Incarnated language

Here are a couple more quotes from the Boston Change Study Group paper I recently mentioned in this post:

...mirror neurons may provide a different neural pathway for linking word and motor experience with different implications. In these senses words are not disincarnated symbols but are also pathways into direct embodied experience that function implicitly, and vice versa. This may help to explain the power of words and stories. We live them virtually.

...although the actual form/sound of the word may be arbitrary (as a symbolic system requires), the embodied concepts that entwine experience with words are not at all arbitrary. They are determined by our morphology, our innate movement patterns, and the real external world of people and things.

This incarnated sense of language vivifies psychotherapeutic enquiry. And, tangentially, here is a quote from a recent post in Science Daily that relates to this "world of people and things":

Studies have shown that infants learn language faster when what they see is synchronized to the sound that they hear.

(The post refers to the importance of babies having a quiet environment in which to learn verbal skills - another subtle and important aspect of incarnating language.)

Meanings are reborn in poems

Here's a great review by Ron Silliman of Joseph Lease's recent poetic work Broken World. And from an interview with Joseph Lease:

We all know—in a sort of abstract way—that being born is meaningful and dying is meaningful—but the meanings get lost in our worst moments—and they are reborn in poems.

Lease is a fan of poetry as incantation, of poetry as spell. This is where power lies, as it potentially does in the voiced language of psychotherapy. And in psychotherapy, meanings too can become reborn.

Emily Pwerle's "overrunning"

Emily Pwerle paints Awleye Atnwengerrp (women's ceremony) dreaming at Utopia, Northern Territory. (See this article on her.)

Here's a lovely work of hers, and I'm struck by the connection with it and Merleau-Ponty's "the whole landscape is overrun with words" (see previous post).

Emily Pwerle - Awelye (UGEP4552) (around 1930 - )
Acrylic on linen, 122 cm x 90 cm

Of course, the language (set of symbols) she uses is somewhat different to Western languages, consisting of the breast painting and bush tomato yam of women's business. But the symbols crowd, positively overrun the "land" in a joyful energetic way that I find pleasing. Emily and her sisters (and of course many other Aboriginal artists) paint on the ground, and this "earthing" of the process is very different from how Western artists usually work (creating the work in the vertical rather than the horizontal). And when we purchase these works we can hang them any way we like - and they are still very effective. In fact, some galleries sell Aboriginal works with four sets of D-clips on the back (one for each side) - underlining the fact that no one way is considered "up".

Here's an article on the Pwerle sisters and their approach to painting.

The whole landscape is overrun with words

The following are some threads on landscape and poetry which have recently intersected for me.

First, an image from upcoming show German Expressionist Prints at the Rex Irwin Gallery.

Erich Heckel (1883 - 1970)
Two men by the sea
Woodcut, 46.2 cm x 32.7 cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

And here is Daniel Siegel (The Mindful Brain, Norton 2007, p54) on poetry:

But then think of poetry ... which inhibits the strictly hierarchical, top-down left-brain processes organizing our raw experience into a preconceived grid. Poetry, like silence, creates a new balance of memory and moment. We see with fresh eyes through the poet's artistry, which illuminates with words a new landscape that before was hidden beneath the veil of everyday language. (italics mine)

In Heckel's work I have a fantasy of words arising from a landscape, and these words also enabling that landscape to be experienced in a different way - it goes both ways. And this is implied too in the quote from Siegel.

The Boston Change Study Group have been doing work on the interplay of what they term the Implicit and the Reflective-Verbal Domains, and here is a beautiful quotation they cite from Merleau-Ponty (in their paper Forms of Relational meaning: Issues in the Relations Between the Implicit and Reflective-Verbal Domains), supporting the idea of an embodied mind (i.e one that doesn't ascribe to the Cartesion split):

The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of "psychic reality" spread over the sound; it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely, the whole landscape is overrun with words. (The Visible and the Invisible, p155)

And a final thread of my own - here is a poem (from a dream) that I wrote last year:

glyphs

last black night
they shuffled silently again in the field
intent upon their ruminations

until one took flame
bright tendrils licking at the seriphs
and then another –

till they all blazed yellow
each now clear in its form
proclaiming some kind of slogan
indeterminate

aortic song and no place for eyes

Ron Dowd
aortic song
linocut, collage 2008, 31 x 27 cm

no place for eyes

tonight cool wind breathes
over the softblack field –

from the field's heart the fruitbat
cries short notes

Field - morning, kangaroo valley

We stayed last night at a friend's place in Kangaroo Valley, and I went walking this morning into the bush and over some fields on the property.

Here's a field I love - it's one that for me resonates with the quintessence of field. (See my GANZ Journal paper and my thesis for more on this interest in fields.)

