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0:40: San Juan Island:
Moving from the mainland to an island cottage coincided with a time of a global pandemic and social unrest. Thereby creating a personal and a broader cultural isolation with both short and long term affects.
1:16: Rhizome:
“A rhizome is a subterranean stem that differs from roots and radicles in the plant kingdom because there is not a singular origin of plant growth. The rhizome becomes a METAPHOR for a “ceaselessly established system of connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles….”(P. Joris, A Nomad Poetics, p.x)
1:43: Drawing: A sea journey to another world:
30”x40”, charcoal on paper.
When we look at an image symbolically we are looking with our entire psyche, the unconscious and the collective unconscious ignited.
2:16: Drawing: I contain multitudes:
30”x40”, charcoal and lime pigment on paper.
Collage: The Return:
12”x36”, book pages, sepia ink, charcoal, graphite and found objects.
3:09: The golden flower/seed of life:
Symbolizes creation and consciousness, the totality of the Universe. It represents both beginning and completion. A seed is the starting point for life, and yet holds all the information for life to blossom. So while it represents beginnings, it is also indicative of the growth, transformation and expansion that will take place, eventually reaching completion. The Secret of the Golden Flower, A Chinese Book of Life is a translation of an ancient Chinese text by Richard Wilhelm with a commentary by C.G. Jung. “The Tao, the Way….is built on the premise that the cosmos and man, in the last analysis, obey the same law; that man is a microcosm and is not separated from the macrocosm by any fixed barriers….The psyche and the cosmos are to each other like the inner world and the outer world. Therefore man participates by nature in all cosmic events, and is inwardly as well as outwardly interwoven with them.” (p.10-11)
3:55: Nature as other:
In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams writes of language and our earliest relationship to the spoken word. He suggests that this relationship was dramatically altered when what was once only spoken became a series of signs and symbols we now call the written word. In this disconnection from a lived experience, our psyche became cut off from the sensory world that had inspired the development of language. This early division began between subject (human beings) and object (everything outside of the human being) with the introduction of writing. The original anomaly of language was replaced by the objectification of nature, thereby leaving the land and it’s non-human inhabitants as lifeless objects.
4:16: Drawings: My respiration and inspiration:
30”x40”, charcoal and graphite on paper. et sic in infinitu (an so on to infinity)
30”x40”, charcoal on paper.
“A poem [image] is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in the flow….part of the energy pathways which sustain life….a verbal [visual] equivalent of fossil fuel (stored energy), but they are a renewable source of energy, coming, as they do, from those ever generative twin matrices, language [image] and imagination.” The Ecocriticism Reader, Landmarks in Literary Ecology, C. Glotfelty & H. Fromm, (p.108)
5:04: Drawings: Charybdis, bending the arrow of time, and accompaniment:
30”x40”, graphite, charcoal, lime pigment and oil pastel on paper.
5:22: Island-ness:
“[A] sense of longing and abandonment echoes much of what we feel today in this environmental crisis and global community, which brings us closer together, yet divides us further. We all seek to belong. Somewhere. Compassion and kindness are often in short supply, Wisdom comes from life experiences butting up against borders; however, in our everyday lives, we often “go to the mattresses”…to defend what we know and cement our boundaries in self-absorptions and protection. In doing so, we take ourselves out of the world of growth and increased knowledge that effect lasting change. In the crevices of the mortar, we might find borders where water permeates, breaks down, and provides a pathway through and past our bordered worlds.” (J. Hampton, Boundaries to Borders in Gretel Ehrlich, p.11)
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6:45: Compass:
According to Henri Corbin, when people asked how far one needed to travel to find “the land of nonwhere,” the response was that “you will always come back to the point of departure”, just as the needle of the compass always swerves back to the magnetic point” (H. Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis: Or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, p. 3).
