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Jung writes of "active imagination," a way of
following an image as it develops... even through a
lifetime. And I had read what he wrote. Jung writes of the
mandala as a possible symbol/shape for the potential wholeness of the
psyche (soul?), and I had seen some Hindu/Buddhist examples as well as
those in his book Symbols of Transformation. Joland Jacobi gives
a diagram of Jung's concept of the conscious/unconscious mind in her
book The Psychology of Jung; and I had a copy of that book. And
I had found a white bird descending in a valley as the symbol of my
masculinity, and a heart as the symbol of the love which
that bird promises forever to keep. And there was the diamond of
the four directions with light and dark, and the blue of the waters of
life, and two snakes I had seen twining in a painting by Morris
Graves. And in 1958 one day with the question, "Do you know my
name?" I followed all of that to seek an answer.
Nowadays "Do you know my name?" lives in the manila folder
in the thumbnail above. The folder lives with perhaps a hundred
or more other folders, each filled with similar "active imaginations" of the images of the
life of the soul. For several years--late 1957-early 1958
through 1961 or 1962--night after night I would follow the paths of
the images appeared in the mysterious intercourse of paper and paint,
a bit of newspaper, a fragment of a painting or a scrap from an
old travel book. Then was laid down the way of working I have
followed mostly since (click
for the year 2000 affirmation of that), and the images in that
work more than forty years ago have so many returned so often in the
great spiral of human life.
#1. to the right was the first sheet in the series,
seeking the seed to start the growth. The paper is torn in a corner like
so many other works from that time because I hung them in a show in
The Cellar, a "poetry and jazz" bar with brick walls, and used rubber
cement to stick the works to the bricks.
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1.
Do you know my name? Do you know my name? If it
is the music drifting across the water of time, what tune shall I play
today?
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A
selection of paintings, 1958
