When describing the pleasure of the images, I can only use words. This is my toolkit for this summer morning to express what is being experienced. I will use the images that appear as I write this text to build it. I will follow them because I believe they have the most to say about the issues that affect them. Thus, found along the way, they will record their self-portrait in my words.
I remember that I have always given myself excessively to my thoughts. I would then disappear from the world, or simply appear in another world. Adults often said that "I was thinking about blue almonds." When they said those words, the image of blue almonds never appeared in my head. I didn't see a single one, and I think this is a very important discovery. After all, we often feel words or familiar phrases differently than we might expect from their designators. Even though at the time I probably didn't yet know what almonds were, because we mostly ate walnuts growing behind my block, I still felt the words differently than what they referred to. Blue never appeared. Never did an almond depict itself. If I'm honest, "blue almonds" evokes in me an image closer to coconut shavings than to said almonds. And in addition, in my mind they are quite dry, not worth thinking about - just sad (blue).
Mitchell, in his book "What the Paintings Want," asks the question, What, in fact, does the image have to do with a person, can it respond, react, "behave" in the right or wrong way?
It can be said that words arrange themselves in our minds instantly, intuitively, in the shape of something familiar. The example with blue almonds was meant to show that, however, the mental image evoked by some words is not always must fit like a glove or fit like a glove (phraseologism from the word hive - e.g., to hive something from molten metal). Here we have a mismatch between the "liquid" image and the form-matrix, i.e. us. This shows in a simple way its vitality and our freedom to create an empire of thought-forms. Even against what we hear or... see. Vitality not at all overly metaphorical, because in fact even biologically confirmed.
Actually, the best definition of something alive is a simple dialectical statement: alive is that which can die.
Are images by any chance alive as long as we are alive? I guess we share some inexplicable bond with an amorphous entity, a symbiotic living thing that takes on a new form every second.
It seems entirely fair, then, to ask Mitchell's question -. Does the image lead us "onward" or walk "ahead" of us?
Let yourself be guided for a moment by the images I am about to pluck directly from my head for you.
Remember the green of the benches in the gray yards? After a few hours of hot afternoon, they warmed up to the point that touching them caused biting pain. Sparking on the skin. Every day a new mark could be etched, a few lines forming a name or a mysterious sign of our presence. Now there was a plum turned in the palm of the hand, rubbing off the blue tarnish on the skin. Under the top layer hides a darker one, shining like a pair of festive shoes. When you tear it in half, you hear a sound. As if someone rustled in your hair (squeeze your or someone else's strand at this point and rub gently with your fingertips). Hold them and stagger small circles. I smell something dry. Fields full of beige ears are just turning into scented sawdust scattered on the desk.
When you return to the plum and put it in your mouth, you can feel the sweetness, which is suddenly interrupted by the sharp taste of an overbitten worm. This is the first disappointment in your life. You can now see the steel bars, as a metallic aftertaste has settled in you. But it doesn't last too long. Already the thought of the polished shoes that the surface of the plum reminded you of when you could still trust it creeps in. The tip of the shoe reflects your entire room. You see the deformed shape of the chandelier. You can wave to yourself or stick out your tongue. You have just reflected yourself in the mirror of your thoughts and you can go home now.
It was an attempt to induce something like synesthesia in you. And it was meant to serve the purpose of making you think for a moment about whether we happen to be unusually gifted beings. We can, after all, feel images. We can hear them and smell them. We can shudder and feel them. We can recall the image of the puddle in which we first set our bare foot. And it will be much deeper than the Pacific Ocean. When we stepped into it, we were accompanied by time and awareness that played out in it. Cutting such a simple phenomenon out of the timeline of our experience makes the moment grow in intensity. It must accommodate itself. Swallow, for example, its smell, the temperature and tint of the air, sometimes even the person who happened to witness our play.
We can compare this process of remembering to the creation of a rar folder, compressed to the limit until it becomes a moment - a small stab. What is unimportant goes to the trash, which empties itself. We can enter such a folder at any time and extract hundreds of files hosted under one title. If you become proficient you can easily jump between files in different folders and even stored on different drives. I think that's why when you're walking through a shopping mall and you smell a familiar scent from the past, you can spend the next half hour reminiscing about a vacation spent at a lake house and feeling the pleasure of a lit campfire all over again.
In our homes we keep favorite images locked in objects or displayed on them, engraved, as it were. In addition to albums of grandfather's photos with torn perforations, looking like holy wafers that were nibbled on long ago, we also collect those containing reproductions from a distant world - varnish-preserved canvases from the Louvre or never-visited places in Australia. We treat the paintings that hold within them a record of the Image with a capital "O," that is, the elusive spectrum located beyond what is merely visible and comprehensible with anointing.
His body was handled almost like a soul.
