I’ve been enjoying the extremely satisfying experience of my insides and outsides collaborating 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 visual images were largely directed by unconscious dynamics. That instinct has transitioned into what feels like a pleasurable mental sensation. As if Persephone is responding to my attentions with abundant, increasingly robust input while I work, proposing prospects that might logically seem far afield from the matter at hand, yet stimulate arrangements of pixels that when implemented seem wonderfully right to me. And there is a feeling of tremendous satisfaction in rendering them.
And then there’s what happens when I stand back and consider an image I’ve rendered. For example, an association I especially enjoy about the image above is that Wikipedia informs me 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. The fire, the human figure and what he’s holding is all that is visible. The rest is black nothing. I recall thinking, “Reason is a rattle we shake against the darkness.”
I think that memory crosses my mind at this time because I sense myself more and more willfully attempting not to work from a linear thread of reasoned intentionality. Instead, trying to organize pixels in expressions of associations. Then wondering wide eyed what potential meanings the image might suggest.
The image is striking in that I have only ever imagined the underworld as a dark and dangerous space. The impression of the underworld with vibrant life and and a peaceful serenity give me pause. Perhaps we are living in an “underworld”? The line “shaking at rattle at the darkness” is very fitting. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you very much for your thoughts. Always deeply appreciated! Something I think can be inconvenient about the mechanics of conversation is that we sometimes have to decide which of the several possible meanings of the subject of the conversation is the one we’re talking about. Underworld may be one of those subjects. I think at the time the Persephone story was emerging, Underworld was primarily thought of as that place where people went when they died. Not a place folks hastened to journey to, and was likely associated with the earth during the time of the year when crops withered and died. But then above ground the season of renewed life came around each year (for the most part). I think it may have crossed people’s minds to ask themselves how that was possible … the earth appears to die, but then comes back to life. From what I’ve read, Persephone seems to embody the idea of something that can die and come back to life over and over, like the seasons. That being the case, during that part of the year when Persephone is above ground (2/3 of the year as the story goes) is also the time of “vibrant life” as you phrased it. On the other hand, if we were speaking of the Underworld in shrink talk, and thinking of the Underworld as a metaphor for the unconscious (the phenomenally-incredible large volume of stuff we are not conscious of), then I think the Underworld is a vast realm of contradictions … life and death, high summer and dead of winter, everything beautiful that might be discovered and all the terrors not yet known. All just there, together, and available to be encountered, I think, if a person’s interests and circumstances permit. That’s pretty much what I think my edge of sleep adventuring is about, which I feel very fortunate to currently have room to indulge in being retired and all.