? If I could see what you feel like right now, what would I see?
His answer:

From theo ellsworth

He opens his heart to you, and I mean that literally. You'll understand what I'm saying when you buy the book.
(note the two of them having coffee somewhere near the middle)


On Austin English's blog, there are 20 questions for cartoonists to answer, and Theo has offered his responses. This one is particularly telling (and also, I think, very, very obvious):
"1. can you describe your drawing routine---how often you draw, how many hour per day---how you break up the day with drawing?

I try to spend as much time as possible drawing everyday. It's a constant battle. There's always a list of other things I should be doing, but drawing comics is what I want to be doing. I try to get up in the morning and get right to work. On good days, I'll work maybe 10-13 hours. I have periods of time each day where I have to make myself completely unavailable (no phones or computers) just so I can sink into my own world and live there for periods of time with no interruption. If I didn't live with my girlfriend, there'd be a lot of days where I just don't see anyone. Other days, I'm running all over town doing chores, trying to get my left brain to help me keep my life in check. Other days, I'll draw all day with friends, which helps me feel less isolated and strange. The goal is to make art whenever and wherever I can."

You may look at all these super-detailed illustrations, realize that just this book is 336 pages long, and wonder: How is it that his fingers still work? Answer: His girlfriend is an acupuncturist.


At the end of the comic, he brings you gently back into your regular body, but not before letting you know that your time in his world has left you with some excellent benefits, not the least of which is inclusion in the Imaginary Body Club, which allows you access to places previously unavailable to you (as a person with only a real body).
Let's hope so.




Please also note that on his journeys, he seems to have discovered a few vehicles, gadgets, and snippets of language that Luigi Serafini left out of his record.

From theo ellsworth

From theo ellsworth

"Dragon Brain Car"

I will leave you today with this insanely wise piece of philosophy:

From theo ellsworth

"I truly believe that for every imaginary problem, there is an imaginary solution."

What Do You See?

"I do not think that 70 years is the time of a man or woman, nor that 70 millions of years is the time of man or woman, nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or anyone else."
--Walt Whitman


Saint Lucy decided at an early age that she did not want to be with a man; she preferred to give her self completely to God, though she lived in a time when it was not permitted to follow Christian beliefs. To deflect the attentions of a suitor who was captivated by the beauty of her eyes, she carved them out and sent them to him. Miraculously, she was still able to see--whether with new eyes that God gave her, as in some stories, or by some higher sight, as in others. I have chosen something along the middle path here, giving her the many eyes of a peacock's tail, which serves also as a sort of halo. Lucy also faithfully braved the dangers of guilt by association, regularly taking bread to the Christians that were already in hiding from the authorities. Eventually, she was denounced as a Christian by another spurned suitor, and after various failed attempts, the Roman soldiers succeeded at killing her.

The idea of sight coming from somewhere other than the eyes is one that can be found in many fables, tales, myths, and religions. There are those even in the current scientific community who spend their lives seeking out and testing those who claim to have some other sort of sight-- into the silent thoughts of others, into the future, across great distances, or into other realms where ghosts, angels, and demons reside. It is suggested that the earliest mention of such abilities is found in the Odyssey, but second sight is very common to the lore of the Scottish Highlands and the Icelandic sagas, and precognition is widely accepted among the Native Americans as well as tribes across South Africa and New Zealand.

In The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot tells the following story about an event concerning a hypnotist his father had hired to entertain at a party and a family friend, named Tom, who agreed to play guinea pig for the evening:

"Tom proved to be a very good subject, and within seconds the hypnotist had him in a deep trance. He then proceeded with the usual tricks performed by stage hypnotists. He convinced Tom there was a giraffe in the room and had Tom gaping in wonder. He told Tom that a potato was really an apple and had Tom eat it with gusto. But the highlight of the evening was when he told Tom that when he came out of trance, his teenage daughter, Laura, would be completely invisible to him. Then, after having Laura stand directly in front of the chair in which Tom was sitting, the hypnotist awakened him and asked him if he could see her.

