To begin the term we are doing a creative 'object lesson' exercise where we choose an object and then develop an idea. I picked a postcard which is a photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins, The Courtyard of the mental hospital run by the Edhi Foundation, Karachi, Pakistan, 1997
I picked this out at random from the box but I was drawn to it as I liked the 'windows' into the images - the image is obviously through a fence or wall and it gives these small insights into the place and through the windows you can see more of these little window squares on the opposite wall. Funnily enough, I was browsing Daniel Paul Schreber's 'Memoirs of My Nervous Illness' as I was thinking about the mental patients who stared into the sun, Bataille wrote about this and this idea that the mental patient is actually experiencing the sacred and the profane. In Visions of Excess, Bataille describes how a young embroider and painter in his spare time, 'stared at the sun, and, receiving its rays the imperative order to tear off his finger' (Bataille 1985:61) the man proceeded to rip his finger off with his teeth, apparently the man had consumed a large amount of rum and cognac the night before and was obsessed with the Van Gogh story that he cut off his ear and then sent it to a prostitute. I consider this and the work of performance artist Ron Athey who also played with the dichotomy of pain/pleasure, madness/sanity and perhaps thinking further that what looks like sanity is perhaps the ultimate madness.
After reminding myself further of Schreber's madness where has created an entire system in which he has constructed an alternate reality; 'The complicated, mythic universe that Schreber in his captivity [the mental assylum] created - an affair of rays and miracles, upper and lower gods, souls and soul murder, voices of nerve language, struggles against the 'order of the world' - concerned itself with issues of reality and unreality, identity and fusion, power and passivity' (Schreber 2000:xix from the Introduction by Rosemary Dinnage). Schreber anted to record his madness. his system and I like this idea of a diary. Above, in the original image we see small windows into life, in the mental hospital, a face, a foot, a torso lying on the ground. A diary is also like this, just small windows into days where the diarist feels like or feels compelled to write.
Therefore, when I was lying in the dark after work today, it came to me what I wanted to do to honour this object that has been bestowed upon me. I will write a small diary, a novellette, an extract, this will be called: 'Geständnisse aus meinem inneren Bewusstsein' (Confessions from my inner consciousness)
Example/draft text:
8th January 2024
The year begins with a yawning, I don't mean a hole, I simply mean gähnende langeweile (yawning boredom). I wake but always want to be awake, I want to not be consumed with the nonsense that takes up my time and does nothing to revive, refresh, excite, and enthrall me. I look out onto the bitter cold and damp of the English day and imagine waking in France to maybe the same cold in January, but I will look out and there will be a crisp sky and sun whose light is so different in colour to the light of the sun here, there is a warmth the Charantaise sun, a beauty, as it lays its rays upon my bare thighs, I am enlivened, restored.
I will write the diary at the weekend and add this first small project to this post when I have completed it....
My little book is now complete and I have made this on Blurb..please find the link here: Confessions from my inner consciousness
Bataille G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Schreber D.P. (2000) Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, New York Review of Books, New York
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