https://videos.files.wordpress.com/16IX9Gat/istock-1297556231-1.mp4
Marrying diagnosis with the descriptive births a discourse that’s combustible, and situates disease in the unconventionally hedonistic arms of art. It’s wetly warm, there, proving a welcome break from the clinical, trades scalpel for symbol, hedges against the new normal of WebMD gerrymandering for something with claws. It seizes the philosophical and feels at home there; this kinship breeds an ecosphere primed for optimizing art’s utilities as vehicle for further exploration into the cure (if there is one) and prescription (expression).
When I talk about expression I speak to the container of Recovery’s. One summer, after a particularly bad 6 months that had left me cognitively overwhelmed and recovering from severe depression, I spent June and July balled up on the back porch of my parent’s house with a 200 page Complex PTSD workbook. I was understudying to be a teacher at the time, and had assigned myself daily pages to complete. I coupled this with regular thirty-minute massage sessions that I could barely afford (but somehow, rather ungracefully did) and somatic healing practices I worked through alone at home. It felt like buzzy balls of energy lifting from my thighs. I would lie there wetly and breathing; breaking the firm, displeasurable ground of inherited brokenness.
It was tentative work. This restoration, those insights, shyly initiating certain pathways to a particularly dense knowledge, culminated in private healing procedures that became pleasurable, despite the severe mental stress and blown-to-bits shreds of a life I’d all but effectively abandoned. These tools, coupled with expressive writing sessions, saved my life for a time and restored portions of my memory that had been compromised for years.
With the surreal, we’re accessing the acute hope of renewal through the violence of symbolism. I’m no artist, only an appreciator, but to me, surrealism’s about wresting the injury (oftentimes psychic) from the activity of art-making through backstory.
What attracts me most is surrealism’s flirtation with simplicity and archetype: maid, mother, crone, or, the body part as jumping off point for a deeper study on avoidance. In surrealist art, I seek pieces embracing reduced definition, healthy helpings of conceptual reverberation, no feathers or frills, all spirit, some spit.
We hide our pain in our tissues, skip stones shallowly over damaging life events in rote capacities because we’re that good at forgetting to unburden. Under Surrealism’s treatment, the stone becomes the head, and its ritual rolling becomes clear metaphor for cyclical health and its patterns of pathology marked by year and stages of gut health.
In Deep Gratitude,
Mary B.
losing our grip on purpose 