From the category archives:

Text

Un- and the new business cards

by Ron Dowd on January 6, 2009

in My Gestaltung, Text

Un- has been around since 2003 as a poem, posted at my old art site. Recently I wanted to explore again the potential crossover between text and the (spatial) field that I’m so interested in, and I’ve made a few (sometimes failed!) attempts at this in the past. I find it a hard thing to do, to enable a synthesis of text and the spatial, the visual. Anyway, here’s the latest attempt to put the Un-poem back into its spatial field. The poem itself is about the underlying field, the noumenal, the enabler from which all springs. This is Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund:

The mysterious teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund, about the abyss, without foundation, dark and irrational, prior to being, is an attempt to provide an answer to the basic question of all questions, the question concerning the origin of the world and of the arising of evil. The whole teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund is so interwoven with the teaching concerning freedom, that it is impossible to separate them, for this is all part and parcel of the same teaching. And I am inclined to interpret the Ungrund, as a primordial meonic freedom, indeterminate even by God.

Ron Dowd
Un-, 2008
linocut, 30 x 30 cm

(As an aside, if you go to the 2003 page, the liquid “Ungrund” you see is a photo I took of a natural mud pool in my home town of Rotorua, New Zealand. Growing up in that city I was often aware that we rested on a volcanic abyss.)

So how do we get to new business cards, seemingly a dimensional shift, from the sublime to the mercantile? Well my wife and fellow psychotherapist Amanda Gruhn (Karima) made the leap, saw the work as a potential carrier of what we do in our separate practices, and what we do when we work together with couples – there’s a kind of un-ing that occurs here before pre-existing seeds can sprout.

We next took the concept to Danielle Kojic (who as well as being a graphic designer is a subtle Gestalt psychotherapist) and she moved the work further, until we ended up with the cards below. And giving the cards to people is a lovely continuation of the energy of their gestation.

(Along with the cards goes a new web site, Therapy Duo.)

Therapy Duo

Tagged as: Art, Poetry, Psychotherapy

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"shatter versions of the self… "

by Ron Dowd on November 9, 2008

in Text

Leonard Cohen quoted in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, on why it takes him so long to write a song:

You shatter versions of the self until you get down to a line, a word, you can defend and wrap your voice around without choking.

And Schopenhauer in The Art of Literature said this:

A good author, fertile in ideas, soon wins his reader’s confidence that, when he writes, he has really and truly something to say; and this gives the intelligent reader patience to follow him with attention. Such an author, just because he really has something to say, will never fail to express himself in the simplest and most straightforward manner; because his object is to awake the very same thought in the reader that he has in himself, and no other.

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Janet Frame – another outsider – to stay my own way

by Ron Dowd on September 8, 2008

in Text

Advance reviews have appeared for The Goose Bath, a selection of Janet Frame’s poetry that’s due out in Australia this month.

On the recent theme of outsiders, Janet Frame was yet another. Here’s her niece Pamela Gordon (in a recent Sydney Morning Herald review of the book) on Janet:

…she never called herself a poet. She always used to say “You can’t call yourself a poet, only other people can do that”.

She felt ambivalent about her poetry, she was always wanting to perfect it. And what she did write, she protected very much with a fierce artistic pride. She knew what she wanted to say, and to say it a certain way, and she stuck with that. Poetry was like breathing to her.

It’s a true mark of the determined outsider, unswayed by profit and public opinion. The attitude is encapsulated in this wonderful poem from the book:

I Do Not Want To Listen

I do not want to listen
I refuse to listen
to the geometric noises
of black and white.

My big colourful mouth
has enough to eat thank you
without tasting
a plain triangle or two.

