A wealth of images comes to my mind before going to sleep, with my eyes closed. This visual stream rushes at me with force and speed. The parade, or rather the dance of the images, expresses its own tempo, cadence, and movement matrix. Extracted from an electric burst, figurative images, strident colors, and varied fonts come to me. All these elements that constitute the raw material of modern visual rhetoric mix with each other. I see juxtapositions, contrasts, transparencies, blurs, evanescences, and degradations in its cadence. Expressions fail to explain the feast of transformations I manage to witness. Sometimes, speed manifests itself as one more element of the imaginary constitution. In others, I manage to perceive the barely diluted step between one image and another. In any of these cases, the notion of time is tricky. A few minutes or no more than a quarter of an hour may pass. I know this because sometimes, driven by a frenzy, I open my eyes and write some notes like these. The reason for this is the desire to retain some qualities of the configurations that are revealed to me in that state. Although I must confess that these retention attempts translated into written language make up a particular state of the dream universe. Thus, at least two pathways or outlets for said material emerge. On the one hand, the written translation, on the other the visual persecution.
The first path is subscribed to that of a double elaboration. The first was produced by the same visual waste, while the second happens through the writing process. With the latter, something is registered and something is lost. But what is transferred to the field of the word is not pure but masked. Between the word and the image, an abyss is founded in which a cosmos fits. There are no equivalences or exchanges between word and image, only intuitions, attempts, and persecutions. In any case, poetry. For its part, what is lost becomes nutrient again for the sediments of memory. They pile up like polychrome strata, cones of ejection, and crossed sediments, forming, in short, submerged mountain ranges at the bottom of the unconscious, from which perhaps one day it will emerge now as a fossil, as a mask of a symptom. The other path, that of visual persecution, is another form of sublimation. The phases that follow this path resemble a certain degree of paranoia.
I use the disorder metaphor, not in a strictly negative sense, but in its contrived illustrative capacity. Agamben has already put the line in this regard when mentioning the relationship between image, perception, and memory. He comments that the life of images can, among other ways, manifest itself as a kind of disorder. Thus, as in certain forms of senile dementia, there is a forgetfulness of the image, in disorders such as paranoia or delusion, the image can be persecutory. It is present even with closed eyes. It is evident that, between the dream world, paranoia, and delirium, there are parallels, similarities, and bridges. We could concede that the paranoid-critical method proposed by Dalí falls under this category. Following this principle, we could estimate sensitivity to perceive objectual links coming from images, including, of course, certain visual persecution, following images, as an ability. Images that persist and refuse to perish. Thus, those images that are revealed as persecutory objects seek a material outlet, they insist on it. As Dalí explains, the force of the image is imposed in such a way that it will probably not cease until it embodies a body. The possession of a body is for the image its alchemy and conquest. By demanding a body to inhabit, the persecutory image will impose its energy and vigor through dream manifestations. For this reason, in the same creative act, a kind of reverie occurs in which a delicate delirium is present.
Let’s take the example of Henry Darger that Agamben proposes. Plunged into the far reaches of the realms of the unreal, Darger is suspended in delusional limbo, also known as a creative act. His colossal writing is more like attentive dictation imposed by an external voice. His visual production, also monumental, seems to have responded to another voice. Both that voice and the images it emanated had to be given a body and Darger offered his own. The voice or voices no longer came from outside but from within. His own vocal cords vibrated in the service of a greater impulse. Darger gave voice and body to a delirious, persecutory image. Isolated from everything and everyone, without contact with media such as radio, television, or cinema, Darger gave himself completely to those unreal realms. He himself constituted a means to shape an overwhelming and overflowing imagination, almost like the trance of the old vate or fortune teller, closer to poetic frenzy than to the orthopedics of the discipline. Henry Darger’s was a pure imagination (within its own confines), self-sufficient to unfold and fulfill a kind of autogenesis, a monad suspended in delicate agitation of insistence. Darger’s images already existed before possessing a body, they only required a voice and a form, a body to ensure their transcendence. Thus, Darger’s creative act was also an act of resurrection. It was to bring to life a dead material, small scraps and remains of other lives, other meats. Darger delved into the dumps of color, in the recycling of lines, and in the cemeteries of images to apply the technique of resurrection to them. He did not hesitate to tear apart, break, tear, or destroy to restore life to an image. There is no room for respect for rules and regulations in that frenzy. The only follow-up that is carried out is indicated by the vital momentum of the demand. There is no place for the prudence of proportions, nor temples to balance. But this does not remove the title of tightrope walker, because he finds and maintains a good sense of dissonance and stridency by force of insistence. In his babelic volumes, the dimensions overflow, the figures are disproportionate, the lines are interrupted and the color is degraded. It is the festival of iconoclasm. There is a parallel between Darger’s realms of the unreal and the gates of reverie. The images manifest themselves and demand attention, they ask to be restored to the real world, to abandon their phantasmagorical state, and to possess a body. They shake the imagination and the universe of visions that take place when the eyelids fall as necessary. The images manifest themselves and demand attention, they ask to be restored to the real world, to abandon their phantasmagorical state, and to possess a body. They shake the imagination and the universe of visions that take place when the eyelids fall as necessary.
The images that are revealed to me before I sleep are impalpable iridescences, but they are not without tact for this. They are delicate scales that overlap each other to conquer color palettes that you would not have thought of while awake. These images seem to gravitate over me like an incandescent mist, at times intelligible and at times clear and transparent thanks to the brief flashes of my consciousness as a refraction effect. They are all things without cause or meaning, pure primitive excitement akin to the discovery of figuration among the flickering shadows of a prehistoric cavern. Soft glow of a metempsychotic experience in which thoughts lose meaning and have no place or participation. Perhaps the only thing that appears in intellectual matters is the hope of deciphering how to bring the savored charm of reverie to reality as if I were anticipating the instrumental machination driven by the frantic desire to record memory and to conquer the art of return. Submerged in those throbbing and trembling apparitions, I become a spectator and guardian of my commotion. All these images will come to constitute materials for subsequent creation, I know. But at that moment I allow myself to be dragged by them towards the depth of their exorbitant cadence under the soporific effect due to the speed of all time gathered at that precise moment. When I close my eyelids it is as if I were folding the curtains of my body. After the imaginary frenzy another curtain falls, my consciousness abandons me, and I plunge into a deep sleep.