Tom looked around the room and his gaze appeared to pass right through his giggling daughter. 'No,' he replied...Then the hypnotist went behind Laura so he was hidden from Tom's view and pulled an object out of his pocket. He kept the object carefully concealed so that no one in the room could see it, and pressed it against the small of Laura's back. He asked Tom to identify the object. Tom leaned forward as if staring directly through Laura's stomach and said that it was a watch. The hypnotist nodded and asked if Tom could read the watch's inscription. Tom squinted as if struggling to make out the writing and recited both the name of the watch's owner (which happened to be a person unknown to any of us in the room) and the message. The hypnotist then revealed that the object was indeed a watch and passed it around the room so that everyone could see that Tom had read its inscription correctly." (141)

So, what was Tom seeing the watch with, then? Was he really seeing through his daughter? Or was he seeing the watch by seeing the thoughts in the hypnotist's head? What is that?

While working on this painting, I came across yet another story, this one about an autistic girl, who has of course been subjected to many recorded medical studies since her abilities were noticed. Blind from birth, this girl wanders around by herself without running into things by making little chirping noises which somehow act as a sonar, as in the case of bats.


In this icon of St. Lucy, I have chosen time as that which is being re-envisioned, or seen new. The various clock pieces come apart, reconfigure, and tumble about through space; some of them are organic, forming the labyrinths where the Christians Lucy must feed hide from the monsters, requiring her to find her way by following an inner radiance and sureness of step, that is, by faith and by transcending (thus the birds) her physical handicap.

(Two heavy influences on my thinking about this work, which are linked in my blogroll: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges, and How to Create a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick).

Monsters

Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life:


"This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known..."

--Remedios Varo

From monsters

How a Monster is Made, and How a Monster is Defeated:



Medusa was once a much-coveted maiden and a priestess in Athena's temple. However, she was raped by Poseiden, and afterwards, in her fury, she transformed her lovely hair into vicious serpents, and her beautiful face into something the sight of which would turn a man to stone. The terror and the violation and her resulting rage turned her into a monster.
Perseus was a fisherman's apprentice who was sent on what was thought to be an impossible quest by a king who wanted to be rid of him: he was told to bring back the head of Medusa. On his journey, he received the help of three divine beings, one of whom was Athena, who gave him a mirrored shield. He used the shield to locate Medusa through her reflection, protecting himself from the curse of her face, and he was able to sever her head from her neck. From her open neck sprang Chrysaor and Pegasus-the winged horse that Perseus is often shown riding in Renaissance art. So, from terror and rage rose a monster, but because of Perseus' commitment and tenacity, the monster gave birth to a magical creature and a hero. Later, Perseus was able to use the head of Medusa--once a source of fear for him--as a weapon for self-defense.

From monsters

In this painting, the girl has been hiding under the bed from the monsters and terrors of the world. But she has discovered that by careful attention to her surroundings and meaningful interaction with her environment, she can become an active participant in her life--she is no longer forced to live in a constant state of cowering defense. She moves the vest pattern and the bee-keeping book just so, she adjusts the position of the green ink, the key and the comb, and as she does, the resilient Perseus appears, as well as a tall, powerful woman--a goal for the child, or a model, an idea of what she might become. The architecture of her room, once a small, cramped, sealed place, begins to widen. She pieces together her heroes, and the breath of life and spirit, in the form of birds, comes to fill them.

From monsters

(larger versions of the photo are available if you follow the link)

Dreaming

"Underneath Your Eyelids," Agnieszka Szuba

"William Stanley Merwin (born 30 September 1927 ) is an American poet. He made a name for himself as an anti-war poet during the 1960s. Later, he would evolve toward mythological themes and develop a unique prosody characterized by indirect narration and the absence of punctuation. In the 80s and 90s, Merwin's interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology also influenced his writing. He continues to write prolifically, though he also dedicates significant time to the restoration of rainforests in Hawaii, where he currently resides.

Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009) and the Tanning Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings." (wikipedia)


"Succubus," Agnieszka Szuba



"In the Chamber of Miracles and Fears," Agnieszka Szuba

Two days ago, I posted a poem of his I had stumbled across on language, which got me looking through his poetry again, which led me to making another post :)

In 1971, Merwin donated the money from his Pulitzer Prize award to the draft resistance movement, simultaneously publishing his objections to the Vietnam War in the New York Review of Books.

His poem, Ogres, which is also a form of protest against war, is a favorite of mine, as it makes me think of dream theories and the necessity of applying them to everyday life. One of the main principles to remember when studying your dreams is that every character in them is actually an aspect of you. You may dream of your husband, wife, mother, neighbor, or the bully in your school, but in your dream each of them is representing some aspect of you that has been prevalent in some internal conflict or that has been the guiding force in your actions over the previous 24-48 hours. And so the idea is not to wake up and go let that person have it for cheating or abandoning or otherwise violating you, but rather to figure out where you have been doing such a thing to yourself--what talent or interest you've been neglecting, where you've been cheating yourself.
If I could look at the waking world in that way, I would spend less time angry, and more time solving problems and drinking magic potions :) The poem Ogres hinges on that idea.


"Theatre of Things Unknown and Unseen"
Agnieszka Szuba


Here's that poem:

OGRES
-W.S. Merwin-

All night waking to the sound
of light rain falling softly
through the leaves in the quiet
valley below the window
and to Paula lying here
asleep beside me and to
the murmur beside the bed
of the dogs’ snoring like small
waves coming ashore I
am amazed at the fortune
of this moment in the whole
of the dark this unspoken
favor while it is with us
this breathing peace and then I
think of the frauds in office
at this instant devising
their massacres in my name
what part of me could they have
come from were they made of my
loathing itself and dredged from
the bitter depths of my shame

--W.S.Merwin--

And here's a playlist of some more dream-related images created by Agnieszka Szuba:

Queens of Fate

Some of my paintings:




Three of the paintings in the video belong to a series on the Three Fates:


Three Fates Dreaming the World Under the Watchful Eye of the Baku

From Blogger Pictures

There is an old Hindu idea that the world is a dream, and each dreamer dreams all the other dreamers, which are all aspects of him/herself. The dreamer is then the creator of the universe and also an actor in it-- all the actors in it, in fact. Here, the dreamer takes the role of the Three Fates from Greek mythology, as they weave the world, simultaneously weaving each other. In the beginning, as always, there is chaos, the mushy sky, formless. In the beginning, the dreamer is already there, taking form from spirit and energy left over from the last dream (is this karma?). One Fate feeds the spool from her hair, and the thread gives form to the chaos of the sky, shaping another Fate, who is already escaping her cloth, one arm reaching out into the forming universe, offering her Gift: nourishment for the birds. The third Fate, who pulls the excess thread in from the second Fate's cloth, her body performing the alchemy that changes air to water, feeds the world fish, which become the birds the second Fate feeds.



The Fates Reconsider





Here the Three Fates have wandered out from beneath the Baku's protective gaze. And as a result they dreamed up war, hwich is the tapestry to the upper right. The tapestry is a combination of pieces of Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari and the sketches for Picasso's Guernica, and at the moment, having realized their mistake, they are unraveling that tapestry, trying to unsnarl it and preserve the thread for a new tapestry. The Fate at the far right is only trying to untangle her hair from it as her form disintegrates into feathers which then take flight as new birds (think Jungian transcendence), while the middle Fate is trying to replant her hair from the strands she rescues as her form returns to water. The water cascades down the slight rise and begins creeping up the far left Fate's leg as a tattoo, which extends to include the horse and rider from the tapestry, this time re-envisioned as a performing horse and rider, the sword of the previous rider now no more than the silver feather in the performer's headband, and the ram (equivalent in some mythologies to the phoenix, a symbol of rebirth) from his breastplate now a puppet-mask, hanging on her right shoulder from tattooed strands of hair. As the strands develop from tattoo to real hair, which she reels onto the new spool, the rest of the tattoo also begins to come to life, a real ram's mask hanging from her hair, and a child hanging from it in creative play, and other new creatures come into being, such as the flying cat (why not?).


