Alligator Lizards in the Air
Not just the America song
for the last year and a half I have been teaching a monthly class at the Berkeley Alembic called Alligator Lizards in the Air: Integration Through Creative Expression. I title after the song by America called Ventura Highway and one of the stanzas in the lyrics goes,
“‘Cause the free wind is blowin' through your hair
And the days surround your daylight there
Seasons crying, no despair
Alligator lizards in the air, in the air.”
I just assumed they were incredibly high and made up some crazy thing called an Alligator Lizard. A few weeks ago, Hawk and I spotted our rather large lizard who lives in the backyard and we sat and watched him sunning himself for about 15 minutes. I got a really good look at the guy and looked him up on my phone once we went back inside. Wouldn’t you know that an Alligator Lizard is a real-life animal and that’s what we have living in the backyard! So shows what I know. They are native to California along the coast. Small world. The more you know (rainbow swoosh). If you don’t know the song, you can listen to it now and just fall in love with that opening guitar noodling.
Anyway, this class is an offering of a variety of tools and techniques to come into dialogue with what our culture calls “non-normative” states of consciousness. What are these states of consciousness you are wondering? It can be anything from meditative or entheogenically induced peak experiences states, visionary states, out-of-body experiences, intense sleeping or waking dreams, alien or entity encounters, and a whole slew of other things that humanity has been experiencing since the dawn of time that got classified as “ not normal” in modernity. Whether it’s normal or not, people have them and there isn’t much resource in our current culture for anyone that does to make sense of them.
I have been experiencing visionary states since I was a small child. I’ve always had a very present imagination and my access to the imaginal realms is incredibly fluid. But there have been things I’ve seen and experienced as a little one up until the present day that goes beyond something I would classify as living within the imaginal realms. They are both within and without is maybe a better way to say it and are real in a way that very few things can be. I’ll do an entire post on all of that one of these days but suffice it to say that visionary states is something I am familiar with. And have you seen my art? It’s also something I include in my work and am in constant dialogue with in my daily life. This relationship is what I hope to inspire in people that come to my class.
I’ve used the word “dialogue” a few times now and that is truly what is happening here. Visionary art, very generally, is both a record-keeping as well as a map to the visionary realms. It is more often than not, a static intermediary. We aren’t trying to create visionary art in Alligator Lizards. Rather, in a Jungian sense, we are getting in touch with our peak/visionary experience on its own terms and inviting it to participate in conversation with us. There is an incredible practice called Dream Tending I learned from the incredible Dr. Steve Aizenstat’s book of the same title that has inspired this approach. Instead of just using it on dreams, I help my students call in their visionary experience and give it life, presence and the ability to communicate.
But how do you communicate with an experience you may ask? Among a variety of methods I use - I literally do a different one for each class I’ve taught, some of my favorites are Surrealist techniques. If anyone knew how to communicate with their unconscious, it was the Surrealists. Decalcomania, automatic drawing and writing, and collage are just a few of the techniques they employed to get the rational mind out of the way and allow for their unconscious dreaming mind to take over and create. Ithell Colquhoun (among others) calls this branch of Surrealism Psycho-Morphology.
Above is an image of Fumage. It harnesses the element of fire, a candle flame, to create random markings on a page that you then see things within. Before playing with fire, however, I guide my students in a short meditation to find out which experience would like to participate in the day’s conversation. Often people come with an experience they would like to work with, but many times, there are several to choose from before class and this guided meditation helps narrow it down.
Once the fumage is complete on the paper, we take a moment to look and see what pops up in front of our eyes in the markings, keeping our visionary experience in the background the whole time. In many ways, our past experience become very present and guides what we see on the page.
This is what came through for me. I didn’t want to see a crab, but there it was. And a Cyclops scorpion lady? The unconscious works in mysterious ways but through this back door method, we can actually make contact and it can tell us things that we may not otherwise have noticed. This bizarre image gave me further insight into an experience I had some years ago that I have been working with for the solid year and a half I’ve done this class. Cool, right?
At the end of class, whoever is called to share talks about their image and more often than not, the visionary experience that participated in creating it. There are always fresh insights in these collaborations and it’s incredible to witness. But here is the crazy thing. You can keep mining these incredible experiences repeatedly, and there is almost no depth too deep for the teachings and revelations they may hold. As I said, personally, I have been using the same experience every class, and I can’t stress how eye-opening it has been and how much I have gotten out of that practice over all of this time. That experience is not something that just came and went as a bloop in the timeline. It’s become something almost of a companion to me that I can sense around me all of the time.
My next class is going to be Saturday, June 29th and you can sign up in advance HERE
Have you or do you experience “non-normative” visionary states? Would you want to try working with them like this? Let me know. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
My new Youtube video on the final white highlights before finishing a painting is posted. I’ve had this in the wings for editing for a few weeks but with travel and deadlines and shows, I’ve finally just finished it. I’ve got an exciting one coming up next about drawing in your painting on the canvas.