A Hurry Through Which Known And Strange Things Pass

A Hurry Through Which Known and Strange Things Pass

Notwithstanding the artist’s bag of tricks there is a surreal terrain neither here nor there but in between where the pale fruits of introversion live in a foreclosed garden. The precarious Guest of the moment is our fleeting thoughts, visitors that arrive, stay a while, and then depart. That is the transient nature of consciousness. Whereas pure awareness, the Host of the immobile center, is what watches. Stay focused in the “host” of your life rather than becoming lost as the passing “guest”. Both the drunken eye of the intellect and the wheeling galaxy will humble themselves. But be thorough- going. Ignorance only falls in love with what is lifeless. Sell your tongues and buy a thousand ears:

The precision of the corpus collosum and the great blue lake of uncertainty.

As we move from inner reality to external form it is the necessity of the image received to be reified as a visual construction. But in the cabarets of aesthetic territory, disregarding the parleying gulls of mind, despite cold winter studio mornings and sweltering summer studio afternoons, when the light comes to rest and the flesh dawns we spontaneously render something that cannot be expressed otherwise. A signified thing with which it symbolizes an ineffable communion explicating the contours of our perishable lives. The material of ready-made welfare and the habitat of impermanence that is the burnished spirit.

Celestials of imposture that we rate nil.

O yes, there is the danger of novel occurrences toward any image received. A rote exercise however without regard to understanding slides off-track. The faulty or useless lateralization rather than a functional heteromodal or multimodal integration that reconstitutes experience and places self-arising and creative advance as chance encounter outside ego-terrain. Necessities that upwrench where we habituate and find our craze for easy desertion. All we can do is go back in a shaft of silence and umbilical negation.

Not to slip into error with irritable reaching but where the dream holds sway.

We ask ourselves (like the 3-inch-tall insect from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland asks Alice) “Who are you?” We are dealing with the hidden material of the psyche. The spiral essence beneath the ice of literal appearance. We question our actions and work and what makes us be. Who are we and what do we want? Rather than the kindred sense of inward and downward to plural centers, the artist we think we want to be dreams of stretching out into the outer corridors of swarming cultural actions and less than limpid names. The expanding space of both instance and consequence, the low-yield of so-called summaries of success.

Declination is where the stone transcends itself.

To explain does not necessarily mean to understand. Let us come further forward and listen with attention: just remain open to emotional impulses and grandiose vagueness, the ups and downs of temperament and temperature, all the ardently desired that anticipates, guides or transforms sense perception. For the genuinely new that might occur we set ourselves in motion to what is actually there. As we cannot fully know the inner contours of the self the way we know anything else, we might come to knowing by a process of existential mirroring. The process of keen observation and reflection on behavior and reaction that allows us to see things growing inside out. How the image regards us and how it takes up a human position as an icon, we immerse ourselves in Alice’s looking glass. And just as developments are never fully deciphered but call for ever new interpretations, we too regain the active imagination with plucky apprehension and invention.

Sensibility is necessary to experience what we do in all its wholeness and complexity.

Inceptual seeing is an actuality of the imagination. A form of perception tied to the beginning, creation, the implantation of ideas. It requires only that we allow it to guide us. The implication that creative solutions can only be discovered in a series of unintentional turnings and permutations. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) the gritty poet who understood la condition humanine might argue, the spiritual as well as formal elements must be constantly reinvented. From subtle to visible state the imaginal in action is always experiential. An engagement in discovery that changes what we see and think. A mindful nomadic sensibility of the manifold of what is.

Certainties only create opaque images.

The uncertainties of transformation turn images into transparent icons. Icons that develop according to their own logic, portrayals true to their nature. The capacity to convert material of what is into new perceptions is a dialogue with the Unseen, the “other within”. The shock of internal recognition at the heart of aesthetic experience that awakens us to the power of unimpeded unknowing. The nonrational illimitable image that holds paradox tautly while at the same time claims gravitational attention is the fresh resurrection of universal admission. The moment of horizontal and vertical intersection of form and formless that becomes the sudden radiant revelation of what has always been and will be. In the locus of quiescence, creativeness grows like a weed until a single breath releases it. As Taneda Santoka (1882-1940) wrote: In its natural state/as a weed/it shoots forth its buds. Taking it a step forward Gaston Bachelard (d.1962) tells us imagined qualities not only achieve aspects of consciousness but can emphasize a daring proliferating sensuousness, intoxicated with inexactitude. (La Terre et les reverie du repos: Essai sur les images de l’intimite, 1948).

We embrace our gift with impulsion.

In the words of Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heany (1939-2013) “You are neither here nor there/A hurry through which known and strange things pass”. A “hurry through” that is the mind off-guard. We scratch at our labor insubordinate of previous work. Our thoughts run on bony tracks; we gather our being. The exhilaration of presentness and openness where the familiar and the unfamiliar rush in and out as a counterpoint of the void. A place so remote yet so close that everything happens simultaneously. Recent and long past, a movement for all eternity that brings near the breath of angels. Innocent wherever it gives in to the urgent promptings of an unknown force, we founder and rise from the same shared daring.

We liberate the image worth seeing that resembles ourselves.