Imitation can certainly be reduced to a matter of copying by rote: breaking an action down into a series of steps, and reproducing them mechanically. Deliberate, explicit copying of single gestures, out of context, would be like this. But it can also be driven by a feeling of attraction which results, by a process that remains mysterious, in our apprehending the whole and trying to feel what that must be like from the inside – by so to speak 'inhabiting' .... (437)
Communication occurs (telepathic, empathetic, psychic etc) because the listener inhabits the body of the person ... and experiences what they are experiencing. (442)
(The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist)
What is it then, that I, that you, are trying to inhabit? What is it in these things, the things that captivate us? What is this idea of ‘stealing’? Inhabiting the form of another, chameleon like, to become the other, the God you desire?
...empathy is associated with a greater intuitive desire to imitate. (441)
There is an instruction I remember, (thanks Layla Martin) Jealousy? what is the sensation or experience you think you don't have? What is the sensation you long for? What does it feel like? Be it, become your god. Do this by feeling the quality of that god.
I step into Kokichis Umezaki's Requiem…
Tangled fields. a barn in November, blue sienna grey: cold rains and the weight of a century – like a body, dressed and enduring its duration, out in its winter frost field. There is nostalgia, the faded memory of order and comfort, the promise of conversation. The trace of another thinker thinking.
Beyond the barn, there is an edge. sharp and distressed and thin and precise. jagged. A downward cut in fits and starts, around and through like river water between stones. black. a crevasse. a delineation. clean. I arrive here. I rest. Then follow it to where it bleeds: a red cut in the flesh. a peeling back of continents – skin surrendered to reveal warmth and liquid.
What do I inhabit? This is the landscape over which i choose to travel: empty. desaturated, with a shock of hot life here and there, a plunge into a swallowing depth, a slit that receeds ever deeper, past red into a vacuous dark. Follow the brittle edge of an old road, the broken and rubbed rail of text, smeared closer to disappearance by the bird-like movements of the eye. What do I inhabit?
A painting invites, (if you look long and if it is for you) a union of flesh and a landscape for the alienated mind.
How do I reply?
Begin with color. Enter it like water.
Follow the line, that living chasm, jagged and definite, cutting, delineating, demarcating.
What then? A refuge? A place to rest?
A cadence? Some shape of rhythm?
Recognize recognition.
ok.
Space ... and the awareness of the need to order it, to language it - just not too tidily please.
This is the perfect imperfection of un-inhibited inhabitation.