Yes, I know rain-
drops are as heavy
and colourless as stones
and fall tropically

rain-bashing what
scurries
without obvious form
and certainly without hope

to the defining
shelter of a microscope.
And I’ve heard
of stick insects and figures

and striped beds
in a sky and rows
of disembodied black
and white flowers yet

poor as rainbows are
against the pressure
and purity
of no-colour

I must fight and fight
with my red and yellow head
even after I am dead, to stay
my own way, my own way

Tagged as: Outsiders, Poetry

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something in a drawer

by Ron Dowd on August 2, 2008

in Text

I’m pleased to say that a poem of mine, something in a drawer, has been published in the latest edition of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. Here is the poem:

something in a drawer

like something i’ve put in the small drawer
of a dresser
(slid the drawer in
while i was unawares) –

and now cannot find
nor know what it was –

like something that a tribe
buried in the land

and then the farming folk
(generations later)
made plots and grazed sheep
changing it all –

something i want to get back to
like last summer
when sulphur crested cockatoos
screeched garrulously
at the window in full flight –

or years before when lorikeets
flocked cacophonous
to a dead tree at dusk –

until they cut it down
for fear it would fall –

or like eros making a flying intervention
dramatic but needed –

something about dark sleep in that drawer
a sadness each day that i can’t get to

Tagged as: Poetry

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Meanings are reborn in poems

by Ron Dowd on June 19, 2008

in Text

Here’s a great review by Ron Silliman of Joseph Lease’s recent poetic work Broken World. And from an interview with Joseph Lease:

We all know—in a sort of abstract way—that being born is meaningful and dying is meaningful—but the meanings get lost in our worst moments—and they are reborn in poems.

Lease is a fan of poetry as incantation, of poetry as spell. This is where power lies, as it potentially does in the voiced language of psychotherapy. And in psychotherapy, meanings too can become reborn.

Tagged as: Poetry, Psychotherapy

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A morning in the wildness of the park

by Ron Dowd on May 11, 2008

in Photo, Text

This morning I walked and photographed from before dawn in Centennial Park, a haven in the middle of Sydney’s busy Eastern Suburbs.

I’m reminded now of Robert MacFarlane’s statement in his wonderful recent book The Wild Places:

I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing natural existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.

It’s good to be reminded that we can experience wildness in the heart of our city, and not think of this as less than the wildness that is “out there” in the Australian bush.

Some images from this morning:



MacFarlane goes on to say:

I had come to see wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency.

There’s a sign in the park that reminds visitors that the ponds drain large volumes of rainfall from suburbs such as Bondi Junction through the Botany Aquifer to Botany Bay, via a complex system of streams, drains, and groundwater flows. And there’s good evidence that in the Northern parts of the Aquifer at least, the sandstone filtration produces water quality better than that coming out of our taps. It’s encouraging that a wild system system can maintain its health in one of the most densely populated areas of Australia.

And finally, a poem relating to Centennial Park that I wrote last year:

the way we walked

we could feel it in our bodies,
had already slipped into our mythology –

the gravel path, the darkening sky
the swamphen strutting on the lilies –

how the green leaves gorged the lagoon
how rain fell upon them, drumming

how we attended to the beats
saw flashes in the west

saw the swamphen, purple
moving over the extent

Tagged as: Landscape, Poetry

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Occupied territory of another sort

by Ron Dowd on May 3, 2008

in Photo, Text

Australia’s ACT (the Australian Capital Territory) strikes me as a powerfully symbolic territory (of a different sort to Winton’s territory occupied by the ratepayer) and one that has a place in our collective psychic life.

This fact has not been lost, of course, on the original inhabitants of this land, who for 36 years have resiliently maintained the Aboriginal Tent Embassy near old Parliament House, and right on the Griffin land axis.

The Griffins delineated a land axis, aligned with the summits of four local mountains. It went from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong. Crossing this at right angles was a water axis along the river, which in the plan became a chain of ornamental basins. By integrating the site’s topography with their design, the Griffins presented the site itself as a symbol ‘of a democratic national identity’ (Vernon, 2002). (The Ideal City)

I found the Griffins’ land and water axes to be palpably powerful, on a beating hot New Year’s Eve walk that we took last year, past some of the war memorials of Anzac Parade.

Hot letters on the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial:

A shimmering Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, also hot to the touch:

There seem to be many rich layers of land and water “markings” at play in these axes, several cruciform incisions at the heart of our democratic system, overlayed with the complexities of histories and current-day relationships between indigenous and “imported” cultures.

