Jonathan Richardson's self-portraits

Foot pain and its emotional effects

I have been making drawings and printed images of people, whereby I listen to them talk to me about their internal perceptions, (interoceptions) of pain, emotion and other inner body feelings. Essentially what I am making are a series of portraits, but images that attempt to reflect the interior world of people, rather than their external appearance. My fellow researcher at the Leeds Arts University, Dawn Woolley is focused on the photographic selfie, so it feels as if we have both interior and exterior awareness covered.

When thinking about a history that might lie behind my approach, I began by looking at expressionist portraiture, but as I dug around the subject, the more I came across the self portraits of Jonathan Richardson. 

Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait, c. 1735

Richardson made hundreds of drawn self portraits over a period of several years. This type of serial facial analysis looked at from a present perspective, feels very modern. For instance in relation to expressionist portraits, in three of his more prolific years, Vincent van Gogh, drew and painted himself over 40 times. and as photography has become the main form of facial representation, serial portraits, such as Jo Spence's 'Brave' series, have become central to documentary practices.

Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait, c. 1738

Richardson even went back to earlier work and made drawn copies of his self-portraits from paintings made many years earlier. Most of his self portraits are however drawn from life, using a variety of materials, including pen and ink, graphite on vellum but mainly black and white chalks on blue paper.

Jonathan Richardson Self-portrait as a poet, c. 1732

Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait, c. 1728

During his early career as a portrait painter he defined his trade in this way, "a portrait is a sort of General History of the Life of the Person it represents, not only to Him who is acquainted with it, but to Many Others, who upon Occasion of seeing it are frequently told, of what is most Material concerning Them, or their General Character at least." However his later self-portraits, which are nearly all dated, are not a ‘General History’ of his life, they are far too particular. They represent the complexity of an inner emotional life, rather than the status or occupation of the sitter.

Jonathan Richardson Self-portrait at the age of thirty, 1735

Jonathan Richardson Self-portrait, 1736

I find his portraits intriguing, especially how with slight differences in the openness of an eye, or width of a face, as well as by changing materials, he can give quite different impressions as to what he is thinking about as he gazes at himself. His images can feel very confident, or fragile, slightly sly or arrogant, quizzical or poetic but they don't feel forced or exaggerated as in Charles le Brun's  work or Messerschmitt portraits.

Charles le Brun: The expressions

Messerschmitt: Character Head

I first came across Jonathan Richardson in the chapter 'Searching for the self' in Susan Owens' excellent book, 'The Story of Drawing'. It is a book well worth a read if you are interested in how drawing supports the various ways that artists think about what it is that they do. We might value painting far more, but it is often an artist's drawings that reveal their thoughts and the roots of their sensibilities; the paintings or sculptures done afterwards often covering up the thinking surrounding an idea's gestation.

Richardson's portraits reminded me that you don't need to go 'over the top' when looking for expression and that it is often in small details that a telling communication is made. He also made his self portraits as he neared the end of his career, something I am also doing. It being a time to continue working if you still have the capability but the pressure to earn money or get out there to make your name is less and you can therefore reflect more on what you have done and how perhaps you can do it in a more interesting or personal way. 

See also:

What is a portrait?

Self portrait drawings

The portrait as witness and control 

The Lamed Vavniks

Portraits and time

Drawing it all together

Dancing and Occult Chemistry

I'm very aware that as I make a drawing my body performs a series of movements that could be thought of as a type of dance routine. Back in the 1960s when I worked at the steelworks, we had a time and motion expert come in to analyse the various jobs that we did and in that analysis I for the first time saw the possibilities of some sort of 'work dance', one that however had military overtones.

Motion efficiency study by Frank Gilbreth, c. 1914.

Frank Gilbreth was a pioneering management consultant, who invented the use of cyclegraphs as a way to improve the efficiency of repetitive tasks. The image above could both be used as an example of how a relentlessly monitored production line could dehumanise people and as an idea for a type of choreography and its documentation. As I sit at my drawing desk, I'm sure a time-lapse image of my movements would not be that dissimilar, except for the matter of my taking a break whenever I want to.

Movement and its understanding can be both a form of control, (think army marching displays as in the Edinburgh military tattoo) and an expression of freedom.

