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I once drew a
very simple image of a child using pen on paper. It stirred me deep inside, and
I resolved to make a larger version with pastels. Most of my good work was
executed on Thursday evenings because of the intensity and sense of magic that manifested
during the weekly solitary stretch, and this time was no exception. I sat down
to work right away when I came home, and even though I usually avoided thinking
of anyone I knew while immersed in a creative act (feeling like the mad
scientist who encounters ever new and bizarre terrain), this time a friend of
mine, Megan, kept popping into my head. She was practically in the room, and I
imagined I was conversing with her while I drew. This might have given my hands
the freedom to be more autonomously guided. When I felt the drawing was
finished, I sensed it possessed a unique type of power. Whether or not it was a
work of art, I could not tell. There was something ethereal about the image,
and I resonated with the intensity in the eyes. But there was also a severity
that aroused my suspicion. All this on the face of a child was clearly
symbolic, especially given how strongly this phase of my life seemed to connect
with childhood.
I went to bed shortly after. In the middle of the night, I had a nightmare in which I was
running from a serial killer, a character in a movie, Se7en, I had seen
recently in real life. The killer brutally murdered people for committing one
of the seven deadly sins from the Bible. Those murdered were not necessarily
the best people in the world, but his punishment was clearly exaggerated in its
severity. The movie had deeply disturbed me, and the same character followed me
in the dream. I woke up with a start and hallucinated “The Child” drawing
before my eyes. It hovered in the air for a second or two before dissipating.
I found that
an initiation like the veil experience was occurring, but this one was more
cerebral and revelation-centric. Instead of witnessing an all-pervasive power
in the room, I woke to a complex multitude of correlated insights and
associations structured somewhat like a hologram. And my mind felt expanded in
all directions. I was able to harvest a few understandings; the rest required a
form of pivoting about in order to fish them out, which I could not perform in
time as my state of mind gradually settled down and “shrunk” to an ordinary
configuration, the hologram dissolving as the apparition of the drawing had
done. The gist of the insights I could ascertain went something like this...
An
interesting aspect of the punisher dream was that my friend Megan was present
at one point, just as she was in my thoughts while drawing the image. In the
dream, her skin was red, and her lips looked elongated, her expression sad.
When I went back to my hometown the following day for my weekend break, I met
with Megan and asked her if anything unusual happened that week. She informed
me about a deeply disturbing state of mind she went through Thursday evening. Even
though real events indirectly triggered it, her painful state seemed to be
exaggerated as well as abstract in nature, and the real source behind her inner
drama was a mystery. At one point that night, she hit rock bottom for a few
minutes and then found herself released unexpectedly. When I told her my story
and asked her why her skin might have been red in my dream, she said she had
been sunburnt recently. She also informed me that she had been drawing faces
lately with a tendency toward elongating the lips.
While one
could conclude with certainty that the drawing resulted in a form of
initiation, it is a question whether the correlated experiences between Megan
and me provided evidence of art’s “occultation.” The fact her disturbed state
occurred the same evening I drew “The Child,” one of the rare times I made art
while thinking of her or anyone else, could be interpreted in a number of ways:
1. It was merely a chance coincidence.
2. The coincidence was meaningful, what is
called “synchronicity,” and showed an unusual intertwinement of fate between
our lives, hinting at archetypal patterns in activation for both of us.
3. There was a kind
of warping of life’s events caused by the act of drawing an archetypally
charged image that evening, which went beyond affecting only me
psychologically, and this resulted in the synchronicity.
4. We are all
interconnected, and my own intense feelings bled through into Megan’s
experience.
5. The drawing
of the child, that is, the materialization in this world of the
child-as-old-man archetypal symbol, itself caused the synchronicity to occur.
Although the last case seems the least likely, it is the only interpretation from which
the drawing could be labeled a “magical” work of art. But the story of “The
Child” continues...
Copyright ă 2012 by Makram Abu-Shakra
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