When you close your eyes, what do you see? What do you hear? Where does your focus go? While this of course varies with each passing day, I’m beginning to notice a landscape that is not often peered into, one that shapes everything we think or do but one that also sits, as truly as the word can imply, in darkness – our internal landscape.
But what does this landscape look like? If we were to picture our internal world, what would be there? Would there be castles? Do we see sages debating our thoughts over a glass of fine liquor? Or would it look more like an apocalypse – uncontrolled thoughts ideas and beliefs falling as lava or a dragon’s breath on our humble ideas and dreams?
I suspect that there is quite a great deal in the idea of our internal reality as understood as mirroring our external one, but I should probably speak a little about the idea immediately proceeding the one that spawned today’s post. I’ve been reviewing as of late all of the things that have gone into making me me, here today with everything that I have and everything that I don’t. As I reviewed the literature that I have been lucky enough to consume, my mind stumbled across the Hannibal Lecter series by Thomas Harris (great reads, please do if you haven’t). Say what you will about Hannibal Lecter, but even if you’ve only seen the movies there’s something about the way his mind works that borders on inspiring. I’m not advocating cannibalism, but I will advocate the way he is portrayed, more specifically the way that he is written throughout the books. Supremely likeable, and perhaps the only character ever written with such perfect control of not only his faculties but those of the others around him, he controlled his world to a degree that only Anthony Hopkins at his finest (sorry, ahem, Sir Anthony Hopkins) could even attempt to portray. For the record Mr. Hopkins, whose given first name is Phillip, won just about every best acting award possible that year and I think he earned every one of them.
Digression complete, the feature of Hannibal Lecter that was simply so striking to me was the way that his mind was arranged. I forget if this was his exact term, but anytime things got tough or if he had to retreat from the world he would go to his mental library. This library wasn’t just a catalogue of information; it was a site to behold. More then one page is spent simply on description of its features – the soaring columns, the staircase to second floor, the sections lovingly arranged with each idea; each artifact in his mind is there, in the most vivid color. His ideas, memories and experiences were not merely things floating about in his mind; they were items that had substance. Items that he could pick up, could smell the paper and the ink, could feel the binding, and could touch the experience as though it was a sculpture. He also mentions his intense distress when he was unable to reach that place, when he found his library in crumbling demise (thanks to drugs his captors were using, but that’s the teaser, check it out).
This library then was not merely a convenient way of classification and order – it was a center of comfort and security, the bastion that he could always retreat to until he understood the answer, a place truly his. Now contrast that with what I imagine is the typical state of our minds, feelings and sensations – messy, chaotic. Control, understanding, beauty, architecture of our own design are not words that would typically be banded about, and are, if not rare, at least uncommon enough to leave ourselves less than jumping at the chance to dig into what’s going on when we’ve shut out ourselves from everything else.
How much more likely would we be to look inside if instead of a noisy mind, anxiety other distraction we actually had something to look at, something to touch, something to feel with our fingers instead of our racing heart. How much more likely would we be to address what’s holding us back if it had form, and features?
I know it may sound a touch daft to think of your issues of jealousy as a horrendous beast or you’re greatest moments as movies in a theatre that we can visit when we want to relax, but is it any more absurd to attempt to tell ourselves to just calm down when we are overwhelmingly affright? Just putting a form to these features makes them more known, and thus more able to be dealt with. I’m not longer just feeling the rosy glow of the moment I feel in love, I can see the way the colors became more vivid in the world, touch the coffee table as it felt. In this way you can more easily separate your internal world into distinct areas, exhibits and features to be interacted with, not just accepted as inevitable.
Once the “stuff” is given in form it should be placed in a landscape, for nothing happens unconnected to everything else. This landscape can be whatever furthers understanding best, but until you have a grounding for the things that make you tick how can you hope to shape them as you wish, make them truly your own?
Mine is forming more definitely all the time as this idea sinks more deeply into mind, and I can say without reservation that certain places are beautiful, some are as filled with mines as the Demilitarized Zone, and there are plenty of interesting critters behind glass at the facilities in the Lab. But no place in this ever forming land is unconnected to anything else. The ground is paved with the similarities that link my desires, the fields soft and green with my memories of comfort happiness, the specific good times to be dug up from the earth when needed and wanted.
The representations are endless, and the comparisons can obviously be as cheeky or profound as we wish and it may be that ultimately it’s a silly way to try to operate with what’s going on when we have just ourselves, but I pulled more than enough interest out of the idea to share. We all have things we need to deal with, and all have issues that we seem to not have the tools to resolve; it is with these problems that sometimes a fresh and perhaps initially silly approach is exactly the poke in the head to wake us up and get us back on our right track. Personally, while looking from the cliffs of my understanding I’m going to go stare across the sea a bit a more – maybe handpick a bunch of dandelions and lilacs and float them out to the waves and hope that what comes back are the answers…
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