Military geometry 

At a sub-atomic level all is movement and one of the earliest twentieth century attempts to describe the invisible structures that lie beneath perceived reality was Besant’s and Leadbeater’s 'Occult Chemistry', published in London by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1908. I have mentioned Besant and Leadbeater in previous posts, mainly because of their interest in visualising thought forms and their book 'Occult Chemistry' subtitled, 'Clairvoyant observations on the chemical elements', is a fascinating example of how an awareness of eastern religious practices was at that time beginning to influence western approaches to visualising the unknown. 

From: Occult Chemistry

This is how they describe visualising a hydrogen atom in chapter two:

'Turning to the force side of the atom and its combinations, we observe that force pours in the heart-shaped depression at the top of the atom, and issues from the point, and is changed in character by its passage; further, force rushes through every spiral and every spirilla, and the changing shades of colour that flash out from the rapidly revolving and vibrating atom depend on the several activities of the spirals; sometimes one, sometimes another, is thrown into more energetic action, and with the change of activity from one spiral to another the colour changes.'

From Occult Chemistry: The complexities of a hydrogen atom

I was fascinated by the relationship between atomic structure and the organs of the body and tried to develop their atom image as a beating heart. Edwin Babbitt had also proposed an atom of this form in his text "Principles of Light and Colour," His model of the atom was a globular structure composed of spirals and spirillae, with three movements: rotation, orbital motion, and pulsation and I think it would have been Babbitt's idea that was used as a model for Besant and Leadbeater’s diagrams. 

Atom heart dynamo

The visualisations of Besant and Leadbeater, as well as Babbitt, in some ways resemble those eventually developed in relation to Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure and the related laws of quantum mechanics; initially these structures were visualised as electrons in orbit, then they became cloud-like and illustrated as fuzzy-edged three-dimensional geometries, such as vibrating spheres, misty toruses or out of focus dumbbells. I suspect that our ideas of the sub-atomic world will look like something very different in another hundred years time. 

A radium atom visualised using Bohr’s theory of atomic structure

Besant and Leadbeater stated, “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed”. “It is" they further stated, "formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.” This reflects some of our earliest human ideas of religion; ideas that arose out of the contemplation of what happens when someone or something 'stops', when movement comes to an end and things die. 

We now tend to think of the sub-atomic world as being composed of wave energies, energy and movement being conjoined. As living beings, in order to respond to experiences, we rely on the constant movement of our sensors in relation to what is out there; we experience this movement as 'life' and its expression is at its most heightened as dance. 

The passepied an old French court dance. 

The structure of the passepied is not unlike the spiral structures that thread through the atoms as envisioned by Besant and Leadbeater. As the body moves through three dimensional spaces, it forms interlocking wave structures, that if for a moment are realised as diagrams that can be seen as similar to the visualisations produced for Occult Chemistry.

Choreography: Laban diagrams and William Forsythe's Space Trace Notation

A visualisation of the sodium atom from Occult Chemistry

Figure in a dodecahedron

I am always looking for ways to link the various threads that arrive within my weekly musings on drawing, searching for how I can come to some sort of personal understanding about what I'm thinking about. I have recently found an article by David A. Becker which has helped me to see how certain strands could be linked together. Music, brain structure, chemistry and geometry are all fused together in his article, 'A Peculiary Cerebroid Convex Zygo-Dodecahedron is an Axiomatically Balanced "House of Blues": The Circle of Fifths to the Circle of Willis to Cadherin Cadenzas'.  He wrote this abstract for his article in the journal 'Symmetry'.

'A bilaterally symmetrical convex dodecahedron consisting of twelve quadrilateral faces is derived from the icosahedron via a process akin to Fuller’s Jitterbug Transformation. The unusual zygomorphic dodecahedron so obtained is shown to harbor a bilaterally symmetrical jazz/blues harmonic code on its twelve faces that is related to such fundamental music theoretical constructs as the Circle of Fifths and Euler’s tonnetz. Curiously, the patterning within the aforementioned zygo-dodecahedron is discernibly similar to that observed in a ventral view of the human brain. Moreover, this same pattern is arguably evident during development of the embryonic pharynx. A possible role for the featured zygo-dodecahedron in cephalogenesis is considered. Recent studies concerning type II cadherins, an important class of proteins that promote cell adhesion, have generated data that is demonstrated to conform to this zygo-dodecahedral brain model in a substantially congruous manner.' 

