Bathsheba by Day Galatea by Night

Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson Bathsheba by Day Galatea by Night January 25th, 2021 • Margot Wilson on ‘everything that endlessly paints us’ Figure 1 - Rembrandt, Bathsheba bathing, 1654. Paris, Musée du Louvre.1 Stigmata by Hélène Cixous is a waking dream: a meditative cauldron stirred anti-clockwise against itself: a somnabulatory retracing of a scar that rediscovers itself: the footprints that remain point in all directions. In Bathsheba or the Interior Bible1 Cixous weaves a poetical tapestry that pierces the private worlds of both Rembrandt and his muse. In placing Cixous’s moving meditation on Bathsheba2 next to Salvador Dali’s Galatea of the Spheres, and borrowing the lens of frontier thought in neuroscience, this essay explores reclaiming of Origin and liberty in dreaming. Bathsheba by day Galatea by night. Cixous writes, that he, Rembrandt, ‘Paints the secret: the trace of what escapes us: he always paints what escapes us: what has just happened, what is going to happen, and which traverses us suddenly, pierces us, turns us upside-down, escapes - beyond the painting, beyond though, and leaves us there painting, suspended, grazed, he paints the body that remains, maybe the skin, maybe the cadaver. The painting is the place of passage.’ Cixous|11 Here, Cixous’ ethereal metaphysical prose on painting intersects with the hallucinatory characteristics of dreaming: Rembrandt dreams of Bathsheba’s presence, Bathsheba dreams of her escape. Bathsheba slips away to her virtual theatre, where, by the 1 Image taken from Hélène Cixous’ Stigmata: Escaping Texts. (London: Routledge, 2005) – all Cixous quotes are taken from ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible’. 2 Bathsheba, though married to Uriah, is critically considered to have been King David’s muse and eventual lover. Debates range from coercion, rape and metaphor for David instead of fighting the war, remained at home. She is the only biblical woman to be portrayed as naked. See Bathsheba biblical figure, britannica.com. Britannica. Also, M.D. Coogan, A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 1 Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson hand, a small child reacquaints her with eternity: with her free hand the child traces the hiatus between Bathsheba’s exterior contraction and interior expansion: with her disembodied tongue the child moistens the scars of Bathsheba’s embodied captivity: inside Bathsheba’s luminous dreams transparent clocks slide from walls: anarchic words wrecking ball the secrets of their own verse: Woman is not a ‘rib’ and she knows it. What has been erased by patriarchal day is reclaimed by oneiric night: the dreamer and cosmos entwined: the ever-decreasing circle of Creation, in the Big Bang sense, is arrested: everything the dreamer knows and does not know ignites: infinite explosions that devour and regurgitate: sprinkling shrapnel rain: scarring the contour of its own somatic shell. Dreaming both heals and returns stigmata. ‘Unlike scar, stigmata takes away, removes substance, carves out a place for itself.’ Cixous|ii Concealed by day and revealed by night in dreams, the violence inside the flesh re-enacts explosive Cosmic Origin. The protest of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba is a ‘rosy blond’ buttery refusal of elimination: within her opulent presence is the violent protesting of the prisoner soul. Beneath the skin’s story is flesh extended by breath and thought: shaping, holding, pressing its liminal sheath against an un-vacant cosmos. A melancholic breathing that through its own hollowness, marks out the corporeal vessel: a wombed-mortal stapled to the rood where stigmata ‘resists being worn down’: strung upon the cross of cyclical time and spatial gravity. In the absence of congruent affirmation, the Mnemosyne3 configuration falls like an empty robe to the floor: the bony manifold alone does not raise the open heart to the heavens. By day the chaotic forces stabilise, by night they reign free: reuniting with Origin4, to re-emerge. Dreaming: a necromancy to the oblivion that gives rise to life, staking out presence: holding death at bay. Am I inside, am I outside? The inside pierces me with holes in my brain. Cixous|v Just ‘like a living tomb’ Figure 2 - Salvador Dali, Galatea of the Spheres, 1952, Spain, Dali Theatre and Museum, Figueres. 3 Mnemosyne – Greek goddess of Memory, muse, ninth daughter of Zeus (muse, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020) www.oed.com/view/Entry/124057. Accessed 20 January 2021. 4 ‘Origin’ here refers to ‘beginning’ as ‘birth’ and ‘rebirth’ and is applied to both corporeality and Existence (includes Creationist, Big Bang and Eternal Impermanence (Buddhist) ontologies). 