Shake your head a little, come back to focus on the plane of the wallpaper. Use it as a visual anchor, a counter to dissociative states, which occur in a mind that is attached to a physical body, still capable of perception of its surroundings, though they may be rendered unreal or absurd.
A trellis of damask, stretching and contracting in zigzag repeats, could give sweetly plastered, shifting walls a trustworthy plane, measurable by motif and scale. Patterns can soothe in their repetition, if one focuses on counting, like I used to in my bedroom at Church Road, denying reality. This focus is a type of mindfulness, anchoring the mind in the present experience of viewing, and therefore confirming subjectivity - I am looking. This is precarious though, and the way we paper our environments cannot change that. Gilding, one might call it. Not in the sense of gilding the lily; more like using plastic surgery to try to fix a lack of self-esteem. Patterns can also be an entryway, like in my grandparents' bathroom, where the wallpaper's pattern became three-dimensional when I relaxed my eyes, like those Magic Eye pictures in the 90s. This non-focus might be more akin to dissociation, when perception alters to allow illusion, or delusion, or revelation. This could be a "dissolution of subjectivity,"[1] patterns leading one out of oneself. I was always able to blink hard, or shake my head, and my grandparents' bathroom wallpaper would return to the flat plane it had been before. Maybe I was lucky. Make your luck now. Move at your own pace and in your own patterns across the surface of a remembered wallpaper from childhood, or from your home, or a film. Try to recall its patterns, and the pattern of your looking. Don’t look at mine yet, just see the remembered patterns sprawling, as the paper takes on its various roles: characters both benign and otherwise, stage or backdrop or context, and at times - "but I must not think about that."[2] Use the paper as a point of focus - hold onto it, and dissociation might be avoided. Listen: my song will bring you round again. Now look at my wallpaper. Dive. [1] Wells, S. K., (2009). ‘”Another world,/its walls are thin”: psychosis and Catholicism in the texts of Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman’. PhD thesis, University of Warwick [2] Perkins Gilman, p.24
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |