Living Designs

This is an image taken from a dream, but surely someone knows the feeling of swimming at night, and that is not a dream. To swim at night, in the ocean or a lake, tell me, what is the feeling? What images would you use to describe your sensations and your thoughts? This image is one I have worked over and over, erasing and redrawing, since 1997, and it is now 2007 -- so for ten years. For me, it holds some of the mystery of swimming at night. A person, an animal, a house: the shadows a bit obscure, but the sense of containment and wildness there.

Window and tree, or windows and tree ... views from one way considered from another. When did I do this image? When would someone else have done this image, or wanted this sort of image? When would someone want an image of a tree caught between two windows, on either side of an architectural/continental divide? I did it when I was thinking of going into medicine, after a life-time of wanting/hoping to be a writer, or its defunct (to me), a painter: A person who had the fantasy of being noticably by what she had to say. As a painter, it was as someone who was noticable by what she could image forth. No one wants to be "something" (a painter, a writer, an accountant, etc), without wanting to be noticed for something, or at least to have experienced at some point that one's skills were well put. One hardly waits around to be nothing. And yet, recently, I found myself strangely overjoyed by a small moment in the movie Man on a Train, where the poetry teacher in a small French...

It is both the arrangement of images/things in our day-to-day lives and in our dreams that leads us to what is compelling us either toward death or toward life. It isn't the things or the images, but how we arrange them--that say something about how we live. Archeology, the prototype for psychoanalysis, really is about studying how things were arranged, so that someone later made an hypothesis about what a culture or civilization valued and how they lived. How we order what we order, or arrange, speaks of our values and desires. These images are not simply images, but arrangements, orderings, and implications.

Anxiety has been treated for years as an individual medical problem, but it has also been treated as a problem related to a stressful environment. Therapists and doctors recognize the role stress has in our lives, even if they don't focus much on the systems we live in. They more often focus on how you as an individual manage the stress. I think it is important to look at both issues, because I believe environments and systems (people systems, work systems, community systems) can be very stress inducing. We think we "should" be able to handle stressful environments, without wondering whether in fact we have created environments we are not really well able to adapt to. It's an odd question to ask one's self: How is it humans could create systems and environments they aren't really well suited to--spiritually or health wise? But I think it is an important question to ask. In fact, humans have created systems of living that end up collapsing. In my work with peop...