There are photographs that store Images, and their materiality becomes an embalmed body for us. Visual artists very often unconsciously become "scribes of the archetype". By offering us an Image, they remind us of the pleasure of experiencing the world directly. They make us realize that each of us is a "man of images" -. un homme d'images.
Why are we so capable of bestowing love, fascination or fear on images of art? They remind us of our ability to see through things and touch Images. They remind us of the thinking that borders on pure experiencing of the world, of our natural "poetic wisdom".
For such was probably the metaphysics of primitive people, completely incapable of reasoning, endowed with great sensuality and rich imagination (...) It was poetry, that is, it flowed from their innate ability, for nature itself endowed them with such senses and such imagination. This ability was born of ignorance of causes: all phenomena whose causes they did not know aroused in them wonder and deep admiration.
(...)
The cave artist did not allow irrelevant things. In cave art, drawing is a kind of writing. Hence my conjecture about the role of recalling phenomena. Our mind cuts off the irrelevant leaving a pure sensation - the Image.
In the face of what moves us, we seem to have always been children. Recall that time when everything was new, and the territories of our homes, villages and settlements seemed an unexplored universe. We saturated ourselves with Images then, guided by maximum acceptance and unification towards what was positioning itself towards us as the outside world.
It is not difficult to see that in all of this there is an echo of some kind of magic, very ordinary and natural, because it is related to our everyday way of recording and collecting content. Recently, completely by accident (are there coincidences since we always give them some meaning?), I came across a book on the secret knowledge of the Kahunas - a people from the farthest part of Polynesia. They were magicians of old, priests whose wisdom was eradicated by Christian missionaries. I was particularly interested in the chapter on getting acquainted with our lower self. In the context of my previous reflections, we can consider it an accurate description of the relationship with the subconscious apparatus that records Images.
When we talk about the lower Self, associated with the subconscious, it does not at all mean the lower-positioned consciousness with respect to value judgment. It is simply the lowest standing of the other three consciousnesses - it is primordial, pre-evolutionary. Uhinipili - because that's what the Kahunas called this spiritual being - the sits in the body like the cast of a pen in a cap, controlling the processes of our physical body and gathering emotions. It also receives all sensory impressions, transmitting to the middle Self for evaluation.
The lower self records all impressions and thoughts. One could say that it (...) produces minute forms, just as one records sounds on a gramophone record or words on paper. Sounds, visual impressions, thoughts and words arrive in groups that consist of individual impressions linked together. The Kahunas symbolized these as clusters of small, round clusters in the manner of currants or grapes. Normally these microscopic clusters (...) are stored in that part of the spectral lower self that pervades the mind or is identical with it. (...) Frequently used memories are extracted by the lower Self almost immediately from memory and given to the middle Self at its request. Hence we get the impression that in conversation or while writing, we always have all the memories at our disposal.
I also find it interesting to build a relationship with our lower self, which I read about in the following pages of the book. Max Freedom Long talks about this being as if it were our inner child, with whom we can play, or who may take offense at us for amen. One form of play is precisely the contact of sending forgotten images to our consciousness. Indeed, sometimes while playing around in the area of a private rar folder (as I did a bit earlier while raking you with images of a plum and a shoe), I wondered if it might be me in the form of a little boy venturing out into the archives to retrieve acquisitions for myself from the here and now. There would be nothing strange about this if it weren't for the actual sense of separation into two people. The boy is playing at experiencing the world anew. Just as he used to, showing everything to me for the first time.
The sources of the forms of human coexistence are permeated by play, as sufficiently elaborated by J. Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens. With my short text, I wanted to draw your attention to the possibility of entering into a deeper relationship with yourself. You can think of it as an encouragement to look within yourself to establish a bond with the reflections of the world. Play can become a tool for discovering pleasure, where the rules of the game are set by Images. They decide which way you will run after your desire and whether you will bounce the ball. At the same time, as it is in a game - with every move you become a better player. In this case, a more sensitive one, who looks at the world, himself and the worlds within himself with attention and curiosity.
1 Kurz, L. Zaremba, The power and misery of the realm of images. The animistic iconology of W. J. T. Mitchell, w: W. J. T. Mitchell, What the paintings want, s. 14
2 W. J. T. Mitchell, What the paintings want, s. 84
3 W. J. T. Mitchell, op. cit, s. 118
4 R. M. Rilke, Experience, w: The Other Side of Nature. Essays, letters, and writings on art, s. 139, in W. Juszczak, The poet and the myth, s. 25
5 W. Juszczak, op. cit. p. 7
6 Ibid, p. 11
7 G. Vico, New Science, s. 167, in W. Juszczak, op. cit. p. 11
8 T. Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, pp. 262-265, in W. Juszczak, op. cit, p. 17.
9 M. F. Long, Secret knowledge in practice, s. 25
10. ibid, p. 26