Dispossession is the shadow side of this occupation of territory in such a grand way – I was drawn to this in my poem on the land axis.

on the land axis

dispossession strikes a chord with me –

you want to make this place
eucalyptic

have set your gunyas
here on the levelled lawns

let in long summer evenings
the smokes of your dreamings
mingle with the scents of roses –

me, going from door to door
looking for what’s been lacking –

returning, in the end
to the little timbers
the jetty, watching the meteorite

that falls and boils its way
into the churning sea

There are also some thoughts on Canberra in canberra, new year’s eve.

canberra, new year’s eve

the big lamps hover
in ceremonial attendance
over the wide empty way

the avenue, the monuments, the dry leaf-strewn earth
vent the day’s heavy heat

at the nurses’ memorial
they touch cast letters –
A for australia’s like a small body
exuding body heat

at the air force shrine
bright steel’s hot to touch,
bronze searing

over at vietnam
a quiet thermal outpouring’s going on
while three pink and greys
haggle noisily

korea’s faired best –
granite and stones having reflected
much of the day’s onslaught –

three bright-metal conscripts
standing fresh and prepared
like sentinels for an evacuated city

the inhabitants having made
other plans for the evening

Energies can potentially be evoked by such national symbols on this grand scale – something I was attempting to consider in some recent linocuts (especially meteors over a field and meteor falling on a slope) – perhaps there can be a redemption for Winton’s youths suffering the occupation of the ratepayer; a potentially more inclusive and energised life for them, rather than one of social and cultural marginalisation.

And I had in mind in my figure on a land/water axis linocut (at recent linocuts) a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or “knowledge-based” markings in the land and/or water.

Tagged as: First Australians, Landscape, Poetry

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Tim Winton and the occupation of the ratepayer

by Ron Dowd on April 26, 2008

in Text

Reflecting on Tim Winton’s understanding of how children can find themselves living in “occupied territory”, and what they must do to survive…

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald (“It’s a risky business”, 24 April 2008):

So what is it about risk? Winton reckons it’s so prevalent among the young because Western culture has such safety and domesticity. “You can understand a residual appetite for wildness,” he says. “But I think there’s also a physical, psychological and erotic correlative to all that.”

He knows all about it. He had that hunger for wildness that he gives the boys. When he was still quite young he moved from the Perth suburbs to Albany with his parents. “Growing up in a small country town, there was this palpable compulsion towards risk and that had to do with somehow defeating the empire of boredom and the empire of domesticity and the empire of the occupation … youth often feel they’re living under occupation; the occupation of the old and the occupation of the ratepayer.

“From that occupied territory, we’d go out on these pointlessly insurgent actions of risk-taking which simply involved fast cars, drugs, sexual misadventure and, where we were, firearms. And, for my tiny coterie of fellow travellers, water sports.”

(The SMH article is in relation to Tim Winton’s new novel, Breath.)

Tagged as: Fiction, Psychotherapy

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Two poetic openings – Wright and Levertov

by Ron Dowd on April 25, 2008

in Text

On the recent theme of openings, here are two wonderful poems. To me, both speak of the possibilities of opening ourselves to deeper, richer parts of ourselves, through encounters with the natural world.

The first is by Judith Wright:

Breath

I turned to the dark window;
outside were stars and frost.
My breath went out to the night,
shaped like a cloud or a mist.
Small and soulless ghost,
what was it my heart meant
that, watching the way you went,
it moved so under my breast?

And here is Denise Levertov’s A Reward. This is a beautiful poem that was originally in her collection Evening Train.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

A Reward can now be found in Denise Levertov’s New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Tagged as: Poetry

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Robert Lee’s new book

by Ron Dowd on April 25, 2008

in Art+Psyche, Text

Robert Lee was recently in Sydney and it was a pleasure to meet up with him again at the GANZ Professional Development Evening. And it was an opportunity to buy from this gentle man his new book The Secret Language of Intimacy (The GestaltPress, 2008), which continues his investigation into the dynamics of couple relationships.

As well as Robert’s work and his description of how he runs his intimacy workshops, I was very taken by Frank M Staemmler’s paper, in this book, on joint constructions and gender-specific misunderstandings. I’d like sometime to try to animate some of his constructions on this blog.

Tagged as: Gestalt, Psychotherapy

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