Doris Lessing's novel 'Briefing for a Descent into Hell' is defined as inner space fiction. It is an incomparably exciting voyage into the marvellous, terrifying, unexplored, yet sometimes glimpsed territory of the inner mind.
The central figure doomed to spin endlessly in the currents of a great ocean, then makes landfall at last on a far off shoreline, discovering ruined places, moon-dazed rituals in mythological rainforests, witnessing strange goings-on and the flight of stanger birds. Eerie lights of crystals lead the mind at times whirling into those inner spaces on breathtaking cosmic journies and flights of fancy.
Yet these meanderings and discoverings of that inner journey echo my own, the metaphors of loss firmly rooted in reality; of a breakdown after the death of both my dear parents; (this art is dedicated to Mum & Dad who both passed away, tragically, very close to each other. I am still in a sort of numbed shock and very slowly coming to terms with the suddenness of them going away from me like they did).
An enigma locked in the minds adventure only resurfacing now and again but always being reconstructed, remembering those almost forgotten places of dreams, of childhood memories. Of eerie and surreal, dreamlike worlds where strange images and unsettling objects inhabit their own lonely, isolated spaces, inhabiting flooded places, grey misty wraiths hanging shoulder-high, always ahead of me or behind me, catching the corner of my eye then disappering as I turn to them, their features almost faceless, not recognisable, they stare blankly, blank as the mood I walk in, the heavily drenched atmosphere weighing me down into the stony water.
Using monochrome to convey the isolation, the loneliness of the disquieting poses, pained figures lost in a moment of time; I walk round them and once past these dream people, my eyes entertain no dream. The long, lonely howl of wind, oppressively pares my person down to the barest pinch of flame, it blows its burdened whistle deep in the whorl of my ear, filling it with far off haunted voices.
Doris Lessing believes that society's treatment of the minds illness is civilizations biggest and blackest blind spot, and that it is through the minds of the broken-down that truths we choose to shut out enter like the disguised messengers in myths and fairy tales.
taken at H22O (KSA Atlantis)