(Becker 2012)

I have previously commented on the way that bi-lateral symmetry has affected our relationship with the world and how we think about it, especially as someone that spends many hours drawing on bilaterally symmetrical sheets of paper. This symmetry is of course reflected in the layout of our nervous systems and in the context of brain connectivity van den Heuvel and Sporns have posited that the human brain contains a bilaterally symmetrical group of twelve major interconnected neuronal hubs that Becker (2012) has linked to our propensity to respond to particular musical rhythms. A relationship illustrated beautifully by John Coltrane's drawing of a circle of fifths that I used in a previous post, as an illustration of the relationship between rhythm and our spatial understanding.

John Coltrane. Untitled (circle of fifths), 1967

Many years ago I used to tap dance, and I recently found an old pair of my tap shoes in the basement, perhaps its time to revisit my inner body rhythms and to see if my feet have more awareness of these issues than my hands. When I began teaching I noticed some of the older staff wore brogue shoes with solid heels and when they strode out into the studio, they used the sound of their clip-clop rhythm, to both get immediate attention and in Patrick Oliver's case to teach students about the relationship between rhythm and space. What I do feel is that it is the bilaterally symmetrical body that 'knows' these things and that the head follows slowly behind. In the head's embryonic development its pharyngeal arches, pouches, and clefts, are derived from the implications of formal possibilities of the icosahedron and it's cells will remember that, especially when the head twists around as the body is dancing. 

UV Map* of my bilaterally symmetrical body made using Maya

*A UV Map is a type of vertex map that stores vertical and horizontal positions on a 2D texture. The letters U (Horizontal) and V (Vertical) denote the axes of the 2D texture because X, Y and Z are used to denote the axes of the 3D space. (Vertex = graph)

I look at the map of myself above and see the possibilities of laying it over a star chart. This week I'm designing cosmic tableware and am thinking about what the tablecloth should look like and am getting close to an idea that welds together drawings of the curved time/space that is gravity and the body map. 

Space time curvature

The cheese platter has already been made in the form of a moon sitting on a sun. 

Soup bowls

Design for batik tablecloth

This is another one of my tranculment ideas. The point being that the things which we surround ourselves with in 'ordinary life' can become entries into a more mythic everyday.

From the micro to the macro is another theme that seems to run through my ideas and as I work through this stuff in my head I remember something else. In the large wall drawing 'Planetary Dance' by Anna Halprin, she presented rituals consisting of explanatory diagrams with accompanying text. Back in 2017 at the Venice Biennale Halprin was offering us a chance to help heal the world by joining its peoples together in a healing set of dances. I took a couple of photographs of the diagrams she drew and they sort of close the circle of my thoughts today on these things and help me link up my various ramblings.

Anna Halprin

At one point in their dancing, participants had blow breath through their hands into the sky and when they do this we are linked back to the chemistry of breath, the exchange of gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide, that takes place between the body and its environment during respiration, but that's another story.

References

Becker, D.A., (2012) A Peculiarly Cerebroid Convex Zygo-Dodecahedron is an Axiomatically Balanced “House of Blues”: The Circle of Fifths to the Circle of Willis to Cadherin Cadenzas. Symmetry, 4(4), pp.644-666.

Morrisson, M. S. (2009) Occult Chemistry and the Theosophical Aesthetics of the Subatomic World RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne, 34(1), pp.86-97.

van den Heuvel, M.P.; Sporns, O. (2011) Rich-Club organization of the human connectome. Journal of Neuroscience 31, 15775–15786. 

See also:

Maps made by our nervous systems

Horizontality and the body

Body cartography

The micro and the macro

Jorinde Voigt: Drawing as abstraction and notation

Stained glass: Finishing

The finished panel

As you can see from the image above the stained glass panel I have been working on for over a year has finally been finished. It's approximately A1 size and it was designed as a response to the fact that when I started the project I had plantar fasciitis, which meant I couldn't put my foot down without extreme heel pain. As I had been making votives, I decided to use the idea of Sooty as a type of voodoo fetish, interceding to bless the pain and therefore release it. It did eventually go away but not I suspect due to the intersession of Sooty. Even so it was an interesting experience and I have learnt a lot technically and have set up my workshop to be able to undertake quite a few of the glass skills used during the past year. The painting I started out with is this one below, and as always its fascinating to look at how a change in technique totally changes the meaning of what can be almost exactly the same image. 

The original painting 

My last post was about the soldering process, which left me with lots of cleaning to do, most of it due to the deposits of tallow still left on the lead. Once the tallow had been cleaned off the next step was to stabilise the panel with black putty, which  ensures that every section is held securely in place. If the panel was to be used as a window, it would also need to be made weather proof and this stage would ensure rain water would not be able to penetrate it. 

Black putty being applied to all the gaps between the lead and the glass

I had bought myself a tub of stained glass putty a while ago, so had it ready. It's much more expensive than the putty you use to secure the glass in a window and I suspect you could mix your own by staining ordinary putty black but I was in a rush to get everything finished, so had bought a ready mixed tub. There is nearly always a reason for the materials being what they are and when I have tried to go my own way, such as using ordinary soldering flux, things haven't worked. 

Stained Glass Lead Cement Putty Black 1/2 PINT (Approx: £26)

I used an old toothbrush to push the putty into the gaps between the leading and the glass. I was amazed at how much putty would be needed to go into these gaps, and it takes quite a while to work it into each section. A circular movement of the toothbrush seemed best, and as the putty began to settle into the spaces, it lifted off the glass surface. (I was initially worried that it might stick to the glass and be hard to clean off). 

The toothbrush: The black putty is very sticky, like thick runny hunny.

As the gaps become filled, the putty pulls away from the glass surface. 

I then, once all the gaps were filled on one side, with help, I turned the panel over and repeated the process. I had some whiting power left over from when I was printmaking and once the putty was in place on both sides, dusted one side with it. This is to help dry the putty and clean off the panel. Using an old scrubbing brush, I then worked my way across the panel, again using a circular motion and this removed bits of excess putty and at the same time cleaned the glass. This was then repeated on the other side.

Using an old scrubbing brush to remove whiting powder and excess putty.

The window was at last beginning to look how I wanted it to. The too shiny look of the solder had gone, the black of the putty now filling every crevice of the surface, which makes the whole panel look as if it is an old thing; something made back when stained glass was a process embedded into a deeply spiritual way of understanding the world. I was beginning to think that all the effort was at last going to pay off. 

The final part was to get the 'look' of the leading right and to do this I used black stove and grate polish. (£7)

'Stove black'

I used to help my nan polish her black iron stove and this was very like the Zebo polish that we used then. When buffed up with a soft duster or rag, you get a rich dull black, which is what I wanted. These final touches were vital as they gave the panel a very personal feel. The surface looks very hand done, the final finish looking like something that has resulted from several hours of intense one to one application. The Sooty window was meant to be a type of fetish or votive and by virtue of the many hours of work invested into its making, it has human spirit built into it.  

Developing the final patina by polishing

This final part of the process felt intuitively right, perhaps because of the link back to the time helping my nan polish that old black iron stove. 

In order to have a good flat light source behind the panel, I ordered an A1 size, LED lightbox from Amazon, and it fits very neatly, I used it to light the window in order to take the photograph at the top of this post. 

It has been a long and expensive process, I have learnt a huge amount and made a piece of work I am very satisfied with, as it extends the conceptual as well as the emotional and spiritual range that I am trying to communicate with. I have also set up my old studio in such a way that I can now cut glass and grind it into shape, I can cut lead and fit panels together, but what I cant do is paint the glass without access to a specialist kiln. My objective was to see if I could become self sustaining in relation to a craft that I really feel does enhance spiritual 'feeling'. But the reality is that it will have to be a 'supportive' skill, one I use occasionally to enhance my work, rather than as a main focus. 

See also:

Stained glass session one

Stained glass session two

Stained glass session three

Stained glass session four

Stained glass session five

Stained glass session six

Stained glass session seven

Stained glass session eight

Stained glass session nine

Stained glass session ten

Stained glass the leading sessions

Stained glass: soldering

Drawing on transparent drafting film

New wine in old bottles

The Oceanic

Image made in response to listening to someone's experience of tinnitus

I have for some time now been making images in response to people's interoceptual experiences. Sometimes when I do this I can find myself lost in an inner sea of the body and experience it as another universe. To be lost within people's experiences, can sometimes induce a feeling within myself not unlike that one sometimes described as 'oceanic' and when that happens the resulting images can feel cosmic. The image above was a final one made in response to a series of visits to someone trying to communicate what it feels like to hear a sound that doesn't actually exist. Sometimes this was an experience inside the body, but not always, at other times the 'sound' seemed to come from outside. The 'buzz' of sound seeming to be like the sea, a sea that existed inside as well as outside the person experiencing the noise.

