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FALL 2007
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My artistic work has always been strongly influenced by entheogenic or psychedelic imagery, and for the past two years, a major project of mine has been to 'map the space' that salvia divinorum besagement engenders. In seeking to do this, I have explored not only the experience of besagement, but the blurring of distinctions that comes with this entheogen..
Very often I begin sketching initial ideas for images while still besaged, and so the distinction between the besagement itself and the recreation of it in art form is blurred or very often erased: for me, the artistic creation becomes an intrinsic part of the experience.
Everything about salvia besagement interests me, and in seeking to lay out experiential mandalas for my art work I have explored physiological sensations, the visionary effects and journeys, the long-term connections that one builds with the plant as well as the questions of how to 'translate' these unworldly experiences into everyday language, and what models and metaphors one might use if that were possible.
The following images were created with exactly these intentions, and although they did not occur during a single experience they are presented in an order consistent with the various stages of sensation during besagement. Thus I often feel some strongly physical stretching effects initially which is followed by a number of visionary phases, completed finally by a coming to ground and a sublime meditative stillness and expanded awareness.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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SPACE TRAINING
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The besagement begins with a steady plunge into a rolling space, non-Cartesian and non-gravitational, in which my body undergoes stretching and crushing that coincides with waves of space physically striking me.
Three-dimensionality begins to collapse and I begin to sense more than one body. It is as if my single physical body has been separated in this new space, as if some kind of quantum uncertainty has left me with no idea which of the bodies I am experiencing is the 'real one', or even if that distinction means anything at all.
...This for me is consistently a difficult set of sensations to re-visualise afterwards, and I have made a number of artistic attempts. This piece represents how my body surely must be appearing during the initial besagement stages to a consensus reality observer. Of course in the moment I'm neither aware of such an observer or indeed anything outside my experiential bubble...
For me, these are the moments when I am shifting awareness. Or training myself in a new kind of space.
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FALL 2007
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INNER LANDSCAPES
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I begin to peer through the ripples into inner landscapes. They come unbidden, strangely dissociated from my everyday, waking life. A monastery, a medieval Islamic university, a beach one million years ago. Or lines of guns firing splodges of space into curiously melded biplanes in a surreal take on the First World War. I am so present in this scene, and so unpresent in the place where my body is (theoretically) supposed to be, that I can almost feel the visionary earth shudder with each firing of the guns and hear the sounds of the propeller blades above me.
...These innerscapes can fly by so rapidly, or pull me in very deeply so that I remain in one for a very long time, but somehow they lodge in my memory very strongly. Sometimes I am able to be lucid enough to set myself a trigger to re-see the image when I have surfaced but very often they simply come back to me as an unbroken movie of images. How to draw something which doesn't stop moving? My approach is to try and capture both the movement and the still images together...
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Funny... I didn't feel particularly warlike today - are there meanings hidden in these landscapes? Do they come from my Jungian racial memory? The spirit world? Some kind of Akashic Record? From my own semi-conscious brain wondering what the hell to do with all this salvinorin? In the midst of the inner landscape, it's 100% real, but afterwards I will be left with questions. Such as, how am I going to translate this?
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VISIONARY REVUE
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SHAMANIC TRANSLATIONS
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I really don't have any answers, and that's fine, because I prefer questions, but truly I don't have any idea what theory, model or metaphor to use to explain these. Maybe the shamans have been right all along, and that plants do have spirits that can speak to us. And then, maybe that's just a metaphor. How far to go, I wonder, with this kind of thinking?
...I have found that thinking of salvia as a spirit is the most convenient metaphor and my work is replete with devotion to her and what I perceive as her intentions. Here the greatness of the plant itself is contrasted with my smaller size. Her healing hands seem to fly out from some place of otherness...
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FALL 2007
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I had a dream about salvia: I was one of a group of scientists analysing her leaves. We found that she completely lacked DNA. Not a single helical strand at all. She must've come from another dimension, or maybe from another planet. I remember looking up and wondering which star might have dropped her. How far can I go with this?
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STADIUM OF LIGHT
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Closed eye visuals quickly turn into physical sensations. I find myself talking about 'The Space', that mythopsychological salvia domain, as if it is a real place I can get to by jumping on a train. It feels as though there are clearly defined routes there that would have clear manifestations in our consensus space. I feel as though I could hop on a rocket and visit The Stadium Of Light in the Heart Of The Sky.
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...The Stadium Of Light was an extended visionary experience that left me reeling. This piece expresses the closeness of the space and how my physical being actually seemed to break through into another reality. It's curious. With some entheogens, the soul or psyche seem to go a-travelling, but salvia seems to insist on me taking my body with me too. It feels very 'actual'...
