Amazed and confused

[chantico]

Imagine this: you are standing in front of a gauzy veil, both pearlescent and dull, and always moving. Behind it shapes move and weave among themselves. When they come close to the cloth, it is transparent enough that you get an image of them dancing-- hazy, impure, but enough that you can hold on to it, and if you want to, translate it. The images don't come in sequence, they don't come when called, and what you remember is never as transcendent as what you've seen. Still, you try to create replicas of them, if for no other reason than to share those quickly fading images. When all's said and done however, the act of translation and the limit of human skill have reduced them even further. Through the filters of the veil, your memory, and the limitation of your hands, what you're left with is something wholly unlike what you wanted to communicate. If only you could eliminate a step-- if the veil wasn't there, you wouldn't need your memory, because you could see clearly. Your hands, with the proper training, might be able to one day be good enough to follow the orders of your mind, but that first requires a clear picture in your mind.

You know you're capable of it. Every night, every time you sleep, that veil disappears, and form and detail is clear (if ever changing).

This is what I'm grappling with in my art-- the three fold problem of lack of skill, lack of visualization techniques, and a lack of focus. The hands need patience and training. The visualization, I think, needs meditation, or some technique like that. But how do I remove that veil-- my lack of focus? I feel like all of my ideas are intentionally hiding from me . . . I know they're there, I can feel them moving, I can see their shadows, but when I try and hold it down, it wriggles away and I'm left with nothing-- sometimes not even the memory of what it was I'm trying to focus on.

In some ways, it feels like my attempts at lucid dreaming. everything works fine until I pin it with my eyes or my intentions, and then it rebels and bucks me off, or out.

I'm grateful to be getting the practice and challenge I am right now, and I'm not so much upset and frustrated by this complex problem. i know there's a solution, but where is it?

Comments

[sarcastibich.livejournal.com]

**applause**

A beautiful and eloquent expression of the struggle all artists face. Well done, this post is itself Art.

I don't have the solution, I don't know if anyone really does.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

If you're talking about representing things actually from your dreams... I really wonder if things in our dreams are all that detailed (or brilliant, I've woken up with the feeling of something really clever scurrying away) as opposed to directly inducing the feeling of detail or cleverness. Like, if you stimulate the brain the right way, you should be able to induce a feeling of "awesome!" while looking at a piece of crap, and if you think, as I do, that dreaming is largely a bunch of random firings as opposed to some mystical connection or perversely inaccessible deep processing, then that faux feeling seems likely.

Of course, stuff *can* happen unconsciously; I've woken up with the key to a math proof coming to me. OTOH, I'm not sure I ever dreamed about such math, as opposed to waking up with the answer in my inbox, as it were. Anyway, to the extent that you might be feel inadequate because you can't incarnate dreamed visions, I wanted to at least raise the possiblity that the visions aren't actually there in detail to be realized, but making you think they're detailed.