Visionary Imagination

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"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

This dissertation is a brief critique on the poetry of Alexandru Mironescu from the literary, mystic-philosophical and biographical points of view, and an attempt to positioning these poems in the context of the history of the Romanian literature and of religious poetry.
poetry, faith, Parnassianism, the Creation, freedom

The Vatican pilgrim casket (sometimes referred to as the Sancta Sanctorum pilgrim
box), containing relics from the Holy Land, reveals important changes in the history of devotional art. In revisiting the increasing use since late antiquity of a linear narrative
in Christian decorations,1 the author relates the three modes of representation in and on the pilgrim casket to three concepts of time—history, memory, and vision—testifying to the establishment of a new pictorial and iconographic Christian tradition, shaped by vision- ary experiences at holy sites, favoring narrative scenes. Beginning in the sixth century, pilgrims’ reliquaries increasingly showed events from the holy sites from which the relics came, images that gained impact as a medium in themselves, as an aid to memory and/or to meditation. The author demonstrates how the visionary experiences that took place at holy sites, recorded in early pilgrim accounts, shaped these iconographic traditions.

As the global crisis deepens, we can hear increasingly strident calls to action:

“something must be done!” The power of this language to goad us into some course of desirable action is undeniable but of course the options that such imperatives generate are always familiar, rooted as they are in past experience—in other words, more of the same, taken to the extreme. A very different course of action becomes possible if we don’t merely react to this power language and, instead, slow down a bit to hear the normally hidden undertones buried within language itself..." (from the essay)

Published with audio examples in Interference: A Journal of Audio Cultures (Vol. 5, 2016):
www.interferencejournal.org/the-bright-sound-behind-the-sound/

This paper responds to a recent article by American sound artist Kim Cascone in which he asserts that the presentation of environmental recordings as ‘sonic art’ is often crucially lacking in some form of ‘soul’ or vitality. Cascone suggests that it is the responsibility of an artist working with real-world sounds to enter a more imaginative engagement than precedents within the field (and within the wider field of sonic arts in general) have historically presented. The paper briefly explores historical impulse to deprecate the importance of imagination, along with the imaginative implications of discourse around what Katharine Norman (1996) calls ‘real-world music’. From here, we explore the relationship between imagination and sound in two pieces of sonic art and argue that one response to Cascone’s call for an imaginative turn can be found within the idea of the ‘symbol’ as codified in Romantic poetic discourse (after Kathleen Raine’s reading of Coleridge). The paper explores the way in which a cultivation of an ‘imaginative perception’ can be used to elucidate such symbols in a compositional context and relates the creative and interpretive use of ‘sound-symbols’ to both Voss’ methodology of the imagination (2009) and Thomas’ multidimensional spectrum of imagination (2014).

Starting from an episode of gender violence suffered by the community of Franciscan tertiaries of Santa Maria de la Cruz de Cubas and caused by its prelates, we analyze here the denounce discourse formulated by these women in the biography of the visionary Juana de la Cruz and in her sermons. Possible change proposals in these texts are also evaluated. In order to do this, we review their concept of what the Church is and the relationship model between the sexes. The prophetic nature of this feminine discourse confers to its views an undoubted political weight.
Partiendo de un episodio de violencia de género sufrido por la comunidad de terciarias franciscanas de Santa María de la Cruz de Cubas a manos de sus prelados, se analiza aquí el discurso de denuncia que estas mujeres formularon en la biografía de la visionaria Juana de la Cruz y en sus sermones. También se valoran posibles propuestas de cambio en estos textos. Para ello, se pasa revista al concepto de Iglesia y al modelo de relación entre los sexos. El carácter profético de este discurso femenino confiere a sus planteamientos una indudable carga política.

Between the Middle Ages and modern times there was in Castile a phenomenon of feminine prophetism with great public impact. Among its main exponents are two tertiaries, the Dominican Mary of Santo Domingo and the Franciscan Juana de la Cruz. Both women incarnated the word of God in a particular way. We will analyze the communication systems that these women used to be heard trying to evaluate the weight of orality and writing in a moment of change from an oral culture to a "civilization of writing" because some important aspects of its prophetic announcement are found here.
En la transición de la Edad Media a la Moderna se dio en Castilla un fenómeno de profetismo femenino con gran repercusión pública. Entre sus principales exponentes destacan dos terciarias, la dominica María de Santo Domingo y la franciscana Juana de la Cruz. Ambas encarnaron la palabra de Dios de forma peculiar. Analizamos aquí los sistemas comunicativos que emplearon para hacerse oír intentando valorar el peso de la oralidad y de la cultura escrita en el momento de cambio de una cultura oral a una “civilización del escrito” por entender que aquí radican algunos aspectos importantes de su anuncio profético.

This paper responds to a recent article by American sound artist Kim Cascone in which he asserts that the presentation of environmental recordings as ‘sonic art’ is often crucially lacking in some form of ‘soul’ or vitality. Cascone suggests that it is the responsibility of an artist working with real-world sounds to enter a more imaginative engagement than precedents within the field (and within the wider field of sonic arts in general) have historically presented. The paper briefly explores historical impulse to deprecate the importance of imagination, along with the imaginative implications of discourse around what Katharine Norman (1996) calls ‘real-world music’. From here, we explore the relationship between imagination and sound in two pieces of sonic art and argue that one response to Cascone’s call for an imaginative turn can be found within the idea of the ‘symbol’ as codified in Romantic poetic discourse (after Kathleen Raine’s reading of Coleridge). The paper explores the...

The fifth vision of Hildegard’s Liber divinorum operum describes the earth divided in five zones: four correspond to the four principal directions and a fifth one is depicted as a zone within them. Each of these zones is considered respecting its geometrical form and the division within them. Regarding its content, the vision could have been approached by discovering the relationship between micro and macrocosms or by inquiring about the links of this hildegardian imago mundi with its possible sources or its similarities with other XIIth century imagines mundi. I preferred instead to focus on the way the vision was build, without referring as far as possible to its content and the details of the associative web based on such content. Basing on Carruthers’ work on the craft of memory, I intended to see the whole vision (that is to say, the vision, its explanation and the hexameron) as a route to be followed. In this route, I looked for steps in the way: recurrent elements or clearly highlighted elements that could be guiding the potential reader through the associational web, elements that persist throughout the vision in spite of the sometimes disparate images that lead from one explanation to another. Those elements, I proposed, were a chart for the reader and probably for the composer as well.

Blake spoke of the visionary imagination. And such visions are not otherwordly; they appear imminently, close-up and intimate, transfiguring the world all around us to reveal presences ensouled, gazing back at us, witnessing us! Poets and mystics have all experienced such revelatory epiphanies, from Keats, to Rumi, to Yeats, to San Juan de la Cruz.

Well, a humble, unassuming red pepper was the place in which object became angel became Nuestra Senora de La Ensalada con Sagrada Corazon de la Pimienta/Our Lady of the Salad with the Sacred Heart of Pepper!

Here is an excerpt from the Sacred Heart of this essay:

"Here a creative writer is seeing 'through' not 'with' his eyes, and works the deforming, liberating, creative, and revelatory dream-like bricolage work of poiesis, of poetic imagination-making. Cartesian thinking cut soul away from the previous trinity of mind, soul, and matter, and imaginal perception has been cut away along with it. Ego stuffed in itself all captured Id, all primary processes of the imagination; image was converted to abstractions and universalizing, imperializing reason. Jung described the psyche, or soul, as essentially image, imagination with feeling, thinking, spirit, and body all together. Indigenous cultures around the world had and have an understanding of soul each in their own way, but the dominant tradition in the West truncated the psyche. And as Al Pacino’s character in the movie, The Scent of a Woman, said, 'There’s nothing like an amputated soul!'

So the angels have had their wings clipped and shipped away in boxcars of abstracted, literal language. The angelology of words has been sentenced and imprisoned in blunt and basic, jargonized, nominal words that are efficient, productive, but don’t heal or inspire. The love arising between Amor and Psyche is sentenced to sentences that only answer basic needs but are unable to hear, speak to, or answer the soul with love.

In the same manner, the world, once experienced as alive and ensouled, became dead and objectified, turned into 'natural resources.'”