Reconnecting with the source: collective unconscious, validation, and integration.
Psychedelic Practice and the human right of expression. Re-claiming anger. PhD diary continued.
There is something about goals that I find disturbing.
I set them, but I take them lightly, precisely because I take myself and my work seriously.
There is something about the concept of sticking to what you’ve decided exactly that is eerily inhuman - what if I don’t feel like it? And yet the awareness that these writings have become public allows for finding a grain of pleasure in pure subjective voice that is not hidden in my paper notebooks, but put on display.
I am reading about the collective unconscious and wondering whether entoptic phenomena can be a type of visual archetype to which we all have access to? The vivid brilliant imagery seen under the stroboscopic light, in the flicker of fire, or of the sun between the tress, on the new dimension above the surface of the changing colour fields of Sharits’ films, behind the closed eyelids pressed with fingertips, and in all manner of altered states of consciousness. Is there, however, a possibility of a brain condition that would switch off the ability to produce this imagery? Can people with aphantasia experience “prisoner’s cinema”? What are the relationships, then, between the imaginary visuals (associative, based on memory, creative), dream imagery, the entoptic phenomena, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, the worlds emerging in a psychedelics-induced state? Do they relate to the unconscious, personal, and collective, in varying degrees, just because they are seen or produced internally, rather than by an objective external stimuli?
We don’t talk enough about rest.
I have never learnt how to take breaks. I struggle to sit still when I’m in pain, just as much as I struggle to move. I am often in pain. It sounds like a solemn confession, but it is a natural and entirely not uncommon feature of human bodies. We hurt. Involvement in tasks that direct the attention towards questions, reflections, and active enjoyment of moments, remaining engaged and busy, is not something I think of as a remedy or a coping strategy. It is that “experiential process that is subject to constant change” (Thompson, 2015), that is my self. I am often guilty of enacting that self solely through things that are quite remote from my own body and my emotions. Distracting from pain with philosophy and science, distracting from anger and sadness with psychology. In this world it is easy. I grew up Catholic, taught in school about the split between the disgusting, sinful, transient body and the perfect, immortal soul. There are patterns that take root within.
On the first day of this year we walked around rainy Dartmoor.
Gratitude and unfinished thoughts.
In the evening we watched Colette because Sam hadn’t seen it before. I sensed anger accumulating under my eyebrows. It felt as if every emotion that ever arose within me suddenly started to seem valid. I’m not sure it was the story itself, but rather the vision of writing as a tool for validation and freedom. “I do not have resolutions”, I wrote in my journal in a quick, unstable handwriting. “Instead, I have the strength to reconnect with the source of my anger, my love, and my passions“.
Whatever that meant, I am now thinking of Judith Butler’s observation that resistance does not mean an overcoming of vulnerability, but rather that vulnerability is the fuel of resistance in the first place. I am turning to the notions of the collective unconscious and the access to it through altered states, not in order to find archetypal explanations of neuroses, like Jung initially did, but in a search for connection - for wisdom and understanding.
Reconnecting with the source of my anger has nothing to do with violence.
And yet this anger demands to be resolved, rather than dissolved as it had been innumerable times. If I drift into theory in an attempt to escape, my feelings keep appearing on the horizon every way I look, like John Smith’s Black Tower. Embodiment, and being present with all that is felt, has to become a regular practice, a ritual of reconnecting. For feeling to not turn into a destructive force, it needs to be handled gently, with recognition it deserves.
In the world in which I grew up in, this world most of us know, feeling, both emotional and physical, is treated not only as weakness, but as an egotistic act. There are only limited socially acceptable ways of expressing feelings, rarely related to genuine needs. The notion of truth seems to have its place only in what is related to the intellectual, logical, rational, within boundaries of emotional restraint. The truth of the body and of the emotions is somehow omitted in daily life, in the professional life, as if it just wasn’t there, affecting our every step. Collective feeling, just as personal feeling, has to find ways of expression that validate it and integrate it - writing, making, art are some of them. I think this is why Espinosa in his Imperfect Cinema manifesto (1969) advocated for art as a human characteristic and right, not something for an elite of selected few.
One of the values that is often thrown around is “be yourself”, which quickly changes into “be the best version of yourself”, especially as an ethos of a school or motto of a workplace. I can’t help but question whether everyone has the same chances at being allowed to and encouraged to be themselves, when parts of their daily lives go unacknowledged? And just who gets to judge what is the “best version” of oneself? This slogan also implies that theres is a range of game-character-like “versions” that everyone can choose from, some better, some worse, and it is only a question of taking a good pick. Be yourself, but, like, suitable to what we need.
“The artist must not seek fulfilment as an artist but as a human being. “
Julio García Espinosa
Why am I talking about this on my Psychedelic Practice blog?
I had set myself the goal to publish every week, for now, but it doesn’t mean all posts will be on the same level and of similar content. Because I am human, and this is a diary. My anger flows out like lava claiming its own validity, something I am exploring in my twenties because I was never taught it before, and I know this process of re-understanding is not unique to me. While I study the ways in which film and moving image affect us, create connection and relationships through expression and participation, I realise that I would be betraying myself if I did not allow the way I feel be manifested through my work, not only filmmaking, but also writing. The meaning of psyche is far from “rational mind”. For it to be revealed, the unconscious has to be faced, the repressed has to be reclaimed, the personal and the collective reunited. It is something that can be done working with time-based art experiences, also a process of re-understanding wellbeing. The anger, which we are taught to restrain and to remain passive instead of feeling and streaming it into inspired practice, is my motivation to learn to take unapologetic steps.
On the first day of 2023 I wrote in my journal:
I am not always right, but I am tired of pretending that I am always wrong.
One of my films made within Psychedelic Practice, the first one in the Fragments of Experience project is currently showing in Cista Arts exhibition online, alongside many wonderful artworks:
Here and What Made Me Be (10Hz)
A part of ongoing project Fragments of Experience, intuitive captures of sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences, in relationship to spaces, nature, and objects. Arising from an interest in a crossover of neuroscientific and philosophical contexts in study of individual identity through uniqueness of synaptic connections, memory, and sensory sensitivities. The first section of the film attempts to portray identity through relationships with what for the artist represents home, while following sections look at the artist’s place of birth and growing up, seen from a perspective of a long-absent visitor who arrives to face the current emptiness and grief of the past, to re-unite with suppressed parts of herself. The stroboscopic flicker of images is inspired by changes to states of consciousness, together with manipulated field recordings, encouraging absorption in the experience in order to not only recognise the unity of fragments, but to allow the viewer to access the images and sounds through unique associations and sensations of their own brain.
It would be great to hear what you’re thinking about the film and/or any themes I wrote about. Do leave a comment or send me a message.
Thank you for being here!