Vulnerability, subjectivity, and encounters with the unknown.
Filmmaking devices for mind-manifesting, transformative, or transpersonal experiences. PhD research diary continued.
Translating
Writing, I am making up worlds. Nothing feels true. Words are circling around what I really feel and think. It’s not a lie, but it’s never an accurate expression. Neuroscientist Moshe Bar wrote that inner speech is a process of translation from the unconscious to the consciousness. Translating abstract ideas into communicable concepts. But I think communication itself happens on a level beyond verbal language. The words can never be right, can never be perfect. Understanding appears in some realm that is not itself accurately describable. Yet somehow it does not make writing redundant.
I look up and realise suddenly, that this vulnerability of which I write, by which I am so inspired, which rises as a resistance against the capitalist and colonial standards of productivity, rationality and effectiveness - is what I lost touch with, just now. Keeping in contact with intuition, with the vulnerability of openness and absorption, of the practice of the psychedelic as a communion, care, sharing, is a process and spiritual practice. In the present times it is not the first instinct to be in touch with the true nature of oneself. The demands of survival in the world, and of operating within social constructs surrounding that survival, do not leave space and do not accommodate for the vulnerability of openness to the unknown.
This week I was planning on writing about my understanding of the psychedelic in the phenomenological sense through the examples of film, art and methods. I don’t think I’m entirely ready for this. I could go on for hours about flicker film genre, the Dreamachine, the relationship of stroboscopic light and sound rhythms to neural frequencies and entoptic phenomena, but I have written about this already in my MA dissertation, and in a short essay published by mnemozine.lu. The latter can be found below.
These topics form an important groundwork for my research and interests, but I’m reminding myself that this blog is meant to be a diary - current thoughts and ideas put into words, instead of a step-by-step explanation of all my previous work and a futile attempt at mapping all contexts at once.
Forget everything
I have been going for daily walks to the sea. One day this week, in the crispy cold air, the sky was so blue I suddenly vividly remembered what it feels like to exist in the summer. It seems the sense of warmth has completely hibernated within me in the past few months, depriving me of the memory of the specific qualia related to summer. I have lived in a four-season structure my whole life (additionally, in Poland the differences between them are much more striking than in the UK), but somehow I never “got used to it”. My body is always shocked by the pain of the cold, by the smell of the spring, by the glittering caress of the sun, and by the world turning to red and gold day by day before undressing for the stillness. The cycles are familiar, logically predictable, but my reactions to the changing smell of the air always come a surprise to the senses and emotional associations, entering through the nose and the skin and flooding my mind. The winter sunlight triggered a sense of warm sand under bare feet, a shiver of long summer evenings, the sun burning my eyelids while an awareness of the endless opportunities of lying on the ground and touching the grass unfolds.
When I sit down to watch a film, I like to forget everything I have ever learned. I want the awareness of tools, structures, techniques, to dissolve, while I’m slipping under the spell of what the immediate sights and sounds. It is a vulnerable state, and the brain, accustomed to predictions, clings onto the instinct to interpret. The works I find the most interesting and enjoyable are the ones that in some way free me from the known. In some films the audiovisual intensity produces a state of reverie, while rhythms of others immerse in a trance, and others yet offer a play of duration and flow which produces meditative states. Surrealistic approaches to imagery and narrative challenge the practical cognitive functioning and allow free-associations to flow.
Unique associations and patterns we all see
In Neuroscience of Identity (2011) Susan Greenfield suggests that the self has its neural correlates not in a specific region or function of the brain, but in the unique synaptic connections emerging throughout lifetime. That each person has unique associations between all things, sensations, ideas and experiences, allows to begin to understand why our subjective experiences are entirely unique, and so is each viewing of a film different to every spectator. On the other hand, flicker film is an example of utilising a knowledge of a feature common to all human brains - the production of entoptic phenomena under the conditions of stroboscopic light stimulation. W. Grey Walter, in his 1953 book The Living Brain, was the first to suggest that rhythms of light can affect the states of consciousness when corresponding to different frequencies of brain activity, measurable by electroencephalograph (EEG). Brilliant imagery and patterns of the entoptic phenomena are generated in the brain between the eye and the visual cortex, and commonly appear under conditions of sensory deprivation, stroboscopic stimulation, as well as states of deep meditation (Buddhist thigle), psychedelic journey, and are claimed to be found in the Upper-Palaeolithic cave art, suggesting that our ancestors accessed altered states, whether via the flicker of fire or shamanic trance or plant ceremony practices (Lewis-Williams, Winkelman).
I am particularly interested in films and artworks that allow the spectator a space to become a participant through the psychedelic - mind-manifestation. This happens through associations and sensations emerging as an insight into the inner workings of the unconscious, either or both personal and collective.
