We All Have Our Veils
(Digital)
Last night I dreamt of being trapped in a game (most likely Silent Hill) and descending never-ending stairways (yep, definitely Silent Hill). I was surrounded by people and none of them had faces (for fucksake, I get it: Silent HILL), so I had to wrap my face in gauze to ensure no one would notice I had a face.
One of the fun things about dreams is that we still don’t know why we have them. The leading theory of the moment is that they’re a function of memory consolidation.
I am by no means an expert on the neuroscience of memory. Not even close. I’m not the kind of doctor they let touch brains. But I am a moderately capable phenomenologist and a historian who studied memory and narrative and how those things build the world. And dreams are, I suspect, a physiological process of memory structured by a story-telling mind to understand its being in the world. Like our waking selves, dreams are “in character” for us. When they’re not, we find them alarming in a way that differs from our reaction to nightmares.
I dislike the woo approach to dreams, which implies all of our symbols are the same (that’s asinine), I dislike the Freudian approach to dreams (which has the same problem, but with more dicks thrown in). I am okay with the Jungian approach to dreams, as long as we take the stance that the person having the dream is best suited to relate the meaning of said dream and we acknowledge what I said above, that the dreaming landscape is a function of our brains and our minds.
I want to be the sort of person who sits with my dream about faceless hordes and goes “hmmmm” and nods a lot and then concludes that modern life has pushed me to feeling I must anonymize myself to survive. But my memory is jam packed with Silent Hill and Silent Hill is jam packed with people/things with extremely fucked up faces and a shit ton of stairs.
None of this means that dreams are meaningless or useless. It just means they’re complex. …You know. Like the beings that have them. All of the following are true: I want to remain unknown and unknowable, I really like metaphorical monsters, and I should probably fill my brain with something other than survival horror.
Knight of Swords
(Ink on Paper)
Positives: assertive, direct, intellectual, daring, focused, perfectionist, ambitious.
Negatives: rude, tactless, forceful, aggressive, vicious, ruthless, arrogant.
I don’t really go in for unfettered woo, but I seem to have accidentally picked the exact Tarot card I should be contemplating. Not because I’m rude, tactless, forceful, aggressive, vicious, ruthless, or arrogant….
Obviously.
Obviously.
Bright Sketch
(Digital)
Stuff like this, I have no idea where it comes from.
It’s like dreams. Last night I dreamt I lived in a pyramid, deep underground. This evening I realized I’ve dreamt of that pyramid many times before.
This strikes me as one of those topics that clearly illustrates a person’s essential temperament. Some people would have dreams like those and think they had once lived in Egypt in a past life. Good for them. Fancy bastards. Me? I just assume “pyramid” is shorthand in my brain for “secret,” “hidden,” and “safe.”
I don’t think the emergent drawings have a great depth of meaning either. I was recently discussing Miami and its lovely abundance of pink and green. Those colors are also complimentary. Sometimes it’s just fun to sketch without brainpower. If words could shrug, that’s what I’d make them do here.
There are plenty of art historians willing to make up a ton of shit about what art means based on its formal qualities and their projections of their issues, obsessions, and essential temperaments. It’s… I suppose more “too bad” than “shocking” how little art historians know about the actual process of making art. If they ever talked to living artists, the answer they’d get most often is, “I have no idea what this is or where it came from, I just know I HAD TO MAKE IT.”
I’m not saying dreams and art don’t mean anything. I love everything about dreams and legitimately want to stab people who don’t understand the holy aspect of all art forms (no part of that sentence is hyperbole). I'm just saying: it’s all complicated. From “the death of the author” (art historians fucking love Barthes for giving them this and I will most definitely revisit it) to the therapist who told me I only made art to avoid grieving for my dead father (a statement that divided my friends and acquaintances nearly 50/50 for and against but which resulted in my immediate abandonment of that particular professional), I have a lot of thoughts about these intricacies.
They’ll have to wait. Til then: enjoy this shiny, mindless, Miami-and-watermelon-summer-goals-inspired nothingness.
