Hyperassociation - Genius Loci and pondering aesthetics

Hyperassociation

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” 

    -- Bertolt Brecht.

 

In my practice of building up the ability to imagine by various practice there came a point where the action of actively trying to produce things to imagine was offset by a desire to think of a subject and allow for my imagination to itself then generate an accompanying image. Simply put then it is rather than say "I want to imagine what an apple looks like" I would instead prefer that I think "it is tasty" and see what is brought into my imagination. A discussion of cultivating this aspect is here which ties into Buddhist philosophy with the activity of "mindfulness". I think it is interesting to segregate the regular discourse of mental activity which typically, from my own experience, prescribes that something should be thought about (imagined) with the notion of turning this slightly around on it's head and instead letting the imagination promote the subject of thought with a modicum of mental guiding force from your own conscious impetus to spark things off.

So then building up from previous practice of extending the abilities of the imagination I proceeded through my day to continue the practice. After some time I became adapted to imagining people in their spaces and their doings. For me, the focus of my category of imagining was concerned with two subjects "human effort" and "impermanence". In the first subject of human effort it meant that I looked upon the world during my day, such as standing at a train station and would look at the brickwork and think about how teams of people would build these great structures for the benefit of all, how they would be paid (probably not well) but how proud they would be to see people using and relying on what they have built and how it would be a respected achievement amongst those they met to have done so. I would look a passing graveyards and remind myself that if anything could be sure it is that they would have wished for their children and the people of the future to experience more love in the world and that we would all be working together to build a better future for all. (This sounds like hippie-stuff - and it is - but the whole point was to try to look for universal qualities that I could apply to as much of my interpretation of my experience as possible). All the while I would imagine how these builders building a train station perhaps a century ago and what their world would have been like and the others they depended on their achievements and accomplishments and the effort they too would be proud of to put into the world.

The second case of "impermanence" is one category of thought to be mindful of that I found quite useful from my studies of Buddhism. I would say that the Persian adage "This too shall pass" is an appropriate categorisation of this notion (Or at least, the decay half more than the arising half). It is a useful thing to bear in mind as a way of categorising things because we generally tend to observe a lot of things around us as static and relatively unchanging but when we bear in mind things like "the only constant is change" and "all is in flux" it helps us break these notions that we hold that are well worn-in. When we stand in the train station observing the brickwork we can observe the fact that these bricks hadn't been there before, were fashioned from rocks mined from the side of a mountain, brought together by human effort only for at some point to either be replaced by another brick or structure or otherwise consigned to be destroyed eventually by nature.

 

There is a tendency for us to look upon things as static in such a way that we ignore the why and how they got there and probably can be chalked up to our familiarity with various things and of course the ever-present fact that you're cursing that the train is late so you won't make your meeting on time. That's not to say we should forego our responsibilities and dream of quarries but rather just to point out the notion that we simply disregard a lot of our experience as flat, uninteresting and not worth consideration so it becomes akin to being flat and mostly invisible to whatever other important matters at hand. It stands to reason that by examining the world around us through this lens of knowing that all things change and so categorising them within our extrapolations of the motivations and human effort and so forth that we actually teach ourselves a kind of ontological framework that can serve us to help understand the beginnings and goings on of other environments that we find ourselves in. Something that I might offer to term a kind of understanding of the "genus loci" of places.

I spent some time living in a Nordic country and for me, this meant that there were actual seasons where snow often blanketed the cities and the landscape for months. As I spent some years there I noticed that structures which seemed normally to stick out as odd within the city or countryside took on meaning when the seasons changed. Their purpose being to help the citizens in getting around or potentially for recreation. An artificial wooden constructed ski-slope stood out like some mysterious purposeless thing during the summer months but obviously served the purpose of recreational facility during the winter time. I had a moment of insight where it then occurred that I understood how to visualise an outdoor setting in those snowy months with much more realistic characteristics than I previously had before I first spent the time living there. In essence, my mind had built this understanding without the conscious consent. It had organised this category of understanding and application purely by drawing on my experience.

As I remembered this concept I applied it in such a way that I imagined then a familiar park and a central set of trees and then expanding on this I thought about how it looked during the autumn when the wind would grow and toss the grass and the leaves. How it would look like under a blanket of snow and ice and then rapidly accelerated these passing of the seasons in this mindscape faster and faster until the change became a blur and only those things that I thought characterised the scene remained. A similar effect can be observed when looking out the window of a train that begins to move and seeing the gaps between the rails of the track merge into a solid, uniform unit which gives us the impression of a solid, unchanging object. Then again, to further extend upon the visualisation one can imagine how a candle flame in the still air can look completely solid and unchanging though we know that it is constantly a different flame from one moment to the next. We see that when we sit in a forest we may choose to sit down and admire the dense forest around us but fail to recognise that all of these livings things are actually in motion, growing at different speeds... some slow like the trees, some faster like vines.... moving around to compete for sunlight, crawling up trees and so on. Or you might travel India and decide to use "that funny looking shop with the sun-bleached blue sign in Hindi hanging over a small veranda that sells phones" to be an appropriate landmark to leave your motorbike before realising that you'll never again find it because they are everywhere... but I digress.

    "We sit together, the mountain and me,
    until only the mountain remains."

    -- Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain -- By Li Bai.

 

There is the possibility that most of course find certain things beautiful or iconic about the changing of the seasons. If you cast your mind back to childhood perhaps there was a time that you painted or wrote an essay or poem about such an event. You could potentially picture a familiar park in the autumn with trees losing their leaves beside a collection of downed trees that were put into stacked logs and behold the beauty of the scene but be forgiven for not including the contemplation that these are dying things, being the corpses and shedding bodies of once living things that are an example of what was once growing and thriving now subject to the grinding impermanence of nature.

The point then of the exercises to be mindful in this regard served to help me understand more about how I understood the world and was aided by the strengthening imagination that became more capable during these exercises. After a time I would be able to walk along a city street and bring to mind the passage of time and how it affected my surroundings and my imagination would build a scene in my mind's eye around me that naturally was able to paint a picture of how the structures and doings around me may have been different in their day and carried with them picturesque details of how people may have been wandering about their lives. It is this aspect of gently "asking the imagination" to build these constructs about the surroundings and to fill in the details along the categories of understanding of what has been practiced to be imagined previously that I call "hyperassociation" as it takes on that quality so that you are the director that leaves the work of producing specific mental associations and their imagery to the task of your subconscious which exhibits itself through your imagination, producing imagery through the kinds of learned association that you have taught it.

For those of you who are reading and are still looking to see where I talk about prophantasia. Believe me, we will get there. Once again I just wanted to talk about my experiences leading up to that point in a relatively well-ordered manner. Hyperassociation may or may not be useful to serve the end of producing prophantasia but as it formed an important part, from my point of view, of strengthening my imagination I include it. The subjective experience I call hyperassociation I will likely refer to to at some point or another in the future so this will serve as a reference for those who want to explore my elucidation of that experience.