"Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and
freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time." - H. P. Lovecraft.
Memory isn't something solid and tangible like rock, it is
more fluid and flowing. Even when I try to recall a distant memory I begin to
realize that the precise facts and details have changed subtly. Even when I
attempt to visualize in my mind the exact features of the face of someone I
met... things become distorted. The process of conversion of a thing that I
have seen, to what it becomes in my mind is ever-interesting, and fascinating. Such
things take on their own life, the imagination works on them. Like Lovecraft I
believe the mind is like an ocean carrying memories in an eternal flow of
tides.
That description may be too entirely casual for some. I
would go further and say that I subscribe to Carl Jung's assessment of a
personal and collective unconscious. In his book, The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious, Jung describes these two important facets of the mind:
"in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is
of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical
psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there
exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal
nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does
not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms,
the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give
definite form to certain psychic contents.”
In a writer such as H. P. Lovecraft one can see immediately
that he was in almost direct contact with this 'collective unconscious.' We may
creatively title this as the deep well-pool of 'archaic elemental forms' from
which he (Lovecraft) drew his inspiration and formed his strange tales. In
actuality this is an exciting discovery, for the source never runs dry. More
importantly it points to another, eternal and infinite existence that is quite
independent of human life... but that we can access this energy, and translate
and transform it. It is not necessarily our imagination, some-thing that we
invent... but we are the conduit through which it can be manifested. The mind
is an ocean from whose depths come a greater understanding of existence.
All Right Reserved / Copyright David John Drew 2013
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