RACHELLE SAWATSKY
Over-mind
April 18 - June 15, 2014
Untitled, 2013
unglazed ceramics with dye
various sizes
Untitled, 2014
watercolor on unprimed canvas
37 x 45 inches
Poem for Over-mind
by Rachelle Sawatsky
The swimmers are always swimming, leaving their shoes on the shore like spouses or hobbies or birth families. They have no jobs and often neglect to return. Their souls descend from prehistoric fish. Not soul as in a Catholic sounding word that keeps looking more like Seoul as I write it but soul as in soul music and soul food, soulful, sad steadiness, or field. Something outstretched like feeling. The swimmers’ ancestors weren’t ravens or eagles with their highly attuned energy frequencies but fish with their low steady hum. Fish energy made from tiny compact brains working with thick strong companion bodies. All brain all memory. Muscle memory for emotions over all ages.
The poet HD once described a transcendental revelation she had on the Scilly islands in 1919 as a jellyfish experience which led her to write about the overmind: a creative synthesis of the workings of the brain and the sex organs. She describes a process of looking through a window of overmind and experiencing a cap over her head and brain that affected her vision. I imagine it less Greek, more like a jellyfish brain lodged in the center of the body. Stuck like a lover. Like Bryher. Bryher who is never mentioned in her poem despite being the poem.
