Spirit-manifesting attacks of hyperfocus
Join me on a trip, a strange PhD research diary as an extension of my handwritten journals.
First rule: do not write in Helvetica.
It puts me off. Just like changing pens depending on the mood, I also change fonts. Perhaps it is more responsible to select a publishing platform instead of a personal blog, which would have inevitably turned into a mess of fancy typewriter fonts, pastel colours, and, forbid, a range of hippie imagery. This is more or less what my old poetry blogs looked like.
I believe I can legitimately call them old now, since I started the first one in 2015. I kept it as an online space for gathering all my poems written in Polish. Poems, I called them, even if they were just lettering, wording, passages of thought and feeling that aided me with holding on to myself throughout the years. The years of liceum, the Polish version of college or sixth form, with an A-levels equivalent at the end, on the verge of adulthood into which I promptly lapsed straight after, resigning from my plans for a career in stage acting and soon abandoning the overfamiliar, relatively small reality of Bielsko - Biała, setting not for the larger city of Kraków with its trials of the dream theatre academia, but for the “bigger world” of zagranica (the abroad).
That blog, as I see it now, is an unplanned account of growing up, becoming an independent person, dealing with undiagnosed and unsuspected neurodivergence and depression, all in the innocent realm of the unconscious, covered up with a graceful, self-empowering anger. One of the posts invites the readers to engage, despite my lack of authority which, I wrote, seems to only be given to holders of academic degrees. It is entertaining to notice that bitter taste of changed plans meddled with an uncanny determination to be heard, something I find myself often lacking eight years later, about to attend my MA graduation ceremony next week.
This, I suppose, brings us closer to the answer to an unarticulated question.
I am beginning this blog as an extension of my multiple journals; as a reflective, subjective, unapologetic diary of my research, artistic practice, and (I dip my finger in wax of a burning watermelon candle, it smells dreamy, feels creamy and warm on my fingertips) the Psychedelic Practice, whose purposes, enquiries, and processes I will be developing as part of my practice-based part-time PhD at Plymouth University.
I am highlighting the part-time mode to indicate that I expect I will be studying for the next four to six years. This is almost as long a chunk of time as the one that connects me to myself in 2015 when I started the poetry blog and moved to the UK. The future, just like the past, is unimaginable. Imagination must be on a different plane than time and space.
I am secretly kindling a hope that not too many people will read these pieces, in case I don’t pass my Confirmation of Route next year and the journey will be cut short, but I suppose even in that case there would be things to write about, considering that nothing can ever be written about accurately, because, in my experience, language is a tool of fiction, or rather a separate reality, and can never encompass the whole truth, therefore anything can be written about, hope abandoned. One of the questions I am always asking is whether there is any mode of communication at all that isn’t partial, fragmentary, one that reveals the whole truth of what one attempts to express, and I intuitively feel the answer: that it is rather a mode or state of consciousness that allows for the full embrace with truth. The term I found useful in description of what I mean by this so far has been cosmic consciousness, but writing this already rises an urge within to define all possible interpretations of this term, throughout the planes of history and imagination, to ensure that words aren’t thrown on the page with assumptions of patterns of thinking, of some universal understanding.
A ritual for voicing.
The purpose, then, is for me to hold a space of regular writing practice that will allow for language-based reflection on the phenomenological aspects of my research, and life, which does not seem at all separate from what I call research, but rather a simultaneous thread in this incarnation. I would use some self-deprecating jokes to lighten the atmosphere, and avoid sounding like a complete dickhead to some, but I rarely am conscious of the right timing, and of what actually works in communication in general, considering that it changes so much depending on who I am addressing. For now, my target audience will remain undefined, while I give myself space to find a voice, evolved and updated since the times when I hesitated to write anything other than surreal phrases that tangled my heart ventricles and allowed me to survive as a solitary independent being at the age of twenty.
As Michael Daniels pointed out in his essays on transpersonal psychology, ontology has to be based on sound phenomenology, taking any shade of guilt of my eager focus on experience and difficulty dealing with the world on the literary plateau. The latter is likely a silly thing coming from someone who hasn’t ceased writing in little journals and sketchbooks since early childhood, but, at the same time, I suppose it is guaranteed that every person who writes confronts the particular, strangely intimate relationship with language that develops in the processes. Perhaps I write because I can’t write.
Some research questions
To avoid excess and make at least one paragraph of this readable, let’s list just a few of the questions that live between my hundreds of pens, yellowed pages, endless text files, tables, sticky notes, printed pictures and awkwardly drawn diagrams, and which I try to answer in mind-revealing, spirit-manifesting attacks of hyperfocused scribbling, moving image editing, sound making and designing.
How can moving image and sound alter the states of consciousness?
What are altered states of consciousness, how do they affect the making of time-based art, and how can they be a methodology?
How sensory perception differences contribute to our experience of the world, and through that, the sense of identity?
How do we communicate and commune with each other and with the more-than-human world, and how a subjective experience becomes transpersonal/transcendent - connecting?
How can language and writing be approached without resentment, if I find that it never can describe the whole truth? I have an answer to this one - it is not the role of language to be equivalent of truth, but to build realities, express the imagination, the inner states, and project subjectivity on the plane that can be received and interpreted by other human beings. Language is the beloved Unreliable Narrator.
So I think I’ll just keep doing it. It reminds me of the Zen principle of action without a goal.