The Madman Within: Valery and the Personal Energy Crisis

Paul Valery par Jullien

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."

 
"Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph." 

"To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth." 

"At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind." 

"A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key." 

Paul Valery

Here, I continue on the themes of an essay regarding a theory of sleep cycles, and the natural course of the human experience of time as espoused in my previous post, Metaphors in the Art of Goya: A Theory of Unconscious Development. Beyond the bounds of the twenty-four hour time bomb, the seer lives to posit the cyclical nature of time in the natural course of creativity as it rises and falls based on the "internal clock" or "the internal orbit" as I will more aptly describe it. Leading through to an experience of time in the twenty-four hour day as much like the seasons, at different stages of life, or the year, we will be naturally disposed to certain times of the day. 

To keep a fixed schedule of waking and sleep throughout one’s life is unnatural and unhealthy, leading to an incomplete understanding of one’s self in relation to the ecological rhythms of the earth, and one’s own nature. Put more concisely, the mad genius intellect of Paul Valery writes, "A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key." So, continuing on this theme, I would say that, a great foreshadowing to the resolution in thought from the prose essay writings on SoJourn(al) can culminate in formulating a creative practice so that any person can discover the certain time of day that best suits their activity and temperament. 

When allowed to our own devices, we naturally settle into a certain time of day based on the kind of activity with which we are engaged as our primary focus in life. For example, if one is studying texts, the predawn hours may be optimal in terms of the energetic rhythms and ecological harmony involved in the practice and the setting in which one lives. This could potentially lead to invaluable developments as a repertoire of useful information for employers seeking to offer work-life balance and optimal efficiency and motivation based on the kind of work in which they are engaged. 

All of this, in both theory and practice, is based on variables of ecological distinction (the character of a place), individual temperament (how one relates to a certain time of day), and the focused activity (one’s primary work or occupation). Regardless of the person or type of work, with the application of guiding principles, one can find a harmonious relationship with time and productivity through attention to details of place (ecological awareness), energy (sleep cycles), and activity (work medium). 

__________

He is silent and still as stone. His face a petrified grey, staring blankly into an off-white wall. His mind has long gone, and yet his body remains. 

The Battle between Carnival and Lent (detail) by Peter Bruegel the Elder

A rodent gnaws into its raw skin. Dirt falls from its brittle hair. The animal dies before my eyes. I was happy and excited to see what once meant my life, and now...

________

As the tired groaning of racist America brews a proud glory of personal despair,
more,
An interpersonal contemplation on the theme of color:
Hair,
Eyes,
Fingers,
Pubis,
Nose,
And Shape,
Body of form,
And the formless desire

White against the all-escaping cloud of solar obscurity,
Who rushed civilization into the neighborhood of the absent & poor

Breaking the long arduous fast
with an unwelcoming community,
founded not on Love,
only on a hope to pray
before the Cyclops’ rise
over the crossed horizon
...

Stretching beyond the bounds of individual reaction,
To choice.

excerpts from "The socialist epoch"

Metaphors in the Art of Goya: A Theory of Unconscious Development

The Dream (preparatory drawing) by Francisco de Goya

The Dream (print) by Francisco de Goya

"The dream of reason produces monsters." Francisco de Goya (source)

The purpose for exhibiting the creative process of a master painter as Francisco de Goya, showing his initial sketch, and final print, runs parallel to a theory I have in relation to the role of the unconscious, and its impacts on the life of both the sleeper and the awake. 

Firstly, my theory is founded on lived experience. The foundation is as follows: If a person follows their natural sleep-awake patterns, without conscious intervention, the body cycles through an internal clock more expansive than the twenty-four hour day. Incrementally, each day one wakes later, sleeps later, and eventually earlier. In the course of over a year of practicing this experiment of consciousness, I have found the twenty-four hour clock to be limiting and a mere fixed point around which my sleep and waking cycles orbit, as a celestial body around its true source of gravity. 

Is this an effect of seasonal, environmental, or psychological pressures? The theoretical part now kicks in. With the exhibition of Goya's creative process in visual representing the night of Man, he is accosted by a host of demons, and in turn, upon waking, those demons become monsters of reason. So, if we allow the regenerative natural patterns of sleeping and waking to unfold, with complete abandon and in lieu of the normative twenty-four hour clock, we give way to a natural creative energy sourced deep within our unconscious, that nourishes our very life-breath with the heartbeat of self-knowledge. 

With this, the world of dream is merely a doorway, as is a metaphor or a myth, towards a more holistic regenerative consciousness of self-awakening. 

See related post: In Defence of Sleep: Regenerative Sleep Cycles of Archaic Man

__________

After hours downtown mall. Winter night. Midwestern city. The street is dim, and I stand, as to wait for a companion, or a bus home. Alone, my eyes scan the glass exit doors with a longing nostalgia for company. As I consider my absolute solitude, two prostitutes brush up against me. They closed in out of nowhere. After a moment of disdain, I begin to hear an inner curiosity.

