#83 Mon (9/12/22) - [OW] A Geometric Proof of Insanity, a dream

 This was the dream I had last night, that was so intense that I woke up with my heart pounding and horripilation.

I laid in bed motionless trying to recall as much of the dream as I could, and things came and went.

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What was in her hand? - I feel like there was a progress in the dream over at least three instance or encounters. I recall the images presented in two of the encounters, although perhaps the images that I recall as completed objects (2) were actually the culminations of two processes, each image composed of a set of intersecting lines which at first move from structured, orderly, geometric to suggestive of disorder, to finally becoming illuminated with the confusing colors.  Were these both produced by the Patient? Was one a comparison to a known Deviant, referred to by the Analyst trying to make sense of his Patient's eroding sense of stability? I have a vague sense that at the reveal of the image, the Patient is holding something hidden in her hand. The Analyst looks from the image to her hand and knows what it is without seeing it. The horror is heightened. [See also Anagnorisis, tragic recognition. Oedipal; patricide/matricide, incest, pedicide/filicide.]

"A network of lines intersecting" (Calvino).  This is repeated like a mantra. (Like the Pale Fire quote in BR 2049). By whom?  (A network of intersecting lines forming a grid is called a graticule from the Latin craticula, or grille, mesh.)

The Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, but as paintings produced by the subject, a test of emotional stability, or rather the subject's desired level of dissociation, disaffection. The ability to remain in equipoise even as the surroundings become increasingly nightmarish.  If one was to remain calm and composed while seated in a burning house, it would be an aberrant reaction, abnormal.  To be taught to maintain this level of self-repression even in the face of a nightmare unfolding would require herculean levels of control.

The 2049 Blade Runner uses the following poem snippet from Pale Fire:

And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

as the new stability Baseline Test. A further logical extension from scenarios in the V-K test to poetry in the Baseline to a new evocative rendering test which would have the subjects create art to prove that they are emotionally stable. 

The soma-zombies (Sombies?) from Brave New World pass this test by always producing tractable and anodyne paintings with a singular perspective. Geometrical, mathematical, rigorous. The society is regimented and exacting, harsh, disciplinary and unforgiving, in keeping with a dystopia; corporatized, anesthetized. Most people seemed lulled into blissed-out stupors or catatonic states of disaffection.

H.P. Lovecraft - One cannot correlate all the contents of one's mind without going mad.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

It is a survival defense mechanism that prevents one from correlating all of the contents of one's mind.  What does this mean?  To correlate, comes from the Latin and means to restore things together, to fit them into their proper places, to describe or identify the mutual relation between two things. And hence to draw conclusions about what is the meaning of the two items in their arrangement, or in other words the contents. {If the contents of your mind, i.e. the evidence, points to the conclusion that the environment or the surroundings are insane, disordered, evil, than the inability to correlate those contents defers or delays the inevitable realization that you live in a crazy world (i.e. hell) or that you are crazy (because you derived a crazy conclusion from the contents). [If you define yourself as reasonable, than the evidentiary standard that convinces you, is by definition a reasonable standard.  To find oneself convinced of both one's own reasonableness and the satisfactory nature of the evidence that one used to arrive at a simultaneously unreasonable, insane conclusion, can only impart this feeling. --  Am I dreaming or am I crazy? (as put by Nelson) Correlation is the key world here, networks of lines intersecting in rigorous geometric order, without ambiguity; supernumerary, supererogatory. 

Borges mentions forgetfulness as a way of keeping your sanity and that Funes, unable to forget anything, gradually lost his mind. This was not explicitly in the dream, but occurred to me afterward.

Singular perspective is a sign of mental coherence, unity of self, rigor, discipline; multiple simultaneous vanishing points or divers perspectives held in contradistinction or dynamic tension or simply in paradox (two mutually exclusive and yet simultaneously true things) is an indicator of insanity, instability.

Two images stand out visually for the sheer terror of them, although without knowing why;

One is kind of like the outline of a violin, or a cello, upright, in outline, but with two lines bisecting it from base to neck.  The interior (between the two lines is blank, white, but from the line to the outside edge on either side is a chaos of colors, a confused profusion. It is almost like a portion of a Klimt painting intrudes into an orderly Mondrian. As if some demiurgic child has colored in a diagram from a geometry textbook on calculating the areas of curved forms.

