The Making of Collages (8)

The Making of Collages (7)

The Making of Collages (6)

The Making of Collages (5)

The Making of Collages (4)

The Making of Collages (3)

The Making of Collages (2)

This begins a series of collages--for the next two weeks--made in the winter and spring of 2010. Each collage became, for me, a point of meditation, an insight into the post-modern age.

Each collage is a visual cut-up. The narrative running through our minds of how the world is constructed, how it works, is ended by tearing it into pieces. The random re-organization of these pieces gives us a new narrative, a new insight into how things work.

A longer introduction to The Making of Collages can be found in the posting of last June 28th.

The Making of Collages

A collage juxtaposes images or parts of images that seem to have little association with each other; the collage presents these images in an unexpected and seemingly random way. Profound images, for instance images of human suffering and hurt, become images describing our age. Archetypal images juxtaposed beside each other give a new association, a new idea of the age. The random aspect of the collage is also interesting, this is interesting because any image placed beside any other image gives a third and new image, a new idea or insight coming from the collage. These collages are a kind of Tarot card reading, or divination, of our age, there is the sudden appearance of some insight in the collage.

Collages are similar to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique which works with words and sounds instead of images. I think you could take any issue of TIME magazine, which has excellent photo-journalism, take the images and cut or tear them up at random, and then glue them to a surface in any order that they occur, and you will have a collage that reveals something of the age in which we live. This is what I did with the collages I am putting up here. There is no "thought" in the making of any of these collages. Gradually gluing down the images becomes a system, a process, for instance beginning every collage at the bottom right hand corner, or trying to impose some kind of order or intelligence on the collage as it is being made. When this happens you have to stop and eliminate this thought interference in the making of the collage.

Then, you can also take the collage and ask what does it suggest? What ideas are there in the collage? Archetypal images contain their own energy, their own impetus in driving the unconscious mind. They are an entrance into the collective unconscious and as such they can be very powerful. My suggestion is always to begin with the archetype and then proceed from there; you can try but you can never really defeat the authority of archetypes that are innate in the human psyche.

The Archetypal Field of Poetry

Published in 2022

Published in 2022, Ekstasis Edition, Victoria, BC, Canada

C.G. Jung made archetypes one of the central concepts to his approach to psychology, and this has been elaborated upon and expanded on by some of his followers, for instance James Hillman. An archetype is a psychological concept, it is a blue print, a prototype, an image, or a pattern of behavioural experience. It is also a term, used popularly today, suggesting that the experience of mythological characters is a pattern that can be seen in the behaviour of average people (as explored in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s books). Another contemporary Jungian thinker who has been influenced by the concept of archetypes is Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst and author of Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche (Spring Publications, Woodstock, 1999).

In poetry an archetype, as an image, or as a narrative, gives depth and sophistication to a poem letting it work on several levels of meaning simultaneously. Maud Bodkin, in Archetypal Patterns In Poetry, Psychological Studies Of Imagination (Vintage Books, New York, 1958) examines C.G. Jung’s “hypothesis in regard to the psychological significance of poetry.” She writes,

The special emotional significance possessed by certain poems—a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed—he attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images,” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same types,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience.

An archetype can include psychological complexes—it is a way to analyze and find patterns in any behaviour. Conforti extends the concept of archetypes to posit, if I understand him correctly, an external existence to the archetypes independent of the psyche, or of psychology. Archetypes, for Conforti, are not only psychological constructs, they also have an empirical existence, such as the pattern iron filings on a piece of glass will make when a magnet is placed under the glass. The division between the inner, psychological and spiritual domain, and the outer domain of consensual and empirical reality, is blurred, even eliminated. Conforti’s concept of archetypes seems to be both outside of time and space, and also firmly located in their expression inside the temporal and spatial. It is a fascinating and, some might say, a mystical idea, one that will be rejected by some (or many) clinical psychologists.

While hearing Conforti speak, to the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal last fall (2008), I realized that his concept of archetypes is one of the clues I had been looking for regarding how poetry is composed. It occurred to me that there is an archetypal field of poetry, which does not mean that poems have already been written and poets merely record what they “hear,” although this is what some poets describe as their experience when writing or composing poems. I suggest (and it’s just a thought) that there is an archetypal field of poetry, a psychological state accessed by poets when writing poems. Writing poems is a [“kind-of”] shamanic journey or process in which images (which can also be archetypal) are retrieved and expressed in composition. This should not conflict with the popular division of poets into romantic (or spontaneous) and classical (or formal).

It is very difficult for us to conceive such a thing, but the reality—not just the idea—of the static ego, formed and unchanging, might one day be replaced with a different concept: of a perceiving entity in the active present moment, a constellation of selves with an identifiable Persona, moving in and out of time and space, and possibly existing in the “undifferentiated unity of existence” (W.T. Stace, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World, A Mentor Book, New York, 1960). We may, one day, conceive of a poem as an existing entity that both exists and doesn’t exist before it is written, and that it comes to us uninvited to be transcribed by the poet. Just as J. Krishnamurti described, during his lectures—including lectures that I attended in Saanen, New York City, and Ojai—that an apparently living entity came to him—not as an invention of his psyche—but as, for instance, a living presence that had a quality of goodness or love that exists outside of his individual consciousness, an entity perceivable at times by him, as existing in the world by itself. There is no “how” as in “how does one access this experience?” There is only the work of creating a foundation for the work to come if it does come or if it is to come.

So, if asked where my poems come from, I would answer that they are from the archetypal field of poetry.