Cocotte on the Road by E.L. Kirchner

"How much?" I ask, imploringly. "500 dollars" she says with a soft smirk. "I don't have that much." I respond, with dry humour, having never intended to act on my curious insides. Surprisingly, my wife steps through the hall behind us and into the background. She sets up her instrument and begins to play. I drift, flying towards the awake. Her unconscious body, her subtle spirit had called me forth, from the fantastic night of isolation.

___________

What of human sound,
The frequent lust to prepare noise in strength of intellectual wonder
and produce unfathomable beauty
            of the entire body
                        descending to and from the ear’s tragic centering
In our musical society, and what to compare “human music” to the grandiose law of nature, expressed in the mere calls of bird and beast revolving their unchallenged voices around the veil of a gross acoustic hall,
            whose rendering dreams an unforgiving welcome to the Earth’s living
            hall,
                        led to a thoughtless demeanor
                                    yet within the mind of man
...

to find a source,
                                                not necessarily of communication
                                                            between human, bird and god,
                                                but a direct connection
                                                            that spells mystery
                                                                        from an inspired gift to all
her sound.

excerpts from "Of human sound"

Season's Greetings from the Wilderness of the Imagination

Woman in the Wilderness, Star or Siberia by Alfons Mucha 

“Listen: in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused by indigestion or whatever you like, a man sometimes sees such artistic things, such a complex and actual reality, such events, or even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, full of such astonishing details, beginning with he most exalted manifestations of the human spirit to the last button on a shirt-front that, I assure you, not even Leo Tolstoy could have invented it, and yet such dreams are sometimes seen not by writers but by the most ordinary people, civil servants, newspaper columnists, priests…” Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, p. 751-2

I recently read the last masterful work of Dostoyevsky, one of the world's greats of classic literature. The book is a testament to the sheer mental strength and quality of such a writer as experienced a mock execution ritual and incarceration in the labor camps of 19th century Siberia. Nearly one thousand pages, I received a copy of this masterpiece from a friend with a peculiar literary collection practice. The two volumes within which the book is contained were of different publications, yet corresponded to the page. This friend, while often aloof, has been a great literary mentor and companion. And as a final note, during the holiday season, I feel that Dostoyevsky's inkling as quoted above invigorates our lives especially today. The popular cult of the Christmas tree and its European folklore breeds a kind of mundane public dreaming, where the workers of the world unite in myth and imagine a complex world full of reindeer, gifts and traditions fabricated from the ordinary, to the ordinary. 

_________  

I have not remembered. Feelings unfamiliar slip away with the light of the world. Yet, in my waking night, before a small crowd of onlookers, I played along to my imagination, manifest with the unconscious origination of a dream reality. 

Whirling Dervishes by Jean-Leon Gerome

I swung Near Eastern rhythms towards her vibrating zither with emotive haste. As I felt the sway of awe form in my hands and heart, a lightness filled the room. I saw. A Sufi dervish began whirling. The air moved in circular deftness to my rhythmic accompaniment. The dancing figment continued unalloyed by the uninitiated crowd of the living; those led to dream only in the deepest dark of night. 

_________

Freeing the foundations of homeward longing onto a single raft
Out on the high seas,
A perplexed guide of Jewish law

Betrayed in the relaxed mystic fire
An American marijuana-seeding mind, Nepalese beauty
Direct from the magic psalm pinned against a “Tat Tvam Asi” wall

Frail pencil marks casting the Odyssey’s modern sequel
Into a vulnerable fasting mind, bled forth into the marathon sky
Massachusetts rain, following me to Calgary in rare consecutive days

Our literary giants, peering upwards, finally
In a New England fog haze through the mirrored mushroom mind
Whose perception flowered into feared atomic explosions

The true sexual freedom in nature
To lay soft stonework ground,
Firm with utterly expressed wonder at the world ‘round

Knowledge timed perfect with musical escapism
Into the bold motionless greed of a trapped metallic girl,
Re-born as prophetess in the unknown seed of Western belief

excerpt from "Grand Repertoire of Failure"

My Hanging Drum Falls to its own Beat

Contrasting Sounds by Wassily Kandinsky

A doumbek drum hangs from a thin pine twig, and as I notice, it falls crashing to a strange forest pit beside a pond directly beneath a scraggly ancient tree, an immense figure, an arboreal delight yet demanding a kind of fear in its profound attention of the earth through its girth of roots, and beside the water’s edge, I pick up my drum from the ground, and yet a piece has been cracked off, a square piece, perfectly removed, and yet I still put it to my hip, and suddenly it feels as if a skin has replaced its plastic head and my hands find a delicate touch with rapid rhythmic technique in producing vibration’s adamant trill, a complete sound wave in the full emptiness of a masterful humbling against the unbroken skin of human touch met with the cover of Earth’s delicate heartbeat bringing that fullness to yet another creation of space in the continuous sound, ever unbroken by finger’s brush as a purr unites breath with rest

September 3, 2011