Revolution: The Tapestry Comes to Life






The child is now a more fully developed marionette; her maker's mask falls away to reveal her spirit mask as she grabs one of the ropes directing her in order to take control of her own movements. The horse has evolved into its own sort of magical beast, which stops short at the observing cat (the flying kitten, now well-satisfied), allowing its partner to go on flying of her own accord. and the threads of the background smoke and mist as they begin to form the shapes of the new world.

Liminal Spaces

In keeping with the theme of dissolving the rules of the board, turning a heavily regulated square with distinctly outlined, limited possible positions into, well, wonderland, I am here posting a few of my paintings:

Winter Queen Rides the Baku

The Baku is a mythological character, which, according to Nicholas Christopher, has a lion's head, a horse's body, and tiger's paws. He eats bad dreams. Here the queen rides him off the board, or the edge of the world.




And then there's the member of the court that never bothers with the court rules, or cultural rules:

Court Jester

This is the joker, present on three levels of life or three universes: the "normal" one; the emerging reflection from the water (i.e. the emotional realm; in dream theory, water usually represents emotions, and then supposedly every person and thing in your dream represents some aspect of you, the dreamer, and so it's as if the physical world is only a reflection of the emotional world inside you-- so actually, which jester here is the reflection?); and the distant reflection-- so far away, it's a constellation, like a macrocosm version of the pair (jester and female mask), again like in dreaming or like fractals: snowflakes, for example, are set up the same as fractals, meaning one snowflake is made up of a gazillion miniature versions of the whole snowflake-- so here, the entire universe is the same jester and his female mask or consort or presence, replicated however many times until it makes a constellation, and then the constellation is replicated however many times until it makes a universe, and so on. Like the way myths are reflections, and they have their representatives in the stars, and how the jester normally carries a mirror so he can show us our "true selves' " part in his behavior. Or the way sometimes you have to look at something a million different ways before it makes sense.

I put a few of my paintings into a video called “Liminal Spaces,” which I'll post here:









Set to Air's "Empty Houses," and guarded by Gabriel's "Dreamland Security."


liminal |limnl| adjective technical 1 of or relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. 2 occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. ...exploring the space between dreaming and waking, between universes, between "streams" of reality, between the subjective and the objective, etc....

And, According to Wikipedia:
"Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology (a "liminal state") and in the anthropological theories of ritual by such writers as Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and others. In the anthropological theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passageinvolves some change to the participants, especially their social status.

The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives.

People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal."

Perception and "Reality"

I am looking here for solid visual aids and powerful emotive stimuli to help my subconscious along in its attempts to accept the idea that there are many universes, and that those many universes may in fact all be overlapping, occupying the same space; that it's not immense speed that we need in order to visit other streams of reality, it's simply a more masterful application of our visual capabilities, of our awareness. My conscious mind accepts the new physics. Greedily. Now I must train the rest of me.
This is a record of that search, and also a record of my own attempt to create doorways out of walls, and windows out of mountains. Following that visual theme, I'll start with a story borrowed from “The Holographic Universe,” by Michael Talbot, in which he relates an experience with a hypnotist his father had hired to entertain some friends at his house. The hypnotist performed a variety of the usual tricks with his subject, a friend of the author's father, named Tom:
“But the highlight of the evening was when he told Tom that when he came out of trance, his teenage daughter, Laura, would be completely invisible to him. Then, after having Laura stand directly in front of the chair in which Tom was sitting, the hypnotists awakened him and asked him if he could see her.
“Tom looked around the room and his gaze appeared to pass right through his giggling daughter. 'No,' he replied. The hypnotist asked Tom if he was certain, and again, despite Laura's rising giggles, he answered no. Then the hypnotist went behind Laura so he was hidden from Tom's view and pulled an object out of his pocket. He kept the object carefully concealed so that no one in the room could see it, and pressed it against the small of Laura's back. He asked Tom to identify the object. Tom leaned forward as if staring directly through Laura's stomach and said that it was a watch. The hypnotist nodded and asked if Tom could read the watch's inscription. Tom squinted as if struggling to make out the writing and recited both the name of the watch's owner (which happened to be a person unknown to any of us in the room) and the message. The hypnotist then revealed that the object was indeed a watch and passed it around the room so that everyone could see that Tom had read its inscription correctly.
“When I talked to Tom afterward, he said that his daughter had been absolutely invisible to him. All he had seen was the hypnotist standing and holding a watch cupped in the palm of his hand. Had the hypnotist let him leave without telling him what was going on, he never would have known he wasn't perceiving normal consensus reality.” (141)

