Some words on Absorption
Thinking about the next film project. Reflections on detachment and connection.
I haven’t written anything in my olive fairy journal for over a week.
A feeling of numbness, or detachment. It’s not new.
I have been living in a reality filled with fatigue and anxiety, struggling to connect to my feelings. First of May, my magical month of the year, I sit down at my desk I breathe in the smell of palo santo, light a candle on a day that started with blue skies. It takes intention to feel.
It takes focus to gather the flow of gratitude, and allow it to circulate.
Being disconnected from myself and others is not only a protective strategy that prevents the overflow, it is also a result of a persistent difficulty with establishing and practicing connection. I find my own ways. I allow for moments of absorption. Holding the awareness of interconnectedness is part of healing.
I have been working on a pitch for a film on absorption. The word is used as a personality trait correlated to hypnotisability and openness to experience, as well as a state. I find it fascinating in the way it corresponds to sensory direct experience and spontaneously experienced altered states of consciousness. For me, the moments of connection feel like an altered state, and happen in the moments of absorption in the present experience.
Tellegen and Atkinson (1974) define absorption as “a disposition for having episodes of ‘total’ attention that fully engage one's representational (i.e., perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational) resources. This kind of attentional functioning is believed to result in a heightened sense of the reality of the attentional object, imperviousness to distracting events, and an altered sense of reality in general, including an empathically altered sense of self”, and Pekala and Wegner correlate it with “increased and more vivid imagery, inward and absorbed attention, and positive affect; decreased self-awareness; and increased alterations in state of consciousness and various aspects of subjective experience” (1985).
I am not sure how exactly will I approach the film yet, but I want to use written, visual, and sonic journalling as a way of intuitive capturing of my experience in various spaces to which I feel a connection. Will I collect rhythmical occurrences that hypnotise me into the presence of the moment and then intensify the sensation by editing techniques?
I am feeling somewhat shy to write more about my autistic experience at the moment, even though this project will directly relate to my sensory differences. I have been experiencing such heightened levels of stress coming from social interactions and rumination that I feel depleted and perhaps even betrayed by my own self - was the knowledge of being autistic not meant to help me to be more aware and able to build boundaries and methods that will protect me? I know things aren’t this simple, but allowing myself to feel this fully is part of the cleansing I needed.
Susan Blackmore wrote that the problem of consciousness is the problem of reconciliation, or difference, between the external “third person” or “objective” world and our subjective, first-person experience of it. Every step of the way while studying consciousness, it becomes clear that our experiences are unique and mysterious in nature, and yet known in some personal, unnamable way. It’s not that only mystical experiences are “ineffable”, as suggested by the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, and challenged by scholars like Andy Letcher who gave a talk at the Breaking Convention. I believe that all experiences are essentially ineffable - like Alan Watts, I think that words are just representations, and, after Blackmore, there is no clear answer to what the conscious experience is. This, as I wrote previously in some of my posts, is a freeing understanding.
That is why I imagine that the only way of effective communication is through the experience of connection.
My new film SUN DAY, which I continued to consider work in progress until recently finding out that something broke in my edit file and I might not feel like fixing it, will be showing in Plymouth Arts Cinema in the Cine Sisters Film Festival on the 13 May. I am looking forward to gain more responses, feedback, and opinions from a wider audience, and am very excited to watch works by locally based female filmmakers.