The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
James Hillman,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
Yet more on emptiness: he’s a nice quote from an interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher. The interview is in a collection of essays and interviews The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy, which I consider to be a pretty good survey of what the book title states it to be!
Q: Is the avoidance of emptiness the root of human suffering?
Adyashanti: I like to call it the dirty little secret of humanity. It’s the emptiness, the abyss, that’s right in the middle of every human being. It’s right there, the silence that is always there, just waiting for some recognition.
Tagged as:
Adyashanti,
Psychotherapy
More on the subject of the void and emptiness, I re-read Bernadette Roberts’ impressive book What is Self? over Christmas and there was one paragraph that struck me as deep wisdom, being as it is so simple.
Instead of going down into their own emptiness, people try to fill it with the pleasures of this world. They run from darkness, nothing and emptiness and often become embroiled in various delusions regarding its true nature. Too few people come to the unitive state [union with the Divine] because they are outside the proper religious tradition or context for having a true understanding of their experiences. (p 62)
Roberts’ path happens to be Mystical Christianity, but the wisdom she speaks of, arising as it does from a living tradition, transcends that tradition.
And raises questions within that traditional as well: I’m particularly taken by Roberts’ revisioning of the metaphorical (archetypal) meaning of the crucifixion, as, rather than a transformation into the unitive state (or a shedding of the ego, as some commentators have it), a transformation out of such a state, to one of a wholly higher order – one in which all experience of Self (which in the unitive state she understands as an experience of oneness with the Divine) drops away, leaving a void at the centre of the Self, that void being the Divine.
And as she says later:
Psychological and spiritual freedom is the ability to live with not-knowing. (p 101)
Tagged as:
Bernadette Roberts,
Psychotherapy
A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:
Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.
Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper
There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.
(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)
It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.
Tagged as:
Joan Rodriquez,
Outsiders,
Psychotherapy
I have been enjoying this William Hawkins image during January, during a time of upheaval and a move to a temporary location, due to our upcoming renovation.
(We’re now on the eleventh floor of an apartment block in Woollahra, from which we survey the Russian Consulate, and the AFP (Australian Federal Police) car that’s often idling in front – its sole occupant, I imagine, grateful for his air conditioning chewing on the muggy Sydney heat.)
The image is from a calendar of Outsider art given to me by my good friend Ardslie. I’ll post an image each month from this beautiful production; the images too good to last just a month each!
Willima Hawkins
Untitled (Rearing Stud Horse)
Enamel on Masonite, 122 x 144 cm (approx)
Hawkins was born in rural Kentucky in 1985 but it wasn’t until the 1970s that he started painting in the style of this work, a style for which he became well known. His rural background and long years of manual labour informed much of his work. This man knew about animals (Two Dark Horses is also great; more at the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists.)
Tagged as:
Outsiders,
William Hawkins
by Ron Dowd on January 23, 2010
in Text
it’s like this at the fish market -
standing around
when all I want is
pink glistening salmon flesh -
there’s a problem with knives
and by the time I get one
you’ve offered me
your breast to cut -
I go for the cheek
incising thin red
around the jaw line
and throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflicted
hiding the act
from the rest of my life
Tagged as:
Poetry
Here’s Jauk Kera Putih (the white monkey) from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Ubud. It’s good to come back to these images from last year’s Bali trip – the figures seem to inhabit a pantheon equally as rich, psychically, as the more familiar (to me, anyway) Western (i.e. the Greek). He’s another very expressive dude.
Tagged as:
Masks
Iam finally interested in blogging again, after being unwell and at the same time preparing for a renovation that Karima and I are having done to our apartment. It’s been a strange period, everything taking its normal but exhausting course at the level of day to day activities, yet below the surface taking a very different, solitary course, one of hyperthyroidism (caused, it appears, by a mercury detox that was insufficiently monitored by the doctor).
The phenomenology of hyperthyroidism was for me centred on the heart, the thoughts being whether that heart could be trusted, what it wanted of me when, thumping hard, it woke me at 1:30 am each morning. Although I felt heat, at a deeper level I experienced icy chill, an existential heart, a cold stranger that seemed completely unconcerned for my sleep and for my well-being in general. I learned something of this stranger: as James Hillman says, sickness can be a vital way for the soul to learn.
Some quotations from Hillman (A Blue Fire, p262 – 263) come alive, seem appropriate not only to my recent experiences, but to psychotherapeutic endeavours in general:
The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea journey of the hero in many ways. We have already noticed the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. The night sea journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness.
Therapeutic analysis remains incomplete if it is satisfied with bringing balm to burning problems. It still has to venture into the frozen depths that have so fascinated poets and explorers and that in depth psychology are the areas of our archetypal crystallizations, the immovable depressions and the mutisms of catatonia…
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This is a psychic place of dread and a terror so deep that it comes in uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the tostell [animal trancing] reflex. A killer lives in the ice…
We may recall here that the Styx is a river of icy hatred that protects the underworld and is holy and eternal as are the god’s oaths that they swear by that frigid river…
The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself…
The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening. Maybe in my ice is my fairy-tale princess, whom ego psychology wants to kiss into life; but maybe she is otherwise engaged in her frigid stillness, deepening toward the Ninth Circle, below everything moving; a detachment and stability reminding of the cold body of death…
What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.
Tagged as:
James Hillman,
Psychotherapy
Ron Dowd
Un – (Heart’s Desire)
Lino cut, collage
Tagged as:
Art,
Lino-cut
Ihave been somewhat unwell recently, so the blog has not been getting much attention. I have more time for reading though, and there’s currently a rich seam of books I’m visiting and revisiting – including some by Maurice Nicoll, friend of Jung and wonderful interpreter of Ouspensky.
Recently I’ve been struck with Nicoll’s statement that “man is a certain ratio between the visible and the invisible”. Nicoll goes on (in his book Living Time):
Man has inner necessities. His emotional life is not satisfied by outer things. His organisation is not only to be explained in terms of adaptation to outer life. He needs ideas to give meaning to his existence. There is that in him that can grow and develop – some further state in himself – not lying in “tomorrow” but above him. There is a kind of knowledge that can change him, a knowledge of quite a different quality from that which concerns itself with facts relating to the phenomenal world, a knowledge that changes his attitudes and understanding, that can work on him internally and bring the discordant elements of his nature into harmony.
There’s advantage in being unwell – that “ratio” seems more stark, more delineated. And our purpose, distinct from the material, of bringing our natures into harmony, seems more clear.
Tagged as:
C. G. Jung,
Maurice Nicoll,
P. D. Ouspensky
