a meditation on disassociation

I would like to revise this and turn it into a sort of essay on craft, and perhaps submit it to a journal. So I’m very interested to see what artists and non-artists alike have to say about it. Please comment. Help start a dialogue.

It is impossible to disassociate entirely. We look at a plastic bottle of soda with a red label and white strip of text and think, “Coca-Cola.” A rug of green stretched over the land beckons to be called “grass.” Regardless of our language we are aware of the sign, the representative symbol in front of the object. Because we know these things it is unnatural to separate their form from our  label for them.

An artist, a writer, a poet, must learn to disassociate. He must look at the world with fresh eyes, create image and metaphor, investigate the deeper nature of things. He must try to see the image behind the label, the actuality behind the sign post. What is this specific grass like? What is its nature, its qualities, both in its universality and its uniqueness?

In daily life many people use external supplements to disassociate. We drink, we do drugs, to disassociate things from other things, and ourselves from ourselves. Once, many lives ago, I sat high on mushrooms on a balcony bar in Thailand that overlooked an incredible beach. I looked at the white table where my water was sitting, and it was no longer a “table” but a form—a legged creature, a white spider perhaps, with a piece of flat, painted wood laid on top that just so happened to perfectly hold my drink. The spilled neon paint on the table that I had noticed when I walked into the bar sober were now explosions of colors, sky colors, cloud colors, sand and jungle and star colors. At the time I realized that for a moment I had disassociated the table from everything I had ever known about ‘tables’ and from the word itself. But while I had gotten away from the names, the signs, the labels of the colors, while I had looked at the ‘table’ anew in a sense, I was still associating with things I knew—the table with spider, the colors with sky, cloud, sand, jungle.

To disassociate entirely would be like reverting to the day you were born, it would be like falling into an abyss where everything is unknown and new. It would lead to madness.

But we needn’t rely on destructive elixirs or plunge into the depths of insanity to achieve the effects of disassociation. We can easily walk into a supermarket and begin dancing as though we are in a club. We can discover the new and unreal by consciously breaking our habit-actions in order to challenge ourselves, to disorient ourselves, to experience ‘newness’ hidden in what we already know. To do this is to make poetry out of life, to make the surreal a reality. This in many ways has been the job of the artist, in that it is linked with metaphor, and the job of the spiritual teacher, in that it is linked with an intense presence, self-awareness, and a desire to uplift the Now.

Travel is another means to potentially disorient and force ourselves to live with disassociation. In a foreign land we observe a strange fruit we’ve never seen and have no name for. We cannot lazily rely on our symbols. If we are to describe it, even just to process it, we must look at it fresh, we must create metaphor, and by doing so even the most layman among us become poets. In a sense, our ignorance becomes our strength.

One of the reasons poets such as Rimbaud and Kerouac’s work is so passionate, vibrant, alive, and new is not only because they were disorienting themselves through drugs and drink, but because they constantly traveled (in reality and in the imagination) and forced themselves to describe the foreign, the strange, the unknown, and especially in Rimbaud’s case, the unreal.

But most of us have a natural tendency to associate, to orient ourselves wherever we are. Before we travel we scan guidebooks to find the best things to see and do. The more diligent among us study up on a country’s history and its present state, perhaps we even study the local language. When we arrive we open up our maps and make mental notes of landmarks because we are afraid of getting lost. We use our research and our wits and whole lifetime of experience to give things names.

But what few of us consider the beauty and utility of being lost? Of being in a strange place where words are only sounds and objects have no names, at least not known to us. This newness, this strangeness can be invaluable for a writer because each moment tests his abilities of description—how will he convey the place and the feel within the place without relying on the usual signs?

Paradoxically, however, the very act of writing, of explaining, of translating, begins to orient the writer or artist, whereas the non-artist can explore the full possibilities of disassociation without ever coming up for air.  And why is disassociation useful for the non-artist? Because through discomfort it heightens his presence, and through exposure to difficult/uncomfortable situations, he is challenged and often times surprised and rewarded. It also enables this non-artist to transcend the normal, the mundane, the commonplace—something invaluable to many individuals in today’s world.

And, because if the non-artist finds a way to articulate this place he immediately becomes, even without being aware of it, a poet.