6:48: Changed by the stream of time:
C.G. Jung believed those patients who had outgrown their pathologies did nothing at all to create this change within their psyche, but rather, that was perhaps the very point. Instead of willing change into existence using a conscious rational ego, there was a sense of non-doing that seemed to occur. The becoming of his patients, occurred when the patients let things happen, when the conscious and the unconscious found each other not by will but by non-doing, “borne on the stream of time” (R. Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 92-93).
6:51: By a Self experienced as Thou:
Henri Corbin explained, “the self one finds yonder, beyond Mount Qâf, is a higher self, the self experienced as a “Thou”. Like Khezr (or Khadir, the mysterious prophet, the eternal wanderer Elijah or his double), the traveller has to bathe in the Spring of Life” (H. Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis).
7:09: Hold our treasures close:
This phrase is derived from a comment made in William Rueckert’s chapter in The Ecocriticism Reader. Rueckert referenced both the work of Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder as he explained that we must give our treasures away as means by which to continue the renewable creativity of the human spirit.
7:22: What is our wish after we have told our stories?
Audre Lorde wrote, “What do we want from each other / after we have told our stories?” (p. 61). Lorde continued by asking, “do we want / to be healed do we want / mossy quiet stealing over our scars / do we want / the powerful / unfrightening sister/ who will make the pain go away…” (A. Lorde, “There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women,” p. 61).
7:38: The sprouts and the crickets
“The most fundamental or transformative events can come in the smallest images. Sometimes they expand the universe, other times they diminish its boundaries” (A. Sexson, “The Make-Believe of Belief,” p. 120).
8:12: Proof of the Daimon:
“Proof of the Daimon.” The image appeared out of nowhere; from a stack of used books, a mere page or two were torn out, and from those pages sentences and words were blindly cut to create verse. With help from some paste and scissors, the poem emerged. It stared up at the woman, and as she read the words in short simple lines, emotion welled up in her eyes, knowing well that within these black and white letters was the image of her soul. From Pacifica Graduate Institute Winter Residential, The Power of Image with Dr. Mary Antonia Wood, March 4, 2020.
8:42: Exists in the world of both air and earth:
Gaston Bachelard believed a root image was always a discovery. He wrote: “considered as a dynamic image, the root assumes the most diverse powers. It is both a sustaining force and a turbulent force. At the border of two worlds, the air and the earth, the image of the root is animated paradoxically in two directions, depending on whether we dream of a root bearing to heaven the juices of the earth, or of a root going to work among the dead, for the dead” (G. Bachelard. The Poetics of Space, p. 84).
8:51: Like the tangling of roots both mother and daughter:
As Carol Christ commented; “Mother and daughter…We are two. We are one…We initiate one another into the mysteries not only of life, but also of death” (C. Christ, The Laughter of Aphrodite, p, 130-131).
9:14: These fields that had been plowed three times:
This phrase is adapted from the poem “Under A Wild Green Fig Tree” by Edward Hirsch. Hirsch described the meadow mowed three times over, as per the myth of Persephone.
10:37: Proof of the daimon, I will serve:
The woman read the lines once more from assembled cut up pieces of paper. The page read, “proof of the daimon…My dear, then I will serve.” The lines spoke a meaning that was incomprehensible yet all knowing. The sentences resonated, and yet as she chanted their tunes she began to unhinge. The woman wondered how the poem could possibly represent, in some quixotic fashion, the entirety of her soul and yet nothing concretely discernable. The meaning was immersed in a lifetime of misunderstanding, and she was just beginning to climb her way out. From Pacifica Graduate Institute Winter Residential, The Power of Image with Dr. Mary Antonia Wood, March 4, 2020.
Hillman believed, “…that soul is ceaselessly talking about itself in ever-recurring motifs in ever-new variations, like music; that this soul is immeasurably deep and can only be illumined by insights, flashes in a vast cavern of incomprehension…” (J. Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi). This is a glimpse of soul, through the spiral of a collaborative film.
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11:13: A voice, a call:
The call marks the end of one phase of development and the beginning of another, whether it manifests as Joseph Campbell's "call to adventure", the impetus that draws the fledgling from the security of the nest, or the drive of the germinating seed to set forth roots and shoots.
