still

The night the demons came I also had a dream/vision of great beauty which remained vivid in mind when I woke. It seemed important to remember it but at the same time the image was so strong I neglected to perform one of those acts of mental filing which will (sometimes) preserve a dream. Writing it down might also have worked but often writing down a visual image only traps it in an impoverishment. But what I have left is in fact a verbal redaction that doesn't return the image in all its vanished glory, a mnemonic without a referent perhaps. The best I can say about this image was that it resembled a painting in that it had a rectangular shape, taller than it was wide, portrait not landscape, and that it was a deep, lustrous black all over except that, at the top right, a dagger of hot pink came in from the side, piercing the darkness. This image didn't really have borders like a painting does, nor was it confined in some kind of other space - it was the space - and though it wasn't exactly kinetic, it wasn't static either. But now a doubt enters. Was it really hot pink, the dagger of light? I think so, but the descriptive phrase, hot pink, doesn't bring with it the associations the colour had in the dream. If I try to think of real equivalents for this image, I waver between some piece of abstract Pop Art and a canvas by Clyfford Still. There was a sense of reciprocity between the black and the pink, a fractal or Mandlebrot-like quality to it and also a figure/ground ambiguity as you get in Still: what is front? what behind? This:


has something of what I mean though not the composition, nor quite the colour. I'm trying to hang on to the image because it feels like an aid in the present - perturbation ...