What's going on?

Ali Cherri, Totems (2022), at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, Venice (23 April–27 November 2022). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Roberto Marossi.

I remember several years ago being drawn to Ali Cherri's work 'The Gatekeepers' which drew on the tradition of erecting totem poles at the gates of certain communities, as a welcoming or a warning. Cherri was making hybrid forms that at first sight I was was confused as to whether this was a contemporary art practice or that of someone from an indigenous part of some country I had yet to encounter. He was tapping into a feeling that I thought I could sense, one that suggested that artists were trying to tap back into ways of working that built direct relationships between us and the world we inhabit. Artwork as portals into the world of the spirit. 

Ali Cherri: The Gatekeepers

Invoking figures inspired by the animal kingdom, The Gatekeepers, presented at the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Marseille, paid homage to the souls of all the naturalised animals housed in Marseille's Museum of Natural History, located just a few steps away. Ali Cherri collected curiosities, bought at auction or from antique dealers, from Marseille and elsewhere. Then he sought to restore to them a presence, by working with these found objects to make them 'strange' again, to give them back a magical presence. I'd a couple of years later seen his work at the Venice Biennale in 2022. I was interested in what he was doing, as at the time I decided it would be wonderful if every house had a warning object made for it by an artist, a sort of protecting spirit that would ward off intruders and protect those inside and I had made some trial pieces to fit on poles that could stand in someone's garden. But perhaps people also needed a welcoming form, one I then realised was already in place, something we call a Christmas wreath.

Christmas wreath.

I was also thinking at the time about Halloween and it is coming round again, so I must have a good look around at what people are doing. Someone down the road has had a large spider put up over their doorway. Every year when the girls were small, it was my job to cut out the face of the pumpkin lantern.

Halloween decorations

It's as if we have a need to at least once a year to just go and celebrate the uncanny, and recognise the fact that there might be other forces at work. Perhaps we all need a touch of magic. 

Back in 2022 during the time the Venice Biennale entitled 'The Milk of Dreams' was held, J. J. Charlesworth, one of the editors of ArtReview, wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Magic in Art'.

In the article he stated; 

 'If ideas of reason, rational action, science and progress are in decline, and if the human culture and consciousness formed by those ideas is dangerous and destructive, then the only alternative can be a return to the premodern: or rather not a return, but a dissolution of modernity and modern ways of thinking in the present. This is the cultural driver for the revival of the sacred and the mystical in art. Magic replaces science, belief replaces knowledge, ritual replaces rational action. Circular time replaces history. And as a corollary, the idea of the distinctly human subject, a being different in thought and action to the rest of nature, is dismissed as the hubris of the colonist and oppressor. While much ecological thinking grounds itself in science, it leads back to what is really the premodern mystical view of humans as participants intertwined with nonhuman entities as part of a greater, harmonious ecosphere. Much of the new mysticism in art regularly invokes the old countercultural tropes of psychedelic transcendence and the loss of the individual self to the collective and a greater planetary entity' He then ended the article with... 'but this time it’s in VR.'

I thought it a prescient article and I agreed with quite a lot of what he was saying except for the ending, whereby he decided that it was now VR that was going to carry the can, so to speak. Perhaps it's my age but I find VR very problematic, not least its ability to eat up resources as more and more data farms are built to serve the ever expanding needs of new technology. We have been here before, in the time of the First World War, the rise of Dada was a response to where science and so called modern civilisation had led us. The deaths of millions in the trenches was a lesson in hubris and artists were not slow to pick up on the fact that science had helped human beings develop more and more deadly weapons, whilst human nature was still in effect 'tribal' and using an operating system developed during a time when the most damage someone could inflict on other humans was by using a thrown rock. 

Leonora Carrington 

The title of the biennale,'The Milk of Dreams' was taken from one of Leonora Carrington's children's books. There had been an effort to readdress the gender balance in terms of historical representations at biennales and she was used as a sort of touchstone, in terms of sensibility. She viewed the artistic process itself as an alchemical act of transmutation, turning everyday materials and subconscious visions into sacred visual realities. She populated her works with magical beasts, giant goddesses, and human-animal hybrids and she was deeply versed in the Kabbalah, Mayan cosmology, and the Tarot. In particular, she reclaimed domestic spaces—like kitchens and cauldrons—as sites of ancient feminine power, healing, and sorcery rather than confinement, there was something about her that reminded me of my grandmother.

One of my blog posts on the 2022 Biennale was the first report on a Venice Biennale whereby I had felt confident enough to put a couple of images in of my own work, simply because I could see that the underlying theme was a pretty good fit of where I was at that time and in many ways still am. The difference is that over the last few years I have become more convinced that the world is again in danger of letting loose science led technologies that we have no idea of how harmful they may be. Because we are still in effect creatures of the Palaeolithic world, I believe we need to in some way return to ways of meaning making that link us all back into the world out of which we emerged. I don't mean by this we need to turn to formalised religions, but that some sort of spiritual need needs to be fed, if not we become mentally disturbed. Some people are already returning to 'nationalism', finding it feeds spiritual needs by providing individuals with a sense of meaning, filling the emotional and existential voids that we need to experience. It gives individuals a higher cause to live and potentially die for, transcending the mundane routines of daily life and it establishes a clear framework of right and wrong based on the loyalty to and preservation of the nation. The problem with this is it also leads very easily to posturing and aggression, which in turn lead to war and war is what brought out all the new weapons of destruction that we saw emerge during World War One. AI led drone technology is only the tip of an iceberg that would be brought into view if a new world war was ever started.

So why magic? Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic states that both truth and falsehood, as well as illusion may be used to effect change, you just have to see what works. He suggests that it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that actions produce tangible results, even though they might not be considered logical. Which is somewhat of a relief and when looking at the diagram (above) he produced to show how the four different modes of thinking were related, it is easy to see how art is firmly set within the quarter bounded by intuition and feeling, a place where I would expect imagination to be comfortably housed. Imagination is one of art's most powerful tools, it's use adds meaning to our lives by taking us out of ourselves and giving us new possibilities. Similar to art, magic uses imagination to create meaning and it is inseparable in its methodology from play. Dukes essentially strips magic of its mumbo jumbo and arcane symbology and gives it a sense of post-modern purpose, some of which I believe the arts can appropriate too.  

But how? There is an ancient Sumerian epic poem dating back to around 2100 BCE called the Epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The poem contains a passage known to historians as "The Nam-shub of Enki." In this text, it is described that long ago, all of humanity spoke the exact same language and praised the god Enlil in unison. The god Enki, lord of wisdom, who was incidentally the deity related to crafts, but also subterranean waters, magic, and incantations, in his trickster mode, decided to change the speech in their mouths and "put contention into it," effectively fracturing humanity's single tongue into diverse languages. (An early Babel myth). In the text of the myth, the word nam-shub (nam-šub) translates to "incantation," "sung spell," or "magical speech. This nam-shub is a powerful idea, and was quoted within a novel by the writer Neal Stephenson, who uses text from the Sumerian epic and quotes it directly in his novel Snow Crash. Stephenson interprets this "incantation that fractures language" as the ultimate neurological anti-virus; a piece of code designed in the novel to shatter a universal mental interface, that had been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and bodies. In this case the nam-shub is used to ensure that humans would still have free will. I. e. Stephenson uses the old idea of magical speech, cloaked in the technological language of a modern world computer virus. In my case 'magical speech' is something I associate with the making of fetishes. It being the associated narrative that empowers the fetish. For instance, my reading of the function of the Mali Boli fetish is to accumulate and control the naturally occurring life force called nyama for the spiritual benefit of the community. 

Mali Boli fetish

These fetishes are complex creations created from esoteric recipes, or 'daliluw'. Animal bones, vegetable matter, honey, and metal are packed around an interior armature of bamboo wrapped in white cotton cloth, which are then covered with layers of mud and clay. Over time their surfaces accumulate related sacrificial materials, including chicken and goat blood, chewed kola nuts, alcohol, and millet porridge. Each added layer of material adds to the power narrative and as it does it lends the structure greater spiritual power. The disparate elements of which boliw (the plural of boli) are composed symbolise the various parts of the universe, so that the whole object can be read as a model of local cosmological belief. It has also been noted that a boli's sacrificial coatings are strikingly similar to the undigested contents of human stomachs, while its interior is made of materials generally associated with the body's exterior surrounding world. For this reason, they have sometimes been interpreted as portrayals of animals and people turned inside out, a sort of 4D transformation, as in H G Wells's 'The Plattner Story', whereby a schoolmaster disappears after a chemical explosion and returns nine days later with his body entirely inverted; literally turned inside out, as in a mirror image. In this case my own visualisation being a more gory one, my anatomic inversion would put the body's organs on the outside. Wells was illustrating a spatial fourth-dimensional rotation, a concept heavily inspired by the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, his Möbius strip being the 2 dimensional cousin of the Klein Bottle, a form that I have thought of as one the human body could easily be seen as being. All of which is my roundabout way of fusing scientific ideas with magical thinking. Contemporary superposition theory within quantum mechanics being my particular go to when trying to tap into possible science/magic conjunctions. As Ramsey Dukes suggests, it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that you just have to explore where and when actions may produce tangible results. In this case I'm tempted to see 'belief' as being a prime mover, especially as I have seen the placebo effect at work, alongside a continuing use of charm bracelets and contemporary votive practices. But perhaps even more than these, is the fact that contemporary politics seems to be locked into what I can only think of as the use of 'nam-shub' incantations, such as 'stop the boats' or 'fake news', short phrases that seem to magically shape reality. 

The Promise of arrival: 2016

'The Promise of Arrival', a work of mine from 2016, is a woven textile, an artefact that you can wrap around you to keep yourself warm, it is also when hung from a wall an image of a boat, one 

filled with migrants, attempting to cross a sea. The depiction of the sea echoing the shapes made by the textile when it begins to fold in use, the sea swell, another 'folding' by analogy, another gambit in a set of artworks that seek to unravel a plot to eliminate refugees and rename them terrorists. This is another 'nam-shub', one used to ensure that humans still have free will, this time as an antidote to the 'stop the boats' incantation, the spell that has been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and therefore bodies too. 

