The inner and the outer

The tree of landscape embedded into the soil of the body

I'm often asked what the relationship is between my visualisation of interoception, my drawings made in response to direct external perception, such as landscapes and portraits and my visualisation of narratives that I have extracted from the stories told to me by people of their life events. They are in fact all very closely related. In the digital print above I have tried to merge all three, which on reflection wasn't the best idea as there are now too many approaches to an idea in the same image; but it does perhaps indicate something about how the three flow between each other. 

Interoception, exteroception and story telling are types of sensory perception and narratives that help us understand the world we exist within. Interoception includes sensing signals from within the body, such as changes in temperature, pain, or fatigue. It also includes the sensations that accompany emotions, like fear, excitement, or surprise and provides feedback about how the body is functioning, by signalling hunger, thirst, or sleepiness. Interoception connects our minds with our bodies. Exteroception is centred on the processing of information that we perceive as coming from the external world, and it is focused on how we use the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to form predictions as to what is happening out there. In order to 'read' these sensations we often give shape to them by cloaking them in narratives. E.g. "I feel really thirsty, there must have been too much salt in that meal." We use stories to make sense of the information coming in to us, both as a filter and as an ethical or world view framework. All of which, the conscious mind receives as qualia, the phenomenal qualities of our experiences. 

The feelings that I try to visualise that sit within the body are invisible but are powerful shapers of how we understand and react to the world. The more I find narratives used to communicate these feelings, the more these narratives could I'm sure be used alongside the narratives that emerge from my own direct external perceptions and be fused with other people's stories. For instance a certain visual quality that I have developed and associated with an interoceptual investigation of anxiety, may at another time be used within an image about migration, so that the anxiety of the storyteller is accounted for. But there is something else, something perhaps even more important, and that is sometimes it's time to tell yourself a new story. So can hope be nurtured within anxiety? Can a belief in a better future be found in the visualisation of pain? 

Detail: textural surface used to visualise a ruined city

I was recently told of dreams of destroyed cities, including a future bombed to rubble Leeds, where both myself and the storyteller live. As I attempted to realise these dreams of cities, the textural surfaces that I developed to visualise the ruins had a particular value that I had previously used to depict inner emotions. The broken buildings were in effect being visualised as if they were broken bodies. Both the non figurative somatic images and narrative sets of figurative images, were in effect reflections of my self awareness of my own consciousness, as I attempted to work with what had been communicated to me. However I didnt want to make images of despair, in order to make them useful I tried to make images of ambiguous possibilities, things of hope. They are most importantly, attempts to materialise thoughts and our bodies are the first indicator of how we do this. We stand tall when feeling confident and fold inwards when anxious, therefore the underlying structures of art forms and key images, also need to reflect this. 

What goes on inside someone's mind is often not what you would expect and the internal narrative that responds to outside interests and appearances, as much shapes those things as is shaped by them. Inner and outer worlds are entwined, the shape of consciousness being found both within the mind and the body, as well as the world itself. A gradual dissolving of the barriers between external 'reality' and inner subjectivity is, I feel, sometimes a very useful thing, as it reminds us of how we swim in a sea of our own subjectivity. 

In psychology this inner and outer reality is communicated in terms of the sub-conscious and the conscious and I'm very aware that that duality still seems to make a lot of sense, therefore an integrated understanding of interoception and exteroception is what I'm trying to work with. 

Detail of an image of ruined buildings

Detail of an image visualising an interoceptual experience 

Just as in the 'real' world, the closer you get to the surface of a drawing, the more you become aware of a jumble of abstract forms. As we approach surfaces with subatomic visualisation techniques, they become even more abstract. The human body is not that dissimilar in topographic form to a torus (donut type form) and you don't think of a donut's hole as being separated from the surrounding space that the donut exists within. We are one contiguous surface, our outside skin, becomes the inside of the mouth or the anus, the donut hole being the tube that connects the two ends. So in effect inside and outside are in reality one. Formally this relates to how electromagnetic fields are then produced by our bodies. Electromagnetic fields are examples of those forces that we cant see and one of these is the weak nonlinear electromagnetic field that surrounds us and is a product of the fact that our cells need to communicate via electro/chemical processes. 

The heart and the brain are well known as organs that generate ion currents. The current from the heart muscle, when measured with electrodes on the skin, can be used to produce an electrocardiogram (ECG); the same current produces a magnetic field that mirrors our torus shaped torso, which when measured, can be used to produce a magnetocardiogram (MCG).