Yes, of course I 'know' it's all in my head. (Salvinorin must be the cause - it's a, what is it now? Oh yes, a kappa-opioid agonist or somesuch)... Then I meet someone who's been there: someone else who knows what I mean when I talk about the Heart Of The Sky. And suddenly it feels like a real space again.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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DREAMING BEINGS
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You tell me, then. Is it real? Just as I can visit the far-off Stadium Of Light or ride the Wheel Of Time to experience forty years of time in barely five minutes, I can also come back to the room my consensus body inhabits to find it surrounded by visitors. The three strangers were the first ever ones to come take a look at me: I could sense their intentions as independent entities, and I psychically knew that they had come only to watch.
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...Actually, not quite. They'd also come to be seen, to be drawn. Or that was my intentions mixing with theirs. In any case, on this journey, in the thick of the experience I picked up a pen and blindly started sketching as the world turned around me. It turned out I mostly missed my sketch paper and was scrawling on the floor, but the scrawls provided the trigger to re-create the Three Strangers rippling out from a whirlpool of realities...
We looked at each other like beings from different worlds tend to do - polite incomprehension and curiosity. Slowly they slipped away from my view and from sensation. Sorry, I meant to say, it was me who slipped away from their view and... well, you tell me.
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FALL 2007
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AWAKENED STILLNESS
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And then you might think it's all over, but it really isn't. Once the music has stopped there's the stillness, the silence before, after and within the melody. I close my eyes, so deeply back in my body, so grounded and real. Far from gadding around in the Heart Of The Sky, my awareness now expands, bubble by bubble, to take in the room I sit in, my house and garden, and then expands to take in the local landscape (I can almost hear the river half a mile away), and wider still, till I'm a little man completely indivisible from a magical landscape, so real it's unreal.
...This is when the initial sketches start to be produced. Note the passive and absence of first person - at times it feels as if no one is drawing, or as if they are being produced automatically. This piece remembers a moment when I stopped sketching and closed my eyes again as my consciousness took in the whole landscape that I sat in. It seemed to be glowing in my inner eyes, and suddenly this consensus landscape seemed as psychedelically alive as the inner landscapes a few minutes before...
The 'me' doing the psychonautics earlier must have gotten exhausted, because there's no 'me' to speak of, to think of. Right. Now. Existence without being. No mind, no heart, no adventure. And no more questions.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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BRUCE RIMELL
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I live in the town of Shipley, West Yorkshire, UK. I'm originally from the south west of England: my home town is Swindon in Wiltshire, county of Stonehenge, Avebury and many other megalithic monuments set in an eerie landscape which somehow always makes me feel at home. I'm also commonly to be found in the city of Bristol as I still have some good friends living there.
I’ve been reading mythology since I was a kid and it has become the ruling passion of my life, contributing a great deal of inspiration to my art. For me, the technical languages of myth encode such diverse information as ancient history, psychological insights, astrological and philosophical theories and a sense of wonder at our world. Taken non-literally, mythology has been mankind's greatest and longest living teacher...
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I have spent two years living in Japan as well (and am still able to speak, read and write Japanese fairly fluently), and that and my continuing interest in languages and other people's cultures often allows me to feel more like a citizen of the world than any particular country.
Music is another passion, and on my website you can hear some of the music that I make - generally ambient electronic with offbeat and playful sounds.
I like authors who break moulds - Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are four of them. In the fields of mythology, poetry, ontology and neuropsychecstasy respectively they have really opened my eyes.
I have also been constructing languages for about ten years and although it’s an unusual hobby, there’s a great deal of satisfaction in constructing a whole and unique way of thinking and symbolising the world. The latest and most fully developed language I have created is Danan.
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FALL 2007
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BRUCE RIMELL
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I love to travel, and one of the things I like to do most is combine this love with my fondness for ancient history. Not long ago I visited the Palace of Minos, Knossos, Crete. I'm convinced the Greek myths about Minos and the labyrinth encode some very ancient memories about these people..
The Palaeolithic Cave Art of Southern France and Northern Spain is for me the most inspiring and amazing art that mankind has ever produced. Forget the Sistine Chapel ceiling or the terracota warriors of Xian. For me, hidden dark caves such as Lascaux, Altamira, Les Trois Freres and Chauvet hold what I consider to be the truest and purest art I have seen. Kind of an unimprovable original.
Dance! I'm actually a qualified dance leader, although I don't do so much dancing these days - not as much as I like anyway. I regularly dance the 5 Rhythms, and as such Gabrielle Roth (the mother of this dance work) has been a great inspiration to me. Its definitely my experience that everyone knows how to dance instinctively.
Here are some more of the major influences on my life, in no particular order: The Desana people of the Colombian Amazon, Sei Shonagon, Xca Maria Pastora, Keith Haring, Mama Huilca Ayahuasca, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Terry Pratchett, the scenery of Uji City in Japan, Avebury, the city of Bath in England, Mircea Eliade, Judy Grahn, the Tahitian language, Jesus, Jean M Auel, Ramon Medina Silva, Dennis Pavao, Manu Chao, Tom Ellard and Severed Heads, Mary Magdalene, Ovid, Nymphaea Blue Lotus, Geza Vermes, Monty Python, the Popol Vuh and Books of Chilam Balam…
Thanks for visiting my sites - enjoy yourself and enjoy your self .
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