I’ve used Blake’s poems entitled ‘Little Girl Lost,#’ (Blake, 1967, p. 136), several times as the basis for palimpsests. Partly because it was tongue in cheek, but also partly because the title resonated with how I was feeling at the start of this module – lost. The use of Blake’s poetry seemed appropriate as the original manuscript for the bottom layer of my palimpsest because this whole journey started with accepting an invitation to wind up Blake’s golden string.
I have come to realise now several important things about Blake and his golden string and why, even if subconsciously, I was following it all along.
Firstly, I realised mid-way through the module, that it wasn’t about following it, it was about winding it up. It was not a passive act but an active one. The string is a guide to awakening and discovering the authentic self, yes, but I couldn’t simply follow it, I had to actively participate in winding it up. I needed to be an active agent of change (Belenky, 1986). By being an active participant, taking risks, experimenting, making myself vulnerable, I was moving towards subjective knowing.
Secondly, the string is a metaphor (I’ve become mildly obsessed with symbols and must look into this further) for intuition. By following the string, or my intuition, I move towards subjective knowing, transformation, personal liberation and my authentic self.
Of course this all links; the golden string stitching maps, the derive that takes a rhizomatic journey, the automatic walking and processes, the using the earth being intuitive, poems that just come to me.
My practice is in the process, an assemblage of multimedia, alive, growing, sprawls and takes different directions like a rhizome, layered like a palimpsest, rooted in the landscape both metaphorically and actually.
I am no longer lost, but found.
(Or at least less lost, but I have realised that being lost is where you are most creative! Welcome the thresholds and liminality – it is in the in between, the intermezzo, the swampy lowlands where the magic happens). (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013) (Schon, 1984).