See also: 

Magic

Hybridity and permeability 

Chaos Magic

Why I'm making animist images

The blog as a research archive

At some point this blog will be put forward as evidence that I have both thought deeply about what it is I do and that my thinking has been made easily available to other people. 

I have several times during the writing of these blog posts referred to the making of maps. Whether these be of landscapes or the body, they are an important aspect of my thinking process. As long ago as 2017 I wrote about how map making could be a tool for enabling effective community ownership of both real and imagined events and I am still using thoughts about body mapping to realise imagined events and exploring how these imaginative maps might relate to more scientific visualisations. In my case I'm mapping my attempts at visualised feeling, off against more traditional mapping, that also includes various anatomical diagrams, from both western and eastern medical traditions. I. e. don't expect a direct link, as when you make a map of a town or landscape, where you can see an exact correspondence between what is mapped and the map. The relationship is felt, rather than understood logically. 

Neurobiological maps can visualise how bodily signals from, for example, respiration, pain, temperature, and heartbeat are continually conveyed and integrated through distributed neural pathways but there is no single, fixed “body map”, each approach produces a different image type, here are some of them:

Pain Pathways

The nervous system

Neural pathways of interoception 

Interoception embodied details

Pathways for interoceptive predictions in the brain

My drawings are another approach to an awareness that we have invisible feelings inside us and should never be understood as additional illustrations of neuroanatomy or as direct visual records of neural activity. They are better understood as aesthetic maps of interoceptive experience. Neurobiological systems continuously register and integrate signals from within the body, but conscious bodily feeling is not a simple read-out of those signals. It is shaped by attention, memory, emotion, expectation and the material circumstances of the moment. My drawings translate this changing, embodied field into visual relations: concentration and dispersal, pressure and release, opacity and permeability, rhythm and interruption. In this sense, the abstractions I make do not move away from bodily experience; they enable the felt dynamics of the body to be explored without reducing them to anatomical illustration.

This blog operates as a research archive as it documents the evolving concepts and material decisions behind the images. This post for instance is an attempt to make sense of mapping alongside the various images I have made of interoceptual experiences. These two images below can be seen as maps, the top one of the throat, just as a first breath is taken after constriction and the one below that of a feeling associated with the chest when it felt as if air could not be drawn in. 

Images made in response to feelings associated with breathing restrictions

We can think of the felt body as being shaped not only by current sensations, but also by attention, memory, expectation, emotion, and context. The experiential map of breathlessness, for instance, can include compression, blockage, turbulence, panic, emptiness, rhythm and an eventual release. The 'mapping' of this experience being something I have attempted to do several times in the past. My abstract drawings translate these changing qualities into visual equivalents, such as density, pressure, broken boundaries, blurred edges, colour changes, tonal variation, layered marks, dispersal, constriction, flow, repetition, or shifts between figure and ground. They do not directly depict the throat, lungs, nerves, or the insula; they make the felt organisation of an experience available for reflection, but they do in their evolution acknowledge more scientific anatomical representations, as well as the representations of other cultures, images such as medical and anatomical diagrams from Tibetan and Chinese medical textbooks and anatomical flap books being significant to my thinking process not as interchangeable systems of medical truth, but as examples of different visual cultures attempting to make interiority visible.

I see my drawings as evolving visual models of the lived body, what phenomenology calls the body as experienced, rather than the body measured. My research continues to be focused on the visualisation of interoceptual experience which concerns the ongoing sensing and interpretation of the body’s internal condition, including respiration, pain, temperature, fatigue, hunger and cardiac activity. Neurobiological accounts describe this as a distributed process: bodily signals are conveyed through multiple pathways and integrated into changing representations of bodily condition. What interests me is that these representations are not fixed pictures of organs inside the brain, and neither are they detached from memory, attention, emotion, expectation or the surrounding environment, therefore the evolution of the images I am making can intersect with any single aspect of this or any combination, such as how the external landscape someone may have experienced may effect the way they feel about the visualisation of an emotional experience. Therefore in these images you find what I think of as 'ghosts' of other representations, traces of trees, alongside geological forms or vegetation; traces of images of lungs, throats, stomachs or ribs, all becoming available at one time or another, as I attempt to make interiority visible. Just as landscapes hold traces of former features, memories of other times, and maps of those landscapes may have indications of those fading features. 

Visualisation of an internal experience

My drawings should therefore not be understood as illustrations of neuroanatomy. They are artistic maps and images of the felt body: attempts to give visual form to the changing organisation of interoceptive experience. The relationship is analogical rather than anatomical. An image that looks a little like a broken rib may be used to evoke a certain recently felt pain, a twisted tube a stomach ache, which may in turn be accompanied by a dense, compressed area of mark-making that may evoke constriction or a broken line may evoke interruption; layered washes may evoke diffusion, uncertainty or overflow, figuration and non figuration being both used in the process of visualisation. Such formal choices do not identify a particular neural process or diagnose a bodily condition. They make available for reflection the felt dynamics through which a bodily state becomes meaningful.

An image made of emotions felt in the immediate aftermath of an operation 

This distinction between the measurable body and the lived body has been central to the development of the work. In my post “Drawing on Experience,” the distinction between Körper—the body as object—and Leib—the body as subject or lived experience—provides a useful conceptual hinge. Neurobiological maps belong primarily to the first register: they model physiological processes. My drawings work in the second: they explore what it is like to inhabit a body whose internal condition has become unusually insistent. The two registers are connected, but neither can be reduced to the other. 

Visualising stomachache

The movement between figuration and non figuration in my drawings is clarified in my article on Breathing. Early notebook drawings use ribs, throats, mouths and obstructions as provisional signs through which breathlessness can be articulated. Subsequent collages, watercolours and prints detach these forms from simple illustration. Ribs begin to overlap with tunnels, vaults and boats; remembered images, bodily sensation and material process become entangled. The later abstract images thus map a transition: not from bodily fact to fantasy, but from an immediate sensation to an expanded field of memory, metaphor and visual experimentation. The drawings record the work of how to visualise interoception, as much as they record the original sensation.

From 'Breathing'

My blog posts hopefully show that this is a sustained inquiry rather than an isolated response to illness. For instance my post “Drawing and healing traditions” questions the supposed neutrality of standardised pain images and argues for the importance of individual visual languages. Its most productive contribution is the recognition that an image can become a stable object to which a person may return, speak about and alter. This is consistent with the artwork’s role as a third object: it provides a shared focus without claiming that the artist, clinician or image possesses final knowledge of another person’s experience. This 'third object' however, also works as a type of externalised thought and as it finds symbolic connections with other things, it may also begin to operate as a fetish, a votive or a charm and thus become magical in its operation. 

“Drawing and healing” and “Anatomical flap books” extend the enquiry into a history of visual models of the body. Medical diagrams, Tibetan images, Chinese anatomical diagrams and flap books are significant here not as interchangeable systems of medical truth, but as examples of different visual cultures attempting to make interiority visible. The flap is especially important. It introduces depth, concealment, revelation and temporal sequence: the inner body is not simply displayed but progressively encountered. My cut-outs and layered surfaces develop this principle into an artistic method for approaching bodily experience as partial, revisable and never fully transparent reflections on 'how it is' when experiencing the confusing signals that come from inside our bodies. 

Interoceptual portrait

“The inner and the outer” adds a further dimension, proposing that interoception, external perception and narrative continually inform one another. This helps explain why a visual language developed in relation to anxiety, pain or breathlessness may later reappear in work about migration or damaged cities. Such recurrence should not be presented as proof that a particular form has a universal bodily meaning. Rather, it establishes a personal and relational visual lexicon: a repertoire of forms whose meanings are tested, altered and situated through particular encounters.

From a series of images of broken cities

My continuing body of drawing, prints and ceramics holds within it expressions of bodily sensation, perception, memory, imagination and narrative, all linked through my own sensibility, without being forced into a single explanation, approach or style. It operates as a visual account of how the lived body becomes available to thought and how the visualisations made become further available as forms that can be used to make images of how I 'feel' about external experiences, such as the continuing trauma of wars or the stories of migrants told to me as I listen and draw. My current work with spinal injuries patients, being a locus around which new visual inventions are constantly having to be made, as people's internal feelings about their experiences are always unexpected and previously not visualised; therefore I have no existing models to work from and am forced to reinvent what it is I am visualising with each encounter; I am I suppose in this case always attempting to map the terra incognita of our invisible bodies. 

One area of the unknown that has recently raised its head has been the ability of the objects I make to become ensnared into the realm of magic; chaos magic in particular being of interest as it is a much more pragmatic approach to magical thinking and avoids arcane symbolism. I'm interested in this, just as I am in geometrical phycology or auras, the frayed edges of non scientific thinking being for myself threads that can be woven into the blanket of art, threads that are just as important an aspect of my research as to how art may affect people, as neurobiology or psychoanalysis. 

I am also very aware that I'm getting older, fingers become stiff, my knees ache and I get tired, another body of experiences to feed into the mix. I'm very lucky in that I can still work and that I'm employed as a research fellow. This eases my subconscious mind, in that the situation tells me that I need to keep working if I am to remain useful. Keeping this blog being one aspect of the work, something I have been doing regularly, at least once a week for over 10 years now. So hopefully as a archive it begins to have traction.

See also:

What is embodiment?

Why do we draw?

Why it matters

The problem with mountains and words

Somatic awareness: Texture and emotion

Wearable objects and curative things

Drawing as research

Chaos magic

For many years I have made fetishes. physical objects made to be inhabited or empowered by a spiritual force capable of offering protection or healing. These objects sit in my practice alongside votives and I view them both as objects of magical power. They operate using what I think of as sympathetic magic; a type of magical thinking based on the belief that an object or action can affect a person or thing through resemblance or a symbolic connection given to something via an associated narrative. 

For instance sometimes I make fetishes in the form of body parts.However they are also like animals, in this way a body part can have more agency and it feels as if it can take independent action.

Ceramic body part fetishes

At other times fetishes take the form of an animal. They are given an energy associated with the way the receiver of the fetish thinks about the animal depicted. A dog may be hard working, fierce, loyal or just dogged. A monkey might be mischievous, thoughtless or just swinging in the trees, the important issue being that the nature of the fetish will depend on what belief the participant has about the animal.  

Ceramic animal fetishes

I am fascinated by objects being able to affect invisible action at a distance. But just as interesting to me as sympathetic magic, is the contagious effect; contagious magic being the anthropological belief that things once in contact continue to act on each other, meaning a person or object can pass qualities, power, or harm to another through a physical association. My fetishes and votives working in this case as objects of touch. My handling of clay for instance is frozen as finger imprints into each object, which is why they are not smoothed out. I can put all of my feelings into my making and hope that those feelings can be passed on to others. 

Loneliness votive

I have made several loneliness votives. We all need a hug a one time or another and that is essentially what they consist of, a form hugging itself. They are small, designed to be kept in a pocket or held in the hand in times of stress. Their surfaces are of polished wax over rough fired clay, so that more handling enhances the effect. I put a lot of care into the final finish, so that whoever is given one, or asks for one, can intuitively feel that I'm passing on something that has had care put into it. The hug becomes a hug for them. It is passed on, both by its symbolic representation and by the 'care in the hand'. 

Occasionally as I'm working I get hints that what I'm sort of doing is reinventing a type of 'chaos magic' or 'magick' as it is often spelt within the realms of those who operate in this area. It was Grant Morrison whose graphic novels 'The Invisibles' I used to read avidly, that introduced me to chaos magick. This is a more modern approach to magic, one that acknowledges the old traditions, but which takes a more 'postmodern' approach to how to apply magical effects. It is more an attitude to practice than a set of rules or a belief system. Chaos magic explores the techniques of magical action, rather than setting up a particular sets of symbols to believe in, however many of the techniques used involve participants in engaging with belief systems. There being no absolute truth, therefore a magic practitioner can theoretically do anything in order to achieve a result. However at its core is a belief in belief, a similar reasoning also underlying why my votive objects can affect both physical and mental change. 

One definition of chaos is, 'The formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos.' The apparent order of things, a chaos magician might argue, is merely an arbitrary structure that we perceive. This formless state of matter, being a primal force from which is built magical energies. A chaos magician has the ability to change beliefs and thinking paradigms whenever a different approach is needed. I. e. they are accustomed to be able to look at and see their reality from different points of view. To the chaos magician, beliefs are choices, but belief is the tool that empowers the magic. I suppose it was this issue that drew me to exploring chaos magic as a system of thinking, as it allowed me to embrace a number of varying systems at the same time and to embed them all into my thought process. Hence my interest in outdated beliefs and para-scientific ideas such as Rayonism, Geometrical Psychology, etheric doubles, subtle bodies and similar ideas. 

At the centre of these belief systems is a concept of materialising thought, whether these thoughts are constructed as flat images or objects, what is interesting is that ideas that were in someone's head are now manifest as tangible things. Ceramic objects, because they are invested with clear memories of my hands at work, are often used by myself as fetishes and I have attempted many times to conjure up the associated energies that need to be embedded within fetish type objects. As you make them, you need to believe that you are investing them with some sort of energy or psychic force, something that is transmitted through the hand/eye/brain relationship and as you bring them into a public arena, you need to be able to communicate that concept to others. Which is why stories and narratives are often needed to bolster the visual affect of these objects. 

My fetish store

Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic produced a diagram to explain how magic sat alongside art, science and religion as a way of explaining or controlling human behaviour. 

I shall in a future post use Ramsey Duke's as a guide as to how magic can be thought of as a way to explain how an art practice can be also in some ways magic too and I have a bit more to say about how an artwork as fetish might operate. 

See also:

Magic

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Magic in art Slideshow

Benjamin Betts and Geometrical Psychology

Eye Music Includes link to 'Thought Forms' by Besant and Leadbeater

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The iconography of the invisible

The active cycle of breathing techniques A paper whereby I try to visualise the invisible sensations that pain and emotional trauma instil within us. A first step towards the construction of a form of ‘illusory enactment’.

Why I'm making Animist images

Apophenic Connections

Sir Isaac Newton's copy of a diagram of the 'philosopher's stone'

I live in a street called Newton Grove. The name Newton was used for several streets in my area of the city, because where we now live was at one time the New Town part of Leeds. The Old English words neowe (new) and tūn (farmstead, enclosure, or settlement), being the historical roots out of which the name emerged. Our house was built in the 1840s and we have seen maps of the area from that time that show that before then, the area was a rural settlement, fields occupying the space where our house was to be built. 

I am therefore primed to remember the name Newton as if it has some significance, as in Sir Issac Newton, a man who achieved the "first great unification", in which he brought together the understandings of the observable phenomena of gravity on Earth with the observable laws of behaviour of celestial bodies in space, formulating a fundamentally new, universal mathematical framework that it was thought applied to every particle in the universe. This was considered the foundational step in the quest for a unified theory of physics. This connection is in many ways an obvious one, as Sir Issac Newton is probably the most famous 'Newton' there is, but nevertheless the idea that someone set out on a quest to find a way to explain everything, is a powerful one and one that for myself has almost religious overtones. Newton was though also interested in what he understood as active principles in matter; which means that he did not view matter as as passive substance, using alchemy to investigate these "active principles"; the forces, spirits, or vital interactions within nature, that he thought might explain chemical changes. Therefore, metallic growth and change as a realisation of vital forces and his great moment of insight, gravitational attraction, were not in his mind of different realities, science and magic, were still bedfellows; science at this time, had not quite pulled itself away from old ideas of alchemy and spiritual forces.