Sunrise

I took this photograph from our North-facing window this morning. I was visited by a dream last night and I was curious about it, uplifted, while at the same time aware of an old sadness beneath the uplift.

In composing the image there was a tension between wanting to lift the viewfinder fully to the sunrise and wanting to stay in connection with the human realm, not yet in light. In the end the composition stayed "snapped" to the dark city forms; it's not enough to have just an expanse of exquisite sunrise.

Monetary relationships and the DSM-IV

As reported in this recent NY Times article:

95 (or 56 percent) of 170 experts who worked on the 1994 edition of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or D.S.M, had at least one monetary relationship with a drug maker in the years from 1989 to 2004.

Whether these relationships affected the content of the DSM-IV is another matter, but it's at least worth knowing the facts.

A morning in the wildness of the park

This morning I walked and photographed from before dawn in Centennial Park, a haven in the middle of Sydney's busy Eastern Suburbs.

I'm reminded now of Robert MacFarlane's statement in his wonderful recent book The Wild Places:

I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing natural existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.

It's good to be reminded that we can experience wildness in the heart of our city, and not think of this as less than the wildness that is "out there" in the Australian bush.

Some images from this morning:



MacFarlane goes on to say:

I had come to see wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency.

There's a sign in the park that reminds visitors that the ponds drain large volumes of rainfall from suburbs such as Bondi Junction through the Botany Aquifer to Botany Bay, via a complex system of streams, drains, and groundwater flows. And there's good evidence that in the Northern parts of the Aquifer at least, the sandstone filtration produces water quality better than that coming out of our taps. It's encouraging that a wild system system can maintain its health in one of the most densely populated areas of Australia.

And finally, a poem relating to Centennial Park that I wrote last year:

the way we walked

we could feel it in our bodies,
had already slipped into our mythology –

the gravel path, the darkening sky
the swamphen strutting on the lilies –

how the green leaves gorged the lagoon
how rain fell upon them, drumming

how we attended to the beats
saw flashes in the west

saw the swamphen, purple
moving over the extent

Black mountain flora

Eucalyptus woodland at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (Canberra). Something about the open aspect of this woodland, the way the ground is revealed, its dryness and heat, and those qualities in the trees themselves, is appealing. It creates for me a "hook for dreams", a potentiality for revery.

Occupied territory of another sort

Australia's ACT (the Australian Capital Territory) strikes me as a powerfully symbolic territory (of a different sort to Winton's territory occupied by the ratepayer) and one that has a place in our collective psychic life.

This fact has not been lost, of course, on the original inhabitants of this land, who for 36 years have resiliently maintained the Aboriginal Tent Embassy near old Parliament House, and right on the Griffin land axis.

The Griffins delineated a land axis, aligned with the summits of four local mountains. It went from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong. Crossing this at right angles was a water axis along the river, which in the plan became a chain of ornamental basins. By integrating the site’s topography with their design, the Griffins presented the site itself as a symbol ‘of a democratic national identity’ (Vernon, 2002). (The Ideal City)

I found the Griffins' land and water axes to be palpably powerful, on a beating hot New Year's Eve walk that we took last year, past some of the war memorials of Anzac Parade.

Hot letters on the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial:

A shimmering Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, also hot to the touch:

There seem to be many rich layers of land and water "markings" at play in these axes, several cruciform incisions at the heart of our democratic system, overlayed with the complexities of histories and current-day relationships between indigenous and "imported" cultures.

Dispossession is the shadow side of this occupation of territory in such a grand way - I was drawn to this in my poem on the land axis.

on the land axis

dispossession strikes a chord with me –

you want to make this place
eucalyptic

have set your gunyas
here on the levelled lawns

let in long summer evenings
the smokes of your dreamings
mingle with the scents of roses –

me, going from door to door
looking for what's been lacking –

returning, in the end
to the little timbers
the jetty, watching the meteorite

that falls and boils its way
into the churning sea

There are also some thoughts on Canberra in canberra, new year's eve.

canberra, new year's eve

the big lamps hover
in ceremonial attendance
over the wide empty way

the avenue, the monuments, the dry leaf-strewn earth
vent the day’s heavy heat

at the nurses’ memorial
they touch cast letters –
A for australia’s like a small body
exuding body heat

at the air force shrine
bright steel’s hot to touch,
bronze searing

over at vietnam
a quiet thermal outpouring’s going on
while three pink and greys
haggle noisily

korea’s faired best –
granite and stones having reflected
much of the day’s onslaught –

three bright-metal conscripts
standing fresh and prepared
like sentinels for an evacuated city

the inhabitants having made
other plans for the evening

Energies can potentially be evoked by such national symbols on this grand scale - something I was attempting to consider in some recent linocuts (especially meteors over a field and meteor falling on a slope) - perhaps there can be a redemption for Winton's youths suffering the occupation of the ratepayer; a potentially more inclusive and energised life for them, rather than one of social and cultural marginalisation.

And I had in mind in my figure on a land/water axis linocut (at recent linocuts) a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or "knowledge-based" markings in the land and/or water.

Tim Winton and the occupation of the ratepayer

Reflecting on Tim Winton's understanding of how children can find themselves living in "occupied territory", and what they must do to survive...

In today's Sydney Morning Herald ("It's a risky business", 24 April 2008):

So what is it about risk? Winton reckons it's so prevalent among the young because Western culture has such safety and domesticity. "You can understand a residual appetite for wildness," he says. "But I think there's also a physical, psychological and erotic correlative to all that."

He knows all about it. He had that hunger for wildness that he gives the boys. When he was still quite young he moved from the Perth suburbs to Albany with his parents. "Growing up in a small country town, there was this palpable compulsion towards risk and that had to do with somehow defeating the empire of boredom and the empire of domesticity and the empire of the occupation ... youth often feel they're living under occupation; the occupation of the old and the occupation of the ratepayer.

"From that occupied territory, we'd go out on these pointlessly insurgent actions of risk-taking which simply involved fast cars, drugs, sexual misadventure and, where we were, firearms. And, for my tiny coterie of fellow travellers, water sports."

(The SMH article is in relation to Tim Winton's new novel, Breath.)

Staemmler's 2nd scheme of interaction

This is an initial attempt to animate Staemmler's second scheme of interaction between the partners in a couple.


I've shown the shapes shifting because that is what happens in the interactions between the partners - behaviours, and the meanings attributed to them by the other party, are in constant flux; and in constant reaction to a wide range of factors in the field* (cultural and gender to name just two), both in and out of awareness.

Frank Staemmler's schemes of interaction are in his paper Joint Constructions: On the Subject Matter of Gestalt Couple Therapy, Exemplified by Gender-Specific Misunderstandings with Regards to Intimacy, in Robert Lee's recent book The Secret Language of Intimacy.

field: "complex interaction of all effects for a given person". For more on the Gestalt field, see here and my own paper here (PDF).

The monaro, drought 2006

Recently, some photos I took in the Monaro region of NSW in 2006 have been coming back to me - I suppose because the header image in this new blog has an image I also took in the Monaro.

The drought was 10 years old in 2006. Here are some images:



My poem seven crows was influenced by driving around Monaro dirt roads at that time, to take photos, as were some small paintings.

seven crows

seven crows inhabiting the night
seek the taste of black meat

harry the river of indifference
that flows like cold lava from the south

with the crows

from the bleached stalks and dry lands
to gloat

having driven the inhabitants
who were once keen farmers

to muttering

shamed
that others may look at their blighted lands
and see their state of reduction

crying
do you want this bloody land
you can buy it from me

To finish, Judith Wright's poem The Cicadas starts out:

On yellow days in summer when the earth
presses like hands hardening the sown earth
into stillness, when after sunrise birds fall quiet
and streams sink in their beds and in silence meet...

Two poetic openings - Wright and Levertov

On the recent theme of openings, here are two wonderful poems. To me, both speak of the possibilities of opening ourselves to deeper, richer parts of ourselves, through encounters with the natural world.

The first is by Judith Wright:

Breath

I turned to the dark window;
outside were stars and frost.
My breath went out to the night,
shaped like a cloud or a mist.
Small and soulless ghost,
what was it my heart meant
that, watching the way you went,
it moved so under my breast?

And here is Denise Levertov's A Reward. This is a beautiful poem that was originally in her collection Evening Train.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

A Reward can now be found in Denise Levertov's New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Robert Lee's new book

Robert Lee was recently in Sydney and it was a pleasure to meet up with him again at the GANZ Professional Development Evening. And it was an opportunity to buy from this gentle man his new book The Secret Language of Intimacy (The GestaltPress, 2008), which continues his investigation into the dynamics of couple relationships.

As well as Robert's work and his description of how he runs his intimacy workshops, I was very taken by Frank M Staemmler's paper, in this book, on joint constructions and gender-specific misunderstandings. I'd like sometime to try to animate some of his constructions on this blog.

Another opening - "to the studios"

In a previous post I remarked on the experience of approaching a grassy rise at Mystery Bay. There was a sense of opening to the sky and the scape, and a great sense of hope.

I get a similar feeling from this wonderful work by Frank Auerbach in the current show at Rex Irwin gallery - Important drawings, prints and ceramics.

Frank Auerbach
Sketch; To the studios 1977
Ink on paper, 29.5 x 34.3cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

For me, Auerbach has captured the sense of hope and opening of a artist approaching his places of creation. And I think this sense can apply to others of us when we approach our places of creativity, whatever they may be. The title has "studios" in the plural and for me this is significant - the creative places in us are plural.

More mystery bay

Gulaga

Descending Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) on the New South Wales far south coast. This was on our February trip to Mystery Bay and around.

Short article on Gulaga.

From my poem blue boat on a stormy sea:

feeling the chill, descended
encountering things of a black shiny nature –

wriggling leaches
that we knocked from our shoes
and a snake that turned its back
slipped away into cover

Mystery bay

In February we spent ten days at Mystery Bay on the New South Wales far south coast. It's a beautiful area and I found writing there very pleasurable. Here's an evening image taken from the cottage we stayed in.

A poem that resulted:

the little ones

a flock of tight knots -
brown gerygones
drubbing on lathes of the decking
like rubber bullets ricocheting

little fists of children

each vector of forces
arriving and then leaving
the verandah empty

not as it was
before they came
but changed, a stage

whereon the piece took place
and the little ones
moved on

And I find the image below a very hopeful one - approaching a rise on an open track, a soulful lifting and sense of space. The black cockatoos love this area, swaying in the banksias and strafing in flocks. Near the headland north of Mystery Bay, on the way to Corunna Lake.

Recent purchase

We recently purchased this great work by Euan Macleod.

Euan Macleod
Bird figure 2007
Acrylic on paper, 76 x 56cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

The work was in the exhibition Figure in a Landscape at Rex Irwin gallery.

Here's another great work from the same show:

Peter Booth
Drawing 2007
(Man and trees in snow)
Mixed media on paper, 13 x 27.5 cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

Some recent linocuts

Some recent linocuts of that investigate energies and the figure in a field.

Ron Dowd
meteors over a field
linocut, collage 2008, 30 x 30 cm


Ron Dowd
meteor falling on a slope
linocut, collage 2008, 39 x 30 cm


Ron Dowd
figure on a land/water axis
linocut, collage 2008, 30cm x 5cm

Reflections on Self and Field in Gestalt and Elsewhere

In this article I related some art works I'd made to the Gestalt contact cycle and the modifications or disturbances of contact spoken about in Gestalt.

I described how these art works led me to wonder about various ideas of self in the Gestalt literature. I inquired about Gestalt field theory, and if and how it relates to the idea of a noumenal field, as I intuitively experienced this in relation to my art making practice.

I suggested how Gestalt phenomenological fields and the noumenal field may relate to each other, and that the idea of a noumenal field is a natural extension of Gestalt's phenomenological field.

The article appeared in the Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand Vol 2 No 2 May 2006.

Download:

The article is available in Acrobat format.
Download the article (RonDowdGJArticle2006.pdf, 25 pages, 360Kb).

Contact me / psychotherapy background

One of Nietzsche's favorite phrases is amor fati (love your fate): in other words, create the fate that you can love. (Irvin Yalom, Staring at the Sun, p100)

Contact details:
I practice psychotherapy in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs. You can contact me regarding psychotherapy on 0422 975 179. Alternatively, you can email me on ron.dowd.therapy@gmail.com.

Practice:
I work with individuals and with couples.

Sometimes in couples therapy it's good to have a couple working as joint therapists. I also work this way, in conjunction with my wife Amanda Gruhn (Karima), who is also a qualified Gestalt psychotherapist.

Background:
I'm recently qualified in Gestalt psychotherapy and am a Member of GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand). I studied at two schools in Sydney, Sydney Gestalt Institute and Gestalt Practitioners Training Sydney.

I've practised visual art making for the past 16 years. I've also had an interest in Jungian psychology for more than 20 years, and have called upon this in my art practice. My first profession was in computing, and I still also work as a business analyst.

Recently I've become more interested in language and poetry, and have for the past five years returned to writing poetry. (I first started writing when I was young.) I'm also influenced in my psychotherapeutic work by the Conversational Model and by current writings on intersubjectivity.

I strongly subscribe to the dictum that in psychotherapy "it's the relationship that heals".

Qualifications:
Bachelor Engineering (Hons), Master Engineering, Bachelor Fine Arts,
MA (Hons) (thesis), Advanced Dip Gestalt Therapy (GPTS), Member GANZ

New blog at "rondowd.com"

Welcome to my new blog. It replaces the old www.rondowd.com, which was mainly a gallery of my visual art making since 1993.

All my art work from 1993 until 2006 is still on-line here.

In this new blog I would like to publish the occasional comment on psychotherapy, art making, poetry, and the cross-overs between them, as I encounter them in my day-to-day work.

I would also like to publish some of my own poems and linocuts.