Art

Use Your Illusion: Further Encounters with the Illusive Real

Following on from my previous post on the illusive real, I now think it is important to provide a proper definition of what that is, by virtue of a more in-depth interrogation of what is meant by the concept. I also provide examples of how a deeper understanding of the illusive real has the potential to foster a playful and rich engagement with metaphysical reality.

Firstly, given that the word illusion is associated with deception, it is often considered to be a human encounter with something that isn’t real. Etymologically, illusion consists of the Latin components in(against) and ludere (play), which form illudere (to mock) and finds its way to the English illusion, associated with deception. I will argue in this article, that due to this original antagonistic conjunction, the illusion has become over-identified with its deceptive component and has been divested of its important and meaningful associations with play and creativity. Perhaps more importantly, as a result of this over-identification, experience of illusory encounters are perceived to be outside of reality, whereas I argue, they should be considered very much part of it.

Psychoanalytically, the illusion is either a wished-for internal object, forming part of a necessary developmental process, a psychotic defence, or simply, a common, neurotic, untruth which we tell ourselves as a means of tolerating anxiety. Within this epistemology, the deception must therefore be mourned to see reality. As Winnicott understood, the capacity for illusion signifies the beginning of an important developmental process. In the early stages of life, the infant relates to the breast as-if it were under her control. If an infant is fortunate enough to grow up in what Winnicott calls “the facilitating environment”, which consists of “a good enough mother” who can tolerate the infant’s anxieties, then she can become slowly and gradually dis-illusioned, arriving at a place where she can relinquish the phantasy that the breast is under her magical control. This gradual loss of omnipotence is an important developmental milestone, as it introduces the child to an experience of mourning at the earliest stages of life, and bolsters her potential to tolerate disappointment. It also enables her to have psychological resources at her disposal later in life when she faces difficulty, by providing her with the capacity to think symbolically and play with ideas, to see other perspectives, rather than relying on omnipotent defences such as entitlement, superiority, or concrete thinking, all of which relate to the illusion stage of development. Importantly for Winnicott, this process of dis-illusion and mourning form the basis of the capacity to play; the child no longer only acts as if the breast were under her control, she now realises that she is doing so; she can think about what she does and she has her first encounters with meaning. All of this makes sense, as the illusion – as we have seen, etymologically, signifies a resistance to play, and the incapacity to mourn the illusion not only means the continuation of concrete thinking, but also the attachment to a wish, which is a self-deception. There is, therefore, certainly great value in this process of dis-illusion, as it brings us closer to truths about ourselves, particularly because the way in which we deceive ourselves can cause us plenty of problems later in life.

All of the above provides us with a strong argument for the divestment of the illusion, and this divestment becomes a necessary stage of getting at a truth about one-self - but does that necessarily mean that this truth is “reality” itself? I would argue that there is far more too reality than this: firstly, Winnicott ‘s paradigm contains the implicit assumption that the child’s illusion is “not real”, and he explicitly states that all that the arts or religion are really for is to help us to come to terms with, or sublimate our illusions. This is essentially reductive and myopic, for the illusion not only provides one with a means of accessing as-if states of perception in order to play, but also opens one’s heart to visionary encounters with the mystical, numinous, and the sacred, and to tolerate, enjoy, and find meaning from them; the illusion is therefore part of human experience that is entirely bona fide.

As I wrote in my previous posts on relational presence, the immanent longing of adolescence and its concomitant illusion of eternal love, rather than only being part of a developmental or psychosexual phase that we pass through, also becomes an important experience of an orientation towards a transcendent, metaphysical reality. This profound experience of yearning is both elusive and illusory; hence the hybrid neologism of the “illusive real”. Importantly, the word elusive, like illusion, evolves from ludere, though where the prefix of illusion is against, the verb to elude’s prefix is away from.