The other could be a person gardening in silhoutte, wearing a wide brimmed hat and a cloak, but the face is turned toward the viewer and also is in color while the rest is only black and white.  In some ways it reminds me of the Baba character in Spirited Away who wraps herself in a cloak and the cloak becomes wings and she flies away. Was she wearing a circular brimmed, conical straw hat? It is the three quarter viewed askance perspective of the face, partially obscured by the brim of the hat that produces the effect here. Only the face is in color, the hat and cloak are just line drawings, the picture mostly white, with a few intersecting lines, smooth curves.

Both of these images were reveals that the person(s) producing them, while appearing outwardly sane, was actually at "Hannibal Lector" levels of insanity.  This becomes evident the moment when the Analyst seems them and is horrified, speechless.  

Coleridge said that in our dreams we see a sphinx because we are terrified, we are not terrified because we see a sphinx. The action in the dream conforms to the expectation of the dreamer. I was expecting to see something horrifying, because I knew I was in a nightmare. The thing that I saw that was horrifying was not the picture itself, but what the picture meant, something not evident in in the content of the image itself. Something unspoken, but understood. Something implicit. Revealed.

Dionysus and The Bacchae, Dionysian ecstasy and excess was definitely called to mind in the dream for some reason, perhaps the death of Pentheus:

Dionysus: "It's a wise man's part to practise a smooth-tempered self-control."

 

The Dionysus in Euripides' tale is a young god, angry that his mortal family, the royal house of Cadmus, has denied him a place of honor as a deity. His mortal mother, Semele, was a mistress of Zeus; while pregnant she was killed by Hera, who was jealous of her husband's affair. When Semele died, her sisters said it was Zeus' will and accused her of lying; they also accused their father, Cadmus, of using Zeus as a coverup. Most of Semele's family refused to believe Dionysus was the son of Zeus, and the young god was spurned by his household. He traveled throughout Asia and other foreign lands, gathering a cult of female worshipers, the Maenads. At the play's start he has returned, disguised as a stranger, to take revenge on the house of Cadmus. He has also driven the women of Thebes, including his aunts, into an ecstatic frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on Mount Cithaeron, much to the horror of the young Pentheus, king of Thebes who also is Dionysius' cousin. Pentheus while disguised as a Maenad, so he can spy on them, is captured, set upon and dismembered horribly by his own mother.

 

(In the dream) Psychologists, who are also something like art instructors/critics, evaluate their subjects either in real time by watching them paint or asynchronously by viewing finished works. This relates in some ways to ekphrasis, which comes from the Greek for the written description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical or literary exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. Thus, "an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art." ... Using ekphrasis to teach literature can be done through the use of higher order thinking skills such as distinguishing different perspectives, interpreting, inferring, sequencing, compare and contrast and evaluating. (from wikipedia)

There were at least two characters in this dream.  There was a young woman, The Patient, and an Analyst/Critic. I was the Analyst, or perhaps I was just the audience, watching, hearing the whole thing. The terror at the revelation of the art was real and intense. Yet, it occurred to me that the terror would be heightened and focused if it is told from the perspective of the Patient, although the reveal has to shock the audience.  Perhaps it is the simultaneous nature of the Analyst seeing the work and recognizing it, labeling it abhorrent (aberrant) and the Patient, who had not heretofore suspected that anything was amiss suddenly becoming aware that she is profoundly, what?  Contaminated, unclean, incongruous, inappropriated - all of these would be horrific to realize. I feel that this is far worse than simply a death sentence - to find that you are incongruous seems unendurable.  Congruent and incongruent are attributes of figures in geometry, incongruent figures differ in some regard from the baseline, either size, shape.  Congruent figures are those that when reflected or rotated are the same as the baseline.  They can appear different initially, but can be made to fit. Even mirror reflection can be congruent. There is no transformation that makes incongruent figures fit. (Aside: the term figures refer to both numbers and images).

Abhorrent means recoiling (from), strongly opposed to," from Latin abhorentem (nominative abhorrens) "incongruous, inappropriate," present participle of abhorrere "shrink back from, be remote from, be out of harmony with" (see abhor). Meaning "repugnant, loathesome"  - 

Recoiling itself alludes to the act of a snake after a strike. Aberrant means to wander away from or to go astray.