I haven’t published in a while.
I still refuse to commit to a specific goal other than an exercise of expression in communicable packages, which means this will continue to be a medley of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, mostly around my research and film interests.
But I’ll start with this:
I get quite pathetic nightmares. Some teenage girls hated me in my sleep and I wept. I am scared of being hated by some uninhibited, commanding, fully deprived of compassion beings. I am afraid of looking stupid to some humanoid creatures which do not possess emotional infrastructure capable of compassion or understanding of any kind of suffering, not even their own. Funny, that’s the representation my mind made.
Having spent two minutes analysing the silliness of my dream I arrive at these conclusions. I have been vulnerable lately. Intentionally, but simultaneously uncontrollably. Things spilling incoherently, without an embrace. I am haunted by anxieties of becoming loud and clear again. Yet, is there clarity, is there tone, or just a puddle of words?
Circles
I have been thinking of publishing my writing again, but I kept putting it off for months, focusing inward, continuing my diaries of fear, hesitation, resolution, realisation. In the meantime I have handed in my RDC.1, the first PhD milestone, it’s interesting to see the ideas morphing and re-forming throughout the first months of my study. I think a lack of sharing can hinder growth, and as much as I spent time attempting to re-understand myself in my journals, I might have neglected framing my thoughts into communicable packages. But perhaps the latter never was my honest goal in the first place? Circles.
I like the impossibility of a full portrayal of identity. Ultimately, any film I make is a questioning of how much subjective experience can be directly communicated. For Laura Di Summa (2019), this investigation of self-portrayal alternatives, along with it’s im/possibilities, is the point of autobiographical documentary. I step beyond the narrative coherences, because thinking, as much as it is temporal, is certainly beyond bounds of linearity. Thinking is entangled with feeling and sensing, and I enjoy not having to classify experiences as any one of them - the freedom that for me comes with making moving image and sound work. I don’t intend for my works to be autobiographical and yet I refuse to relinquish the authenticity of them freely becoming so, between the lines of observatory questioning and sensory phantagmorgasming. Does using made-up words allow me to get closer to what I am attempting to express, or does it pull me further into incomprehension? Depends on the point of view. Is expression meant to work for me, and communication for others? Meanings are fluid.
Soliciting, disclosing, inviting, adjusting
Starting work on my next project, I am further exploring relationships with objects - objects of sensation, of attention, objects as things, but most importantly, objects as entities. David Abram wrote about Merleau-Ponty’s conviction that the surrounding world comprises of animate presences with “an active, dynamic contribution to perceptual experience” (1997). They both highlighted the actions of the sensible entities, describing them as able to use powers, soliciting, disclosing, inviting, adjusting. Abram argues, along with Merleau-Ponty, that in a state of direct perception, outside of conceptualising and interpretation, one can become fully immersed in this interaction we call perception:
“Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my head, I find this silent or wordless dance always already going on—this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits.“
Commanding and engaging
In this sensory realm beyond language, one I so often retire to, intentionally or spontaneously, I slide into a different state of consciousness, attention altered, where, as Abram writes “certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness“. Did both Abram and Merleau-Ponty have a heightened ability to experience absorption? Would they score very high on those personality scales that research this ”disposition for having episodes of ‘total’ attention” (Tellegen and Atkinson, 1974). I believe that, even though some people might be more predisposed to experience absorption, whether because of sensory sensitivities or for any other reason, certainly each person can consciously adapt this attitude of openness and immersion which directs this altered state.
Those who read my previous blog writing in January - May, or any fragment of my research for that matter, by now are likely aware of my fascination with absorption. I would find it hard not to be interested in it, considering that high absorption scores in psychological research have been connected to “fantasy-proneness, imagery ability, and hypnotizability” but also to “synaesthesia, empathy, creativity, emotional brain processing, feelings of self-transcendence, and experiences of dissociation and hallucinations“ (Lifshitz, et al. 2019). All the best parts of life, huh? Everything that allows to experience the reality of the human bodymind immersed in its environment. Well, the truth is I have no idea how to write blogs.
This way of apprehending “objects” of sensation as active entities is certainly entangled with the view that defies anthropocentrism and places us, the experiencers, on the same level as the experienced, the Other, the more-than-human. Indeed it contributes to rethinking the distinction beyond the experiencer and the experienced, indicating that, if everything can be treated as an entity, all is simultaneously a subject and an object of experience. I find this comforting, and phenomenological philosophy, at least as practiced by Merleau-Ponty, as spiritual one.
I am looking at a way of looking.
I look at my collections of pens, shells, sea glass, notebooks, and I try to imagine the invisible. What “overlooked presences“ will make themselves seen? Merleau-Ponty also treats imagination as a property of the senses, a continuation of the ongoing exchange, a way making contact with “the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible“. In some likely easily explainable but undefinable way, I do feel safer and more confident among my plants and pens, as if their silence was indeed dripping with a level of unlinguistic compassion, a presence more purely knowing, less demanding than that of people. I seek reimagination of connections with both human and other-than-human world alike, as neither could fully exist without the other. I look and de-look, see and try to unsee. Fidget the entity in my fingers like a word which meaning becomes a pure sound when repeated too many times. It doesn’t need to take over, it already wields the same amount of control that I do. I am yet to look at how it will see.
Some sources:
Abram, D. (1997) The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books.
Lifshitz, M., van Elk, M. and Luhrmann, T.M. (2019) ‘Absorption and spiritual experience: A review of evidence and potential mechanisms’, Consciousness and Cognition, 73.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002) Phenomenology of perception: an introduction. London: Routledge.
Tellegen, A. and Atkinson, G. (1974) ‘Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences (“absorption”), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 83(No. 3), pp. 268–277.
The photo and video material in this post are fragments of my current work in progress.