Mind Cave Invitation
Greetings, cave dwellers.
Images haunt me. Not nightmares or ghosts, exactly, but the fact that we wee humans can concoct images in
our noggins, that some ephemera can blaze on the back side of our skull's walls makes me wonder. This blog will explore ideas related to this ability. I suspect I'll explore its connections to religious thinking and religious experience in various forms.
My earliest memory, in fact, was a waking dream. When about four-year-olds or so, I woke up, gawked at my bedroom ceiling, and saw floating overhead about three sea turtles. They smiled, I think, as they floated or flew across my room. (Even as I write these words, images of turtles and of a tow-headed boy surface.) Why does this memory--if it is memory more than concoction--haunt me? Why do I find so much significance in these fleeting images I regard as my earliest "memory"?
And so what? Why does this experience of having mental images matter? I don't know, really, but through this "blog essay" I intend to explore why images--from dreams, from imagination, from religious experience--matter. Why do we human beings have this capacity to create, remember, recall, and find significance in images? Do other animals have this capacity? How might this ability to form images in turn affect our bodies? Our sense of reality? Our sense of identity? Our capacity for violence? Our capacity for benevolence?
Other than being a dreamer like you, what else "qualifies" me to write this blog? Well, again, I don't know. I've written about and published articles and essays related to the imagination and to dreams. I've been a crazed poet in an earlier life--a wholly unprofitable but rewarding endeavor nonetheless that daily asked me to heed my imagination. My next book, too, will explore images in more depth. It's tentatively titled _Tracking Wonder_ and includes research drawn from artists' lives, archaeology, psychology, and neuroscience. It also will include my direct experiences in "tracking wonder" with animal trackers, a shaman in Peru, an artist-cum-archaeologist who has devoted her life to studying our country's oldest cave art, the founder of the Lucid Dreaming Institute, and more.
Images craze me, I guess. I hope you'll join the crazed conversation and post your responses.
Images haunt me. Not nightmares or ghosts, exactly, but the fact that we wee humans can concoct images in
our noggins, that some ephemera can blaze on the back side of our skull's walls makes me wonder. This blog will explore ideas related to this ability. I suspect I'll explore its connections to religious thinking and religious experience in various forms.My earliest memory, in fact, was a waking dream. When about four-year-olds or so, I woke up, gawked at my bedroom ceiling, and saw floating overhead about three sea turtles. They smiled, I think, as they floated or flew across my room. (Even as I write these words, images of turtles and of a tow-headed boy surface.) Why does this memory--if it is memory more than concoction--haunt me? Why do I find so much significance in these fleeting images I regard as my earliest "memory"?
And so what? Why does this experience of having mental images matter? I don't know, really, but through this "blog essay" I intend to explore why images--from dreams, from imagination, from religious experience--matter. Why do we human beings have this capacity to create, remember, recall, and find significance in images? Do other animals have this capacity? How might this ability to form images in turn affect our bodies? Our sense of reality? Our sense of identity? Our capacity for violence? Our capacity for benevolence?
Other than being a dreamer like you, what else "qualifies" me to write this blog? Well, again, I don't know. I've written about and published articles and essays related to the imagination and to dreams. I've been a crazed poet in an earlier life--a wholly unprofitable but rewarding endeavor nonetheless that daily asked me to heed my imagination. My next book, too, will explore images in more depth. It's tentatively titled _Tracking Wonder_ and includes research drawn from artists' lives, archaeology, psychology, and neuroscience. It also will include my direct experiences in "tracking wonder" with animal trackers, a shaman in Peru, an artist-cum-archaeologist who has devoted her life to studying our country's oldest cave art, the founder of the Lucid Dreaming Institute, and more.
Images craze me, I guess. I hope you'll join the crazed conversation and post your responses.
posted by Socra-tease at 3:02 PM
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