The heart's magnetosphere

In his 1975 paper "Magnetic Fields of the Human Body," David Cohen details the detection and measurement of weak magnetic fields produced by the human body, primarily from the electrical activity of organs like the heart and brain, demonstrating that these magnetic fields are measurable using sensitive instruments like superconducting quantum interference devices or SQUIDS; that is as long as the measurements take place in a heavily shielded environment. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies brain activity in relation to its magnetic field and it produces images of the fields explored such as the ones below.

A Magnetocardiogram

As far back as the 18th century, people believed that you could cure illness with magnetism. Dr Franz Mesmer advocated the use of “mesmerised” water and iron filings, to remove obstacles to the body's energy flow. What was at one time conjecture, has now been revisited as part of a growing awareness of the importance of the body's internal communication systems, Our present day awareness of the body and energy flow is however still being informed by the Indian tradition of chakras. The chakra's are often visualised as circular or wheel like forms, (Chakra = Sanskrit, "wheel") and they were first introduced to the West by C. W. Leadbeater, who I have referred to in the past as one of the authors of 'Thought Forms' an important influence on the development of abstraction. Chakras are understood as seven vortices of energy, that are located at various points along the spine. They are both physical and spiritual centres of energy focus and the key issue in relation to wellbeing, is that these energy flows can become blocked and when they are illness is the result. I.e. if the body's internal communication systems are not working properly, we will become physically ill. Here we can see a clear link between the images produced as magnetocardiograms and those produced to visualise chakra energy. In both instances, illness can be read as a problem related to energy being blocked or not flowing properly.

C. W. Leadbeater: Image of a chakra energy flow: 1927

I'm doing some work visualising pain at the moment. The more I talk to people who have had spinal injuries and attempt to visualise their interoceptual feelings of pain, the more I begin to feel that we collectively have an intuitive grasp of these issues. Some of the images that are emerging are not that dissimilar to those produced by Leadbeater, in particular when he was trying to illustrate body auras for his 1902 text, 'Man, visible and invisible'.

He of course had some pretty strange ideas but was a man of his time, with stereotypical views of what he thought of as primitive man and associated ideas such as the differences between 'savage' and 'civilised'. However his visual difference between the 'mental' body aura and the 'astral' body aura is an interesting one, and some of his other visualisations of invisible forces, such as a sudden rush of affection, still feel as if they do touch upon something, even if only as a hesitant guess at a possibility. 

Illustrations of auras from Leadbeater's 'Man, visible and invisible' 1902

The repeated downward sloping curve of the 'Miser' and 'Deep Depression', reminded me of what I had written earlier on Watteau and the inverted hemisphere line. 

The inverted hemisphere line. 

In Leadbeater's auras, as set out in 'Man, visible and invisible', intense anger and the shock of fear are visually translated by the zig-zag. Anger in particular feeling as if it is the zig-zag of the lightening strike that is being called to mind. Several people I have spoken to about how their pain feels have used the image of lightening strikes to get an idea across to me of how intense and sharp a pain might be. No matter how hesitant, I do feel as if there is something worthwhile here to continue exploring. 

Perhaps I'm far too subjective about these things, but as what I'm trying to do is to find some sort of balance between objectivity and subjectivity, it is probably a normal response in a time of the dominance of scientific method, to worry about moving away from objective measurement. But I am after all an artist not a scientist, and as such I want to find things out in my own way, even if it means taking several steps back into time, in order to think about how I can move forward. 

An emotional landscape of traumatic pain

References

Besant and Leadbeater: Thought forms

Cohen, D. (1975) Magnetic fields of the human body. Physics Today, 28(8), pp.34-43.

Kuman, M. (2018) Our Weak Nonlinear Electromagnetic Field that Rules Everything in the Body is Emotionally Sensitive: Journal of Complementary Medicine & Alternative Healthcare October 8(2)

Leadbeater, C.W., (2014) Man, visible and invisible. London: Quest Books.

Leadbeater, C.W. (2013) The chakras. London: Quest Books

See also:

Macro and micro embodied networks

Eye music Includes a reflection on Besant and Leadbeater's 'Thought Forms'

The emotional line

The zig-zag

Qualia

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

Benjamin Brett and geometric psychology 

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The inner body up close