shadow worlds

my reply to a post on the "Writing the Extraordinary" MLA class I'm taking - Erik Davis is leading the class. this week we're reading & discussing fever induced writing. one of the class members posted a quote from "Black Elk Speaks, the account of an Sioux "holy man." In this context "holy man" meant that the person experienced vivid hallucinations caused by severe childhood fevers."

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thanks for this. I love the quote you highlighted "Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world."

love the idea of the shadow world. I was thinking about this often whilst walking home from the train a few months ago - when the light was perfect for casting shadows. I kept thinking what if the shadows were from another me in another time. and we were all held together by my body, but could pivot between one or the other. sort of like those handheld viewfinders where you pull the lever and it advances the frame of the circular card film. but it would rotate in multiple dimensions. then I went to a sound art performance and one of the performers was casting amazing shadows on the "digital noise" screens behind him. I was filming it but framed it so his "this-world body" was to the edge and it was his shadows who were creating the ambient sounds from the guitar. and I was doing a video project where we had to make one based on previous video - a chained video project - and mine was on shadow out of time like the hp lovecraft book (from Erik's previous class)

I like that Crazy Horse's shadow world is a higher resolution that ours. "everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world" - we see things visually quite clearly and defined. yet we see shadows (from the other worlds?:) as blurred and generally in monochrome / greyish / darkish tones. if the other world's shadows are so vivid (for us) then think how vivid their reality must be. (our dreamworld?)

(& I just did a drag & drop typo - and one became eon - & I just re-read my blog post for the shadow out of time video and saw the mention of plato & remembering across aeons of time - another synchronicity)

also I went to the readings of David Eagleman's writings on tales of the afterlife as part of the sydney Vivid festival last year (curated by Brian Eno) - some of these readings seemed to be along the shadow world line too. (they were all really inspiring, and it was presented as people sitting at old fashioned school desks on stage reading out their (his) stories on what they (he) thought was the afterlife.