In the text titled The Transforming Stance, I have formulated the programme of ‘commonplace’ reality in art’ (1). In a series of seances conducted inside a pyramid, modelled after the Great Pyramid built by Khufu (Greek: Cheops) at Giza, I have noticed a certain puzzling effect. Dreaming inside the pyramid would fill in a certain pre-set time frame: either as a prognosis of upcoming reality or as a kind of retrospection in reverse order: first the effect and then the cause, first the results and then the beginning of the event. However, such ‘prognostic’ dreaming appears to lack the vividness characteristic of normal dreams; it also seems to unfold in real time, which in the dream assumes the form of a projection in intolerably slow motion. These two kinds of dreaming have been happening repeatedly and exclusively during the seances inside the pyramid.
While remaining sceptical about the theories regarding the pyramids as non-manmade structures, I want to draw attention to the singularity of the pyramid’s effect on the human system. Nonempirical ‘experiences’ in dreams acquire particular vividness inside the structures of this kind. It may seem that the pyramid acts either as a detector or a generator of the energy of the unconscious that we harbour inside our minds as a result of the collective experience of human race that has been repressed and removed from our individual consciousness. The process of detecting or generating this kind of energy is independent of the will of the person present inside the pyramid as an effect produced by the very geometry of the pyramid that determines its inner order. Perhaps the ‘pyramid effect’ consists in revealing our inner order and lets us realise that being immersed in consciousness we guide ourselves from the outside of our innermost being, deriving from the external material reality our conviction of the relevance of interpretations based on cause-and-effect relationships and our belief in their meaningful nature. For in fact in our deep inwardness we all live our separate lives, equipped with all the experience of the animal species that has successfully competed for survival and, through successive generations and evolutionary transformations, has not only triumphed over the unfriendly world of external materiality but also has been on the winning side in the mortal combat known as ‘the survival of the fittest’ (2).
All this may constitute the contents of our unconsciousness, our individual inwardness which gets revealed through the creative process. This personal revelation effected through art will make us aware how very lonely we are among the madding crowd. Thus, art may become a form of collective consciousness revealing the unconscious or not-yet-realised aspects. This assessment appears to bode well for the future of art; as a projection of self-awareness it articulates and brings into collective life the inexhaustible resources that are to be found in every individual.
Natalia LL, 1979
Footnotes
(1) Natalia LL: The Transforming Stance, 1972
(2) El sueno de la razon produce monstrous, F. Goya, Los Caprichos
Translated by Małgorzata Możdżyńska-Nawotka