Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: What is today's wisdom?
A: "The quieter you become, the more you can hear."
- Ram Dass
"The poor long for riches, the rich long for heaven, but the wise long for a state of tranquility."
- Swami Rama
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We all dream. We all fantasize. It is mind’s way of seeking connection. The problem is that dreaming and fantasizing don’t create connection; or rather, they create a false connection. This snail of a drawing speaks to me about the futility of fantasy. The snail is fantasizing about her home in a pond far away in her mind. But, mind wants to bring it closer. Mind replaces what is for what may be if fantasy becomes fulfilled. But, fantasy can never be fulfilled but for one reason: it’s fantasy. Fantasy has the quality of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a type of fantasizing that protests authentic living and emerges out of a deep sense of not having the capacity to fully engage with life. Notice how Ms. Snail is “turning around,” like Orpheus. In the myth of Orpheus, Orpheus was given permission to reunite with his lover, Eurydice, who was released from the underworld. Orpheus was permitted to take her away with him on one condition, that he should not turn around to look at her 'til they should have reached the upper air. Under this condition they proceeded on their way, he leading, she following, through passages dark and steep, in total silence. They nearly reached the outlet into the cheerful upper world, when Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, and Eurydice was instantly borne away. This is exactly what happens when we get lost in fantasy and nostalgia.
ReplyDeleteThere is a double-coding in the act of turning around. It is both visual and meaningful; the doubleness of “turning around’ contains the altering (from future to past) and ceasing of time (a pause between past and future). Why would we “turn around” if our journey is taking us forward to our destination? Perhaps it is an act of navigation-- orientation, or reference. Perhaps we cannot go further ahead without the knowledge that the past provides. The question then becomes one of motivation: What causes this action of “turning around?” Is it fear? Self-doubt? Guilt? Or, merely the need to re-evaluate our present position?
The Orpheus myth recalls nostalgia, the painful longing to return to a past that never was. Nostalgia is from the Greek, nostos, meaning "to return home" and algos, meaning "pain," and suggests a deep longing for an earlier time. But, the time Orpheus desperately longs for is necessarily imaginary, not of space (which we can return to), but a wish to override the irreversibility of time. Nostalgia is a reaction to lost time, the inability to return. It is primarily an emotional response to fate, to time’s irrecoverable nature in conscious awareness. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that accounts for nostalgia's power. However, this is not the past as actually experienced; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire
What Orpheus does not realize is that his fixation on the past is in fact about the present, an inverted history, we might say, of a perceived unattainable ideal life which is projected into the past. Nostalgia is a recollection that is, at the same time, a forgetting (or, dynamically speaking, an ignoring, or dissociation, which reflects the inability to assign emotional significance to a situation) at the service of fantasy’s desire to reconstruct the past.
This taking flight is an exile, a “turning away” from self-awareness and the responsibility of the present—which might very well mean confronting (and therefore, grieving) a past that was complicated, contaminated, difficult, and ugly, or confronting an irretrievable loss that precludes the fulfillment of a future fantasy-- of what could have been.
Your interpretation is very interesting and mind provoking (which I love :). However,it takes you to a very different angle than I saw in this drawing. The term we both start off from is "fantasy". While your line of thought takes you to the grievous and complex relationship and journey of Orpheus & Eurydice, I saw and felt a very different story:
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the graphics of the vertical spiral (snails house) vs. the horizontal spiral (fantasy/vision of a calm lake). This in itself gave me the sensation of "upheaval" vs. "calmness". The snail looking upward in a dreamlike fashion gave me the idea that "she" is dreaming of a "calm/quiet life". Given the fact that snails are not known for a hurried lifestyle gave the whole image a humorous note that made me chuckle.