I'm sure most of us have at one point or another swum out a little beyond our depths when at the seaside, or on a foreign holiday found ourselves swimming in a deep clear sea on a beautiful sunny day. These can be moments when you just close your eyes and float, letting the sea take you and as you do everything seems to be in that moment, all worries and fears for once dismissed, as you experience a oneness with the moving waters, the sea sound in your ears and the sun above. This is the feeling of the oceanic.

The 'oceanic feeling' was first used as a term by Romain Rolland. De Cruz (2022) states that Sigmund Freud in response to a letter from Rolland, attempted to explain religion as the result of certain cognitive dispositions and saw it as a 'childlike yearning for a fatherly figure'. He took Rolland's idea of “oceanic feeling” (of limitlessness and being connected with the world), as a sort of phenomenological explanation of religious experience. But what if the reality of that experience is of a deeper significance, and in being reminded of how we are totally immersed and interconnected into the world, we begin to see other moments when we are totally 'lost' in our worldly integration. Higgie, (2023, p. 73), quoting Freud, writes that he also linked oceanic states to the times 'when people fall in love and consequently feel as if they are merged with another or are in some way transfigured by the experience'. Higgie (p.74) goes on to point out how Marion Milner widens Freud's vision when she writes that an oceanic state could be experienced moments of artistic creativity, when the unconscious mind lets go of the distinction between me and not me, between seer and seen, and does things that the common sense, conscious mind cannot do.'

My occasional posts on 19th century and early 20th century mystic approaches to how to visualise invisible experiences are I'm sure linked to this feeling. The moment of creativity is something special, even if we only get lost within it momentarily, in those times we let our mind/body dissolve itself into the world via the materials of making. Higgie's book reminded me of the central importance of women to a more mystic tradition of art and it has been very useful in letting me feel connected to a range of approaches to art making that have long been there and it has also reminded me that we need, as Higgie states, 'elements of illusion to cope with reality'. (Ibid, p. 88)

Image produced in response to a conversation about tinnitus

The tinnitus image above was made directly before the one that sits at the top of this post. It is easy to see the relationship and the differences. The spiral remains a very important aspect of the feeling tone but the eye has gone, it was far too obvious and grounded the image in an exterior seeing, rather than opening it out into a more 'mystic' interior life of the invisible. The colour was too predictable and had no real sense of the un-reality of an alien sound. The notes around the edge are annotations taken from a conversation made in response to a previous drawing. I listen, I draw, I take the drawing away and then develop it further. Once satisfied that I have something worthwhile, I take it back to the person I spoke to and we begin another conversation about the relationship between the image and the experience they have had. Gradually the images are changed, a type of co-production emerging. At its best when I let go of my control, an image can arrive that seems to myself at least, literally 'wonderful'.

References.

De Cruz, H. (2022) Religion and Science The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), Accessed from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/religion-science/ 15. 1. 25

Higgie, J. (2023) The Other Side: A Journey into Women,  Art and the Spirit World London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Coda

It has been great to be chosen as one of the best drawing blogs out there by Feedspot: See: https://bloggers.feedspot.com/drawing_blogs/ for a link to all the ones shortlisted. 

See also:

Art therapy and perceptual research 

Drawing water

The uncertain certainty 

Freud and drawing invisible forces

Ibrahim el Salahi: Pain relief drawings

Sensuous aggregates

On being knocked down by a car at night

There are moments in life when time and space seem to lose their hold on you. For example when I was knocked down by a car when crossing a road and everything was happening at the same time, a sort of clumping of experience in a way very different to 'normality'. Thinking about the experience from a distance I'm reminded of other people's attempts to describe the thing I might call an accelerated intuited moment. The term ‘sensuous aggregate’ is one taken from Husserl who used it to describe a ‘unified intuition’ (Farber, 2006) and is a term used to describe the various feelings and bodily knowledge that come to us through pre-cognitive thought. This ‘sensuous aggregate’ is something that I might also call a ‘feeling tone’ when describing an experience. In both 'Logical Investigations' and 'Ideas' Husserl argues that our perceptual consciousness is based in the “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle. In philosophy, 'hyle' is a noun that means matter, especially matter in its original, unorganised state. In my case a road and a car in the rain at night. It can also refer to anything that receives form from outside itself, i.e. 'that which is formed'. Hyle when brought together with some form of representation, could I think be another type of sensuous aggregate. This is the intuitive or as Williford (2013, p. 1) puts it “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, something we discover, rather than create, another possible bridge between consciousness and the experienced world. I would argue this is another aspect of what we also call our 'feeling tone'. It's the something that lies behind statements such as, "It's all going well", or "I'm anxious about something", "this is very exciting" or "I'm going to die". The general summation of my response to stimulus, determines my flight or fight response and is the overall judgement my embodied senses are making in response to what is happening out there. That judgement depends on the form I give to the perceptions I receive. 

