What we believe

about a week ago my friend Jay told me a fascinating story. his uncle had to have his pacemaker replaced and while the uncle was on the operating table he died for about twenty minutes or so. this happened twice.

jay rushed to his uncle's bedside when he was completely back in this world and asked him what had happened.

"nothing his uncle said. nothing at all. there was just black."

"oh," jay said, "wow, nothing at all? how disappointing. "

"yeah, it was disappointing, there was no white light, no angels, my father was not waiting for me, there was just blackness and these two mayan indians standing next to me telling me not to answer this kid that was calling me to come over to him. he was the next door neighbor who had commtitted suicide a while back and he was there, sitting on a fence, calling me to come over to him, and the mayan indians, two men, kept telling me to ignore him and not to go to him. finally the kid turned around and his face was half gone. it was gruesome and sad. the indians told me to turn away, that he was dead and it was not my time."

Jay was astonished. and we who were listening to the story were astonished and blown away. funny version of nothing, i thought. And i have been ruminating on this ever since. We have these amazing, inexplicable brains, they process thought, emotion, sensations and then make stories so that we can make sense of things and we believe our stories so completely it seems we don't let ourselves open to new ideas even in the in between world. that is wild!!

when the priest came into the hospital room jay's uncle really was mad with him. he accused him of lying to him all these years. there is no after life etc etc..

Jonah Lehrer, in his excellent book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, explains similar phenomena over and over again in essays about art and the science of the brain. Here, in an essay about Cezanne, he shows us how Cezanne's paintings, the dabs of color and thin lines depict what the eyes really see, the mind fills in the rest. he explains the subjectivity of sight scientifically.....

"as Cezanne understood, seeing is imagining. the problem is that there is no way to quantify what we think we see....the shocking fact is that sight is like art. What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas which is the brain. When we open our eyes, we enter into an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex.... It is art, and not science, that is the means by which we express what we see on the inside. The painting, in this respect is closest to reality. It is what gets us closest to experience..."

-PROUST WAS A NERUOSCIENTIST. Johan lehrer. pgs 112-119.

this book is so fascinating. i highly recommend it. he shows how the "human brain has been designed to believe itself.." pg 70.

it seems that actually we really have no idea what exists and what doesn't because we can only see what we believe in. Clearly we have made agreements in society about what we are seeing but even that is subjective. try and describe a shade of red to someone and get them to point out that exact color. almost impossible. we agree on red but the shades and variations slip past the agreement.

so maybe that's why i'm making these images with angels all wrapped in light. i'm trying to push the edges of what i can see. what i believe. and they are how i see. my interpretation of how i see. what i believe. i'm trying to give my own dream the slip.

here are the images. it's subjective. make of them what you will. oh and talk about subjective, an acquaintance was visiting the other day and she said to me, "oh but you do all this superimposing in photoshop etc.." i was dismayed.

so for the record. these are shot with a pinhole camera on polaroid film and minimally burned, dodged, toned in photoshop. less than i would have done in a dark room. that's the truth, no matter what you believe!


xx
iva

Light and the cosmos

I was given a huge gift the other day.

I was mooning around in my office. Fretting and imagining a terribly bleak future and biting my nails and then trying to meditate and be in the now . that wasn’t working , my imagination was really too good. I was totally caught in the drama of falling markets, impossible to pay mortgages, chastising myself for not being prepared, not having my ducks all in a row. This was getting bad, silly, and on top of that totally perplexing. I actually have never spent so much time fretting over things like this. So then I had to begin to examine why I was doing what I was doing. Auggh. More hell. More devilish gremlins dancing around in my silly mind. I sighed. I glanced out of the window.

The light was gorgeous. I grabbed my camera and ran outside and discovered a light rain falling through the late afternoon light. The sun burst all light and gold through the dark clouds. There must be a rainbow I thought but couldn’t see it so I started playing with the light and the way it came through the left over cosmos in my garden and forgot all about the future and the nail biting.

A pure shot of exuberance rushed through me. All that existed was exquisite beauty. So simple. And free. All of the worry fell away. All the thinking. And I just was with my camera and the incredible light.

Frinally, humming to myself, I slung my camera over my shoulder and walked over the hill towards home, and there was the rainbow. A shocking streak of color arching down to earth. I was so excited I started jumping up and down and shouting thank you! thank you! thank you! ( okay I do these things sometimes usually when no one is looking but now I’ve blown my cover. ) I snapped my last pictures and then went home. No more gloom. Just pure pure joy.

Now several days later and the sky is leaden and the gremlins are lurking I am picturing the light and the cosmos and trying to remember that this feeling of joy can always be around the next corner waiting for me to get out of my head. I just have to open my eyes and see.

and when that doesn't work the images help a lot.
so here they are.

Thank you rainbow maker!

once again Te Amo, Te Amo, Te Amo
Xx

drinking from the river lethe

am finding what i'm getting to and faster than i thought i would. must be a mind addled by lyme's disease, let's me slip away from the temporal plain more easily. and i find myself wandering about with odd images,  angels in all forms, and the sun cooperating. and this passage from The Republic appearing just when i needed it.



"...all the souls had now chosen their lives...they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of forgetfulness, which was a barren waste, destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all about all things....about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake and then in an instant they were sent upwards in all manner of ways to their birth, like stars shooting..."

The Republic -Plato-  Jowett translation


and here we land our wings in tatters, our faces confused, half angel half human, or rather, all angel dreaming to be human, wandering about, trying to trick away the effects of the forgetful water and remember who we are. remembering in our sleeping dreams but brushing them away until something jogs our memory and little by little the light is let in.

so here are the pictures that came,  the drink from the river and the landing on earth.  or something like that,  i think words get in the way from now on.  so whatever,  it certainly is the most fun in this world to wander around a farm with angel wings and a pinhole camera! and i seem to be moving backwards so the last photos i posted would come after these.  it's not linear so there we go.   

xxx

on duty angels

Off Duty Angel

The ideas for these images are coming to me in bits and pieces and then they emerge, seemingly,  of their own volition.