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| Pictures of Patti Smith and the vampire Caleb (Michael Easton), a couple of my muses. |
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| Links to some of the animal organizations I support: Alley Cat Allies Defenders of Wildlife National Wildlife Federation Humane Society of the United States The Animal Rescue Site Tabby's Place |
| Horror Vacui |
| by Alison Armstrong |
| A site in progress, featuring writing and dark muses. |
| Journal on Dark Muse Topics by Alison On "Placental Consciousness" The following is a quote from the author J. G. Ballard in his book The Drowned World, which I find particularly relevant to my interests in myth, psychology, "dark muses," and art works originating from our inner void: "The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time." In this book Ballard describes a future in which global warming has made almost all of the planet uninhabitable except for the arctic and antarctic regions. Since the polar ice caps have melted, much of the earth is a boiling lagoon, filled with primeval life forms. Human consciousness, like the plants and animals of the external world, seems to be drifting towards a prenatal,placental state , a solipsism in which the boundaries between dream and reality are dissolving. This world is an autistic oasis, each invidual in his/her own oceanic universe. Such is the world as depicted in the works of Expressionistic artists--the painter Edvard Munch, the poet Sylvia Plath, the films of David Lynch, as well as the ancient shamanic maskmakers. These works summon the urges, the wild, tangled, seductively ensnaring roots of our earliest memories. |