If so, another way to approach the images I have been making is to see them as diagrams of 'sensuous aggregates'. 

Sensuous: relating to or affecting the senses rather than the intellect.

Aggregates: a whole formed by combining several separate elements.

Often more than one sense is activated at the same time when I have a feeling. So when I'm drawing I try to bring together into one representation more than one feeling tone. Perhaps a sense of cold shiver with a knotted stomach and a vision of an empty landscape on a misty day. 

Deleuze and Guattari in response I presume to their reading of Husserl, stated that art relies on the creation of sensuous aggregates. (Rodowick in Furstenau, 2010, p. 31) So art itself could in some ways be pulled into this clump of aggregates. A clump that has now reminded me of 'the paradox of the heap', a philosophical puzzle that explores the vagueness of language and the difficulty of defining vague concepts. A heap is by definition an amorphous concept, and so is a sensuous aggregate. I know what I think I'm getting at but it might only be poetry that can save me. Heap, gravel, sand etc. out of which we build roads and buildings. But not that, something else.

I thought I saw an angel

It looked like a glowing stone

It was committed to religion 

One built on death

I picked up the stone

Put it in my pocket

In the dark it opened wings out from its back

It had had a vision of my future

When I was knocked down time seemed suspended. The car lights were frozen in my mind, but I was planted into the road, slammed flat. The image that eventually arrived is now seen by myself as a sensuous diagram, starting as a very rough drawing in a notebook, it began to morph as I began to daydream what it was like to be almost dead. It was as if I was part of a scene from a film, embedded into the scenery, but still allowed to play my part. I can see the scene now, a sensuous street, at night everything has an animist soul; the lights, the glistening road, wet from continuous rain, dark shops brooding, a stolid deep red post box, looking on, mouth open as if to say something, my shopping dispersed over the damp road, broken eggs leaking yokes in the rain, as I too dissolve into the flowing waters of the gutter. But I survived and I thanked by guardian angel.

It's now over a year since the accident, but I still see myself in that moment, as if I was outside my body, yet in it. Working with people who have had traumatic accidents has reminded me that I am making images for them to inhabit as much as myself, so images will need to be made like animist objects, so that they can be inhabited by other beings, put on like clothes or crawled into like a tent. 

Reading

Aaltonen, Minna-Ella (2011) Touch, taste & devour: phenomenology of
film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations. MPhil(R) thesis. Obtained at: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2666/01/2011aaltonenmphilr.pdf accessed on 14. 11. 11 

Farber, M (2006) The foundation of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the quest for a rigorous science of philosophy London: AldineTransaction

Furstenau, M (2010) The film theory reader London: Routledge

Harvey G. (2015) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism London: Routledge

Williford, K. (2013) 'Husserl’s hyletic data and phenomenal consciousness', Phenom Cogn Sci.
1​ DOI: 10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.

See also:

I swear I saw this

The topology of dreams

Drawing on experience

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Some thoughts on art and spirituality

The topology of dreams

Visual representation of “Awake state” vs “Dream state” according the Topographic-dynamic Reorganisation model of dreams

At the end of my post on the Borromean Knot I stated that the topology of dreams was perhaps the next thing to explore. There always seems to be a gap between what goes on in the mind and experience. Sometimes it seems as if we measure all experiences in relation to the experience of being in a particular body. Consciousness being a sort of embodied realisation of the process of becoming aware. But when I dream I'm somehow conscious of something but at the same time not conscious, because I'm asleep. It's interesting to see that Dali's work is still used to indicate dream states, his "paranoiac-critical" method, was a very conscious application of a visual methodology, designed to sit between readings, in order to destabilise a viewer's perception. It is the flitting between states that is perhaps what fascinates artists.