11:30: Quartered and cooked, dissolved and now resolved:
In the work of the medieval alchemists, C.G. Jung perceived a symbolic representation of psychological transformation. The early stages of this process involved heating (calcinatio), breaking, and dissolving (solutio) the material to be transformed into its most basic constituent parts. "Quartered" refers to this process specifically as it relates to the divided psyche, in contrast to the image of wholeness of the psyche that Jung termed the "quaternity". The "resolved" psyche has reintegrated, at least partially, through coagulation (coagulatio).
11:40: Rising, to gather and weave:
As a seedling develops, it gathers water and nutrients through its root system and transforms sunlight into energy through the chloroplasts in its leaves and shoots, effectively transmuting light and elemental materials into living structures.
The "dark light of the earth" refers to the lumen naturae, the "light of nature" described by Paracelsus. "The lumen naturae is an image of light at the core of ancient alchemical ideas. One of the aims of alchemy was to beget this light hidden in nature, a light very different from the Western association of light as separate from darkness."(S. Marlan, Black Sun, p. 97). Jung referred to the lumen naturae as "the light of darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness."(C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, p. 160)
11:51: To spin black and white thread into the red of a child's flushed cheek:
Another reference to the alchemical process, which progressed from black (nigredo), to white (albedo), to red (rubedo). The red of the third and final stage is symbolic of new and vibrant life. Just as dead, decaying matter within the soil is ultimately transformed into nutrients that are then incorporated into other organisms, so to the outgrown, lifeless elements of psyche become the raw materials for a newer, potentially more integrated orientation.
12:35: A universe would like to be tucked into a grain of sand:
A riff on the famous lines from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
12:52: We must become dry, dry as bones:
The seed is in a semi-static period of repose and dormant potentiality. Fluid in its early development, the seed germ gradually dries and hardens to roughly five percent moisture content. Germination marks an end to this stasis and, paradoxically, an embrace of life and inevitable death. "The body and flesh are identified with death because anything that is born into spatio-temporal existence must submit to the limitations of that existence, which include an end, death. This is the price of being real."(E. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 95)
12:59: Concentrate, come to the common center:
Etymologically, the verb concentrate derives from the Latin con (with, together) and centrum (center). The verb evokes the importance of the image of the mandala to Jung's understanding of the psyche.
“In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through a the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.” (C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Unconscious, p. 338)
13:04: Islands of sanity:
In a podcast entitled Islands of Sanity in Black Dog Times, I draw comparisons between the mandala-like imaginal cells that direct the transformation of a caterpillar into butterfly with Margaret Wheatley's evocative term, islands of sanity. "I know it is possible to experience grace and joy in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas." (M. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?, p. 38).
While researching the podcast (recorded in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic), I found this painting (Spheric Vision 1) and quote by C.G. Jung: "In 1919 I had a bad flu and a forty-degree temperature. It was the "Spanish Flu." I felt I was losing my hold on life. Then I had a dream... I found myself in a small sailboat on a wildly disturbed sea. In the boat I found a sphere. It was in the inside of the boat, and I had to bring it to safety..." (A. Jaffè, Erlebtes un Gedachtes bei Jung, p. 53)
13:30: We cast seeds and stones:
The ultimate goal of the medieval alchemists went by many names, perhaps the most commonly used was the lapis, the philosopher's stone. Far from being an inert substance, the philosopher's stone was thought to have the ability to essentially propagate itself, to influence its environment through what the alchemists termed multiplicatio. "Multiplicatio gives us a hint as to how psychotherapy might work. To some extent, the conscious individual who is related to the Self seems to be contagious and tends to multiply itself in others." (E. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 228) Similarly, the images and insights distilled into a piece of literature or art can have a profound influence on the psyches of individuals who encounter them.
13:49: In breath, out breath. Peak and trough:
Buddhist thought anticipated modern physics with the insight that everything, at the deepest level, is a pulse, everything resembles a sine wave -- peaks and troughs, inclines and declines, arising and fading away.
