The Hammock Papers: Reverie.

26 December 2011

Reverie.

Judith Reeve on journal writing ...

Reverie and intuition when joined to sensory observation release, what many artist have called, the waking dream. This waking dream, this deep sense of reverie melded to our inmost feelings, produces the “creative insight”. I find that when I am in the act of painting my mind wanders in and out of my subject and puts me into a state of reverie and in this state many insights come to me- ones specific to what I’m painting presently but also those images that are seeking form and have yet to be manifested. I also receive intuitions about my work in general or my personal relationship to the world.

This waking dream not only produces the creative insight but allows “images” that are unsought for to present themselves. The Sufi masters described this waking dream as the “isthmus” to the imaginal world of images. This image appears with such force and conviction that one becomes compelled to manifest it. This inner compulsion cannot be ignored. It eats away at the artist until the work comes to fruition.

So much passes before our eyes and is lost. One cannot “hold” it and look at it keenly because we have not developed the capacity through these two forms of observation to seize it(either insight or image). Keeping a journal is a method that aides in both the inner and outer observation necessary to be a creative individual. What seems at times to be unimportant later reveals itself to be significant. It is these threads of “significances”, when joined together, that act as a map. I like to think of the artist as a cartographer mapping his own myth that is at once himself as well as a microcosm of the” soul of the world” as Carl Jung called it.

Read the rest at Attentive Equations.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL