Detritus of a disordered mind:
The soul, our life’s star,
Hath elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar.
William Wordsworth,
“Ode (‘Intimations of Immortality’)” in William
Wordsworth: Selected Poetry, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Penguin Books,
1992), 209.
Last night, in my dream, I was taking
part in a group exhibition. I go to the building where the exhibition is taking
place. I enter the basement and see an old mattress with a pile of artworks on
top. I look through them and realise that these are my old paintings and
drawings. Many are damaged and look as though they have been here for years.
I go upstairs and look around the
exhibition space. No one will speak to me. There is an empty space where my
artworks should have been. The curator looks annoyed with me. I pass someone I
used to know and they look away. I realise that the other artists are finishing
hanging their works. It dawns on me that I should have been here long ago and
hung my own artworks with the curator’s input.
When I wake, I realise that I have been
dreaming about my inability to finish anything. I feel a sense of
disappointment that I could not gather my artworks together and figure out how
to display them. Instead, they are languishing in a basement. This is the story
of my life. There is something of value in the basement, but I am incapable of
bringing it out of the basement to see the light of day.
In order to explain this inability to
finish anything, honesty is the only solution. I have given up trying to order
my thoughts into a narrative sequence that makes sense to the reader. I have
also given up trying to arrange my images so that they also tell a story.
Instead, my thoughts are put down in blocks. A page or so that makes sense
before my thoughts dissolve into disordered ramblings. My writing process is
similar to my artistic process. It occurs in bursts of activity that eventually
tip over into nonsense.
Depression is often perceived as a Black
Dog, but for me depression is the absence of the Black Dog, my soul, who like
most dogs runs off and gets lost. My soul gets lost in the underworld, leaving
me bereft of the energy or impetus to do anything in the topside world. It is
only when the Black Dog returns that I begin to make art, to write, to do
anything. The problem is, he doesn’t stay for long. Soon my latest artistic
enterprise and enthusiastic burst of writing becomes disordered and chaotic.
I have a computer littered with chunks
of disconnected writing and a house full of detritus following my latest
artistic “project.” Certain rooms become cluttered with decayed plant matter,
old light bulbs, clumps of fur, bits of bone, broken egg shell, Victorian
glassware, images cut from sheets of acetate, sheets of glass, broken mirrors,
sprouting potatoes and pieces of fruit. I then have no energy to clean up the
resulting mess.
I associate the periods of communion
with my soul with the helical rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the
constellation Cannis Major. Siris rises briefly in our night sky. The rest of
the time Sirius remains below the horizon, somewhere in the underworld. Unlike
the fixed stars that enable us to navigate, Sirius leaves one lost at sea.
My souls brief return heralds a period
of productivity. The resulting artworks have little, if anything, to do with
me. When my soul leaves, I no longer dream at night, daydream, make art or
write. The missing element seems to be the ability to dream. Without this
ability I feel bereft. Perhaps I am talking about communication between my
dreaming self and my waking self that only occurs in short bursts.
I only recently had a name for this
bizarre state of affairs, this erratic communication between me and my soul.
The reality of Bipolar 11 is a frustrating inability to finish anything. Rather
than starting a project and finishing it, I have to start again each time. I
have now accepted that my projects will never be finished, that my artistic
process is one of always starting again. Only when the stars are aligned can
the resulting artworks and writings form part of a constellation. If not, it is
a waste of time.
Starting again each time may also
explain the recurring visual motifs that haunt my artistic practice. My soul,
my dreaming self, is trying to communicate something too me. It cannot stay
long enough to get the message across. Each time I have the impetus to make
art, the same visual images return like revenants. They reappear in different
artworks in different media. Until recently I had no idea that this was
happening. Looking back at my old artworks, it dawned on me that this has been
occurring since childhood. Perhaps this is why there is a pile of my old
artworks in a basement in my dream. I am meant to go through them to see what
they bring to light.
The recurring visual images include
birds, eggs, trees and bones. Related to each of the recurring visual images
are various different mental associations. These mental associations are an
unseen, invisible undercurrent that rises to surface with the appearance of
each visual image. They are evoked, called up, by the visual images. The
associations do not make any rational sense.
I am worried that this association
generation is pathological, that I am perceiving connections between unrelated
things. That the mental associations are symptomatic of falling into a
temporary, recurring dream state similar to that described by Maurice Blanchot in The Space of
Literature.
‘The dream
touches the region where pure resemblance reigns. Everything there is similar;
each figure is another one, is similar to another and to yet another, and this
last to still another. One seeks the original model, wanting to be referred to
a point of departure, an initial revelation, but there is none. The dream is
the likeness that refers eternally to likeness.’
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 268.
The recurring visual motifs and
corresponding mental associations could be aspects of an archetype. They may be
the remnants or residues of ancient cosmologies that return and have an afterlife
within my artistic practice. Carl Gustav Jung notes in “The Archetype in Dream
Symbolism” that in obsessive or recurring dreams,
‘… we have to
take into consideration the fact, already observed and commented on by Freud,
that elements often occur in a dream that are not individual and cannot be
derived from personal experience. They are what Freud called “archaic
remnants”—thought-forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the
individual’s own life, but seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited
patterns of the human mind.’
Carl Jung, “The Archetype in Dream Symbolism,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 18, ed. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 521.
Jung explains his notion of an archetype as,
‘… an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs — representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern.’
Carl Jung, “The Archetype in Dream Symbolism,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 18, ed. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 523.
Perhaps Blanchot is right and there is
no original model, only a stream of resemblances. I cannot say for sure either
way.
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