That's what I mean when I say I want to make doorways out of walls.

The part of the puzzle I feel is represented by the chess board, if I continue following the imagery of Alice in Wonderland, is the social conditioning that limits what we see. For example, there is the Bartlett Effect. The Bartlett Effect is a major problem when the only evidence you have in investigating a crime is eye-witness testimony. Numerous experiments have shown that several people all present at the same event won't see the same thing. Your average, averagely fearful white suburbanite will tell you that the perpetrator was a tall black man. Thirteen people present at the same bank robbery will all point confidently at someone different in a line up: someone who was in Germany at the time and so couldn't have been there, someone they saw on the news, one of the other victims. Anyone the police officer next to them seems keen on. This is your mind, having bracketed the world into patterns, seeing what it expects to see. People get frightened in these scenarios, and if your mind can’t grasp what it sees, it’ll do a little overdubbing--see something it can grasp. In fact, according to current neuroscience, we actually “see” very little. We take in a bit of information through our eyes, and our brain fills in the rest based on memory, past experience-- what we expect. The breakdown can be somewhere close to 50/50: fifty percent of what we think we're seeing is in fact only what we're expecting to see based on a combination of what we've seen before and our inherited cultural expectations. (And then, a lot of what we've seen before was already based on those inherited cultural expectations...)
The following section of a BBC documentary on the brain plays with this idea a bit:





Now, if all that's true, then all kinds of amazing, impossible things could be happening right in front of us all the time, and we just don't see them. Right?

Rob Gonsalves' paintings are another fantastic representation of how training yourself to see from more than one perspective at once can allow you to see more than one existence at a time. Here's hoping this becomes a talent off the canvas as well:

On Alice in Wonderland

Because we should all take as many trips down the rabbit hole as possible...

Maggie Taylor's photography (and her website) has that mysterious, impossible feel to it that lends itself well to Alice in Wonderland. The book "Maggie Taylor's Landscape of Dreams" is also oddly fascinating.











you can see more of her work here:
http://www.fineartphotography-online.com/02/artphotogallery/home.html
and here:
http://www.maggietaylor.com/

Another excellent interpreter of Alice in Wonderland, but in an entirely different vein, and in black and white, is Abelardo Morell.








He also uses a technique called camera obscura, which is when a room is closed off except for a pinprick of light from the outside, and a large format camera is left with an open shutter for a long period of time. The effect is, to me, like a visualization of the modern theories in physics which suggest that many realities are occurring in the same space, that parallel universes overlap. It just takes a very intense sort of visual ability to perceive them...










That they are set in bedrooms adds a dream-like quality: if you were lying down in the bed, maybe with your eyes closed, this is what you would see...


And then, I love his photos of the Romeo and Juliet set at the Met:





You can see more of his work here:
http://www.abelardomorell.net/index.html

And then, if you need more help getting past Newtonian Physics, Economic Laws, and other Useless Rules, I recommend Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."



You can get an impression of him here:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/site.php



Also, not to make this endless, but one must have the proper chess set for this sort of event, and it has been made my Gil Bruvel:





It is the mechanical world versus the natural, organic world, and the artist makes it quite difficult to decide.