This type of connected thinking, whereby you just let your mind pick up on whatever threads seem to become valid and for whatever reasons, is a psychological phenomenon which is known as apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns or relationships between completely unrelated things. It is also it seems to me the root of how magical thinking came into being, a belief that one's thoughts or actions can influence the course of events in the physical world, without any seemingly direct causal links. I'm both trying to show how apophenia works in my own case, especially as I write these blog posts and at the same time suggesting that perhaps there is some sort of magical something that emerges from the process of making these connections. Why might that be? I'm very aware that we are communal creatures and I have seen a lot of actions lately made by groups of people whereby I can't see any sense being made, except for the fact that people want to follow the implications of what others have said. This is the magic. We don't operate as creatures of reason, we operate as creatures of belief. This has long been understood by politicians especially and the art of rhetoric is a clear example of a system designed to shape people's actions by making them either believe what you are telling them or distrust what someone else is telling them. Rhetorical tropes alter the actual meaning of words. You can use metaphor to say that one thing is actually another, for example if you want to change the idea of a classroom from being an ordered centre within which learning takes place, you can simply say, "This classroom is a zoo". Notice how insistent the sentence is and how much easier it is to take on board. The classroom effectively becomes a zoo in your mind, an idea now completely eclipsing the more complicated idea that a classroom is a centre within which learning is taking place. If you use metonymy, you actually replace the name of an object with something else and that something else carries with it certain associations; for example if we look at the current U.S. President's administration, we might find that we begin to criticise it, but we can replace this complexity with a short term that covers a whole host of history and ideas and can call it 'the White House'. The White House' has decided that.... sounds far more neutral than so and so's administration has decided that...Sometimes we use synecdoche, whereby we use a part of something to represent the whole, such as there have been a lot of 'hungry mouths to feed'. Again this is a way of avoiding the actuality of the situation. There are starving people out there and they need food; that is the reality, but 'hungry mouths to feed' feels a little less urgent, less real. Perhaps the best example of how a rhetoric trope changes the way we think of words is irony. It can literally reverse a meaning, such as when we say "What a lovely day", when everything is going wrong. Another rhetoric trope is 'repetition', you state the same thing over and over again, until people begin to believe it. There is something called the illusory truth effect. Repeated statements are easier for your brain to understand and process than new information and your brain mistakes the feeling of ease and familiarity for actual truth, jumping from "I have heard this before" to "it must be correct". This is because in the real world of daily life, things you hear often (like your address or basic facts) are usually true, so your mind applies this rule to other statements even when they are false and it does have a pretty fast impact too, as believability increases after hearing a claim just two times.

Recently when reading Neil MacGregor's 'Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples', I came across another Newton, a John Newton, the man who wrote 'Amazing Grace' who was an English slave ship captain turned Anglican clergyman, who finally became a prominent anti-slavery abolitionist. Neil MacGregor was writing about the collective need we have to celebrate beliefs and in particular how prose can be activated for community engagement using rhyme and how when once rhyme is achieved, the associated rhythms lead naturally into communal song. In this case John Newton's poem, 'Amazing Grace' a poem with a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of the sins people commit and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, was set to music several times, but did not get traction until it was eventually in 1835 put with a tune named "New Britain", to which it is most frequently sung today.

When I downloaded a copy of the song-sheet I then found out something else new, but something totally central to the themes that run through this blog, the fact that the song was set out using shape notes, so that people could read music easily. Another example of the use of a visual language to help people think through a proplem.

"Amazing Grace" became widely popular in 19th-century America largely through these shape-note hymnals and songbooks, which like William Walker's The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp, used a visual notation system, whereby note heads are drawn with specific geometric shapes (triangle, circle, square, diamond) corresponding to the solfège syllables (fa, sol, la, mi).

The shapes make it easy for untrained people to sight-read and sing harmonies together in community gatherings. As well as this being another example of 'eye music'. Shape-note singing (often called fasola singing) is meant for group participation rather than passive listening and it is in that group participation that belief is constructed, alongside collective action and comradeship.

All sorts of ideas can be activated for communal engagement using rhyme, not least magic spells. We have all heard at one time or another Shakespeare's classic lines from Macbeth,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Shakespeare that great shaper of the English language understood the power of words embedded into a rhythm. But contemporary media still uses the idea of rhyming spells to make them more effective; such as this rhyme from the TV show 'Charmed'.

I am light
I am one one too strong to fight
Go back to shadows where dark dwells
You cannot have this Halliwell
Now go away and leave my sight
And take away this endless night

I am light,
I am one too strong to fight.
So go away and leave my sight,
And take with you this endless night.

In order to make my votives more effective, I have also used short rhymes as a way of ritualising the transfer of the votive back into the hands of the person who initially wanted the votive.

And so we move from the name of the street where I live, via the invention of gravity, to singing hymns and witch's spells and end with my own attempts to help my votive images work by providing simple rhymes for basic ritual chanting. Connections are also the things out of which we weave stories. 