2 Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson Cixous describes Bathsheba as deserted ‘like a living tomb’. Where does Bathsheba go? To the place where the tomb is alive, to the vortex of Galatea5, I bid. Convening, bathing and languishing perhaps, in ‘she who is white-milk’: inhabiting the inert marble statue that took possession of Pygmalion’s coveting heart: brought to life by Aphrodite to appease his lamentable prayers. Bathsheba, who by day is Rembrandt’s ‘portrait of sadness’, might in her dreams, become Dali’s Galatea. Inside Galatea’s spheres Bathsheba disperses to her centrifugal limits: experimenting with her own fragments: sampling the infinite facets of herself: teasing apart the intersection of the harmony and efficiency that abides in all things. The dervish spheres in Galatea of the Spheres spin and spiral: compressed and held in place by natural orbits of flesh and energy: tethered by a needle’s eye to the chaotic and harmonious cosmos embedded within: all things born out of One Source. But Bathsheba’s Galatean life must not leave her deprived of sleep, elst the coherent epicentre of her will disintegrate, fragment, disorientate, forget: the potency of her presence will crumple and dissipate: leaving behind a ghost shell. She [Bathsheba] does not look at us. […] she is gone behind her eyelids […] that is to say dreaming, that is to say leaving, in order to look at us. Cixous|7 Bathsheba, inside her Galatea prism of dreaming, not only reconfigures the contradictions of her feminine existence, but the nonsense of the world she inhabits. The objectification of her flesh. The attributing to her lunar ambiguity and delusion: because Selene6 (Moon) has no light of her own only that of reflecting Helios (Sun): a Homeric tale retrieved and propagated by medieval men which only in [virtual] being-Galatea can Bathsheba repair: reclaiming the light of Selene-Woman, I speculate, returning the origin of natural order. How else could Bathsheba’s sorrow be a force of power? How could Selene-Woman, with her unsurprising waxing and waning, her evident eclipsing: remember herself? Woman. Womb-man. Cosmic womb birthing embodied light. I’m not talking about archetypes or universals, of Selene and Helios, of Woman as extension of Man, but the actuality of womanly embodiment of Origin and Light, that Rembrandt adeptly portrays. The answer, I conjecture, might lie in explorations taking place within neuroscience and dreaming. Macrocosm and Microcosm Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist, Karl Friston, occasionally playful with the tropes and ontologies of freedom, observes human brain functioning as a ‘sentient system […]’ that must contain ‘a model of the world it inhabits’.7 Friston (et al8) believe that consciousness contains an embedded ‘a priori belief that things will change’. That the beliefs created and held inside, contain a virtual model of the world outside. The neural landscape no longer portrayed as a strictly linear circuitry, but as arrays, flashes: described by Friston as a ‘Markov Blanket’9 or virtual thing-ness that ‘intrinsically causes its own sensations because it is embedded within its environment’.10 Working within a theory of ‘unity’ (one substance with two aspects, that of internality and externality), ‘think of it like a house’ Friston says, a house of ‘me-ness’ inside which the self only ever gazes through a window at the world outside. Appropriating his Markovian model, sentient Bathsheba then, through her looking glass gauges her own survival, seeks out and ‘predicts error’ so that she may ‘minimise surprise’, all very calculus, yes, but bear with the physicist’s reframing of everything, as it dismantles a wall that reveals a secret door behind which the story of Woman might be concealed. 5 Robert Graves considered the Galatea/Pygmalion myth is allegoric to the demise of Aphrodite matriarchy. See R. Graves (1960). The Greek Myths. (Penguin: London, 1960) p. 64.1. 6 Homer (Hymn. 32. 1,7) describes Selene as ‘the eye of night’. Alongside her brother, Helios, she rode her chariot across the heavens. The Moon has no light of its own but reflects the light of the Sun. 7 K.L. Friston - Free energy and active inference - Rovereto, November 6, 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLXKFA33SSM) 8 In particular see J. Allan Hobson’s dreaming-brain research, Hobson has collaborated with Friston since 2013, he proposes a new model of consciousness that opposes Freud’s repression theory, it includes primary and secondary consciousness, protoconsciousness, Friston’s ‘free energy principle’ and ‘Markov Monism’ (J.A. Hobson, K.J. Friston, W. Wiese Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness: From Cartesian Duality to Markovian Monism, Entropy 2020, 22(5), 516; https://doi.org/10.3390/e22050516) 9 Named after Andrey Markov (1856-1922) Friston states ‘If something doesn’t have a Markov blanket, it doesn’t exist. From the perspective of systems neuroscience, the Markov blanket is a new and important thing in the toolkit that allows you to demystify and talk with a different calculus, and a different language, about things such as sentience.’ A Markov Blanket (Friston) also corresponds with a version of Dual-Aspect Monism called Markov Monism. The two aspects are the internal and external regions of the Markov Blanket boundary. 10 K.L. Friston - Free energy and active inference - Rovereto, November 6, 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLXKFA33SSM) 3 Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson Bathsheba, yielding to patriarchal dominion by day, at night, through the constellations of her dreams re-encounters and restates herself: Bathsheba/Galatea/Woman sheds the chameleon mask that conceals her innate species and inter-species parity - which One Substance (with internal/external aspects) insists upon. Natural selection and synthetic hierarchy are not the same thing, there is universal urge to predict change that grounds the evolutionary dynamo that propels natural selection in all life, then there is Rembrandt’s Bathsheba presented as a woman resigned to a biblical fate. But evolutionary metamorphism is not fool proof, is scarred by its own evolution. The idea that ‘such an overriding influence, that your expectations about stimulus is that things will always change, even if there is no change in the sensory input’11 Friston|2013 is both its own problem and solution. All thoughts, actions, beliefs, even ‘spontaneity’ arise from the same unitary (macro/micro) cosmos. Bathsheba’s scars, created by day are re-arranged by night, both remembered and accumulated for the purposes of circadian re-tracing: as Cixous states, ‘in fleeing, the flight saves a trace of what it flees’. ‘Scar is comparable to Siegfried’s invisible point of mortality, a non-scar, but a trace reserved for the passage of death, a door requiring a password, scar adds something: a visible or invisible fibrous tissue that really or allegorically replaces a loss of substance which is therefore not lost but added to, augmentation of memory by a small mnesic growth.’ Cixous|12 There is a twist, as knowledge extracted from brain lesion studies show, suggesting that ‘lesions show us dissociations in cognition we could never have hypothesized, and thus can radically change our model of the architecture of the mind.’12⁠ There are primary lesions and sometimes paradoxical lesions. Similar to the scar, the primary lesion takes away cognitive function, reduces, while the secondary lesion paradoxically reverses the effect of the first, just like Cixous’ stigmata. Somehow what is lost is retrieved by the arising of its rescue, stigmata’s wound calls to account everything: the internal beliefs, the external dogma, the conflated deception. ‘Stigmata are traces of a sting. Piquer in French, to prick, to sting, to pinch, pricks in order to take, in order to prick piquer steals, strikes and removes, sows, speckles signs its blows, leaves behind and takes away, annoys and excites at the same time, gives back what it takes, serves the interests of the thief and the police.’ Cixous|12 Woman compressed as woman: Bathsheba is saturated by artificial absolute hierarchical dependency. Bizarrely, as selfdeception goes, the experience of phantom limbs might compare. Amputees for many months sometimes report the physical sensation of the missing limb, a trick of the brain determined to resist its own atrophy. An organism defiant, working too hard to defeat change. The healing process is a lengthy one of re-tricking the brain into changing internal beliefs that eclipse the bodily facts. In treating post-traumatic stress disorders, and in order to achieve ‘closure’,13 Rosalind Cartwright, states that patients with PTSD specifically require REM sleep and dreaming that engages directly with their trauma. An immersive dream therapy that is its own experience: its own virtual performance. Bathsheba does not have a phantom limb but a phantom Woman, Woman as a self-lit Selene: a Selene not dependent upon Helios for her own light. It follows, that the same metamorphic rudder that by day may trick the brain, by night is set free from the dominion of a priori conditioning: from the compulsion to hawk-eye the torrents of change: is free to roam with ancestral spectres to the dark sides of Sun, Saturn and Moon. In actuality the Sun possesses no dark side, only idioms grafted by patriarchal stargazers. In the night as Galatea, Bathsheba traverses and re-imagines her own private galaxies. She ‘samples surprise’, unmoors herself from predictability: but there are two prisons she must escape: the external 11 See K.L. Friston - Free energy and active inference - Rovereto, November 6, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLXKFA33SSM R. Adlophs, Human Lesion Studies in the 21st Century 2016. Neuron. 