Areas of the brain

Northoff, Scalabrini and Fogel, (2023) when explaining why they have developed their current dream model theory, state that it is produced, "In order to bridge the gap between brain and experience". Their theory is a topographic-dynamic re-organisation model of dreams. They state that topographically, dreams are characterised by a shift towards increased activity and connectivity in the default-mode network, (DMN). If that gap can be bridged, it might help me to visualise or at least begin to model in my mind, some sort of diagram of the interrelationship between perception and consciousness. 

Raichle (2015) explains that 'the brain's default mode network consists of discrete, bilateral and symmetrical cortical areas, in the medial and lateral parietal, medial prefrontal and medial and lateral temporal cortices of the brain'. Interestingly, as well as this applying to humans, it applies to other primates, cats and rodent brains as well. 

The discovery of the default mode network reignited a longstanding interest in the significance of the brain's ongoing or intrinsic activity, i.e. a growing awareness that it is always active and doing something, even when it would appear that there is no need for it to be active because we are asleep or at rest. Resting-state studies, have indeed come to play a major role in researching the human brain in relation to health and disease. For instance, 'happiness' is very subjective. It has been suggested that unhappy people are prone to ruminate more and therefore Luo, Kong, Qi, You,& Huang. (2016) have posited that unhappiness may be associated with increased default-mode functional connectivity during rest.  The relative hyper-connectivity of the DMN areas may they argue, be associated with higher levels of rumination, which suggests that those of us who take time to rest, think too much when we do so. 

My recent experience working with people who have suffered traumatic spinal injuries, suggests that the less people are able to use their bodies, the more their mind operates to compensate for this. I have been holding conversations with people in a specialist spinal injuries ward, whereby we work together to visualise how they feel pain. The most active images have emerged from conversations with someone paralysed from the neck down. Perhaps some of the images that have emerged from these types of conversations might become starting points for diagrams of the interrelationship between perception and consciousness. 

Conversational image

But what of dreams, the images out of which so many of our inventions arise, all derived from a time when the body is supposed to be at rest?

From an anxiety dream: The visualisation of an inner feeling

Northoff, Scalabrini and Fogel, (2023), suggest that in dreams, there is a shift away from temporal segregation to temporal integration of brain inputs.  This they believe results in 'bizarre and highly self-centric mental contents, as well as hallucinatory-like states'. However, no matter how interesting this research is, it doesn't really deal with the mind and it would seem to me that it is the mind that is conscious, not the brain. 

I like to play table tennis and one of the reasons I do this is that I don't have to think too much about what I'm doing, I simply have to react. In fact if I try to think about what I'm going to do, I will miss my shot. This tells me that when incoming stimulus is focused and in need of a response, that somehow decisions are much simpler for the mind to make. Twenty seven plus thirty five, is a simple sum, and as I do it in my head, I focus on just that, I don't begin to speculate on other things. But when I sleepdream, or when I daydream, little external stimulus is coming in and therefore in order to keep active, my mind goes on to predict other possibilities, some of which are wonderful, some stupid and some frightening. Even when nothing is coming in via external senses, my mind seems to want to keep processing something; it keeps on trying to predict other possibilities. Perhaps this is why at times we need to be bored. If we look at Bayesian inference theory to explain this, we find that subjective probability lies at the core of how our fast response systems operate. Fight or flight mechanisms are driven by these things, so our body believes in their vital necessity and wants to make sure we are always on guard, even when we don't have to be. It would seem that because of this, what could be seen as a wasted energy process, is in fact one whereby wonderful things like dreams are made to happen. As a model, this closely resembles how most of us operate when we develop a working process for making artwork. Both are iterative processes; according to Bayesian inference theory you receive an initial stimulus, test it and then update your model of the world based on the new information; when making art you set down an initial idea, test it out and then update the idea based on what you have discovered. 

No matter how much better neurological visualisation techniques get, they do not seem to get us any closer to an idea of what consciousness is, or what a mind is. The mind is not the brain, it isn't even located in the brain, being it would seem distributed not just into the body as a whole, (the embodied mind) but out into the world itself, (the extended mind). In, 'You Are the Universe' Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos, go one step further and suggest that each of us is a co-creator of reality and that we live in a conscious universe. On the way to their current theory they dismiss animism as a way to think about this, but I still have a personal affection for an animist universe, as it allows me to inhabit and talk with and through non-human animate and inanimate things, if only in my imagination. 