See also:

Eye music

The triangle

Memory drawing and hands

Wearable objects and curative things
The narrative tradition in drawing

Joseph Campbell

In the previous post I suggested that it was perhaps time to devote a post to Joseph Campbell and his work. I first read Joseph Campbell's four volumes of The Masks of God when I was teaching on the foundation course at Leeds. The first of these, Primitive Mythology examined the roots of myth in hunter-gatherer and tribal societies, looking at psychoanalysis and early human history. Oriental Mythology explored the mythic traditions and philosophies of Asia, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, and Shinto. Occidental Mythology focused on Western mythology from the Near East and ancient Europe through the classical era and the Middle Ages and finally I read Creative Mythology which focused on the modern era, tracking the evolution of the individual myth-maker from the twelfth-century troubadours to modern literature and art. These books had a profound influence on me at the time and their relevance it seems to me becomes more and more important as I get older. In particular in a time when people of different religions set themselves against each other, without looking for that commonality that lies beneath their beliefs and which forms links between us all.

Campbell set out to explore what lay behind the various myths of as many cultures as he could. He went back as far as archeology let him and gradually made his way towards where we are now, pointing out that each myth had a 'local' construction, i.e. aspects of each myth were specifically to do with the time and place the myth was constructed within. These 'local' aspects were often to do with how the people organised themselves as a unit and often set out rules of behaviour. However, each myth also had universal significance, whereby it reflected the common reality of the human condition, which allowed people to come to terms with birth, growth, maturity and death, these things being aspects of everyone's lives no matter where they came from and when. By breaking myth down into these two different categories it became much easier to see how conflicts arose. Basically it was the local differences that caused difficulties. A religion developed in a specific area of the world, during a specific time, would have local issues related to what the conditions of life were at that time and place. If people continued to believe the same set of rules for hundreds of years, those rules would begin to appear arbitrary. For instance a belief that the world was created let's say 6,000 years ago, might have been feasible to people that lived 2,000 years ago, but the solid evidence of the more recent science of geology disputes this and tells us that the world was created four and a half billion years ago. A book that was written when knowledge of the history of the planet was very sketchy, should not be used as a sort of equal truth in relation to constantly updated real evidence about reality. But Biblical creationists still believe that the universe and all life were directly created by God in the exact manner described in the Book of Genesis.
In Primitive Mythology, Campbell tells a story of the commonality of our underlying nature, it develops a narrative centred on how we make sense of what it is to be human. He uses anthropology, archaeology, and psychology to show that all humans share a fundamental core of spiritual history. Not only does he do this but he proposes that the mythological stories that give meaning to our human lives, are composed much like a great symphony. His book looks at how early humans expressed religious awe, as well as how the continuing rituals of certain still existing tribes, help us to understand how and why religious awe is significant in the establishment of meaningful social codes of behaviour. He also explains how humanity's oldest spiritual worldview emerged; the practice of animism, a belief that all things possess living spirits, be they animal, plant or substance, such as a landscape, a star or a force like the wind. This is something that I have come to believe myself, which helps me to find a very personal connection with those early modern humans. Early peoples must have had a hard time surviving, but perhaps some times were harder than others. Those who strove to find forms that could express and communicate their religious reverence of and interconnection with the surrounding world, must have believed very strongly in a reason to do so, as to make a carving such as the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, would have taken up a lot of energy, which otherwise could have been devoted to hunting or fishing. Perhaps a figure like this might have been made during a time of excess, such as when fruit was in plentiful supply, but the fact that the figure is carved from the tusk of a mammoth suggests that it was made during a time of long winters, when elephants needed thick hairy coats to survive the cold.

Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

I have pointed out in an earlier post that archaeologists think that early humans viewed cave walls as thin, permeable membranes that separated their physical world from the spirit realm. Painting on the surfaces of these cave walls being a way to interact directly with the animal spirits believed to dwell within.

Lascaux Cave

This concern with ideas whereby spirits could move between things, is highlighted by that hybrid figure of the "Lion-Man"; a 40,000-year-old ivory sculpture that is half-human, half-animal. The sculpture is a physical manifestation of the act of a human transforming into an animal or channeling the raw power of a cave lion.
This sculpture is a model I often think about when drawing. The form was found within the shape of the mammoth tusk, the curve of the lion man's body echoing the curve of the tusk. Just as when you are making a drawing, the image often emerges out of the way drawing materials suggest form. Of course this is also the case when I'm making ceramic objects, the clay itself will feel as if it needs to go in one direction more than another and as it does the implication of a new form begins to reveal itself.
I have a drawing led practice, i. e. that it is in drawing that I find manifestations of imagery that guide my practice. I have used a wide range of media, including screen based approaches and whether I am using pencil on paper, a finger pushing through charcoal dust on a floor, chalk on a blackboard, tape on a wall, a stick on a beach or a mouse and computer screen or a drawing tablet and computer monitor, each media will suggest new and different forms. There is some sort of exchange principle that moves back and forth between myself as an organic entity and the substances I engage with to create meanings. This process I find very similar to animism, the spirit of an idea being passed between myself and the media I use to materialise my thoughts.

