The façade pictured in the image at right belongs to the second and third floor of a building on Grant Avenue in San Francisco which I photographed in February 2003. That façade is NOT an element of the lovely Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, at which I had the pleasure of helping to staging a conference in the 1980s.
A fun attraction of the Peabody continues to be the twice-daily march of the Peabody Ducks to and from a fountain in the center of the hotel’s main lobby. Another fun but lesser-known uniqueness of the hotel is the “Lead Duck” pin. If you are wondering what a pin made of lead and shaped like a duck could be about you are already leaning in the direction I hope this post will take you.
The pin is given to key folks who are participating in the staging of an event at the hotel. It lets the hotel staff know that the wearer is to be accorded special assistance if requested because they are an event lead…er. Pleasantly aware that “lead” has at least two meanings, and potential humor can arise from a meaning switch, when the hotel’s delightful convention manager presented me with my pin she declared me a “Lead Duck” – pronounced “led” as in the heavy, bluish-gray, soft, ductile metal. I remain very amused.
I love words that can mean more than one thing. From words soulful like tear, to words colorful (another word that also has a couple of meanings) like booty. Which brings me to façade and reflection and the image above.
I think of my own experience of my own experience as a layer-like zone vacillating in a conical space between unconsciousness and consciousness. Imagine on the left side of the screen an immense globe of swirling unconscious material, each mote of which is related to every other mote by a gazillion associative connections. On the right side of that globe imagine a conical space…a transition area the base of which projects from and interacts with the swirling unconscious stuff. And emerging to the right from the apex of the cone is a line of thoughts, formed when the unconscious stuff moves and is processed through the cone into a linguistic-like conscious thread that allows me to purchase a jar of pickles, open it, and tell you about it.
Regarding that conical space, I think of myself as sort of a band or layer that moves back and forth between the unconscious base and the conscious apex. Often hovering nearer the base than the apex. Especially lately since I’ve been willfully courting a state that, with increasing frequency, allows what I see there to linger as images that can be recalled. Images from a depth within the cone that precedes the point where one or another related meaning gets designated as the next bead in the linier conscious thread – from a depth at which differentiation between things has not yet occurred.
My conscious thoughts (the thread) regarding the image above include the 13th century Dominican preaching friar Meister Eckhart’s statement that, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
I hasten to add that I’m not getting all religious or spiritual on you here. Rather I’m inclined to suspect that the human mental structure is…among a great many other things…a personality generating mechanism. And I propose that for each individual, the person they think and feel themselves to be is one of those generated personalities. I’m also inclined to think that additional, usually lesser, personalities form whenever a great deal of unconscious material (lots of tiny motes of information) find themselves connected by an especially enormous number of associations. So, I’m inclined to speculate that the God that Eckhart engaged with was a personality generated by his human mental structure as a consequence of the friar’s extraordinarily deep consideration of the possible source and meaning of all things.
A similar example might be the 12th century Andalusi Arab scholar Ibn Arabi, who it appears contemplated God with such zeal that a constellation of related material accumulated in his mind so complex and rich in detail that it seemed to him as “real” as a person one might bump into on the street. He reported that while walking alone in contemplation he sometimes encountered a beautiful young man, or a woman lovely beyond words carrying a vessel of water, who spoke to him of love, kindness and compassion.
I now hasten to also add that I’m not having Eckhart or Ibn Arabi experiences. Mine are entirely venial. I reference the two worthy gentlemen above to illustrate the high regard in which I hold what I perceive to be the human mental structure’s apparent willingness to share fun and interesting stuff. What I’ve been playing at personally seems like sort of optical listening – on the edge of sleep being treated to a progression of ever-changing visual images, none lingering long enough to become statically precise, each seamlessly transitioning into another. A tremendously entertaining meandering pageant. I think that sort of play contributed significantly to development of the image above.
And here’s a haiku I composed earlier this year which was much in my thoughts as I worked on the image.
moon in silver mist
she draws the dreamer to her
look back now and see
Finally, here’s the Lead Duck pin, presented at approximately twice its actual size.
