Skip to main content

The Ship of Life.

 

‘This sea of sleep, deep in the foundations of human nature, has its high tide at night: every slumber indicates only that it washes a shore from which it retreats in waking hours. What remains are the dreams; however marvellously they are formed, they are no more than the lifeless remains from the womb of the depths. The living remains in him and secure in him: the ship of waking life, and the fish as the silent booty in the nets of artists.’

Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 399.

Sometimes I have premonitions, dreams that alert me that something is about to happen. Often, I would prefer not to know. The rest of the time I try to divine the future through tarot cards or runes. This is a pointless exercise. I am on a journey, like everyone else, on our ships of life. Most of us are far from our destination and we cannot know what our destination will be.

We have cargo, our past, which we can jettison overboard if we please, or that we can rummage through for hidden treasure. There is also the bounty bought up in our nets. My fear is running out of treasure. What if I stop dreaming, then what will I do?

It is this fear that drives the desire to see the future, for then I would know what I am working towards, what direction I am going in, what I will create. I could write about hauntings but those feel more personal, as though unconscious contents manifested in the outer world.

I feel that writing is different to making art. You cannot go back to old works and re-work them or use elements of them to create other works. Having said that, Marcel Proust repeatedly reworked the manuscript of In Search of Lost Time until it looked like a piece of conceptual art.

‘Proust composed by an immensely complex process of writing and rewriting, weaving together passages sometimes composed years apart, filling his margins with additions and, when the margins ran out, continuing on strips of paper glued to the pages.’ 

Carol Clark, “Marcel Proust Was Almost Impossible to Edit,” Literary Hub, January 8, 2019, https://www.lithub.com/marcel-proust-was-almost-impossible-to-edit/

The thing is, I have stopped dreaming. I have not had a dream for weeks. I have not made any art either. Somehow the two are linked but I don't know how or why. Hopefully I will start dreaming again and make some art.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Unconscious, the Collective Unconscious and Symbols.

  Jung observed that the idea of the unconscious presented by Carus and von Hartman disappeared without a trace, it then re-emerged in medical psychology. [1] He noted that at first, the unconscious denoted forgotten or repressed contents of the psyche. [2] Jung suggested that it was the study of dreams that allowed psychologists to study the unconscious aspects of conscious events, ‘As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.’ [3] Jung then noted that, ‘It is on such evidence that psychologists assume the existence of an unconscious psyche – though many scientists and philosophers deny its existence. They argue naively that such an assumption implies the existence of two “subjects,” or (to put it in a common phrase) two personalities within the same individual. But that is exactly what it does imply – quite correctly.’ [4] Sigmund Freud, despite being aware of the m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Denkbilder.

  Denkbilder or thought-images were a writing form utilised by members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Probably the most famous denkbild being Walter Benjamins “Angel of History” from section IX of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History . It is an image in words, but an image that cannot be rationally explained despite the proliferation of different interpretations. ‘A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows as angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence...
Post a Comment
Read more

Night Writing: Carl Jung.

  For me, the genius of Carl Jung lay in his willingness to allow dreams to influence his thinking. Jung wrote, ‘I knew no reasons for the assumption that the tricks of consciousness can be extended to the natural processes of the unconscious. On the contrary, daily experience taught me what intense resistance the unconscious opposes to the tendencies of the conscious mind.’ [1]  In dreams, houses often refer to the psyche of the dreamer. Following one such dream about a dwelling Jung developed his theory of the collective unconscious. Jung interpreted the dream as follows, ‘It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche – that is to say, of my own then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated style, The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became....
Post a Comment
Read more