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Issue 10 - A Journal of Letters and Life
Gallery
DREAMING THE DRAWING,
DREAMING THE POEM

by John Randolph Carter

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See John Carter's poetry in current Poesy section.

I like to follow my mind as if it were a stream meandering down a hill, speeding up, slowing down, taking unexpected turns. I don't want to know ahead of time what the next word will be or the next image or how it all is going to end (if it does end). I write and draw in order to find out. I like to surprise myself and I do everything I can to make that possible.
     Like a photographer who carries his camera everywhere (I think of Cartier-Bresson), I wait for my own internal "decisive moment." My landscape is my mind, and I need speed and candor. Bresson did not crop his photographs; I would not erase a line. Nor would I pre-visualize or draw erasable guidelines or create written outlines. What is important is that I allow what is real to emerge unedited and uncensored. What is real to me is what is born of necessity--candid, raw, vital, urgent, natural, direct, resonant.


Left Side Drawn by Right Hand, Right Side Drawn by Left Hand

As I create, I feel like I am asleep dreaming the work while being simultaneously awake, observing, analytical. The drawings, like dreams, have their own unfolding life of surprising landscapes, strange animals, monsters, bizarre characters and unexpected juxtapositions. As these works unfold, they frequently seem strange to me--as my dreams often do. Part of me knows that this seemingly unreal world is my real world wearing a mask of strangeness.
     The mask is protective. While appearing strange to my conscious mind, these creative works may speak directly to my subconscious self and be assimilated without my having to take conscious responsibility. Though I have grown and changed through this process of unconscious assimilation I have, for many years, taken extensive conscious responsibility for my creative works and their meaning. My increased conscious understanding has made these works more potent and the creative process a greater personal risk.


Mandrill Lion King

As my hand moves across the page drawing a line or writing word after word, these works seem to be creating themselves. As the drawing or poem emerges, my conscious mind behaves like an audience in a darkened theater watching a drama unfold on the stage--sometimes whispering, sometimes silent. My hand plays out this drama on the page in spite of occasional storms of protestation from the audience. Critical judgments by my conscious mind must be suspended or, at the very least, subordinated to the performance at hand--the unfolding.
     Occasionally awareness surges up from the depths of this immersed state and boils to the surface. Ah hah! This is what it means! At these moments I must resist the impulse to interrupt the process as one might awaken oneself from a dream. Whatever the poem or drawing is becoming, I wish to see it as it is.


Runner Caught Between Dinosaur and Bully

With each willful continuing there is new growth into new dimensions of self. In the act of creation, I accept myself. In the conscious flash of recognition of what the work means, I accept myself. Through these acts of acceptance, I change. As I change, my drawings and poems change. With each change I become more of who I am--more real, more realized.

                                   
"My
young men                
never
work.
 
Men who
labor
cannot                              
dream
 
and wisdom
comes
through
dreaming."

  -Smohalla,
   Nez Perce Indian religious teacher
   of the "Dreamers"

Whether frog or prince
the image is me.
 
Part of me wants to
greet the stranger.
 
Part of me want to                     
bolt the door
and sound the alarm.
 
The stranger that's welcomed
comes but once.
 
The stranger that's rejected
returns again and
again.
 
(verse, John Carter)


Initiate with Robot and Octopus-Armed Peanut

(The essay "Dreaming the Drawing, Dreaming the Poem" is adapted from a catalogue essay for the one-person exhibition, Mindscapes, 104 Drawings, held at the New Jersey State Museum and the Minneapolis Institute)


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