25. Mental Wireless: Coded Language from a Psychic Realm?
In Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950) the title character listens obsessively to the car radio as it emits strange otherworldly messages, seemingly embedded with a poetic code.
These coded transmissions sound as if they are coming from another realm, perhaps an in-between place – like the electrical malfunctions and audio anomalies in Lynch’s films – a bridge between separate realities.
There is a communication here…some kind of telepathy coming from another realm, beaming mysterious signals across the airwaves…
…some kind of telepathy.
It feels apt that I have begun delving into the book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (1970) recommended by the illustrator and former tutor of mine – Geoff Grandfield. Though it appears to be a highly readable and addictive book from beginning to end, it does feel necessary to dive in and out of different sections. Perhaps it’s just my impatience to get to the weightier parts, the lure of such chapter titles as: Inner and Outer Space, Time – a New Frontier of the Mind, Artificial Reincarnation…
These ideas…Time as a form of energy, patterns of an unknown energy, time as appearing immediately everywhere…’Time links us all and all things in the universe’ (Ostrander/Schroeder, 162)… thoughts changing the density (or perhaps destiny!) of time…
I can’t help but think of Borges’ short stories and Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman.
Possible titles: Transmission I
What reflects between two mirrors?
Reading about how telepathy flows more freely in outer space, I think again about Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972), based on Stanislaw Lem’s book of the same name…, particularly the ocean.
I have been working on this…
Transmission I
2017
Notes from two exhibitions – Paolozzi at the Whitechapel / Latham at the Serpentine:
Both had a strong sense of decoding through deconstruction. In Paolozzi’s work I could see this coded language of symbols and interchangeable shapes. Both seem to be creating a new language. Latham attempts to decode the bigger picture: the mechanics of the universe…both artists reveled in different media, crossing boundaries.
… viewing the manifestation of a different (higher) level of thinking…
Lines of connection in the universe
(quasi-) scientific/forensic
…Like circuit boards…
…Morse code…
…Detritus of an abandoned world…
Images from the Eduardo Paolozzi exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery, London – March 2017…
Images from A World View: John Latham exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London – March 2017…
And what follows is a process of deconstruction and reassembly – Making art like music. Extracting to create a pulsing coded message…—
A folding of the fabric…
‘Fusing the exploration of inner space with the exploration of outer space’ (Ostrander/Schroeder, 87)
The Zone is thus not a purely mental fantasmatic space in which one encounters (or onto which one projects) the truth about oneself, but (like Solaris in Lem’s novel) the material presence, the Real of an absolute Otherness incompatible with the rules and laws of our universe…reducing/retranslating the encounter with the Thing to the “inner journey” towards one’s Truth. (http://www.lacan.com/zizekthing.htm)
References:
Ostrander,S & Schroeder, L (1970) Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain Bantam Books
Leave a Reply