I’ve been experiencing something unprecedented and extremely satisfying. A feeling that my insides and outsides are working rather transparently and collaboratively on the same project.
As I’ve droned on about at length elsewhere, I’ve been courting my unconscious, and in that service I’ve been thinking of my unconscious as personified by Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and the goddess of springtime, vegetation, and the cycle of life and death. The image above is the latest product of that suit.
I’ve long held that key decisions I’ve made while developing a visual image have been largely directed by unconscious dynamics. That instinct has expanded into what feels like a pleasurable mental sensation. Like Persephone is rewarding my attentions with increasingly unveiled input while I work.
Don’t worry, I’m not hearing voices. But thoughts are coming to me while I work that seem to arrive from far afield, suggesting unanticipated arrangements of pixels that suddenly seem so very right. And there is a feeling of tremendous satisfaction in rendering them.
A related association I especially enjoy about the image above is that Wikipedia informs me that Persephone is holding a sistrum – a ritual rattle. A very long time ago … perhaps in my twenties … I recall visualizing an anxious “primitive” standing close to a small campfire holding a rattle. Nothing else is visible except the human figure and what he’s holding. The rest is black nothing. I recall thinking, “Reason is a rattle we shake against the darkness.”
I think that crosses my mind at this time because I sense myself more and more willfully attempting to not work from a linear thread of reasoned intentionality. Instead, trying to organize pixels in expressions of associations. Then, standing back and wondering about potential meanings the image might suggest.