2016 Jun 15; 90(6): 1151–1153. doi: 10.1016 j.neuron.2016.05.014. 13 R. Cartwright, The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012) p 160-165 12 4 Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson world of patriarchal woman that she inhabits, and her internal separation from a priori Woman. Like the poet divining the unsung voice, she must die to her own presence, become ‘null’. Something Cixous and Dali have come to know. The painting is the place of passage. And in order to paint this, one must be dead. He [Rembrandt] paints like a dead man. Like a poet. Like a dead man. Cixous|11 Dali paints Galatea of the Spheres in full knowledge that the veil between death and life is illusion, that death and life are paradoxically identical, inseparable and interdependent. In Galatea of the Spheres Dali freeze-frames the cosmic cauldron, renders the sub-atomic structures: removes the conditioning architectures of the conceptual and political imposed by embodied inside/outside cognition: leaving all but the lucidity of a protoconsciousness14 born and reborn as Woman: remembered by Bathsheba as Cixous’ stigmata. Stigmata: a thing formed of paradox: internal Woman / external woman, Bathsheba / Galatea. Dali was an early Surrealist who was eventually expelled15 from the movement by Breton and his cohort. Surrealism, said Breton, is ‘to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality’ or surreality.’16 The division between dreaming and reality then, may reside in the approach to fragments, the synthetic overlaying of Cartesian dualistic meaning, the asserting of the appearance of the fixed-unfixable. Galatea’s orbiting spheres lean into an infinitely divisible centre: the intersection of sensible harmony and efficiency: but harmony when unchecked: sprawls, free wheels: intoxicated by its own state, destroys its own form, wanders (into infinity): while efficiency unchecked, revolves in ever decreasing circles, disappears (into zero). Working together, they stabilise in self-regulation. Our human existence, according to Friston, is an act of resistance: un-dispersing ink in a petri dish: a ‘contraction [that] depends upon the electrochemical states, showing occasional catastrophic explosions falling into the primordial soup.’17 Our human brain is an electrochemical playground in which prevailing decay and entropy is stabilised. Not stopped. Not reversed. Stabilised. Dali’s Galatea is the embodiment of a silent sonic expanding universe that booms outwards: corralled by the cycles of procreation: the sperm to the egg: obliteration and form in the same corporeal paradox. Suspended between sea and sky, Galatea becomes the prism of Bathsheba’s retreat, the place where the truth of her exists. A dreaming life is not a playground for the subconscious, but a homeostasis that self-regulates, ‘keep things within bounds’: briefly permitting the protean origin in us, Bathsheba/Galatea - to obliterate her cognitive and somatic semblances, to immerse in the paradoxical unknown: become the absurd, dismantling the axis of harmony and efficiency. Rembrandt paints thoughts, Dali paints consciousness It isn’t only Galatea’s head spinning in a semi-exploded revolution, it is the content of Dali’s skull swirling in a metaphysical and existential contradiction. Through the lightning rods of his antennae intuition flows a metaphysical comprehension of the living paradox. In Galatea of the Spheres, Dali traces an aperture through which to draw forth the inexpressible. His technique is to torment his attention towards acute paranoia, inducing a state of exponential anxiety that commands/dictates/orders the minutiae of meaning: distrusting any motivation intent on fixing, denying, ignoring, paralysing. Dali’s Galatea of the Spheres epitomises his ability to manipulate his owns senses into extreme altered states: hyper-sensitised states. The painting portrays Dali’s fusion theory combining atomic science and Renaissance Neo-Platonist alchemy, aptly called ‘nuclear mysticism’. The Surrealists, including Dali, were earnest advocates of Freud, embracing particularly, Freud’s theory of sexual repression and his tri-strata model of consciousness as the Ego, ID