Flicker film is an example in which the psychedelic potential is constructed through the duration, rhythms, colours, and shapes. Apart from works of Paul Sharits, who himself was deeply interested in altered states and in interaction with the “individual psycho-physical subjectivities and consciousness” (1969), variations on this approach had been exercised by Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, and, more recently, by Rainer Kohlberger in Not Even Nothing Can Be Free of Ghosts (2016), as well as, pushing the relationships between the rhythms of image and sound and the neural rhythms to their extremes, Joshua gen Solondz with Prisoner’s Cinema (2012), and (tourism studies) (2019). The latter film is an interesting combination of the purely sensory approach of the stroboscopic editing, and personal imagery, gathered in the period of ten years during the author’s travels. While the stroboscopic form and structure can affect the viewer’s state of consciousness, the content reveals fragments of the filmmaker’s own “mind” - the unique subjective choices of capturing and editing images. Something similar occurs in Pablo Mazzolo’s The Newest Olds, where a view familiar to the author is manipulated with the use of colour and movement, and in Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona, where the editing and rhythms of voice reveal a subjective story of girlhood. Films by Mexican Collectivo Los Ingrávidos, while often carrying messages of resistance and revolution, use the language of rhythmical trance-like ritual.
My idea of Psychedelic Practice is a curiosity towards the existing and potentially developing relationships between the individual and the collective with the process of filmmaking and the experience of film. In his Entangled Life (2022), a fascinating book on the ways that fungi teach us about the interconnectedness of life, Merlin Sheldrake writes about an important aspect of research involving psilocybin. While the same chemical reactions and similar patterns of brain activation occur in most of the participants, it is the nature of the first-person reported subjective experience that corresponds to the therapeutic results. With this in mind I accept that, even with the extensive developments of Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology in regards to first-person perspectives, the subjective experience is still a challenge to scientific methods. But what about artistic methods of enquiry?
Sensory subjectivity
I am interested in the convergence of psychedelic sensory stimulation and the mind-manifesting approach to making, where the subjective sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences are shared. Filmmaker Ben Russell talked about a radical pleasure of subjective experiencing, while also pointing out that the uniqueness of subjectivity can make life a lonely journey. This led him to the interest in ethnographic approach to filmmaking, where learning about others allows to learn more about ourselves.
Adult/Adolescent Sensory Profile Questionnaire (can be viewed below) is a diagnostic tool developed by Brown and Dunn that shows differences in individual’s levels of sensation seeking, sensation avoiding, low registration, and sensory sensitivity. I keep coming back to it at different stages of my research, as well as making, in order to remember how the subjectivity of experience starts with the senses. To be aware that the way of seeing, hearing, and feeling the world is not the same for all of us. How can I express it with the way I capture images and sounds, and with the way I edit, manipulate, weave them, how can I express it with the way I use words and voice?
Within and without
There are many inspirations within the art, film and literary world, that can support the task of mind-revealing through making. For me one of them is diaristic and autoethnographic writing and poetry. I am inspired by feminist and experimental approaches of writers and artists such as Johanna Hedva, Roxane Gay, Anais Nin, Audre Lorde, all touching on aspects of vulnerability and exploring the subjective rather than the objective aspects of being, focusing on the human experience with poetic honesty. Once again, the resistance against the capitalist, heteropatriarchal and colonial mindsets is expressed in and amplified by the works of art that are lucidly aware of human nature as it is, rather that as it’s ought to be by these standards - works that embrace the vulnerability of the uncertainty and the unknown.
In works which encounter the unknown through the relationships with the natural world, such as films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or works of Laura Huertas Millan, the tropical forest becomes a character in the story, rather than just a place. Leading into the mysterious landscapes, in J.P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta’s El Mar La Mar (2017) the sensory environment of the fauna and flora of the Sonoran Desert serves as a plane for accounts of mythic experiences of otherworldly encounters.
Another previously mentioned way in which the unknown can be approached is through the surrealistic structuring of narrative, imagery, and associations, which offer a cognitive surprise that, through challenging the logic, can alter the exploitatory state of mind and open it to the experience. This tool is applied in surrealist films such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Luis Buñuel’s The Andalusian Dog, as well as in many of David Lynch’s narratives, such as Lost Highway or Inland Empire, presenting unexpected inconsistencies of the characters and the story in the former, or a labyrinthine, dream-inspired spaces and adventures in the latter.
Perhaps I did end up writing a little bit about what I set out last week. I just didn’t expect to get here. This is an abrupt ending devoid of conclusions, but so is the nature of fragments, acceptance of which is part of my endeavour.