If we look at this through the lens of secular materialism, the “illusive” signifier bars access to play through deception in the ways described above, and this access is only granted once the infant comes to terms with the reality of her omnipotent self-deception. However, I would argue that, although the mourning of the illusion can help the child to play due to the newly acquired capacity for as-if states of mind, the disavowal of the reality of the illusion forecloses versions of play which are not based on mourning alone. Moreover, as the illusion is not considered to be real in materialist terms, this compounds the occlusive impact of these two prefixes and forecloses playful engagement with the illusion. If, on the other hand, we can countenance the counterintuitive notion that the illusion is part of the very fabric of reality – which, as an idea, I aver, is inherently playful - then this can broaden and enrich our experience of reality itself. In this way the prefixes of illusion and elude indeed bar us from play and creativity, but this does not mean that we should disengage from them, as if we perceive them only as indicators of hollow deception (not real). Instead, we should do the opposite, and playfully engage with these strange trickster-like elements of language so that we see them for what they are, as sphinx like ciphers which hold the potential of experiences of the unchartered real. This now equips us with a means of engaging with play at a greater depth, and we become more open to experiences of the anomalous, the numinous, the mystical, and the sacred. Children intuitively know how to play in this way, and they engage with the illusive real without any problems. As they grow up, they may become artists, and discover ingenious ways of playful engagement with the illusive real, through Surrealism, Dadaism, ritual theatre, and automatic drawing; they may grow up to become magicians, who engage through the I-Ching, the Qabalah, or tarot cards; the magician is a perfect archetype for the illusive real as s/he represents engagement with play, esoteric knowledge, and eternity.

Whether children, artists, and magicians engage with illusion through play, artistic practice, ritual, or esoteric knowledge, all are driven by a curiosity to know what lies beyond, and, to play with reality. Use your illusion, but remember it is real.

The Living Stones of Colquhoun and Rodin (Article)

“There is no time in this Cathedral; there is eternity”. Auguste Rodin, The Cathedral is Dying

In December last year, I was fortunate to enough to visit Notre-Dame a week after its official re-opening, following the devastating fire five years earlier. Despite the freezing temperatures, it was a tremendous experience standing in the square, witnessing the splendor of the full moon above the cathedral’s two towers, listening to the cacophonous bells as the evening congregation – and hundreds of tourists – flowed out of the lower portals of the western façade. As my gaze moved slowly beyond the portals, and over the gallery of kings, it settled upon the rose window above the balustrade.

As I attempted to focus on the detail of the window, this became increasingly difficult, as now the bells gathered a savagely sublime momentum, an exhilaratingly captivating speed of sound. The bells dissonantly clashed one moment, melding into a sonic symbiosis of overtones the next; with each attack they seemed to gain greater consciousness of one another, dancing in playful conversation. I could now witness subtle shifts in colour in the rose window; it had now become a synesthetic, kaleidoscopic mandala, a spinning gyre within which sound and vision had become one, dissolving each micro-phase of time in on itself, every temporal shift promising a glimpse into the eternal. Although I was very much swept up by the emotional intensity of this experience, I also took time in this moment to allow myself to sink into a deeper reverie and enjoy fondly thinking about the times I had been to this cathedral before, staring up at this magnificent creation.

It was only as I reflected later on my experience of Notre-Dame, that I began to think about the animistic nature of the way I had related to the cathedral, where I had become attuned to the bells as living, breathing subjects, and this, in turn had animated the rose window with its unforeseen colours. The artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun deeply understood the importance of this animistic relationship to one’s environment, and the way this becomes a means of connecting with one’s ancestors and the deepness of time.

“Stones that whisper, stones that dance, that play on pipe and fiddle, that tremble at cockcrow, that eat and drink, stones that march as an army - these unseen slabs of granite hold the secret of the country’s inner life”. (Colquhoun, p.64)

It is now clear to me that a profound relationship to the sacred cannot occur without this animistic regard for the subject of its gaze - in Colquhoun’s case here - the neolithic monuments of Cornwall. It is no accident then that Colquhoun and the artist Auguste Rodin appear to have independently used the term “living stones” to describe the vitality and deep reverence that they held towards the sacred creations of history, whether they were neolithic, as in Colquhoun’s Cornish study, or Romanesque/Gothic for Rodin. In Rodin’s essay The Cathedral is Dying the whole cathedral becomes an animate structure comprised of living stones, and experiencing it in its fullness enables one to experience its essence:

“For all holds together, the least element of truth evokes the truth as a whole, and the beautiful is not distinct from the useful, no matter what the ignorant may believe” (Rodin, p.19).