and Super-Ego. In essence, combining the revolutionary Big Bang Theory of the day, with 16th century Cartesian dualist mind/body/God predominantly Freudian patriarchal theory. Many characteristics of the mind-states of paranoia and psychosis are now believed to occur and be naturally, if not necessarily experienced in the sleep state of dreaming: activating an annhialatory override state within the human condition that enables the dreamer to adventure within her own private playground of the absurd. These tipping point mental states are safely unleashed in 14 J.A. Hobson, REM sleep and dreaming: Towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 2009, 10, 803–813. Dali was charged of supporting race war, and his ‘paranoiac-critical method’ refined such that it contradicted Surrealist ‘automatism’. 16 I. Chilvers, The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 611 17 K.L. Friston - Free energy and active inference - Rovereto, November 6, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLXKFA33SSM 15 5 Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson dreaming and grounded creativity but have a catastrophic capacity to destabilise the ‘sanity’ of the waking state. Matthew Walker goes so far as to propose dreaming as ‘overnight therapy’: a place: an occurrence: during which ‘REM sleep performs the elegant trick of divorcing the bitter emotional rind for the information rich fruit.’18 Dali’s paranoiac-critical method effectively inverts the fractal matrix of consciousness, that dynamic paradox, activating the essential mechanics of the dream state within the wake state. ‘Indeed, I argued that if REM sleep did not perform this operation, we’d all be left with a state of chronic anxiety in our autobiographical memory networks, every time we recalled something salient, not only would we recall the details of the memory, but we would relive the same stressful emotional charge all over again.’ Walker|21019 Virtual Freedom Perhaps like Dali and his Galatea, Bathsheba, Woman, is virtuoso of the waking/dream state, straddling both realms: extending her silent flesh in space while inside she plays freely, dreams and daydreams: revelling, remembering vitally, every nuance and dendron of being Woman. By day, Bathsheba floats as undispersed ink inside the patriarchal cell, then by night, Bathsheba escapes to Dali’s cyclotronic planets, atomised and yielding to the arc that harmony and efficiency eternally shapes: holding the cosmos and everything in it, in a mesmerising circular trudge, every step taken encoded in the ‘craft of death’.20 In sleep her Markovian Woman triumphs. ‘What is marvellous: the ordinary metamorphosis: these people are subject to alteration, to time. Time [change] is at work. And not just time. Everything that endlessly paints us from the inside.’ Cixous|11 From what and where does ‘everything that endlessly paints us’ exist? The same everything bound in the blanket of consciousness, the Markovian pool from which the artist draws her paint, the writer her ink, the philosopher her thoughts: Woman, her truth, her eternal Origin comprised of gestational cycles, held in place by a double helix of efficiency and harmony, propelling the paradox of life and death day and night wake and sleep scar and stigmata: for only a paradox and the absurd provides a space for freedom freedom from paranoia of death, freedom from the prevailing torment of anticipating change: freedom to embrace and inhabit paradox, is to become co-creator to become more than an attribute of existence. To be Origin. Margot Wilson is writer and artist specialising in dreaming, meditation and neuroscience in art and performance. 18 M. Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams. (Penguin: London, 2018) p 208 Ibid, p 210 20 Cixous’ term, p 11 19 6 Royal College of Art: 2021 Margot Wilson Bibliography Adlophs, Ralph, Human Lesion Studies in the 21st Century 2016. Neuron. 2016 Jun 15; 90(6): 1151–1153. doi: 10.1016 j.neuron.2016.05.014 Cartwright, Rosiland, The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives. (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012) Chilvers, Ian The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. (Oxford University Press, 2009) Cixous, Hélène, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible’. (London: Routledge, 2005) Coogan, Michael D., A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths. (Penguin: London, 1960) Hobson, J. Allan, REM sleep and dreaming: Towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 2009, 10, 803–813. Friston, Karl J. (2009). The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain? Trends Cognit. 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