Darkness and Dreams

Babylon

Living on a constantly rotating planet (what, you hadn't noticed?) we experience a regular succession of periods of darkness and light. Day and night, we tend to call them. But, in the latitudes above and below the "tropics" – defined as that band around our planet's tubby belly, where day and night are pretty much always a neat 12 hours each – night and day vary in length on a predictable yearly pattern of "seasons", because we rotate about an off-centre axis set at about the angle of a broom leaning against a wall. We humans in those more extreme latitudes have been observing and wondering about these planetary mood shifts since, oh, way before geography lessons and weather forecasts were a thing.

To state the obvious, in daylight most of us are awake and doing stuff, and at night we sleep (or try to) and, eek, dream. The dark can be scary, and dreams can be very weird, so it was probably inevitable that, when it came to cooking up ways of explaining to ourselves what the fuck is really going on here, "light good, dark bad" would be a solid starting point, wherever you happened to be situated on the planet. Unless, of course, you found the world of darkness and dreams more to your taste.

Equally inevitably, I suppose, the next step in the explanation process was for the self-appointed spirit-boffins to work up this inchoate, touchy-feely instinct of "light good, dark bad" into some imaginary cosmic snakes-and-ladders game. Partly because that's what spirit-boffins do – i.e. take some simple truthy propositions and turn them into a multi-faceted speculative fiction – but also because the tribal bureaucrats have always welcomed any way to control everybody else's behaviour without excessive clubbing, stoning, and spearing. As a typical effort in this direction, take Manichaeism, for example. According to Wikipedia, "It taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good spiritual world of light, and an evil material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of the divine." No naughty stuff, please, we're Manichees!

Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of saying that I've recently returned to making some digital images – no, wait, don't go yet! – and in the process had something of an insight into the way my imagination works.

The key word here is "imagination". While acknowledging that photography is perfectly possible at night, for me it is essentially a daytime activity. When out and about, I carry a camera or my phone; I see something that tweaks my aesthetic sensibilities; I take a photograph. If the resulting image works for me, I may well share it with you: "Here, look at this real thing that grabbed my attention!" Now, it is often said that a dozen photographers, confronted by the same scene, will make a dozen rather different photographs. I'm not sure how far I believe that. In reality, it is surely more that, out of a dozen different photographers, eleven will probably walk straight past something that will nonetheless deeply fascinate one of them. "Here, look at this real thing that grabbed my attention!" is the essence of photography: whatever degree of heightened individual sensibility may be involved it is always essentially reactive. You don't dream up a photo.

Persian Wars

To construct something out of nothing, even when collaging together some ready-made photographic parts, is a very different activity. Your imagination is performing an active engagement with your aesthetic sensibilities, or a "looking within", to use a metaphor; it's more a case of "Here, look at this unreal thing that I just made up!". This imaginative engagement may not actually take place at night – although for me it often does – but I think it is very like dreaming out loud. And, as I have belatedly come to realise, my imagination is rather dark. Or rather, it tends to go to dark places and bring back some disturbing trophies, whereas others who have also chosen to face the challenge of a blank canvas will fill it with images and colours that are manifestations of light. Whether this is because their imagination encounters something shining within or out of a fear of the darkness lurking there I couldn't say. Clearly, "light" is not the same thing as "banal" (just ask Semele), any more than "dark" is necessarily profound, but, given the choice, it seems most people would prefer to hang something brightly colourful and uplifting on their wall or, failing that, something banal. Dark and slightly disturbing, not so much.

In the past I have sometimes referred to a sort of "heavy breathing" that some artists and writers resort to as a substitute for genuine profundity. Ted Hughes can be a terrible heavy breather, for example. By this I don't mean the sort of heavy breathing that results from strenuous exercise (or so I'm told) but to the sort of nuisance phone call (which I imagine is now obsolete) where the caller would simply breathe heavily into the microphone of their handset with the intention of scaring or upsetting the recipient. It occurred to me, as I was assembling various scenarios onto my blank digital canvas, that I might be doing something of the sort myself, like those lurid imaginings of a hellish afterlife painted onto mediaeval church walls with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of simple folk. Of course, this darkness can be very appropriate, for example in my series illustrating William Blake's "proverbs of Hell", but as a sensibility I concede that it's not calculated to win friends, influence people, or even get my prints onto a gallery wall.

In the end I may be stuck with it, as I suppose I must be one of those people who find the world of darkness and dreams more congenial to their imagination, but I thought I should at least try forcing myself to go the other way. Let there be light!

Well, almost. It's light, it's colourful, but that tree does look a bit trapped in there, though, doesn't it? And are we outside looking in, shivering in the snow? But, talking of snow:

Crossing

Morris Minor

I know... Not exactly brightly colourful and uplifting, but neither, I hope, banal. But these do feel more satisfying and sit much more happily in my comfort zone. Somewhere between light and dark: not what you'd call sunny, but not really the stuff of nightmares, either. In the end, as I say, I'm just dreaming out loud. If I've started to snore, just give me a nudge.