I dream:
I am building a cairn as an artwork. Someone else is building one as well and I notice he wraps a ‘skin of rock’ around a part of his cairn. Such skins are naturally formed when a rock is weathered and subject to intense variation in heat and cold, along with water getting trapped in cracks and splitting layers of the rock, etc. My dream companion is incorporating such a natural phenomenon into his art work.
For those not familiar with cairns, they are a pile of rocks built up over time by travellers passing by, to mark their passage:
Highlanders returning from battle would remove a stone from a pile to mark their survival. In northern Europe and North American indigenous cultures they’ve been used to mark gravesites, while in Scandinavia they were historically used to mark coastal pathways. In Peru, rock cairns are built as shrines and they hold symbolism in folklore from Britain, Ireland and Greek mythology.
As interesting as all this is about cairns and our heritage or past, I began to wonder about “cairn as art”, which is what my dream stressed. There is something unknown, unfamiliar about that image. I felt a gathering excitement. It’s not too much of a stretch to think such an image as pointing to the unknown future, rather than the past. None of the traditional cairns were considered art as much as shrines or testimonies to the dead, thresholds between worlds, boundary markers, navigation tools so travellers did not get lost, etc. but not as art—especially contemporary art! The manner in which my dream friend made his art work, with a skin of rock wrapping part of the cairn is new; it has not appeared before, in my experience.
In the dream I was building my cairn—a work in progress. All the details in the dream are significant to soul, and are satisfying to soul even in a dream thought of “on the way to completion”, that being the mood of the dream. But now I have my dream memory and a pull towards doing more, through a concrete enactment that bears some erotic relationship to the dream memory. I suddenly wanted to gather some stones and build a cairn in our recently renovated backyard.
My desire led Anita and I to walk along an inlet of Sydney harbor, looking for suitable stones. It was low tide and a recent storm had left its mark on the land. As I scoured the muddy surface for suitable rocks, something caught my eye. Where smooth tide-worn rocks were hard to find, I noticed, with increasing alarm to the point of getting overwhelmed, a Tsunami of plastic things covering the mud flats from end to end. My immediate thought was, “it’s too much, this can’t be stopped, it’s over!”
During the previous week I learned what I had long suspected to be true. Recycling plastics is a sick joke! Most end up in landfills (Greenpeace research). We separate plastics and paper as dutiful citizens, assured we are helping the world, only to have them reunited at the other end, along with all the other garbage, and buried. I no longer bother to recycle and a deep sadness has moved over my heart. I have watched in despair when I see construction companies wrap entire buildings in enormous sheets of plastic for the safety of their workers and to reduce dust. At least Christo is making art when he works at that scale with plastic. I also noted our major food markets recently trumpeted, “no more single use plastics” only to see vegetables increasingly packed in “single-use” plastic in order conveniently to sell to us.
Somehow, recycling a sandwich wrapper in the face of this relentless storm of plastic seems like pissing in the wind. So I have stopped doing it—i.e. recycling plastic and pissing in the wind.
In thinking about this now, as I write, I begin to wonder about the connection between plastic skin wrapped around the mostly plastic things of the world, at all scales, and my dream companion who partially wrapped his rock cairn with a skin of rock. I also consider my discovery of many more plastic things on the mud flat than rocks. Rock skin takes millions of years to form, plastic wrapping takes, what, a day to roll out?
So far then, I have received this dream, written it down, pondered the image in terms of the past; noted the anomalies that cannot be understood in terms of the past or tradition (cairn as art, the rock skin); enacted a relevant (erotic) response to my dream in the empirical world (going for a walk looking for stones); and discovered a powerful connection between rock skin covering rocks and plastic wrapping or skin covering our world of mainly plastic things (i.e.oil based products).
Having written this, I know I must continue my exploration of an art form that is responsive to my dream. My next move is to gather some of those plastic pieces, as well as rocks, and getting hold of some plastic wrap, perhaps drawing Christo into the conversation. Then I will perhaps find my next move, under the aegis of eros.
Something new is being prepared in these dream hints, something coming towards us that draws these images together in the psyche in order to “speak” to the human mouthpiece, through familiar images of the past, generating at the same time a sense of a further task in the empirical world. This task involves the production of a cultural form that can both articulate and maintain the new value emerging from the unknown future. This is why following the hints of erotic connection (they bring pleasure to the recipient) is so important. In this terminal time for our species, most cultural productions are rooted in connections generated by fear, or the will, not love. And we are seeing the result, a world that is in its essence anti-human.
My imagination stirs in response to the image of cairns as connected to the future and the presently unstoppable skin of plastic covering the artificial things of the world. We even talk of the plasticity of the brain! “Plastic” springs from an old word meaning “to mould”. There is a moulding of the things of the world happening, including us, or of the very world itself! And we are unconsciously producing only a technological interpretation of this moulding, in terms of literal plastic.
There is another interpretation available to us but it is now banished from all discourse—the soul’s self-interpretation, for which it needs a human artistic response, not a technological one, in order to actualise. What will this new form finally be? What is the medium that is the mould, the “plastic” from the psyche’s point of view? And is the deepest intention, beyond our technological intentions, to “cover” the world and its things with this “plastic” or moulded medium?
Rock! the most impenetrable medium, seemingly absolute in its hardness, impervious to moulding, belongs to our time of materialism, equally hard and impenetrable. Yet a skin of rock is to be included in the cairn art work. How can the most impenetrable medium become a “plastic” skin i.e. mouldable? At present we are trying to answer that question, delivered to us from “beyond”, only technologically, i.e. by covering the world and its things with literal plastic, just as Christo announced to us. But art can reveal to us another “plastic” medium that is conformable to impressions from “beyond” and is the true plastic medium that seeks to “cover the world” as a skin.
But since we insist of enslaving ourselves solely to a technological interpretation of the world and its skin, the artist must build now a cairn—an homage to a failed possible future.
So I am off to gather plastics and rocks to make my art work.
Two days later: And here it is:
