SUSANNA RUEBSAAT, PhD
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding. (1)
Not long after my vision loss, I went to an unfamiliar city. I wondered if extending myself into the unknown in this manner would bring me some insight into the equally uncharted terrain of my blindness. Where was I? Inside or outside of myself? Was this blackness surrounding me or in me? I needed to extend this dark interiority so that I might discover its seed, the deep intention psyche held for me. I wanted to twist into the inside/outside polarization itself.
I had previously taken for granted my ability to stride into the landscape in front of me so blindly while still fully sighted. Now I was entering this gap between the intention and extension my experimentation with the unknown presented to me: the very liminality of my own subjectivity. I needed to leap into this mythopoetic landscape in order to close this gap, ironically, by entering into it. Here I was like a liminal activist wanting to shape symbolic processes into embodied images I could see. So I felt for my camera.
The camera is a small symbolic version of the vessel of transformation, that vas in alchemy. The body and lens of the camera operate much like a mythopoetic inquiry—holding images inside its dark body and transforming them into pictures. I knew the camera would surely be the trusty friend it had been for so long while I was fully sighted. My intention was to see, even if my eyes could no longer do this in a manner I was accustomed to.
Susanna Ruebsaat PhD, BCATR, RCC, RCC-ACS is a registered art therapist and clinical counselor, supervisor, and doctoral mentor at City University who has been in practice for 25 years. She has a background in Jungian theory and practice and is also interested in further exploring Existential Psychoanalysis in its endeavour to engage rather than fear the unknown, understanding the unknown as the necessary condition for creativity.
She has one book published: “Mourning the Dream/Amor Fati. An Illustrated Mythopoetic Inquiry” and is working on her second: “I Myself am a Dream. Growing Down into Our Mythological Roots”.
She writes: “Our demons hold, as do our dreams, deep pools of our archetypal life to be reflected upon. Archetypal would include ancestral. If we can be with our own hauntings those of other people might seem less ferocious.
1. Lao Tsu
I am in a process of transformation.
I can let go.
Kinds of Dreaming
(charcoal and colour photography)
The Creative Process and Personal Aesthetic: The Link
The creative process is very much linked to what might be called our personal aesthetic. Our aesthetic has to do not only with what we like or appreciate, what we think of as beautiful for example, but with the very way we do things. Every movement, gesture and decision is intricately connected to our aesthetic. Like our fingerprint, our personal aesthetic leaves its unique mark on everything we touch.
Exploring the nature of our aesthetic by looking at the more obvious patterns of how we do things, what we value, as well as the kinds of decisions we make on a consistent basis, can be a revealing and insightful process. If we more closely examine these patterns we may also recognize a kind of order that is operating beneath our conscious volition. This is the order of our aesthetic, the guiding principle that operates behind the scenes shaping our physical and psychic realities.
Our aesthetic is the creator of those realities, in a sense, as it determines the shape, colour, dimension and feeling tone of experience. It is what determines the form the creative process will take:
• what colour a certain shape will become,
• what quality of line will hold a particular movement,
• what gesture will contain a certain sentiment,
• what word will best explain a thought,
• what expression will be offered any given emotion, and
• what decision will evolve out of a certain set of circumstances.
These are the ‘properties’ so to speak, offered by our aesthetic to give form and substance, and expression to the raw material of our experience.
Our aesthetic allows us to communicate who we are and what we experience in a way unique and particular to us. It offers us its tools of expression so that we might freely engage the creative process and fulfill that very human imperative to be fully ourselves.
One particular way to explore, or examine, the aesthetic and at the same time incite the creative process, is to engage those very properties of the aesthetic; through colour, line, shape, movement, and word, we create images that trans-form our aesthetic naturally into concrete expression through the process of art making.
Our aesthetic is Psyche’s gift in how to make our way through the inner and outer encounters of life and move towards Beauty.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats 1918