When you feel you have a response, trust it

It has a meaning.

This book has come back to me, requesting that I step off the linear track of always trying to move forward/make space for emergent newness/surprise myself, and instead spiral back. To look again, perhaps more spaciously this time, to see what I might have missed the first time round.

It’s June, 2021. I’ve prised myself out of my Covid-fog and have managed to get myself to the island of Lismore, on the west coast of Scotland. It’s idyllic. I’m in a tiny cottage on the edge of a sea loch, looking out at the light shifting across the water. Sitting at the large window cut into walls so thick that my new sketchbook and all my little pots of paint can be spread out beneath it, with plenty of room to spare.

I haven’t made any paintings for weeks.

You just have to start, I say to myself. Do something, do anything.

I try to open myself to all aspects of what’s around me; the smell of the woodsmoke which has lodged itself into every pore of the rough-painted stone walls; the sound of oyster catchers outside, the feel of the rough floorboards under my bare feet. I push back the voices waiting to criticise me for the supposedly pedestrian nature of this looking at the world with a pen in my hand. I take a step.

I start to feel the people who have lived in this cottage, stretching back hundreds of years; walking across the stone threshold, going down to the stony beach, cooking on a simple stove. Bracing against the bitter winds in winter, when the view of the water would be obscured by low-lying cloud, and the darkness was complete by 4pm.

…and through all the human times the grass kept sending up its shoots, birds sailed on the wind, eating carrion, tending to their young, swept up dead on the shore, and the light never stopped changing.

It’s a start. I try not to judge what has come.

I’ve brought a book with me.

It tugs at me, asking to be read, but when I start reading bits of it I feel a little uneasy. It’s about directly interfacing with, or indeed perceiving one’s own inextricable entanglement with, the deepest layers of the world. This is what so captivated me about the Kogi people living in the high Andes, who made two films with the BBC (1990, 2012). In the second film the Kogi said they were speaking again in order to tell us that they could feel that the earth was beginning to die as a direct result of our actions.

The book talks about how you can experience the world when you lessen the ‘sensory gating’ which prevents us from being overwhelmed with intolerable amounts of stimulation from our environment. I’m not sure I want this. I am already far too permeable.

I skip most of the early chapters, being up to speed on complexity and emergence. Then I get to chapter 12, ‘Following Golden Threads’.

He’s talked in the previous chapter about what he calls the ‘feeling sense’, which I struggle to grasp. He explains the mechanisms by which the brain takes the raw materials of perception and turns them into something meaningful which can then be stored as memory. It seems that perceiving something is not simply a matter of perception at all, but involves linking what you perceive to stored memories that help you to make sense of what you’re perceiving.

This process, he suggests, acts as filter which screens out the reality of how the world actually is. With attention though, you can learn to understand a bit about how your own filter works.

As you spend more time with this kind of sensing, your own unique forms of representation will become familiar to you. You’ll tend less then to mistake the representation for the thing itself.

Feeling the world brings the natural synaesthetic experience of the world back into conscious experience.

…your brain is creating a metaphorical representation of the perception from your store of memories and experiences… Just as musicians can’t exactly describe the feeling impact of particular aspects of song texture, it is not easily possible to capture feeling perceptions in language.

It’s possible, but it takes a lot of work and much time to escape the necessity for metaphor, years of time.

The sensory gestalt holds within it the essential meanings that belong to that feeling experience, and, with work, you can begin to extract those meanings in a more consciously usable form.

This kind of sensory perception can be used with everything in the world, including plants and ecoranges. It is the way that natural scientists such as Goethe and Barbara Mclintock learned so much about the world around them.

But to truly learn such deep truths about the world you must go even deeper, you must learn how to follow golden threads.

I’m pretty lost at this point (and not only because I have no idea what an ecorange is). I start to feel my brain slipping away from me, but he’s given me two specific and at the same time totally elusive ideas; the idea of the feeling sense, and the idea of following golden threads.

I don’t know what any of it means, but, accustomed as I am to sallying out with only half a notion about whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing, I attempt to give the ideas some room.

I try let the island come through me onto the pages of my sketchbook, without asking any questions.

The feeling dimension that is inside all visual phenomena.

Reclaiming the feeling sense, and developing it as a primary sensing tool, is one of the main ways to enter more deeply into the metaphysical background of the world.

The secret kinesis of the world.

How does it feel?

Things have a feeling tone to them

He describes the ‘feeling sense’ as a combination of seeing and feeling, perceived together; a kind of synaesthesia which is known to artists, writers and musicians. This is the state, he says, from which they make the art that is most likely to touch and involve their audience.

I’m not sure I know what he means, but I try to explore the idea.

I go down to the rocks outside the cottage and stare down into the water below me.

How does it feel?

Green limpet-covered, rocks underwater, weed waving down there. What do you feel? Fear, depths. A desire to swim free in three dimensions, explore under the surface. Do you like it? The vast space. Fear, no. The urge to swim in it, why?

How does it feel? Wide endless deep cold reflective enveloping beckoning.

Hard black rocks, fractured diagonal lines. Indian temple, the yellow lichen, so bright, turmeric on the image.

How does it feel? Hard, bright, timeless, reaching back. Stone. Stone carving. Time. Humans trying to relate, find their place in it.

Buhner begins his discussion of golden threads with a quote by William Stafford:

When you find you do have a response, trust it. It has a meaning. When something captures your attention in this way, trust it. Follow it home to where it lives, deep inside the world.

If you do use your feeling sense as your primary perceptual touching of the world you will encounter, from time to time, touches on your feeling/sensing that are out of the ordinary. These touches will capture your attention as nothing else in the feeling field does. From some place deep inside you will come an urge to turn toward that touching, a desire to immerse yourself in it, and to begin to follow wherever it leads. These unique touches are what the poet William Stafford called golden threads.

A movement through the doors of perception…into the metaphysical background of the world.

Registering the touch of the world upon you. I can’t get this idea out of my mind.

But then I have to leave the island. I get home to my house by the sea. I wonder what a golden thread even is.

The next day I invent a new way of continuing. I decide to open a book of Indian plays or poems at random, take a verse, and then make an image to go with it. Anything that appears or captures my interest, without asking what or why.

Oh Mango-blossom, here, I offer you to Love
Who already holds his bow firmly in his hand
May this flower be the most potent of his five flowered arrows, to aim
at the wives of men who travel far
(tosses the flower up in the air)

Kalidasa, 248

Carpeted with budding Kandali leaves
the scarlet backs of mites
that come with rain,
And new grass gleaming like shattered agate,
the ground glitters like a gorgeous woman
adorned with dark gems.

Rtusamhara

I hollow out, become a fertile field; make space for the seeds grow.

It’s only now, when I look back, that I see that the images in the book, as they unfolded, were following a golden thread (or perhaps a number of golden threads…).

I’ve been struggling to get clear about the idea of the golden thread ever since that time, but now I see it. I know this; the feeling of an inexplicable pull towards something, which is almost literally speaking to me, saying, ‘Come, come over here, look at this….’.

The Lichen Wave, image from around 1976

The lichen did it, all those years ago. The turmeric-dusted images of India spoke this language, and the red Torii arches on the way to shrines in the pine forests above Kobe in Japan.

Entrance to a shrine in Japan

I see now that this is how the artefacts began to appear in my paintings; scanning ancient images until suddenly one of them said, ‘Me! Choose me!’.

For deeper reasons than any of us can know, of all the connections that run through the world, there are certain ones that touch us more strongly, that call us, that become golden threads, that generate notitia, the attentive noticing of the soul.

The connections that touch us this way… are meant for us for reasons only the Earth will ever know.

But Buhner warns that finding and following these threads is not a simple matter:

True writers (musicians, scientists, all artists) follow; they are servants of the process, not its masters. They follow the thread where it leads and write down what they find on the journey. They are, in a sense, transcribers, and good writers know it. (But) being too purposeful… may break the thread. One must be careful not to pull too hard.

I’m going to end with Buhner’s instructions for following golden threads, which is a description of a state that most artists know intimately.

The secret to the following of golden threads is immersion in the thread through the use of the feeling sense, an immersion so deep that you forget everything else but the touch of that thread and the effort to bring it into form in the world.

movement
moving
leaves catch the
light
catch the
air

A goldfinch lands on the wire outside my window. I see it and say, ‘how beautiful!’. But if I ask myself ‘how does it feel?’, something changes. I think I get it now.

.

All indented quotes from Buhner, italic non-indented quotes from the sketchbook.

The Kalidasa verse comes from ‘Kalidasa: The Loom of Time’, 1999, Transl. Chandra Rajan, Penguin Classics

The Rtusamhara verse comes from ‘The Circle of Six Seasons’, Transl. Martha Ann Selby, Penguin Books, New Delhi