A drawing made using computer software: 1990s

In the image above made many years ago, I can still see the influence of Campbell's books. At the time I was excited to see how using a computer as a drawing tool would help shape ideas; the then heavy pixilation of screens meant that diagonal lines and curves looked like jagged staircases. This fact coupled with a need to 'paint' colour blocks using a 'fill' tool, meant that there was no blending or smoothness of surface available. I also found I could use a 'wax layer' printer as an output device. This meant putting through a printer wax impregnated papers, one after another; the printer then heated the areas where it was lifted off onto the print paper. The wax papers were cyan, magenta, yellow and black and at the time I really thought the limitations were leading me to discover fascinating image potential. Looking back on those images I see that the hybrid human/animal form was part of my image bank then and it still is. Joseph Campbell had viewed hybrid human-animal figures, 'therianthropes', as profound psychological and spiritual symbols, that reflected the earliest stages of the human mythic imagination. He explained that rather than separating humans from nature, ancient mythologies used hybrid figures to bridge the gap between our inner consciousness and the external 'natural' world. Which is something I find I'm still thinking about as I strive to find forms for interoceptual experiences.
Early humans developed a visionary framework centred around shamanism, whereby individuals with spiritual knowledge could enter ecstatic trance states. These altered states could be achieved through rhythmic chanting, dancing or sensory deprivation, states that allowed them to believe that they were traveling to otherworldly dimensions to commune with animist entities. The first indications that we have in archeological evidence of such early spiritual thought is that people began to purposefully bury their dead. Bodies were often arranged in deliberate positions (such as facing the rising sun) and buried with flowers, animal bones, or precious tools. This clear conceptualisation of an afterlife, must have also included a surrounding set of rituals, such as the widespread use of red ochre to colour the bones of the deceased. This use implies a very early symbolic connection to blood, the representation of a life force through the use of a painted colour and in the painting of these bones there must have been sought some sort of spiritual transition.
In addition to rituals surrounding death, early hunter-gatherers felt a profound and direct kinship with their environment. They worshiped the immediate forces of the landscape that surrounded them. Unusual landscape features like waterfalls, ancient groves of trees, thermal springs, and high mountain peaks were treated as being sacred. They were in awe of the creatures they hunted, developing concepts of animal guardians and related deities who could protect the souls of both humans and other animals. Out of these beliefs myths arose, narratives that could act as guides and give clues to human spiritual potential, helping individuals and the tribe to connect with the deep experience of being alive.
Primitive Mythology was not I soon realised 'primitive' and it had a profound effect. I remember reading it in sections on my way to work. In those days I caught a bus in the morning and it took the best part of an hour to get where I needed to be, so Campbell and many other authors were consumed during a time I felt would be otherwise wasted. This meant that I was primed to enthuse my teaching with what I was reading and of course it was also influencing what I was trying to make as an artist. Campbell's ideas of 'enthusiasms' were a guiding light for both. When asked by an interviewer how do we find the God within us, Campbell replied, "Look to see what makes you enthusiastic? Then follow it." He then pointed out that the word 'enthusiastic' comes from the Ancient Greek word enthousiastikos, which literally means "possessed or inspired by a god".

Joseph Campbell in conversation

I also read Campbell's other books but non of them had the impact of Primitive Mythology; Creative Mythology though did give me a clue as to what I should be doing as a practitioner, his thoughts on James Joyce's Ulysses I often passed on when talking to students. In particular the idea that one day in someone's life could become as mythic a journey as Homer's epic poem, The Voyage of Ulysses; which was a great reminder that everything we experience in our daily 'normal' lives has the potential to be mythic. 

I was during this time a young father and the activities undertaken by my daughter and son were huge influences. They seemed to be able to tap into the deep mysteries of a mythological condition by just doing what they did, they did not need to learn about this, they knew it. This made me very aware that in our society education in many ways was designed to iron out the creases of ancient myths that we all inherited. We had to learn to put on new clothes and discard old ones, even if the old ones were still serviceable. 

My daughter as a bird: An image worked on over 3 sheets of A1 paper: 1987

The drawing above is from the time when my daughter was a girl, back in the 1980s. We lived in a back to back terraced house and the children at that time could play in the street. She used to dress up as a bird; my wife had made her a costume which included a bird head/hat and she would 'fly' in and out of the house and up and down the street, totally inhabiting her bird persona. It was for myself a realisation of how deeply embedded into our nature Campbell's ideas about animism were, that we needed to find ways for our spirit to travel into other forms if we were to release ourselves from the prison of our current existence. Both my son and my daughter developed aspects of their young lives that demonstrated how this could still be done. As an artist I tried to record this, the warping of the street being an attempt to draw what it must have looked like to a humanbirdgirl flying through it. Much of the work from that time has been lost, but the struggle to find imagery that might help us to come to terms with or be a portal through which we might find at least one of the masks of God, continues. 

Another more recent hybrid

See also:

Drawing and spirituality

The tattoo: Drawing on the body

For Patrick: Potting the 8 ball  A reminder of how when teaching we used to embed everyday experiences into mythic consequences

Bringing the inanimate to life

The art of memory

Why I'm making animist images