Motivated by a suspicion that I may be in the throes of an affective disorder...again...I took a simple online personality disorder test and this was the result:
Disorder | Rating
Paranoid: Very High
Schizoid: Moderate
Schizotypal: High
Antisocial: High
Borderline: Very High
Histrionic: High
Narcissistic: High
Avoidant: Very High
Dependent: High
Obsessive-Compulsive: High
(URL of the test: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv)
Though not meant to be diagnostic in any way, I still wanted to find what kind of questions are asked to poke into the structure, however shifting, of the persona. But I've always known I am a functional, often articulate, crazy person. Just what kind of crazy, is what I'd like to know.
While I have always felt that my person is often divided in some way and that somehow a shadow-self looms every now and then behind my awareness and will, I never thought this was a serious matter until I gave this alterego its own space and its own time to take over. Often in the form of active imagination, the Other writes, draws and makes sculptures. We always had a symbiotic relationship, this Other. Then it dawned on me that perhaps this Other and what I consider my Ego are just parts of a complex of the Psyche - and there are even more. They are not evil, these "Others", only occluded, endarkened, inchoate.
Almost unaware of its processes of manifestation, I am now suspicious that I have been giving life to these primal selves, these disincarnate souls that are not necessarily me, but use the facility of empathy to gain access and take possession. I have used the word "channelling" before, and now more than ever, more urgently than before, I can feel presences that are nearby, or within, ready to take over and find expression and manifestation.
Even as some claim that there are no haunted places only haunted people, I am suspect that I am indeed haunted. Or "open", whatever the case may be. Have you ever felt like being watched? I do, all the time. Ever since I was a boy I can feel these watchers around me. Often I catch a glimpse of them, but when I do relax my perceptual set, they appear. Oh boy, do they appear all right. The only other artist I know who indulged in this type of creative-psychic process was William Blake, who was reported to have even resorted to "psychic portraiture", that is he painted ghosts. (including that weird Ghost of a Flea).
I make it no secret that the forms that my sculptures take come from acknowledgments of these disincarnate presences, as they appear to me in dreams and in active, free imagination processes, others from hallucinatory episodes (not drug induced in any way). For five years now I have thought of this as an interesting creative process that I can use as a strategy for iconographic purposes. Now, it begins to take a life of its own in my everyday life. So thus comes the paranoia and the urgency to understand: what is this?
This "ability" has several precedents. My mother's side of the family is known for its share of mediums, which includes MY mother. Also that side is also known to have schizophrenics, quacks and dozens of grandaunts and granduncles who practice some form of witchcraft, indigenous or syncretic Filipino nature religion. Filipinos think this ability can be inherited. So can personality disorders. Did I just involuntarily open myself to this latent genetic "gift" by giving it expression in my sculptural work? (Example: my first public work, Ines Canoyan which stands in front of the sea in Ilocos Norte was provoked by a vision of a diaphanous fishwife at the same beach during a summer twilight.)
It can be amusing to see where this takes me. Only that I fear "getting lost" and somehow dissolved, in that pool, deep pool of phenomena that can lead to the suspension of self. I had a grandaunt who disappeared for 18 years this way. She literally spoke with "mermen" and she was gone and came back smelling of brine and the sea two decades later, with wild stories of how she was abducted by these mythical creatures. I had also another granduncle who lost consciousness after an illness and he was presumed dead and in the locano custom, laid out in a bier without embalming, for some days. During the wake, he suddenly "resurrected" and asked for water. Then he regaled his cortege with a strange tale of a journey to distant lands to seek out his children and friends (who were abroad). Ironically, after his thirst was quenched, he went back and did pass away, for real. Many many times did I find myself like my Lolo, sleeping and dreaming and journeying, only to come back to tell strange tales.
Or has the choice been made for me? Am I not really in the middle of this transition - am I not already performing mediumship in the form of art? In a certain way, I feel this is so, and that I may have just created the psychic anchor, so to speak, (or the Silver Cord, as Edgar Cayce used to say) in meditation exercise of prajna, supra awareness.
Having said that, art for me turns from form and tradition, to an open space. It is, first of all, a stage where the possible - all that is possible and creative - can be performed and shown to the public without the entanglements of any bias, ideology, etc. Art is the only open space for the public and personal dimensions for encounters. I understand this now, more than ever, having seen the eagerness of the artists of New York to find that space and that sense of display and performance. Not to mention the aggression and the will to fight for freedom, precarious freedom to express.
I feel much better now, having articulated these thoughts. Perhaps I am really haunted. But that is the starting point of what I can offer.
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