Rodin attributes this essential convergence of beauty and utility to Gothic genius and the architects’ capacity to imbue their towering constructions with the spirits of nature. Rodin, like Colquhoun, Swedenborg, Baudelaire, and many an occultist, understood the importance of observing correspondences in nature in order to access a particular kind of spiritual essence and thus find a means of appreciating its mysteries: “the jubilant uncoils into ornaments like a snake in the sun” as he so beautifully put it.

“Both flower and fruit were models for the Gothics. One learns much by studying sequences, correspondences and analogies – for the same law governs moral and emotional life – providing one already has an understanding of this general law.” (Rodin, 2020, p.27).

It is by understanding “the law” of correspondences which therefore deepens one’s spiritual and emotional connection to the world, and whatever may lie beyond it. However pompously authoritarian it may sound, Rodin does not intend “the law” to mean that we must learn “rules” from a didactic manual, rather that we would enrich our experience of life by practicing a particularly Bergsonian form of intuitive engagement, which would allow the imagination and the intellect to work together, leading us to appreciate “the harmony of oppositions”.

For Rodin, it is by studying correspondences in nature that we gain a greater understanding of the essence of an object and its analogous relationship to other objects in its environment: through this attitudinal shift object (it) becomes subject - thou in Martin Buber’s terms. Rodin laments the absence of this form of relating in a world that fails to appreciate the spiritual treasures of the cathedral, or its profound connection to nature; “these rose windows whose magnificence was inspired by the setting sun or the dawn” (Rodin, p.33).

For Rodin, this respect for correspondences also applies to one’s relationship to time as it enables us to forge a deeper bond with the creations of the past and what it might have felt like to have lived at that time. I an aware that these “how we used to live” type exercises can become quite puerile if they are only done in a historical way, so it is therefore important to allow oneself to imagine, using the trusted tools of reverie and day-dreaming.

When Rodin visits a cathedral, he is “imbued with past centuries, the venerable centuries that produced these marvels” (p.39). For Colquhoun, it concerns what she refers to as “the psychic life of the land” (p.57).

granite, serpentine, slate, sandstone, limestone, chalk and the rest have each their special personality dependent on the age in which they were laid down, each being co-existent with a special phase of the earth-spirit’s manifestation”(ibid).

Colquhoun underscores the individuality of each age of creation and its concordance with spirit and matter: art, religion, magickal ritual, and walking in nature are all potential ways of coming into contact with the many different “personalities” of the past. For Rodin, it is the cathedral’s bells which become the unifying voice through which bygone ages speak to us.

“They are not dead! They speak in the voice of the bells! These three strokes for Angelus that sweetly strike against the sky know no obstacle or limit either in space or time; they come to us out of the depths of the past, they rejoin our Chinese brothers and the deep vibration of the gong” (Rodin, p.39).

Rodin believes that it is our dislocation from the past - to which the deep vibration of the bells unites us - which is the cause of our alienation. I would argue that this alienation is driven by our preoccupation with the future, leading to anxiety and fear as we lose touch with the whole that we may call God, or perhaps instead, the infinite, Ātman, The Real, The Dao, and so on and on. Fear and anxiety are connected with a fragmented, mechanized, reality that we have created which has become almost entirely disconnected from the unifying whole of correspondences and the natural world where the forests of the mind connect with those of the cathedral, or whichever sacred place we are visiting.

Sacred instruments such as the bell, gong, or tanpura therefore help us to find the sound of eternity within, where each tone becomes an Aeon, and its corresponding overtones phenomenologically create a continuity of experience across those Aeons. Paradoxically, although the overtones fill the space between the notes, it is they which, through the embodied nature of the experience and its trance like nature, allow space to open up to us in the fullness of our minds and bodies.

References

Colquhoun, I. (1957). The Living Stones: Cornwall. Peter Owen

Rodin, A. (2020). The Cathedral Is Dying: Auguste Rodin (Ekphrasis). David Zwirner Bookss