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Notes for Panic Paintings
16/11/2022
Notes for Panic Paintings
I’ve only been to the Lake District once, but I remember standing in sunshine among the tipping hills and describing to my friend a sense of blustery exhilaration. The feeling was a slightly hysterical impulse to run and yell, a sort of mob terror and joy. ‘That’s panic’, said my friend, ‘as in Pan.’
For a modern person it’s not easy to conceive of panic in that particular sense. In the wild Greek wood, gorged on dance, wine and singing, an orgiastic state was attained where the wild goat-man-god takes the revellers onto a level of frenzy, a Bacchinal.
It seems to me that an orgy (I haven’t actually been to one) will give you both a body and an out-of-body experience. It used to be very normal for anyone and everyone to become lost in ecstatic religious trance and dance at a village level. The church provided opportunities to be carried away with spiritual fervour, and though folk dancing now seems an anodyne or hip jollity, it can become a deep and transporting experience; I have sometimes played a repetitive Macedonian tune on my flute to dancers to the point where I became inhabited by the tune, swimming in it, losing myself. I felt able to curdle milk, to cause crops to fail, tgat I could be sucked into a dark turmoil. This was in Tuttington.
I’ve always lived in and near woods and there is nothing as thrilling as running among trees and bushes with a big wind blowing, as the dusk falls. To be lost in the woods is to become your nameless self, experiencing primeval sensations of being alive; the rushing leaves, the twigs tearing at you, the ground now flat, now tussocked, falling branches. As a child in the woods I read the Brothers Grimm, the Langs ‘Fairy Books of Many Colours’, Roger Lancelyn Green’s ‘Tales of Ancient Greece’.
Woods are places of dense elemental habitation, both vegetable, animal and fairy, with eyes, hands and tongues everywhere, The feeling of being looked at is the feeling that you are prey, and maybe it is why surveillance in cities is so deeply unsettling. Donna Tartt evokes this so well in ‘The Secret History’ where the god Pan enters the students in the wood, and they tear apart one of their number in an ecstatic frenzy.
I’ve only been to the Lake District once, but I remember standing in sunshine among the tipping hills and describing to my friend a sense of blustery exhilaration. The feeling was a slightly hysterical impulse to run and yell, a sort of mob terror and joy. ‘That’s panic’, said my friend, ‘as in Pan.’
For a modern person it’s not easy to conceive of panic in that particular sense. In the wild Greek wood, gorged on dance, wine and singing, an orgiastic state was attained where the wild goat-man-god takes the revellers onto a level of frenzy, a Bacchinal.
It seems to me that an orgy (I haven’t actually been to one) will give you both a body and an out-of-body experience. It used to be very normal for anyone and everyone to become lost in ecstatic religious trance and dance at a village level. The church provided opportunities to be carried away with spiritual fervour, and though folk dancing now seems an anodyne or hip jollity, it can become a deep and transporting experience; I have sometimes played a repetitive Macedonian tune on my flute to dancers to the point where I became inhabited by the tune, swimming in it, losing myself. I felt able to curdle milk, to cause crops to fail, tgat I could be sucked into a dark turmoil. This was in Tuttington.
I’ve always lived in and near woods and there is nothing as thrilling as running among trees and bushes with a big wind blowing, as the dusk falls. To be lost in the woods is to become your nameless self, experiencing primeval sensations of being alive; the rushing leaves, the twigs tearing at you, the ground now flat, now tussocked, falling branches. As a child in the woods I read the Brothers Grimm, the Langs ‘Fairy Books of Many Colours’, Roger Lancelyn Green’s ‘Tales of Ancient Greece’.
Woods are places of dense elemental habitation, both vegetable, animal and fairy, with eyes, hands and tongues everywhere, The feeling of being looked at is the feeling that you are prey, and maybe it is why surveillance in cities is so deeply unsettling. Donna Tartt evokes this so well in ‘The Secret History’ where the god Pan enters the students in the wood, and they tear apart one of their number in an ecstatic frenzy.
