Stillness of the deep soul
An immersive exhibition shows how chaos only goes as far as the surface.
As far as we know, humans are the only creatures that possess self-consciousness and self-awareness in the fullest sense. Other animals enjoy various degrees of awareness of the world but it is limited, perhaps above all because they don’t have language, the quintessential organon of the human mind.
The power of language to organise and articulate our thoughts, and to present them to us as the object of rational thinking, is in turn immeasurably enhanced by the invention of writing. Unfortunately, we spend a very small part of our time and employ a fraction of our intellectual energy in the search for wisdom; much of our attention is devoted to illusory fears and desires, to useless chatter, complaints and the vociferous expression of futile opinions. Social media is almost entirely filled with the expression of opinions and especially of anger, mainly as a way of bonding with virtual friends.
This useless agitation of the human mind is fostered and encouraged by the mass media because it is so addictive. But it is superficial, like choppiness on the surface of the sea, which is why the Stoic concept of ataraxy or non-disturbedness comes from a verb that describes the way the oars of a ship churn up the surface of the sea while the deeper water remains still.
In a similar way the ancient Indian Samkhya philosophy that underlies yoga sees the mind as an ultimately material thing, connected with the body: it is not the same as consciousness, but that through which we are conscious of the world. Hence the idea of yoga practice as citta vritti nirodha, the stilling of the turning of the mind: it is only when the mind becomes clear and limpid like still water that we can see through it.
Meanwhile, most of what goes on in our bodies, the organic and physiological processes, is completely beyond the scope of consciousness, and mostly beyond the range of will.
The autonomic nervous system keeps our heart beating, our lungs breathing, our digestion assimilating food and our bodies sitting, walking and carrying out other necessary actions seemingly of its own accord.
Complex cellular processes are taking place continually, as old cells are replaced or repaired. Even more disconcertingly, we are beginning to more fully appreciate just how many other living entities, mainly the gut flora or biome, coexist with us in a symbiotic way.
And yet this corporeal existence is far from entirely divorced from our mental experience: body and mind are not wholly separate and parallel phenomena.
On the contrary, our thoughts can affect our physiological processes: anxiety, for example, can cause sleeplessness, digestive disturbances and even an accelerated heartbeat; and these physiological states, sometimes triggered by memories, associations of ideas or acquired responses of fear, will in turn distort our ability to think calmly and accurately.
And there are ways that we can affect this system, which different cultures have understood to varying degrees for centuries. The main principle is the control of breath. This is in fact the only part of the autonomic system that is also capable of being consciously controlled and directed: we can hold our breath, we can breathe more or less quickly or slowly and more or less deeply.
And this kind of control can be enormously powerful, for just as our breathing becomes faster and shallower when we are afraid or stressed, consciously slowing and deepening the breath can bring feelings of anxiety and panic under control.
Conscious breath control is not only used in yoga but actually underpins the whole movement practice, as well as forming a whole discipline called pranayama. Breathing is also fundamental to meditation, but also to other practices that aim to achieve a trancelike state, and this is part of the subject of Mel O’Callaghan’s installation at Artspace, although this would not be immediately apparent on entering the gallery.
The first of two rooms occupied by the gallery is all white, brightly lit and hung with curved glass sheets, treated to be partly reflective and partly frosted.
The first impression of this room is of being caught in a kind of hall of mirrors: the glass panels reflect the viewer, as well as other visitors, although we can also see through them. There is a sense of distortion but above all of being surrounded by our own image, ubiquitously reflected back at us, like an illustration of the inescapability of the ego.
It is, however, in this room that a performance is held twice a week, at midday on Friday and Saturday; and the performance — which I have not had the opportunity to see — apparently consists of movement and above all breathing practices that are inspired by Sabine Rittner, a German trance-therapist, whose website has details of various seminar and workshops, including one that invites participants to “immerse yourself in the magical power of rhythm, pulsation and sound. Explore the effect of archaic cult rhythms of your body”.
It seems at first sight that we are entering an entirely different world in the second room of the exhibition, which is dark, with benches to sit on and the far wall occupied by the floor-to-ceiling projection of a three-channel video work that lasts for 20 minutes and is immediately impressive and absorbing.