Night thoughts: Climbing out of the subconscious

In the image above, ladders and tree roots are extensions of my body/mind; my hand and arm as they extend out from the edge of the frame, are images of my hand and arm as they extend into my field of vision. The rest of my arm is known to me by proprioception, the interoceptual sense that makes us aware of balance and our body parts. This is also true of anyone who looks at the image, their own sense of inhabiting a body, allows them to feel what it might be like to climb out of the space below the edge of the frame. This inner sense is also part and parcel of my sub-conscious, a state that exists inside my body, just as much as consciousness does. They are intertwined sensations. Memories of ladders and tree roots being another set of neurological energy flows that are woven into the arrival of an image such as the one above.  

Dreams are I believe central to my own imagination and I still keep a notebook at the bedside, so that when dreamt images emerge at night, I don't lose them; even if it means that when I wake I find I don't really understand what it was I was seeing during that night's dream state. It's the mystery that intrigues me, the fact that there is no answer, beyond a belief that there is something beyond the everyday and a feeling that underneath the surface of perception lies something deeper and profound. These are wonderful reasons to keep going, to keep looking for that unknown something that is just outside of my perceptual range. I am in making images looking for something I know is there, but I can never touch, something that I suppose is sometimes called reality. 

There is another theory about how consciousness is constructed, called orchestrated objective reduction theory (Orch OR). It was originally proposed by physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff in the 1990s. It also, like art, seeks to bridge the gulf between physical matter and felt experience. The idea is that consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions in tiny proteins called microtubules, which are found inside neurons. Rather than being a product of neural connections, Orch OR posits that consciousness is based on non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits (like binary bits, qubits are the basic units of information in quantum computing), formed collectively in cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified through the neurons themselves. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles forming superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules. The oscillations are either electric, due to charge separation from London forces, or magnetic, due to electron spin. Consciousness therefore arising from quantum computations which are connected to the fine-scale structure of spacetime geometry. If this idea has traction, it might explain how 'spooky action at a distance' works to build some sort of cosmic consciousness, or at least free the mind from its prison within our skulls. The idea has reached the point whereby diagrams can be drawn to illustrate how it works, which for myself means that it has more visual momentum.

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse and they are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine
B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.

David Bohm was very interested in these issues and he proposed a solution by looking at what he called 'implicate' and 'explicate' order, which he thought of as ontological bases for quantum theory, and are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behaviours of subatomic particles, which quantum physics describes and predicts but struggles to explain. In 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' he described how differing contexts might change the appearance of certain phenomena. The "implicate" (also referred to as the "enfolded") order, is a deep fundamental order of reality. The "explicate" or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally perceive. He stated in relation to this, "In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements." (Bohm, 1980) 

As space and time become questioned as to their role in our perceptual understanding of the world, a door is opened into a universe within which the spaces and times of dreaming can be enfolded, their topology perhaps more like that of the tessellations and associated optical illusions that Roger Penrose introduced to Escher, which had a direct effect on his making of the print, 'Ascending and Descending'.

Escher: 'Ascending and Descending'

References

Bohm, D. (1980/2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London: Routledge

Chopra, D. and Kafatos, M.C., (2018) You are the universe: Discovering your cosmic self and why it matters. London: Harmony.

Davey, C. G., Pujol, J., & Harrison, B. J. (2016). Mapping the self in the brain's default mode network. NeuroImage, 132, 390–397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.02.022

Northoff, G., Scalabrini, A., Fogel, S. (2023) Topographic-dynamic reorganisation model of dreams – A spatiotemporal approach, Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews, Volume 148,

Lau, H.C., (2007) A higher order Bayesian decision theory of consciousness. Progress in brain research, 168, pp.35-48.

Luo, Y., Kong, F., Qi, S., You, X., & Huang, X. (2016). Resting-state functional connectivity of the default mode network associated with happiness. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 11(3), 516–524. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv132

Raichle M. E. (2015). The brain's default mode network. Annual review of neuroscience, 38, 433–447. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-014030

See also: 

The Borromean Knot

Paper and skin

Knots

Benjamin Brett and Geometrical Psychology 

Drawing and quantum theory part one

Drawing and quantum theory part two

Quantum entanglement

The geometry of consciousness