I have been suffering from blocked ears this last week or so and it has been accompanied by sore throat and cough, you know the type of thing. The stuff you shrug off when younger but which seems to hold on for too long as you get older. I thought that I would be recovered as soon as I could get in to see a specialist ear wax removal person, but after they had tried hard for a long time they gave up and I have to go back again, after another week of olive oil in the ear treatment. Apparently I have a very narrow ear canal and the wax could not be pulled through it. However it was not a totally bad experience because they did have a tiny camera operating at the same time to see what was happening, so i did get to see down into myself from an unusual angle. I was able to then enter my head imaginatively from a new direction. I was left with earache for several days afterwards and an accompanying tinnitus like sound in my head, not unlike a roaring sea, which of course I have tried to visualise. One advantage of working on the visualisation of interoceptual experiences is that my own are just as important as other people's and I now have more empathy with those people who have tinnitus.
As I tried to visualise the experience, I also began writing about it, to see if the one communication system could inform the other. This is a transcription taken from the notebook I keep at my bedside, alongside the visual notes I drew at the same time.
I'm dream/thinking around 'soar', a word that sounds the same as sore and saw. I see a bubble trapped, and now several, all trying to rise up, wanting to soar up and out into the sky above me, but they are held down by the massive weight of a granular blanket that sits over the whole of one side of my head.
The dull ache of pressure goes into a hole at the centre of my vision and then begins to spread out, I feel the soreness radiating as white light out from this dark centre.
The soreness spreads out into the jaw, it now becomes a saw, sawing into the bone. It sits just underneath the left ear, which was the one the ear specialist had spent an hour with, trying over and over again to suck out recalcitrant wax. I imagine it massed up inside, hard and brittle, resisting the oil that tries to soften it. As the awareness shifts to the bone, it is as if there was a transfer of energy from one state to another, as if from liquid to solid or from rotary to linear movement. A spiral begins to revolve around the growing white centre of my vision, and a sound that reminds me of the whistle we had on a kettle many years ago, begins to come into my awareness, as if from a distant room in the house.
Something is trying to get through, I feel it, rather than see it. Those bubbles are pushing to be released but they are not strong enough, things are stuck down, but something is still trying to lift them, as if the glue that holds them in place was still drying and not quite able to hold anything firmly. Things are trying to be repositioned, olive oil, is trying to have its say.
Occasionally my other ear comes into focus. It is also blocked but has not been prodded and pocked about so much, so it sits in the background, but very solidly, a huge full stop, emerging like an iceberg from the other side of my face, but dark, not white, exacting a huge pressure and singing a gravity tune, one that is vibrating my cheekbone, as well as eating into my forehead.
The next day, I began to work from my notes in order to visualise what I had thought /dreamt about during the night.
I used the written notes as well as my initial scribbles, to develop the next image. Although using information from 'inside' it of course still adheres to a remembered body plan. I was also reminded of an old exercise from my pre-diploma course in Wolverhampton, whereby we had to draw our faces by touch. I did like the fact that the head seemed very alive in its pain and how a very literal response to what I had written, had given the image a certain unpredictable something, that kept it in the now.
To draw breath can be about giving yourself a pause, allowing for a moment that is about gathering your thoughts together before having to take action. A last breath or dying gasp, signifies the end. I was what was called in my day a 'blue baby' on arrival into this world and for a few moments there was a worry I wouldn't survive, but after some hard slaps from a nurse, apparently I began to breathe and have continued to do so ever since. It feels as if I needed reminding that breathing was going to be central to my life, I was at the time probably still dreaming of the comforts of being inside mom, and not really wanting to take on the responsibility of life.
I recently put up a post on drawing the dead and the dying, but I don't think I managed to say anything particularly useful, well not in terms of where I think I'm going with my own work now; so perhaps a return to the subject is needed. One of the most moving images of death that I know of is Claude Monet's painting of his wife Camille. She had been ill for some time and although her death was expected, it was still a tragic loss for him. He painted her as if she is slipping back into the life stream, dissolving back into the waters she came from.
Monet: Camille Monet on her deathbed: 1879
Seven years later another impressionist painter Marie Bracquemond, painted 'Iris in a Vase', another image of death. She made an image that is in its own way as powerful a meditation on death as Monet's. Monet tells us that death can be an individually tragic experience, and even though it is something we all have to face, when we do it is always a difficult moment. When we do face up to it, hopefully we recognise that death is actually what makes life so special, and in doing so, we embrace it. Bracquemond reminds us that everything dies and that in that moment of death, life returns back into the materials out of which it emerged. She extends our sympathy out into the wider world of vegetable life, a reminder that plants are a life-form too and that like ourselves they have to follow a cycle of living and dying. She was reworking an old vanitas tradition, but within the conceptual reframing of Impressionism, a moment of cast light, being as monumental as a cathedral, the sight of a cast petal, as weighty as a stone.
This is a bitter lesson for myself, in terms of what I am doing and how I do it. It's not so much the recording of sensations that is important, my blocked ears are in fact inconsequential; more important is the fact that I'm trying to visualise the fact that sensations flow between inner constructions and outer perceptual experiences and that this flow, will at some point need to stop and be translated into another state. One that I should be more accepting of, because at some point I too will return into the flow of materiality. In making images of what I think, I leave something behind, if only for a short while, and if those images help someone think about their life and find comfort or meaning in that thinking, then that's fine and my work will have fulfilled a purpose, even though I would have no awareness of it.
See also
Drawing the dead and the dying
Drawing as a model for life experience