I ended up watching it twice through on the first sitting and then dropping back in for a third look after a second walk around the glass mirrors.
The video was made in collaboration with an eminent scholar of marine geology and is based on footage shot, under the artist’s direction, by a deep-sea exploration submersible at the East Pacific Rise axis, at a depth of almost 4km.
Here hydrothermal vents emit streams of superheated water — three to four times the heat of boiling water — in the midst of an otherwise freezing ocean abyss.
This an extreme environment, where the pressure alone is almost unimaginable — something like 400 times the pressure of our atmosphere at sea level.
The deepest any scuba diver has been able to reach, for example, is around 300m and most stay at around 10-15m. which is barely below the surface compared to these terrifying depths. It is also pitch black, for no light can penetrate so far through the intervening water.
But even in these seemingly unliveable conditions there are creatures that have adapted to the pressure and to the huge variation in temperatures. At one point, for example, an extraordinary red worm coils through the water: this is the Alvinella worm, which has apparently adapted to living in water that can change temperature so dramatically.
And this is the real subject of this work, as the title suggests: it is looking for something like the epicentre of life itself, where we discover some glimpse of the state of the very early stages of living creatures, unimaginably long before there was any life on dry land, let alone any of the subsequent evolution that eventually produced the human mind.
Depending on the point at which you come into the gallery, you may encounter a bleak undersea terrain of colourless rocks that looks at first barren: but then you notice a tiny starfish-like creature clinging to the rock, or the movement of an octopus in a dark crevasse. Or you may enter as the red Alvinella worm glides through the water.
There are many other colours too, some of which may be the result of colour treatment of the original film, for many things are dark or colourless in the depths of the ocean simply because of the lack of light. Red is apparently nonetheless a common enough colour to discover when you introduce the artificial light needed to film anything. Some of the other colours may be artificially enhanced, although no doubt based on some differences of tonal value and perhaps of vestigial chroma.
One of the most interesting questions, at this level of the chain of life, is whether we are looking at examples of flora or fauna. Are these plants or animals? The answer is clear in some cases, not in others: they are certainly living things, but what kind of life do they have exactly?
St Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy was derived from Aristotle, distinguished three categories of life, based on different kinds of soul: plants had a vegetative or nutritive soul, that is a life-principle that allowed them to grow; animals have this as well as a sensitive soul, which allows for perception and subsequently movement; humans have both of these as well as an intellectual soul, which is the basis of the consciousness and awareness that I mentioned earlier.
But what to make of the extraordinary reticulated plant or creature that opens out across all three screens in a rare panoramic view in which we lose all sense of scale? Or of those remarkable things that bloom like tropical flowers, or in another case sprout out of tubes, becoming pink phallic forms with vulval mouths — and which are in fact riftia pachyptila, the tube worm.
These last creatures look and behave like flowers rather than animals, both in their physical appearance and also in their fixed position, because one of the properties of animals is generally the capacity for locomotion. But that is precisely the point, that at this level of primitive forms the boundaries and the behavioural differences between the two kingdoms are ambiguous.
This is also part of what is intended by the title: Centre of the Centre suggests a quest for something like the epicentre of living forms, the point at which some mutation in the primal soup of minerals and chemicals produced the first very elementary organic cells.
In reality, this probably happened in more tepid waters — at least common sense would lead us to this conclusion — but these warmer waters are now filled with more evolved creatures.
It is only down here at the very frontier of the inhabitable world that we still encounter nothing but the most primitive and ambiguous lifeforms.
But what of the theme of breath, which seemed so important in the first room? In reality, that theme is carried on in the video through the soundtrack, reminding us that even down in the extreme icy depths creatures need to extract oxygen from the unimaginably pressurised water.
The sound of breath is pervasive, but especially important at certain points, particularly in one section where the screen is filled with tiny white creatures waving tentacles in the water, while the soundtrack is of increasingly rapid and urgent breathing, as though gasping for breath. This is one of the points that, although the projection is on a loop, could be considered a conclusion: the gasping reaches a crescendo, then suddenly ends with a long exhalation as the screen goes dark.
Mel O’Callaghan: Centre of the Centre, Artspace, Sydney, until October 27.
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