Thirteen: Psychepoetic Film Practice?
Considering a new title and thinking about peculiar relationships with some numbers and words.
Thank you so much for your time taken to read any of the posts. I am away for Easter weekend and will keep this one short.
There is magic in waking up to birds singing and the sunlight seeping in through the window. Winter is always just too long for me. I miss the privilege of having a garden. I keep scrolling through available flats in the area, even though it’s too early to move again just now, we’ll have to wait until the end of the tenancy term. Still, I consider it great luck that we got the flat we have now, with massive windows and high ceilings.
Thirteen has always been one of my favourite numbers - in times when I cared about things like that. As a teenager I enjoyed finding four-leaf clovers on a Friday the 13th and feeling proud that I don’t believe in negative superstitions - only in the positive ones. Despite not having too many objective reasons to claim this, I had been considering myself lucky. The little things count: then as well as now. And these little things turn into bigger things as I take care to sit for a moment every day and just allow myself to feel gratitude. It gives me a feeling of connection to the universe. On one hand I feel embarrassed to write things like this publicly - I feel as though I lack appropriate, declared spiritual grounding for this kind of statements, on the other, I couldn't care less. The evaluating part of myself which continually judges every word and action doesn’t have a say when it comes to art and poetry - this is where I find freedom, in not having to explain.
In the thirteenth week of writing this publication, I feel a wave of gratitude for all feelings, words, and events that flowed out in between now and when I started. For the past two or three weeks I have been wondering whether I should change the name of my project. Because of the wide and complex, but simultaneously specific connotations of psychedelic film, and the word psychedelic as a cultural, aesthetic and chemical/natural symbol, I started thinking that perhaps it would be best if I had my own name, which doesn’t carry any of that weight, which allows to reimagine the filmmaking practice inspired by aspects of psychedelic, but ultimately one that is its own.
Psychepoetic came to mind as a word that I have been using for a long while in my writings, without ever exploring the meaning - it was created some years ago purely intuitively, as a title of my old poetry blog, now also serving as the title of my website: Psychepoetic Laundrette. I felt drawn to these words because of the way they sound, and, obviously, because of their first letters being the same as my first and last name (another one of those things that felt important for no explainable reason). Laundrette is just a beautiful word, carrying something mysteriously hypnotising in the image of rows of washing machines, spinning rhythmically, a space taken out of time, a symbol of meditative reflection, a pause, and change, emerging clean and clear. Psychepoetic is a word I made up, for the very reason that I am considering using it now - I loved the meaning of psychedelic, but I wanted something unique and new. I wrote poetry with the interest in the psyche, which Jung defined as “totality of psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious”, so this seemed suitable.
Psychepoetic Film Practice could be a title I start using from now on.